You make one more mistake of this magnitude and it’s a fireable offense.
John and I might have wound up okay after I went back to his office and apologized, but we weren’t that okay. I knew my character’s bank account would be closely monitored by the QC department, and I didn’t think I could plausibly claim that somehow 4500 in gold just happened to get deposited by ‘accident.’ Not and get away with it.
Caught between two mob bosses – one in real life, one in a videogame, both making my existence a few degrees shy of miserable.
How the HELL was I going to make 60 gold a DAY?!
A little voice in the back of my head whispered, Meera.
She had offered to give me 600. We’d spent 500 on her collar, then another 50 on all my bags… but she’d mentioned she would be receiving another thousand in the weeks ahead.
With 1000 gold I could knock the principal down to 3500, which might give me a fighting chance –
No.
I was already conflicted about sleeping with her. Particularly about fantasizing about Alaria while doing it.
Not conflicted enough to stop, apparently, or refuse blowjobs to taunt rivals, but I didn’t feel great about it.
Meera was clearly in love with me, and yet I was just using her for sex.
…and her pretty damn impressive dungeon-diving skills.
But I drew the line at sponging off her for money.
…well, sponging off her any more than I already was by crashing at her place and eating her food.
Although I kind of figured I was paying her back in orgasms for that part.
I wouldn’t borrow massive amounts of money from a woman in real life – especially money I wasn’t sure I could ever pay back – and it felt just as skeezy here in OtherWorld.
I knew logically that my moral qualms were stupid. After all, Meera was just a videogame character.
But she felt real.
Like Alaria did…
Within seconds I was deep into daydreaming about my succubus again.
My guard was down – which is how I got nailed.
Somebody hit me hard enough from the back to send me sprawling face-first onto the ground and knock off 5% of my hit points.
I flipped over, expecting a dead Priest and a Shadow Knight –
Instead, a black, scaly creature with a lizard’s crested head was looming over me. Next to him stood a spiky orange monstrosity and a thing that looked like Baby Cthulhu.
“So we meet again, Warlock,” Toothy sneered.
At least he only had two demons for backup instead of twelve like last night. Thank Heaven for small favors.
I was just about to Soul Suck him when a metal chain flew out of nowhere and wrapped around his body, and a small fireball scorched his forehead.
“What in the Abyss?!” he roared as he staggered backwards.
Blutus stepped out of the shadows, as did Stig.
“Human-lovers!” the black lizard sneered, then yelled at his companions, “Kill them!”
The orange porcupine and Elder God Jr. were about to attack when a blade made of fire erupted in the darkness.
FWOOSH!
Meera’s angry face appeared in the glow of the flames as she raised the sword high.
“Uh-oh,” Baby Cthulhu said, right before he skedaddled.
So did the tangerine sea urchin, which left only Toothy the Demon.
“Looks like you’re flying solo this time,” I said as I jumped to my feet.
“I don’t care – I’ll kill you all!” the demon roared.
…then he turned around and ran for it.
I hadn’t been expecting that.
I guess he believed discretion was the better part of valor, too – although he looked kind of awkward with his arms pinned to his sides by the chain.
“You’re going the wrong way if you want to kill us!” I called out after him.
“Later!” he added over his shoulder as he disappeared into the shadows of the shipyard.
For a second I thought he was angrily saying Peace out!
Then I realized he was saying, I’ll kill you LATER!
Either way, I’d had enough for today.
“Thanks, guys,” I told my crew.
“Do you want us to chase them down?” Meera asked.
“No,” I sighed. “I just want to go home.”
“So… you don’t want to go out anymore?” she asked. I caught the undertone of hope and excitement in her voice.
Oh yeah… that’s right…
The meeting with Varkus had completely taken the celebratory wind out of my sails… but I wasn’t exactly in the mood for 50 Shades of Grey reenactments, either.
“I think I just need to go home,” I said.
“And have fun?” Meera asked with undisguised longing in her voice.
“And relax.”
She didn’t look too happy at that answer, but she didn’t say anything else.
I turned to Stig and Blutus and held out 50 silver. “You guys can go have fun, though. Just be back at the dungeon tomorrow morning an hour after sunrise.”
Stig swiped the coins off my palm, and both he and Blutus yelped “Thanks, boss!” at the same time.
I watched them go, then turned reluctantly to Meera. She was standing there with her hands behind her back and an expectant smile on her face, rocking her shoulders back and forth like a little girl who’s trying to be good but can’t stand still.
Only problem was, when she did that, her breasts jiggled tantalizingly under her tunic.
I stood there, mesmerized, until all that wobbly boobage gave me a chubby and undid all my previous objections.
“Oh, all right,” I grumbled.
“Yaaaaay!” she cheered. She leapt up into my arms, wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck, and kissed me deeply.
It was nice.
Not as nice as if Alaria were doing it, but…
I pushed the succubus out of my mind and French-kissed the angel until she hungrily scooped me up in her arms and flew me home.
27
And so began a pattern that continued for the next week.
Get up in the morning. Eat breakfast.
Go to the dungeon and meet Stig and Blutus.
Grind, grind, grind.
Go back to Exardus and sell off all my loot.
Then, every two or three days, go and pay off Varkus what little I had.
(It wasn’t exactly ‘little’ – I mean, I was earning 42 gold a day on average. But in comparison to my overall debt, it was a drop in the bucket. Maybe a thimbleful in the bucket at most.)
Then go home and have tons of kinky sex with Meera… usually while fantasizing about Alaria.
Then go to sleep, get up, and do it all over again.
The only aberration was when I would occasionally go to the Underneath and ask around for Dorp. It was sort of like a reverse haunting… me looking for a ghost that was nowhere to be found.
Of course, I always went to the Underneath and Varkus’s office long before sundown, just to be safe. And I always watched my back to make sure I wasn’t being tailed by any black, scaly demons.
Throughout all this, I settled into a kind of quiet desperation. I felt trapped by the same mind-numbing routine.
Yeah, yeah, I know – Welcome to the human race, ass-hat.
Or more like Welcome to the rat race.
Get up. Go to work. Come home. Eat a frozen dinner. Watch some TV. Go to bed.
That’s the real world, though. You kind of expect a humdrum life in the real world.
But when you’ve got an entire planet full of magic and dragons and mystical surroundings, and instead you’re stuck in a city of bland white skyscrapers and the boring grind of a mindless 9-to-5 out in the lifeless sands of a desert, it really drives home the question of What the hell am I doing with my life?
I bet you’re saying, At least you got to fuck a hot chick.
Except, when you’re in love with
someone else and the hot chick is kind of needy and annoying and only wants to do weird shit in bed, it ain’t all that. Not after the first couple of times. Trust me.
There was a saying I’d heard: Show me the hottest chick in the world, and I’ll show you the guy who’s tired of banging her.
I always thought that was bullshit. Bedtime stories for frat boys.
Until I found out it wasn’t.
But at least it was sex, no matter how unfulfilling.
The worst was the dungeon. There were no surprises, nothing fun about it. Just the boring, repetitive sameness of it all. Like sorting out ten million white pieces of paper by whether they were ivory, eggshell, or alabaster.
Well, I did finally figure out how to kill SuperCalifragilisticExpialidocious, the chick in the pyramid. It was a matter of getting between her and the door so she couldn’t get out of the room. But even that was like figuring out how to turn on a gas grill in the middle of a forest fire: just more of the same.
I even got so bored I went in to see the Oracle again, hoping she would dispense more wisdom. But she said exactly the same thing as last time.
…there is only ‘I like’ and ‘I do not like’…
…there is only ‘I want’ and ‘I do not want’…
I left the temple just as frustrated as I’d entered. More frustrated, since I’d given up a piece of treasure worth a couple of gold.
The other players I dungeon-dived with at least made things bearable. Oh, I would wind up with the occasional group of assholes, but most people were fairly cool. And if not cool, then affable. And if not affable, then at least interesting. I added a good number of players to my Friends list over the weeks.
But at the end of the day, they were all just a rotating list of guest stars in the endless rerun that was my life – here for an hour and then gone, off to more adventures. And I was left behind… trapped.
Inside Meera’s luxury high-rise: trapped.
Inside the dungeon: trapped.
Inside Exardus: trapped.
Inside Vargus’s vise-grip of debt: trapped.
Inside an unfulfilling relationship: trapped.
Trapped, trapped, trapped.
For the first time, I began to understand what Alaria had been so deathly afraid of.
Dorp’s illusion of her chained, pregnant, and surrounded by screaming children?
It didn’t seem quite so harmless to me anymore.
I was almost longing for a rematch with the dead Priest, goblin Hunter, and Shadow Knight. Anything to break up the tedium.
The one thing that was good was I kept leveling up – although it went from every other day to every few days, and then it took even longer.
At Level 18 I gained a pretty bitchin’ new power: Hellstorm, which was my only AOE (Area of Effect) attack. Basically I could summon a swarm of little bat-winged demons about three inches tall who threw down flaming bits of sulfur at my enemies for six seconds.
The only problem was that Hellstorm made it that much easier to kill the scarabs and snakes and sand trolls… which made it that much more boring to do the dungeon… which made me want to kill myself that much sooner.
Probably not Hellstorm’s intended effect.
There was a slight deviation from the norm at Level 20 in that I didn’t get to fashion a new collar and summon a new demon. What I did get, though, was the ability to FINALLY buy and use a mount.
The day I leveled up, I went into town and – instead of doing the responsible thing and paying off Varkus – blew all my money on a jet-black stallion with glowing yellow eyes. Instead of curling down its neck, its mane turned into black mist that coiled through the air like smoke.
A fitting mount for a badass Warlock.
I named him Balrog, after the creature of shadow and fire that Gandolf fought in Lord of the Rings.
I got to ride him from Meera’s high-rise out to the dungeon… then back to the high-rise in the afternoon.
…yay.
Sort of the equivalent of buying a Ferrari to commute seven blocks.
But occasionally I would let him loose – just the two of us galloping through the dunes, his hooves thundering across the sand.
And for a moment I would feel free.
Every time, I considered not stopping. Thought about continuing on into the desert, damn the consequences.
Varkus’s bounty hunters? Fuck ‘em.
Dying of thirst? Oh well.
Anything to leave this humdrum existence behind.
But then caution and common sense would catch up with me and give me a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t flee Exardus.
I had debts to repay.
I had a job to do.
I had people counting on me.
Whether caution and common sense actually did me any good was another question entirely… but the two of them combined would always convince me to return to Exardus.
And so I would go back to the same pattern of waking up… grinding all day… grinding at night in Meera’s bed… then lying awake, thinking of the woman I had let slip through my fingers, and dreaming of the life I was supposed to be living.
I continued like that for a while, in a downward spiral of depression and hopelessness.
Until things suddenly came crashing to a halt.
28
The four of us were gathered for dinner one night. Meera had finally relented on allowing Blutus in the apartment. He was sitting at the table, ass on the floor, with his big hairy legs tucked up under his chin. He looked like one of the monsters in Where The Wild Things Are had accepted an invitation to a little girl’s tea party.
Stig was in his high chair drinking a bottle of beer. Meera had also completely relaxed on that policy, too.
I found the more she got laid, the more she relaxed.
Funny how that works.
Meera was in the kitchen preparing dinner. Which was odd, since servants usually delivered it on silver platters.
As I sat in my chair, I started hearing odd noises.
Pop! Pop! PopPopPopPopPop!
I frowned in disbelief. It sounded a lot like she was popping popcorn – except it didn’t sound muted enough. Like she was doing it without a lid.
But how does she know how to pop –
Oh yeah.
She’d asked about it that first day in the dungeon. How to fix it, too.
I was impressed she’d remembered. Apparently she’d been planning this for weeks.
Throughout all the popping noises, Meera kept yelling in exasperation, “Aaah! No, stop – come back here – ”
“Do you need any help in there?” I called out.
“No, I’m fine!”
Yeah, I kind of doubt that.
I got up from my chair and left Stig and Blutus at the table.
When I entered the kitchen, I was struck by a hilarious sight: Meera looking frazzled and panicked as white, puffy shapes popped! out of a skillet on the stove. Hundreds of other pieces lay all around her on the floor.
The chick could kick ass in a dungeon, but she’d been defeated by the popcorn monster.
As soon as she saw me, she burst into tears. “It was supposed to be a surprise! I had to find corn, and then get someone to dry it out, and that took weeks, and now I’ve gone and ruined it!”
I smiled at her innate sweetness, then walked over and held her as she sobbed into my shoulder. All around us, pieces of popcorn zinged through the air.
“It’s okay,” I said soothingly.
“But I messed it all up,” she sniffled.
“Actually, you did pretty good for somebody who’s never popped popcorn before,” I lied.
She looked up at me with teary eyes. “…really?”
I pulled a strand of blonde hair away from her eyes and smiled. “Yes. You did.”
Then I leaned over and kissed her gently.
I think it was the first time I’d kissed her that way – and the first time we’d ever kissed without sex being involved.
>
It was nice.
When I finally pulled back, she smiled shyly. “So you’re not mad?”
“No. This is the nicest thing anybody’s done for me in a long time.”
“Really?!” she asked happily, like a little girl who’d been told her mud pies were the best mud pies of all time.
“Really.”
She looked down in dismay at the popcorn littering the floor. “But now it’s dirty.”
“Aaah, your floors are clean enough to eat off of. We’ll extend the Three-Second Rule to the Three-Minute Rule just this once.”
She looked puzzled. “What’s the Three-Second Rule?”
“Never mind. Just pick it up. I won’t tell anybody if you won’t.”
She nodded, then made a face. “If you don’t care, I don’t see why a couple of demons would.”
I closed my eyes and sighed inwardly. Every time she started getting back into my good graces, she would let loose with a broadside against Stig or Blutus. It was like dating a slightly racist chick who would make offensive comments without realizing it.
And it was getting real old, real fast.
“Be nice,” I ordered.
“Fine,” she pouted, then pushed me out of the kitchen. “Go sit down, I’ll be in in a minute.”
I walked back into the dining room and sat down in my chair.
Stig squinted at me. “What happened.”
“Nothing. Just… be nice when you try the popcorn, okay?”
Stig made a face like he wasn’t making any promises, then took another swig of beer from his bottle.
Two minutes later, Meera emerged from the kitchen carrying a plate and smiling triumphantly.
“Here we are!” she said brightly, and laid down the plate in front of me.
On it were about 15 pieces of popcorn.
It was like one of those fancy-schmancy restaurants where they serve you a single lamb chop and a couple of radishes carved to look like tulips, then charge you 50 bucks.
Haute popcorn.
“Uh… thank you,” I said.
Meera picked up a fork and handed it to me. “Try it!”
“That’s… not really how you eat popcorn,” I said gently.
Her face fell. “It’s not?”
“No. For one thing, you usually put a whole bunch in a bowl. And you eat it with your fingers.”
Pengantar Psikologi Klinis Page 31
