Girl Games: A Sweet Lesbian Romance

by Mia Archer

  Most people but Colin. “Damn it!”

  I sighed as my phone started beeping. A low pulsing warning with the screen turning a dull red that pulsed in time with the beeps. That meant danger was getting closer. One of the warding spells I’d set up when I got into work this morning was doing its job and keeping me safe.

  “Your boss is going to kill both of us if she finds us doing this on company time again,” I shot to Colin via the work’s IM. Not that he saw it. No, if I was getting that warning on my phone that meant he was close. Definitely not back at his cube working like a good little cog in the corporate machine.

  I stuck my tongue out at him. If we were going to do this then we were going to do this. It’s not like I could ignore the challenge. Well, I suppose I could unflag myself and then Colin would be left high and dry trying to explain what the hell he was doing over here, but that wouldn’t be any fun. Part of the thrill of the hunt was that moment when the hunter realized they were the hunted.

  I stood and looked over the edge of my cubicle. Richard looked up at me, light reflecting off of his bald head, and cocked an eyebrow. “Having fun with Colin again?”

  “Shush. You’re going to give me away!” I hissed.

  Richard rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Sheila’s going to kill you if she finds the two of you playing the game on company time again.”

  Sheila might kill me if she heard about it, but I also noted that Richard reached out and swiped at his own phone. Hit a few buttons that unflagged his character who’d most definitely been logged into the game. I smiled. Rules were rules, but nothing could overcome the addictive power of Alternate Realms.

  “Sheila wouldn’t dare fire me over something like this,” I said.

  “You really think you’re irreplaceable? I mean you do good work, but plenty of kids graduating CS who’d love to have your job,” Richard said.

  “That’s true, but how many of those are a top player in Alternate Realms? She wouldn’t have anyone to be starstruck over if she fired me.”

  Richard rolled his eyes but he also smiled. He knew I was right. I’d become something of a local legend in the department. Except for that time I’d accidentally fried everyone when I was trying to keep Colin off my back.

  Oops.

  I looked back at my screen and then I glanced at a filing cabinet next to my desk. For a moment I thought about pulling out my glasses, a pair of cheap plastic wired glasses that attached directly to my phone. I hadn’t bothered upgrading because I figured if I could get to the top with old faithful then that was all I needed. Hell, I didn’t even really need the glasses to frag my friends in the office.

  So I didn’t bother getting them out. Partly because my ego told me I didn’t need them, but mostly because if I put them on that would be an obvious tell to Sheila that we were playing Alternate Realms if she happened to look out of her office.

  The beeping on my phone was getting louder and I reached out to hit the mute button on that spell. Some spells you could mute, like if it was something I cast that notified me there was danger sneaking up on me. Other sounds, like a spell hitting me or even the dreaded death noise, happily piped out of my phone’s speakers at top volume whether or not I had headphones in so every player around me would know what was going on.

  I really hoped Colin didn’t launch an attack that would register as a hit and play a loud sound that would definitely pull Sheila out of her office. That was the one feature of the game that made it really difficult to play in an office where it wasn’t exactly frowned upon, but wasn’t exactly encouraged either.

  “He’s going to get you this time,” Richard taunted in a singsong voice from the other side of the cubicle. I tried to tune it out, but not before getting in a parting shot of my own.

  “Yeah, you’d like that wouldn’t you? Someone succeeding where you’ve failed so many times?”

  Richard let out a huff from the other side of the cube wall and I could just imagine his shoulders rising and falling indignantly. It annoyed him that he’d never been able to get the drop on me even when he was right next to me all day long. Eventually he’d stopped trying because he got tired of the death sound blasting out of his phone at all hours.

  Richard wasn’t very good at Alternate Realms.

  I popped my head over the cubicle wall again. This time I saw him. Colin. Walking towards me with a huge grin on his face. He had something up his sleeve. He always did when he was smiling like that. He also always found out that whatever he had up his sleeve usually wasn’t enough.

  I decided to test the waters. I pulled up a menu in-game on my phone and selected one of my nastier spells. A high level homing fireball that slammed into my enemies and pulverized them. At least in theory. It also created some splash damage, a lot of the spells in game had those pesky semi-realistic side effects, and so I ran the risk of pissing people off if they had their characters logged in and flagged as playing.

  Whatever. That was their problem. Not mine. They knew they were in a war zone if they kept themselves flagged near me.

  I didn’t have my glasses on so I didn’t see a crude representation of a fireball go streaking down the hallway towards Colin. On my cheap set of glasses it was just some simple LEDs that looked like one of those ancient handheld games my older brother played with when I was a toddler. I’d heard some of the newer more expensive sets could make the graphics look almost like the real thing as the alternate reality of Alternate Realms was laid over the real world.

  I couldn’t see the fireball, but I could flip the game over to map mode on my phone. I watched as the spell tracked a path over a satellite image of my office building. The developers weren’t so skilled that they had a detailed map of the building and I’d never uploaded one, though industrious gamers had added maps of various buildings that were popular hubs for the game over the past few years.

  I held my breath and resisted the urge to cackle with glee as the spell made contact with a dot that represented Colin. Or more accurately it represented Colin’s character. The spell hit him.

  And winked out. There wasn’t even the sound of it hitting his character and causing some damage as he moved inexorably down the hall like a geeky and woefully undersized Terminator that could feel one emotion judging by the smile on his face: glee.

  “Uh-oh,” Richard said. “Sounds like someone’s big bad fireball spell just fizzled out.”

  “Shut up Richard,” I said.

  I ran over the scenario in my head. Usually a fireball or a lightning spell or something like that was enough to take Colin out. He must’ve gotten tired of getting fried before he even got to me. Obviously the jerk had gotten his skinny little mitts on some sort of anti-magic spell or device or something. And he was coming right for me.

  I plopped down on my chair with a thud that had the thing protesting. I winced. It wasn’t that I was heavy so much as the chairs and equipment they kept in this place was right next to the definition of “barebones” in the dictionary.

  Colin was coming right for me. I had maybe a minute before he was right there. He had something that was preventing my magic spells from hitting him. I sighed and opened a panel in the game. My finger hovered over my phone’s screen as I closed my eyes and prepared for the inevitable.

  I turned off sound notifications, but the phone was still pulsing in my hand. The ward spells I’d set up were still telling me that a potential hostile was getting closer and closer. I might’ve turned the sound off, but the vibration was still working quite fine thank you very much. I waited until I could almost sense him standing right in front of me. Until the phone wasn’t pulsing. It was just a steady angry vibrating buzz in my hand.

  I pressed on the screen. Immediately there was an almost comical “schwing!” noise from my phone. Followed by a gargling shriek from a phone almost right in front of me and then the suitably morbid death song.

  I opened my eyes. Smirked up at Colin who was standing at the entrance to my cubicle with a shell-s
hocked look plain on his face. He looked down at his phone screen which was displaying bloody red splotches to let him know he’d been killed. By a good old fashioned melee attack.

  “How the hell did you do that?”

  I tried to make my smile look innocent. It was hard. How did you look sweet and innocent when you knew you were a big bad shark swimming amongst the minnows?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about Colin,” I said. I turned back to my computer, but not before I heard a throat clearing at the door to my cube. I squeezed my eyes shut. I knew it was too good to be true. I turned around again.

  “Something wrong Sheila?” I asked.

  She stood there, about forty years old and not looking a day over her mid-twenties. She had blonde hair flowing past her shoulders. Blonde hair that I sometimes wondered about running my fingers through. The boss lady was fucking hot. There was no getting around it. Not that she used her hotness at all. No, she ruled through a unique combination of fairness and an iron fist that I found admirable.

  Except for those occasions when the iron fist was descending on me.

  “I’m pretty sure I just heard the death song from Alternate Realms over here. You two wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” she asked. Her arms were crossed, but there was the barest hint of a smile threatening at the corner of her mouth that told me she wasn’t mad. At least not too mad.

  “Nothing like that going on here,” I said. “Just working hard!”

  “Working hard on making your reservation for the Gathering?” she asked.

  I turned and looked at my screen. Damn it. I knew I was forgetting something. The page for the Gathering was still up on my monitor. I figured there was nothing but to own it and go for sheer ballsiness at this point though. I twirled back and faced Sheila with a smile.

  “Nah. I made my reservation for the Gathering months ago, but you already knew that didn’t you?”

  This time the smile that was threatening really did turn up the corners of her mouth. Just a little. Enough to let me know I was in the clear.

  “Right. Well make sure you get everything done that I outlined in that email. I’d hate to have to call you in remotely while you’re off at the Gathering.”

  “Sure thing boss!” I said. What I wasn’t going to add was I had no intention of bringing my computer or my mobile hotspot along with me. There wasn’t a chance in hell that I was doing anything that even had a whiff of work attached to it while I was off on vacation.

  “And as for any wannabe heroes who are coming over here to kill the company Alternate Realms superstar, maybe you should think of ambushing your friend after hours when you’re not on company time?”

  Colin looked down, but I knew Sheila was just having some fun with him. Not that he had any way of knowing that since he didn’t work with her enough to know when she was bullshitting and when she was seriously mad. I figured I’d let him stew for a little while. It might save me some trouble the next time he decided to distract me from being distracted from work because he wanted to try and prove himself.

  “Right. It won’t happen again,” Colin said.

  “Sure it will,” Sheila said. “I’m not going to be an ogre about this. I remember when I started out DOOM was the big thing that hit productivity. That was an old video game, for you whippersnappers.”

  “I know what DOOM is!” I said, indignant. I remembered playing it with my brother. And being terrified because that wasn’t the sort of game a little kid should be playing, even if it looked quaint by today’s realistic standards.

  “Right. Just make sure it doesn’t affect your work too much,” she said, and then Sheila was gone. Colin breathed a sigh of relief, but I just rolled my eyes and turned back around to the computer to look at pictures from other live events ARealms had put on in the past. Let him think he was actually close to being in trouble there.

  “So are you going to tell me how you did that?” he asked.

  “Did what?”

  “Killed me!”

  “Well I put the pointy end of my character’s sword into the soft squishy end of your character’s character. Then the game decided I won and you died. That’s how it usually works.”

  “But you’re not supposed to be able to do that! You’re a high level mage!”

  “So? Does that mean I can’t be a high level Fighter or Assassin or something like that too?”

  “Well I suppose, but that would take you forever to get skills in both on your character!”

  I turned and smirked at him.

  “You spent forever dual classing your character. Didn’t you?”

  “I’m not telling,” I said.

  I figured it was simple insurance. People in this game tended to think of you as fighting with weapons or magic. No one ever stopped to consider that someone might make a character who did both just because it took so long. Those people had no imagination, in my opinion. They also weren’t as good as me.

  There was a reason I was on top. At least locally.

  I turned back to my computer, back to a slideshow of pictures from past live events that was running past. I figured that was it for our little interaction, but my breath caught when I saw the most beautiful and stunning creature I’d ever seen in my life. I hurriedly clicked back to the picture of a gorgeous girl, about my age, wearing the most elaborate dress I’d ever seen someone in at an ARealms event and a crown on her head.

  “Who’s that?” I breathed.

  Colin leaned over my shoulder. “Oh, you mean the queen?”

  2: The Gathering

  Anna:

  “The queen? What are you talking about?”

  Colin moved over and leaned against my desk. He crossed his arms and looked down at me like I’d just grown a second head or something. I blushed. I hated it when he looked at me like I didn’t know something about the game.

  “You’re kidding me. Right?”

  “No? I didn’t know we had a queen.”

  “Well there’s a queen in the game,” Colin said.

  “But I didn’t vote for her!”

  Colin rolled his eyes and looked down at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world. I hated it when he did that.

  “She’s the queen! You don’t vote for her!”

  “Don’t look at me like I don’t know anything about this game. I’m the master around here.”

  “Right, you’re the master and sometimes I think you don’t know anything about the game you’re playing. The queen is supposed to be the head of the factions. Or she’s the head of the royal faction that’s supposed to make sure the other factions don’t fight too much. In theory.”

  I shook my head. “Those people are all idiots. All I need is my phone at my side.”

  “Correction. You’ve only needed your phone at your side to win in this office and whenever you go to the East Bumfuck Alternate Reality invitational. If we’re going to the Gathering you’re going to be up against some of the best players in the world. You’ll need to go with a faction if you want to live for more than a half hour in that wilderness.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I’ve never needed anyone but me, and I don’t see that changing when we go to this Gathering thing.”

  “Hey!”

  I rolled my eyes and decided to amend my statement. More to make Colin feel better than because I actually felt that way.

  “Okay. All I need is my phone at my side and you helping me out.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Every good player needs someone to act as bait anyways,” I muttered.

  “You know I can hear you when you mutter like that, and it hurts.”

  “Whatever. Tell me more about this queen chick. Is she the queen every year or something? Do they swap it around? What does she do?”

  I suddenly found myself wanting to know everything I could find out about this girl. She was just so… compelling. That face. Those striking blue eyes staring out at me from the pictures. The way she filled out that dres
s. It made me want to rip that dress off, even if there wasn’t much of a chance she swung in my direction.

  What was a girl to do?

  “So what can you tell me about her?” I asked.

  Colin shrugged as I pulled up more pictures. Turns out they had a whole gallery that was dedicated completely to this queen lady, turns out her name was Erin, and what she’d been up to. ARealms liked to promote the more glamorous aspects of their game. Probably figured it was good for marketing or something.

  “Not much to say. I hear she took control three years ago when they had the first big Gathering, and there hasn’t been a new queen since. Not sure if that’s an appointed position she keeps or if it’s something where you have to cut off her head to take her power, but either way it seems like she’s there to stay.”

  “Very interesting,” I said. I tapped my lips as I looked at this Erin girl. Beautiful and the top player in the game? Someone who managed to hold onto her position for so long? That seemed like someone who had a target painted on her back. She sounded like the perfect opportunity for me to really test out how good I was.

  It was a damn shame I was probably never going to get close enough to her to try myself against her.

  “I don’t like the look in your eyes Anna,” Colin said. “You only get like that when you’re planning something that’s going to get me in trouble.”

  I fixed Colin with my best and most innocent look. From the way he stared down at me, skepticism incarnate, it didn’t seem that he was believing the sweet and innocent act one bit. Oh well. It was worth a try.

  “You don’t have anything to worry about,” I said.

  “I don’t? Because I’ve noticed that around the time you start telling me I don’t have anything to worry about is usually exactly when I should start worrying.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Seriously. It’s not like I’m going to get close enough to her royal highness to do anything.”

  Oh the things I would do to her royal highness if I could get close enough to have a little fun, though. I flipped to a picture where she was in an armored bikini of all things and suddenly I was feeling things that hadn’t hit me this strong since I first hit puberty and realized I was a lot more interested in being “just friends” with some of my girlfriends and that boys were still yucky.