What to Read After FSOG: The Gemstone Collection (WTRAFSOG Book 4)

by Selena Kitt

  A millionaire at seventeen years old by his own doing.

  From there it just got worse. He’d attended the California Institute of Technology but had dropped out after a year and founded his own company, Draco Multimedia, out of a warehouse in Irvine. Eventually that company built its own multi-complex campus in the same city. They produced several games—the culmination of which was currently Dragon Epoch, a subscription-based fantasy environment that millions of players worldwide paid for the privilege of playing. Including me.

  Now I knew exactly what Heath had meant when he’d said that Drake and I had things in common. Or maybe it was his own starry-eyed gamer worship that had gotten in the way. If I was a hardcore gamer, Heath was worse. He was the one who’d gotten me into the whole thing in the first place.

  Now I was growing skeptical about Heath’s judgment. No doubt he was fan-geeking during those “multiple interviews” where he and Drake had spoken for hours both in person and on the phone.

  I brewed myself a pot of tea and glanced at the clock. I had hours yet before work, no desire to study and tons of blog posts to write—at least three reviews, one interview and a couple of spotlights.

  And yes, my weekly report on Dragon Epoch. But I wondered how I could keep that completely neutral—as if I didn’t know he was watching.

  Then again, while my blog was quite popular in the gaming community, I doubted a child prodigy genius CEO had time to regularly read the tripe I wrote. His game was far larger than the trivial comments I made on it. He’d probably been alerted to the auction by one of his underlings. Maybe he’d even glanced over the blog once he’d won.

  I’d criticized his game all over my blog. I loved playing it and found it a deeply immersive and fun experience but, as with practically every fantasy-based role-playing game in the industry, it was ripe with misogyny. After all, the companies knew who their main customers were: young, horny guys in their late teens and twenties, suffering through college and all types of social awkwardness. Why not create female avatars and nonplayer characters that were all lithe, sexual and scantily clad? Anything to sell game subscriptions…

  My objections were mostly mild and sarcastic. I’d make scathing comments like, “Come on boys, can you imagine your local half-elf healer jaunting down to the pond to collect herbs in her chainmail bikini? Hope she got her Brazilian wax before she donned that thing or else, ouch.”

  Sometimes I got hate mail, but usually my snark amused the male readers and got a lot of “hear, hear!” from my female readers.

  I wondered if Drake had ever seen the column. I wondered if Drake, himself, was a misogynist. His behavior this afternoon had not led me to believe otherwise.

  Flustered and distracted, I had the choice of engaging in one of my two favorite activities when I had things on my mind: running or playing on the game. With a sigh and a flick of the computer switch, I picked the easier one—once I’d changed out of that dreadful skirt and into my forgiving yoga pants. I needed to get my mind off of that afternoon’s weird encounter and logging into Dragon Epoch was the best way to do it.

  I was all set to go slaughter a horde of monsters when my notification list lit up.

  *Your friend FallenOne is online.

  I was shocked, pleasantly so. He hadn’t been on in weeks. A pang of some feeling I couldn’t describe resonated in my chest—longing, excitement.

  Before I could start the chat, my screen flashed.

  *FallenOne tells you, “Hey.”

  *You tell FallenOne, “Hey, stranger! Where have you been?”

  *FallenOne tells you, “Haven’t logged on in forever. School is kicking my ass.”

  *You tell FallenOne, “Should be over soon, no? So glad I don’t have classes this semester.”

  *FallenOne tells you, “Lucky. Had to get on the game to blow off some steam. Wanna go kill stuff?”

  *You tell FallenOne, “Always. You going to be on for our regular game night? Fragged misses you, too.”

  Fragged was the name of Heath’s Barbarian Mercenary. I waited. Fallen didn’t reply for a few minutes and I wondered what was going on.

  Fallen and I had had a friendship, as with Heath and our other friend from Canada, who used the character name of Persephone, for over a year. Fallen had never wanted to join our guild but he played with us regularly even though he never used in-game voice chat and only texted in game. He seemed shy and unwilling to come out of his shell. Still we’d joked around and spent hours LOLing and giggling at the stupidest things. For a while, there, I really thought I had a bit of a crush on him. Sometimes I still felt the pangs of it even though my logical thoughts ruled that as being ridiculous. I hardly knew anything about his real life except that he was on the east coast somewhere and in college. I wasn’t in danger. You couldn’t fall for someone over an online game and long IM chats, could you?

  But then I’d posted the auction. We had argued about it and he’d all but disappeared. And even now he was still distant, hesitant. I had no idea what university he attended or what his real name was—he was that shy. I could have ruled these two instances—my auction and his disappearance—as coincidental if it hadn’t been for what came next in our conversation.

  *FallenOne tells you, “You still going through with that auction?”

  I grimaced.

  *You tell FallenOne, “Yeah.”

  *FallenOne tells you, “I know it’s none of my business, but is it really a good idea? You’ve been through a lot of shit this past year with your mom being sick and that big test. Maybe now isn’t the time for you to do something drastic like this?”

  I sighed. Why didn’t guys understand that for a woman of my age, being a virgin was a burden more than anything else? I just wanted to dump it already. Why not profit from it?

  *You tell FallenOne, “Everyone’s gotta lose it sometime. Why not go out with a bang?”

  *FallenOne tells you, “Pun intended, I hope?”

  I laughed. That “sounded” more like the Fallen I knew. We chatted for a few more minutes before we traveled to the same game zone—the place where our characters were located, the Misty Caverns, in order to go hunt bad guys together. Little more was said about the auction or our personal lives after that. Fallen didn’t promise to log in again on our regular game night and with no small amount of sadness I realized that this might be the end of our regular gaming relationship.

  Our mutual friend, Persephone, would be sad. She’d been trying to play matchmaker for Fallen and me for months and she hadn’t been subtle about it. And me, well, I wasn’t sure how I felt. More confused than ever, I guess.

  After a few hours, a few hundred oozing undead and several quest rewards, Fallen decided to log off. I kept going—a form of procrastination and avoidance of the things I should be doing and thinking about. The question of Drake, Mr. CEO of the game I so loved, and his arrogance was still on my mind. Killing monsters didn’t help so I resolved to go for a run later that evening.

  But I never got there because less than a half hour after Fallen logged off, my door was nearly pounded off its hinges. I’d have recognized that knock at midnight in the middle of cyclone. With a smile I got up and jerked open the door.

  My two besties—besides, Heath, of course—stood in the door, shoulder to shoulder. I grinned at Alex, the daughter of my landlady, who had her long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had beautiful olive skin and was wearing a tight T-shirt with a printed-on bowtie and the motto Bowties Are Cool across her ample chest.

  Jenna, her best friend and roommate, with the brightest blond hair I’d ever seen on a person out of childhood—complete with a shock of brilliant purple—fidgeted beside her.

  “Password?” I demanded.

  The two girls glanced at each other and in unison they chanted, “I aim to misbehave.” I grinned at our favorite quote from Captain Mal Reynolds of Firefly.

  Jenna sidled into the room, squeezing ahead of Alex. She held a Tupperware container that rattled and said,
“Can we come in?”

  As she was already mostly in the apartment anyway, I stepped aside with an exaggerated sigh. Alex grabbed my arm and gave me a dramatic shake, her dark brown eyes widening. “We are doing a Doctor Who marathon at our place tomorrow night. You gotta come. There’ll be a drinking game. We shoot tequila every time the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver. We do a beer bong when he says ‘I’m the Doctor.’”

  I laughed. I loved Doctor Who but I knew I wasn’t up for that. Not this week. “I’ve got my study group—”

  Alex stomped her foot and the sound of it echoed on the floor below, which was the ceiling of her mother’s garage. “Come on, Mia! There will be cute boys there. Cute boys who love Doctor Who.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, and they’ll be even cuter after the beer goggles are on.”

  Jenna shook her box again and it rattled as she plopped down on my half broken-down couch—the fabric was shredded and patched with duct tape. “Okay, so you don’t like to party. We get it. We’ve been asking you for months. But at least tell me you are going to come to my Dungeons and Dragons game next Saturday.”

  I groaned inwardly. Not this again. “I’m sorry, Jen, I have to work a double shift on Saturday.”

  She raised her pale—almost invisible—brows at me and popped off the cover of her plastic container. “You think you’re a gamer, punching around on your keyboard, hunched over your monitor? You haven’t truly gamed until you’ve used these,” she said, holding her palm open to display some tiny three-dimensional plastic pieces of all sizes and colors. Some were shaped like pyramids, others were multifaceted spheres. Some gleamed like gems in the late afternoon sunlight. All of them were covered with plain, white numbers.

  “That little tiny pyramid looks cool,” I conceded.

  Her face fell. I’d somehow displeased her. “This is a d-four—a four-sided die. It is perfectly balanced to give me the perfect chance for a completely random one-in-four roll every time.”

  “Um. Okay.”

  Jenna pulled out an oilcloth and began polishing the shapes. “You don’t get to use cool stuff like this for computer games.”

  I sighed. “I’m sorry. I promise I’ll come soon. But this test has me so stressed out I can hardly think of anything else but studying and working so I can eat in order to keep myself alive so I can continue to stress about this damn test.”

  Because I’d failed it last year. I’d bombed so abysmally that that failure hung over my future like an executioner’s axe. It froze me with fear so that the thought of taking it—and failing it—again made me physically ill inside. Instead, I studied and studied and put off the retakes. The test was offered every month and everything—everything—I’d planned for my future rested on that godforsaken test. I hadn’t yet found my confidence, or the courage, to try it again.

  But if I didn’t do it, I’d never be a doctor.

  Since school and testing usually came pretty easily to me, I’d thought that the MCAT would be the same. How terribly wrong I’d been. I swallowed an icy pebble of fear, willing myself not to think about it.

  Alex plopped down beside Jenna and fingered some of the dice in the box, avoiding my eyes. “We get it,” she said, but it was easy to hear the hurt in her voice.

  I sighed, sinking down onto the metal folding chair opposite them—I had such fashionable furniture. It was bad, even for a college pad.

  “I’m sorry. Really.”

  Alex looked up, her eyes hard. “I said we get it.”

  Jenna placed a hand on her arm. “Alejandra, calm down please. I’m sure she’ll hang with us again when the test is over.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t you two have finals coming up or something? Why aren’t you studying?”

  They attended nearby California State University in Fullerton, which was on a slightly different schedule than my school, Chapman University. Alex cleared her throat. “Because I’m a communications major and she has such good grades that she opted out of most of her finals, because she’s a fucking brainiac,” she said, jerking her thumb toward Jenna.

  Jenna looked up and despite the crap she’d just given me, I could read real empathy in her pale blue eyes. She was stunning, really—like the love child of a Norse goddess and Alexander Skarsgård. “It’s okay, Mia, really. If you ever need help studying or anything, let me know. I could quiz you. I don’t know much about bio, but I know there are some physics-related questions on the test and since that’s my major…”

  I sighed, running my hands through my hair and resting my forehead in my palms. “I’m the worst friend ever.”

  “No. You’re just stressed out and if you keep this up, you’ll fail just because you’ll be too keyed up to even focus.”

  I rubbed my forehead with my thumbs, feeling the beginnings of a stress headache. This day! It felt endless, between the lack of sleep after my late shift, the rushed preparations, the unexpected meeting with a pompous but very hot asshole, the weird gaming session with Fallen and now this.

  Alex got up from the couch and came over to crouch beside my chair. “Pobrecita,” she murmured in Spanish, meaning “you poor thing.” She slipped an arm around my shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

  I sighed again and leaned my head on her shoulder. Then she invited me to eat downstairs with her mom and we pigged out on her awesome enchiladas.

  “You leave it to me and Jen,” Alex said. “We’ll find you a hot nerd and then you won’t be able to say ‘no’ to our parties.”

  I grinned and swallowed, my throat suddenly tight. I’d met a hot nerd earlier that day and found I didn’t like him much.

  Chapter Four

  As the next few days rolled on, my mind constantly dwelled on the question of whether it was the right decision to proceed as planned. I was finding it awkward to even force myself to do my weekly DE report. This week’s had been a bland, neutral commentary on some of the lamer quests in the game. But what about next week and the week after? What about after Drake and I slept together? Would I always be worried that he’d be stalking my blog?

  I could opt to cut my regular DE report from the blog. Readers would protest that. I received lots of hits, re-blogs and comments on that feature. My blog was my livelihood. It brought in more money through advertisements than my hospital job currently did. Hopefully it would keep paying the rent throughout med school as well.

  So, after days of mulling it over, I came to a decision. And while procrastinating making the call to Heath, I happened to log on and find him on the game.

  *You tell Fragged, “Hey dude, whatcha doing?”

  *Fragged tells you, “Killing trolls in the Golden Mountains. This new hidden quest chain is driving me up a tree. Come help me, I need your enchantress. They keep stunning me.”

  With a sigh, I complied, running my character over to the nearest magic portal chamber to take her to the location where Heath was tirelessly hacking his way through troll parts to find some small clue to the game’s latest mystery.

  *You tell Fragged, “You and everyone else who plays the game. You didn’t try to weasel the secret out of Drake, did you?”

  *Fragged tells you, “No. I doubt he’d tell me anything anyway.”

  *You tell Fragged, “You sure? You definitely chatted with him for a long time.”

  My character was almost to Fragged’s location in the game, at the base of the Golden Mountains, when I got jumped by an aggressive mountain goblin.

  *Fragged tells you, “Where are you? I’m up to my asshole in troll guts.”

  *You tell Fragged, “I have aggro. Goblin jumped me. I’ll be there in a minute. Oh and by the way, I need you to get in touch with the number two guy in the auction. It’s not going to work with Drake.”

  I was just finishing off the mountain goblin, my character at half her full life, when he replied.

  *Fragged tells you, “Um. What?”

  *You tell Fragged, “Just do it. I’m almost there—shit! Another goblin! Come help me. He has friends and I’m o
nly at half my life.”

  I watched as my red health bar—the indicator of my character’s life—started to dwindle. I punched buttons left and right waiting for his Mercenary to show up with his mighty sword so he could stand between me and the bad guys. We spell-casters referred to the big brawny warrior-types as “meat shields” because they stood between us and the monsters while we shot them with magic spells.

  *Fragged tells you, “I’m on my way. I strongly disagree, by the way. If you’re going to go through with this, then D. is your best bet. And we probably shouldn’t be texting each other about it in his own fucking game.”

  Fragged arrived to save my bacon when I had only a sliver of health left. I backed up, drank a healing potion and punched my highest-level spell, “Bedazzle,” to stun the goblin and his friends. They swayed back and forth with stars in front of their eyes while Heath’s Barbarian Mercenary beat them down one at a time.

  “Take that, sucker!” I muttered aloud.

  I turned back to my keyboard, quickly typing in my next message to Heath.

  *You tell Fragged, “So why do you disagree about calling it off with him and going to the other guy?”

  I finished off the second goblin with a lightning bolt and then sent a healing spell to Fragged, who was down to a third of his life.

  *Fragged tells you, “Because D. is the best prospect, hands down.”

  I gritted my teeth, frustrated.

  *You tell Fragged, “Are you saying that because it is in my best interest or because you have DE stars in your eyes? You are hooked on this game and I know that’s what you spent your hours talking to him about—wheedling game secrets out of him.”

  *Fragged tells you, “WTF.”

  His character, turned to mine and made a rude gesture. In response, I flipped off the screen, though I knew he wouldn’t see it.

  *You tell Fragged, “Real mature.”

  *Fragged tells you, “I’m not very mature when I’m pissed. If you think, for one minute, that I was putting my own interest ahead of yours, then how can you even call me a friend, Mia?”