by Lexi Archer
Anyways, I’m getting away from what’s important. Nobody could play on this kind of server for any appreciable length of time and not know what “it” was. “It” was the thing that made these kinds of servers infamous, even though most people weren’t interested in that sort of thing.
There was role-playing. Building a story with other people. Developing a character. And then there was “role-playing” where people got together with an avatar of the opposite sex, or the same sex depending on their preference, and went to a quiet corner of the zone or some private dungeon for some fun that amounted to little more than poorly written two player erotica improv.
John shrugged and grunted which surprised me. Usually the mere mention of that stuff got more of a reaction out of him. “I don’t know what you expected, dressing yourself up in that ridiculous bikini outfit. You know that’s all those people want.”
I rolled my eyes. “I should be able to enjoy role-playing without having someone trying to digitally hump me.”
John rolled his eyes and turned back to his computer. “Raid’s starting again. Tell that guy you’re married and he needs to fuck off. And seriously consider maybe not putting yourself in a position where you have random guys hitting on you?”
I blinked. Usually John didn’t get that pissy about me role-playing, but he seemed to be in a mood tonight. And dealing with him in a mood was putting me into a mood of my own. I put my hands back onto the keyboard, as soon as I was transported back into the game where I was good and pissed off now.
My eyebrows lowered and my face darkened as a storm cloud passed across it. I was amazed that this asshole couldn’t see the danger he’d just ignited. I reached my hand back and smacked him with all the force I could muster, sending him flying across the tavern with a very surprised look on his face as magical energy crackled around him. Everyone else in the room who was busy off in their own little world continued to not pay attention to the altercation. A few heads looked up, casually interested, but most weren’t concerned with our business. Especially when one of us was using magic and the other looked like an undercover enforcer.
He picked himself up from the shattered table he landed on and stalked towards me, a storm cloud on his own face. “What’s the big idea you bitch?”
I stood and stared up at him, held out my hand and allowed a fireball to dance between my fingers. He looked down and his eyes widened when he saw that. They widened even more when they heard what I had to say.
“If you’re going to god mode then I can do the same thing,” I said. “And if you’re going to treat a role-playing session with somebody as nothing more than an excuse to solicit them for a little “fun” then I’m going to break character! Now I suggest you get out of here before I report you to a game moderator and see what they think about your chat logs. You are aware that what you’re trying to do is against the rules, right? Very against the rules.”
I left out the part about being married. Better not to get into that. Better not to let the room know I was actually a girl out in the real world.
He paused and looked at me and then to the rest of the room. More than a few people had turned towards us. I’m sure most of the people who were sitting in this room were sitting in here looking for the very same thing this guy was. I rolled my eyes and let out another disgusted noise. This is what I got for coming to a general role-playing area.
The asshole faded away, no doubt logging out of the game rather than sticking around to risk more humiliation. Of course he was logging out of the game under the false assumption that if he wasn’t logged in then the moderators wouldn’t be able to do something about him. They could ban him just as easily if he was in game as if he was out. Not that I actually had any intention to report him. I was actually more mad at myself for losing control like that and breaking character in public chat. That was violating one of the biggest rules of being involved in the role-playing community.
I sat down at the bar and buried my head in my hands, despairing of ever finding somebody who was worth role-playing with in a public area like this. I needed to just logout for the night or send a private message to somebody on my list who was passably decent at writing.
Only all the people I usually role-played storylines with were either offline or they were the kind of people who churned out the same repetitive crap every time. The last thing I wanted was to spend another night wasting time with someone like Caitlin who was always the mysterious elf princess who kept her identity hidden and then swears you to secrecy when she reveals who she truly is, or Mike who was always a stoic but goodhearted adventurer whose morals always overcame his desire for money by the end of whatever story we were working on.
Boring. Typical. Predictable.
No, the game was starting to get stale. It was starting to get boring. I sighed at my keyboard and my character sighed in the game. It was starting to feel like there were no new worlds to conquer, no new scenarios to explore.
I pulled away from the keyboard and out of the game world. What I needed was a break. What I really needed was that date night I’d been looking forward to all day at work. I looked over my shoulder to John who was engrossed in his raid.
I smiled to myself. Maybe the night could still be salvaged.
3: Second Chance Denied
I didn’t see Kayla sneaking up on me. The first indication she was anywhere close to me was a hand on my shoulder that caused me to curse and jump.
I held up a finger. I needed to make sure I was in a spot where I could stop for a moment. Thankfully she’d decided to come over and pester me right after we’d finish one of the bosses, and so a note that I needed to take a five-minute breather was enough to put the raid on hold.
“What’s up babe?” I asked.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” Kayla said.
“It’s no problem. We were at a stopping point anyways. So what did you need?”
The five minute breather was literally just that. A five minute breather. I needed to be ready when the breather was over which meant she needed to be quick about telling me whatever the hell it was she needed. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at the thought that of course she’d come over and ask me something now that I was in the middle of the raid and couldn’t get away from the computer.
Kayla glanced at the screen but didn’t say anything. She sighed and looked unhappy. I had a feeling that unhappiness had to do with me being in the middle of a raid which just annoyed me even more.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“Really. What is it?”
“I was hoping we might spend some time together,” she said. “But I see that you’re…”
She nodded towards the screen and this time I did sigh. I glanced over to the raid. We weren’t even halfway through and we’d been at this for a couple of hours. If we finished things up then I wasn’t going to be free for at least another couple of hours. Why did she have to wait until I was in the middle of something important to suddenly decide she wanted to spend time together?
That sent a flash of irritation running through me that was perhaps a little stronger than it normally would be. That really did piss me off. I come home from work and she has her nose buried in her computer. She barely even acknowledges me other than glancing at me before I hop onto my computer and log into the game myself. And now that she was done with whatever the hell was she was doing, writing two-person fanfiction with that pervert who was hitting on her which I wasn’t happy about let me tell you despite the strange stirring in my cock when I thought about it, she expected me to drop everything so I could accommodate her busy schedule?
Yeah, that didn’t just annoy me. That really pissed me off. And despite the fact that she was offering to have a little fun, a little bit of fun that definitely had caught my cock’s attention, my anger won out over my arousal.
It wasn’t very often that happened.
Only I didn’t want her to know I was angry. The last thing I wanted was to let on
that I was mad. No, I needed to turn the screws without showing how pissed off I was. Pissed off would start a fight. And that’s the last thing I needed to deal with right now if I had a raid I needed to get back to.
Missing the raid because of an argument over not having sex would be even more annoying than missing the raid because my wife decided she wanted to get laid after she was finished with whatever super important thing she was up to in-game.
“I’m sorry honey,” I said. “I’m in the middle of a raid so I don’t have the time. Maybe if you’d said something when I got home…”
She let out a snort. Yeah, she seemed upset. Only I’m not sure what I was supposed to do about it. I was just telling her the truth. She had her chance to have her fun, and that window of opportunity had closed. I definitely wasn’t going to bend over backwards to accommodate her storytelling schedule after she’d gone ahead and ignored me when I walked through the door.
“That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll just go read a book or something.”
I tried to sound as casually disinterested as possible. The whole point of this was to make it sound like I was choosing the game because I’d rather do that than date night, not because I was being spiteful. Honestly I would’ve much rather gotten laid than spend the evening in a video game. I would’ve dropped the raid in a heartbeat, but I was pissed off. And when I got pissed off I started doing things that might be stupid, but whatever.
“Sounds good honey,” I said. “I might be in there in an hour or so if things go well here.”
“You always say that,” she said with a pout obvious on her face, but that pout just made me happy rather than annoyed. I knew I shouldn’t be happy that my wife was pissed off at me. I knew I shouldn’t be happy that I wasn’t going to get laid tonight. Only the chance to give her a taste of her own medicine, a taste of what it felt like to be ignored because she was always engrossed in that damn video game by the time I got home was too delicious to pass up.
“You never know!” I said, playing dumb. “Anyways, I’ll see you when I’m done.”
The raid did end up going faster than I originally thought. We were getting better at this. And part of the reason we were getting so good so fast was precisely because I seemed to be spending every weekend night playing the game rather than spending time with my wife, but I wasn’t the one who started that particular Cold War. No, she was the one who was always planted in front of the computer and barely acknowledging me when I got home from work, so I didn’t feel too bad on that score. I didn’t feel like it was particularly my place to try and fix it if she was the one who was breaking things.
I moved into the bedroom and Kayla was already asleep. Her Kindle was beside her where she’d let it go when she dozed off. I picked it up and put it on her nightstand and then settled in to get some sleep myself.
Of course I couldn’t help but feel a little annoyed that she was already asleep. I couldn’t help but feel a little annoyed that she’d rather spend time in game than talking to me. It made me wonder what she was up to that she was so engrossed with the videogame and not with her husband who was right in front of her. It made me think about that guy she’d admitted was hitting on her and wonder about what she wasn’t admitting to.
Could she be getting up to a little bit of the digital hanky-panky I’d been afraid of despite all of her assurances that she wasn’t doing anything of the sort? No, surely she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t go that far. And yet I couldn’t think of a reason why someone would be so singularly obsessed with the game otherwise.
Damn it. And now my cock was getting hard again. Apparently thinking of my wife and sex in any context was enough to get it going.
I looked over to her and decided it was probably a good idea not to try for a dishonorable discharge with her right next to me in bed. After all, she could wake up and that’d probably start an argument. So instead I went to the bathroom.
Though surprisingly as I was getting off it wasn’t exactly sex with my wife that I was thinking of, but the thought of her having a little bit of extracurricular fun with someone else in the game while I was sitting next to her on my own computer completely oblivious to what was going on.
Weird, but I decided to go with it because I was so ridiculously turned on anyways and I wanted to rub out some frustration and get some sleep.
4: Slightly Astray
I glanced at the clock before I logged into the game. It would be at least another hour before John got home and I figured I had time to get in a little bit of fun in-game before he showed up. Plus I was more than a little annoyed with him after what happened last week. Annoyed to the point that I didn’t even know if date night was going to happen.
I was in the same inn as last week though it was more sparsely populated during the day. Most people were still at work at this hour, though that would change soon. I was about go port to a different area when the door banged open. I turned to see who’d arrived.
The human barbarian who walked through the door looked much the same as any other human barbarian in these parts. He wore a cloak that was tattered and torn in places, though he’d obviously taken care to repair it in other spots. Perhaps he was just in from a long trip. Underneath the cloak he wore the once fine but now faded and threadbare clothes of a man who had fallen on hard times.
As I looked him over I figured that no doubt he was a member of one noble family or another. They seemed to spring up constantly and fall just as quickly as they rose. Both because noble houses were a popular role-playing target for newbies who didn’t know what they were doing yet and because in the game lore there was the whole giant cataclysm that ripped the world asunder and sent humans scattering, nobles included.
I sighed. No, there definitely wasn’t anything promising about a low level human who looked much the same as every other low level human. And he was making his way directly towards me. I suppose it couldn’t be helped. Just like last week I was the only elf in the room.
It really was my fault for drawing the wrong type. I was something of an oddity. Most elf players tended to stay in elf zones. It was amazing how quickly the pseudo-racist undertones of a book series could translate into pseudo-racist undertones in an online role-playing game. Sometimes I thought the people who spouted nonsense about being superior to humans half believed their crap, even though it was probably a human on the other side of the computer doing the role-playing.
At least I was pretty sure elves hadn’t discovered computers and video games. Not yet.
That was one of the reasons I’d come to human lands. The Hokuten Order was ostensibly an elf guild with a few humans here and there. If I stayed where most of our official role-playing events were held, where my guild held the most influence, then I’d almost never make it to human zones.
So in a way I spent time in human territory in the hope I might find somebody who surprised me, though so far I’d found nothing to disabuse me of the commonly held belief that the people who hung out at this particular inn in the human territories were nothing but a bunch of shallow idiots who were more interested in getting their rocks off with a little bit of two way erotica improv than in constructing a genuine storyline and getting into real role-playing.
The human stepped up to the bar and turned to face me. He had a winning smile and I had to admit he was sort of cute in a rugged sort of way. If you were interested in humans, which I most certainly was not. Well, which my character most certainly was not. I wasn’t one of those crazies who didn’t make a distinction between the character I role-played and reality. There were plenty of them out there, believe me.
He leaned an elbow against the bar and immediately lost his balance. Immediately went flying and clattering to the floor sending several empty drinks that were waiting for the bartender to come and pick them up flying. I couldn’t help but giggle at this odd and pretty novel approach to an opening move.
He stood and almost lost his footing again. It appeared that clumsiness was a trait with
this one. I glanced to the sword by his side and wondered how he was able to use the thing without accidentally cutting his head off. Then again that was a sentence that could apply to humans and just about any piece of technology more advanced than fire.
He finally managed to regain his footing and didn’t even bother sketching a bow. He just plopped down on a bar stool and took a deep breath.
“Well that definitely wasn’t a good way to make a first impression,” he muttered.
In the game, in character, he was probably right. Only speaking from a strictly out of character perspective it was a wonderful way to make a first impression I pulled away from the keyboard and blinked. “Now that’s interesting…”
I raised an eyebrow. Studied this strange avatar before me. Stumbling and causing a mess like that was definitely novel. It was definitely something I’d not seen before. Usually this inn was filled with people role-playing for the first, and they were almost universally the type whose characters were secret gods or half dragon or some other nonsense.
Which was pure poppycock. There were no dragons in Tales of Elassa. If there was one thing I hated more than people who used the game’s role-playing community as an excuse to do a little bit of one-handed two-person erotica improv, it was the people who brought in elements that were outside of the worlds established lore.
That made me see red.
So this mysterious person standing before me was refreshing. His character had a vulnerability. His character wasn’t another stoic hero just returned from slaying thousands of his enemies. No, he was just a little clumsy. And that that was enough of a hook that I was intrigued once more. It was enough to make me want to know more about him. It was enough that he was already more promising than the first asshole I ran into and we hadn’t even started properly talking.
