by Mia Archer
I knew it wasn’t a fair thought, but I never said my mind was entirely rational. If I was completely rational then I never would’ve done something crazy like fall for a girl I only knew through a videogame in the first place!
Okay, that was enough guilt. Time to let her know I was here.
“Sorry,” I typed. “I was away from my computer.”
“Good! I was hoping I’d catch you online today!” she said.
I arched an eyebrow. She certainly seemed very excited to see me online. And her excitement was feeding back into me. It was making all the worries I’d had over the past week about her not wanting to see me anymore melt away.
“Really? Why?”
“Well I’m actually kind of excited and kind of nervous about what I’m about to ask…”
Now I was really curious. She goes away for a week, probably busy with work or whatever, and when she comes back she has something to ask me that has her nervous? Color me intrigued.
“You have my attention,” I said. “Go ahead…”
“I want to meet you.”
I blinked. That’s what she was so worked up about? That’s what had her hesitant to talk to me? That wasn’t a big deal! I almost wanted to laugh.
“Well that’s not a problem!”
“Really? I didn’t expect you to say yes so quickly!”
“Sure! Where do you want to meet? One of the dungeons? One of the inns? We could go and hang out in one of the elf zones, get away from human territory for a while if you’d like,” I said. “I’m getting kind of tired of human territory anyways.”
There was a pause. A definite hesitation. Something about that hesitation told me I’d just said something wrong. What could I possibly…
Oh.
No. she couldn’t possibly mean…
“I didn’t mean meet in game,” she said.
Well yes, it looked like she certainly could mean that. I blinked. she wanted to meet me? We’d only known each other for a few weeks. Sure it had been a whirlwind few weeks, but I was still hesitant.
It’s not like I’d never met people I knew from the Internet. Sure there were crazies out there, but we lived in a world where most dating started online and most of the moral panic about ax-murdering Internet predators had died down, and yet something about this whole situation, something about how she was jumping to meeting me in person so quickly, gave me pause. It had me wondering once more if this was all a setup for something sinister. It had the worst-case scenario part of my brain kicking into overdrive almost immediately.
I hated it. I’m pretty sure the creative side of my brain that came up with all of my favorite stories, that helped me when I was writing my novel, was also the part that went into gear when I was spinning out a worst-case scenario. It was both a blessing and a curse being creative like that.
I looked back to the screen. “I don’t know…”
“I figured you’d be a little hesitant,” she said. “But hear me out. I was thinking we could meet at Elassa Con next week!”
I blinked. Elassa Con? The idea of going to the convention was enough to set my heart racing. The idea of going to the convention and also meeting Kaira set my pulse going so quickly that if a doctor were to examine me at that exact moment they probably would’ve diagnosed me with hypertension and put me on medication.
I fought down that quickening of my pulse though. There was no way this was going to happen. There was no way I was going to be able to make it to Elassa Con, no matter how exciting the prospect of going to one of the biggest conventions of the year and meeting my mysterious online “friend” at the same time might be.
“I really can’t afford that,” I said. “I’m kind of a poor college student. It’s not like people in an MFA program are really loaded with money…”
“What if I told you I could take care of your tickets?”
I laughed. A laugh that caused movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see Megan turning, raising an eyebrow. A crazy idea occurred to me.
I turned back to the screen. “Sure! You just pay for plane tickets and a hotel room for me and my roommate so I can make sure I have someone with me in case you turn out to be an ax murderer and we’ll call it a deal!”
I figured that would be the end of it. That would be all it took for her to admit she was just joking around, though I didn’t think it was a very funny joke and it was making me seriously question her judgment. As much as I would’ve loved going to Elassa Con, as much as I would love to meet her assuming she was actually the girl she seemed to be, there wasn’t a chance she was going to foot the bill for all of that. Not for me and Megan. No girl was that into me. In my limited experience no girl who played Tales of Elassa would be so loaded that she could blow that much money on what would amount to a first date, for that matter.
“Yeah, that’s not going to work out,” she said.
I smiled even as I fought down disappointment. I knew it. Then my eyes went wide as I read the next words that popped up in the chat window.
“If you can’t swing the plane tickets then I’ll probably also need to get both of you tickets to the convention,” she said. “How’s that sound?”
I blinked. “Okay, that’s enough. This isn’t funny anymore.”
“Who said I was joking?”
“Well obviously you have to be joking. You’re not going to pay for me and my roommate to fly out and go to that convention.”
“Why not?”
Why not indeed? It was a perfectly reasonable question on its face that was absolutely ridiculous when examined closely. Why would some random girl pay for a girl she just met to fly out to one of the biggest conventions in the country so she could meet her? Why would she pay the added cost for my roommate just in case she was an ax murderer? For that matter, probably the most important reason even though it was the reason I was least likely to admit to, why would she do all of this for me? I wasn’t anything special despite the way she gushed over me. Despite the way we’d gotten along. Despite our whirlwind online romance.
I knew I shouldn’t be listening to that quiet voice in the back of my head, and yet it was so insistent. It made so much sense in this case. If a girl was going to do all of this just to meet me then there had to be some catch. There had to be something wrong with the situation. Whether that was that she was a crazy murderer or something else I didn’t know, but I just couldn’t believe that this sort of thing was happening to me. This was the sort of thing that happened in a cheesy romance, not in my life!
“I’m dead serious Maia,” she said. “All you have to do is say yes.”
“This isn’t a joke?” I asked.
“No joke. I want to see you. I want to fly you out to the convention. I think it would be the perfect time for us to meet. All you have to do is say yes.”
I still didn’t quite believe it. Only she seemed so certain. So sincere. If this was a joke she was certainly dedicated to it, but something told me she wasn’t telling a lie even if I hardly believed it. And yet even as that ever present quiet voice of self doubt was whispering that this couldn’t possibly be true there was another part of me that was jumping for joy and desperately hoping this was true. I realized that I desperately wanted to meet her in person.
I hadn’t felt this way about anyone in a long time. It didn’t matter to me that our romance essentially took place on a computer screen. It felt real to me, and that’s all that mattered. Now all I needed was to meet her in person and see if it was real in the real world, as they said in-game. It was another huge step, but I'd already thrown myself into this and had a wonderful time so what was the point in stopping now that I'd mostly gotten over most of my inhibitions?
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Don’t think about it too long,” she said. “It gets more expensive to get you out here every minute you wait.”
I chuckled. “But you don’t even know where I live.”
“Doesn’t matter. This is Elassa Con. Th
e longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be to get a ticket into Indianapolis. And it’s going to get really hard to find a place to stay.”
I rolled my eyes. She was laying it on pretty thick. I wasn’t sure what to think. Surely if this was a joke she would’ve given it up earlier. Surely she wouldn’t still be going along with it, unless this was part of some sick joke and she’d been playing me all along. Unless this was her endgame. I’d known some pretty terrible people in my time online, and this definitely wouldn’t be the worst thing I’d heard about someone doing to somebody else.
And yet there was a voice that was louder than my nagging self doubt for a change telling me this was the real deal. There was a voice that was dueling with my inner pessimist and telling me to go for it.
I really needed to talk this over with someone. And there was only one someone I could think of to talk over something like this.
I looked over my shoulder. It looked like Megan was in the middle of a raid, but we had a roommate protocol for that. “Megan, I’m calling an emergency meeting!”
11: Emergency Meeting
Megan didn’t even hesitate which made me grin. Emergency meetings weren’t something we took lightly. Usually they were for big events like a breakup or something like that, but the deal was any time one of us called an emergency meeting we dropped everything immediately.
Megan was in the middle of a raid. Probably something important at this time of night, but she typed something and then she was pulling her headphones down and coming over to me with a worried expression on her face.
She glanced at my screen but I’d minimized the game. I didn’t want her to see my conversation. I didn’t quite believe what was happening. I couldn’t quite believe that I was about to have this conversation with her.
“Living room,” I said.
Megan nodded. “That’s fine.”
We walked the short distance to the living room and Megan flopped down on the couch. I flopped down on the other side and sighed. Megan raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, out with it.”
I opened my mouth tell her everything and then closed it. Opened it again, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell her what had been going on over the past couple of weeks. I couldn’t quite bring myself to explain my situation to her. There was so much to cover. A whirlwind romance. The fact that the whirlwind romance was with a girl. That the girl wanted to fly both of us out to see her.
“Is it really that bad?” Megan asked.
I rolled my eyes. “You have no idea!”
“Amber. I just ruined an entire night of raiding because you called an emergency meeting,” she said. “If you can’t tell me what it is then I’m going to go back and try to salvage the raid.”
I looked down. Looked back up. Smiled a smile that must’ve looked pretty sickly from the worried expression that crossed her face.
“Would you want to go to Elassa Con next week?”
Megan blinked. And she fell back rolling on the couch laughing.
“That’s good Amber! But really, what’s going on?”
“I figured you’d react that way,” I said. “But I think we really did just get an invitation to Elassa Con. All expenses paid.”
Megan sat up and locked eyes with me. Her eyes moved back and forth searching for any sign that this was a joke.
“Bullshit.”
“That’s exactly what I said at first!”
And so I sucked it up and laid it all out for her. I told her how I’d met Kaira in the game. How we’d been talking with each other over the past couple of weeks. I went into almost everything, how great she was, though I left out the bit about what we’d gotten up to in our dungeon run the last time we met up. I even pulled up her picture on my tablet which was sitting on the coffee table. Megan looked her up and down with an appreciative whistle and raised an eyebrow.
“Well she’s definitely a hottie if you're into women,” Megan said. "You and another girl! I never would've imagined it. Then again considering how quickly you always lost interest in guys maybe there was a hint..."
I reached out and gave Megan a playful smack. "Shut it."
Megan grinned and then she looked serious again. “The question is, is she really who she says she is or is she just some troll getting her jollies online?”
“That’s exactly what I was wondering,” I said.
And it surprised me to realize that the only problem I had with this whole scenario was the question of whether or not she actually was who she said she was. There was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted to meet her. There was never any doubt in my mind that I had to meet her. There was just a quiet terror that if I did meet her she’d turn out to not be as advertised. She'd become just another story of online dating gone wrong, albeit a story of online dating gone wrong featuring a girl who apparently had much deeper pockets than most people in those sorts of horror stories.
“You really like this girl, don’t you?”
I smiled. “Yeah. Is it that obvious?”
“You have that ridiculous look on your face that you get whenever you’re reading one of those cheesy romance books.”
“Hey! Those aren’t cheesy romance books! They’re cheesy fantasy books. Big difference,” I said.
“Is there a difference? Heaving magic? Heaving breasts? Same stories, different fixation.”
I shook my head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“But seriously,” Megan said. “What do you have to lose? I haven’t seen you look like this about a guy ever, and if it turns out you don’t click with a chick what’s the worst that happened? You got free tickets to the hottest convention in the country!”
“I know…”
“And if you get there and it turns out that she’s just as awesome as you expected then that’s even more of a win!”
“I know,” I said with a sigh.
“So what’s the hesitation? Free tickets either way, just make sure you get round-trip tickets instead of a one-way ticket to the pit in her basement or whatever.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “You’re horrible Megan!”
“Hey,” she said. “If I’m going to be going along with you then it’s my job to make sure you don’t wind up getting tossed in some creepy pit in a basement. Hell, it’s my job to make sure both of us don’t wind up in a pit in a basement somewhere.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re starting to sound like me and my worst-case scenario problem.”
“Whatever Amber,” she said. “I really don’t see what the hesitation is. Either you get free tickets to the convention and a great girl or you get free tickets to the convention and it turns out that lover girl is a complete slob. Either way all I’m hearing is free tickets.”
“You mean all you’re hearing is that you get free tickets because you’re coming along as my chaperone?”
Megan shrugged. “So what if that enters into the equation just a little bit? Can you blame me?”
“Selfish much?”
She fixed me with the most wide-eyed innocence she could muster, which wasn’t much. “What can I say? If I’m selfish and my selfishness helps your love life then I’m all for it!”
I rolled my eyes. “So we’re really doing this?”
Megan nodded. “We’re really doing this!”
I sighed. “You do realize, of course, that what’s probably going to happen is I agree to meet this girl and it’ll turn out she’s completely full of shit and we don’t get plane tickets or anything.”
Megan shrugged. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “Okay, well it’s decided. I guess that means the emergency meeting is over!”
“That was quick,” Megan said. “Mind if I go try to salvage raid night?”
“Sure thing,” I said. “Besides, I need to log back into the game myself.”
My fingers tingled as I logged back into the game and looked at my friends list. Sure enough she was still the
re. Apparently she’d been confident that I was going to make a decision pretty fast. I smiled. Her name lit up and my chat window started blinking.
“So?”
“We’re game if you are,” I said.
“We?”
“My roommate,” I said.
“Oh, right! Let me check something here real quick…”
I waited. I was definitely curious how this was going to work. How was she going to just pay for this? And then another thought occurred to me. In order to get a plane ticket you needed to provide identification, an address, that sort of thing. How was she going to pull this off? Because I wasn’t particularly comfortable giving her that information.
“Okay, all taken care of,” she said. “You should have email.”
“What?”
“Oh, and one more thing,” she said.
One more thing? As if all of this craziness wasn’t enough?
“Bring that costume. Can’t wait to see it! I’ll have one of my own ready to go.”
I blinked. My costume? Oh, right. Though I wasn’t sure my semi-slutty con costume was first date appropriate…
“I have to get going, more work stuff, but check your email. Trust me.”
I guess she wasn’t going to give me time to get out of bringing the costume. Crap. I needed more information here.
“That’s it? What about how we’re going to meet once we get there?”
“Just keep your messenger up. I’ll take care of everything.” And she left with a smiley face. She was gone. I sat at my computer fuming. This was all very peculiar, and it was making me wonder if she’d gone crazy. If I wasn’t about to be the butt of an elaborate joke.
Curiosity burned though. I flipped out of the game client and fired up my Elassa mail. I was expecting to see something from Kaira, but nothing prepared me for what was actually waiting for me. An official communication from Elassa Corp. What the hell?
