Devastator

by Jason Cordova

  Tori knew why she was so nervous. For all their flirting and dating, despite the activities they’d done together over the past year or so, Dylan had never called anything they’d done a “date.” He’d tried to keep it informal for her so she could ease into some semblance of normality and build up trust once more. It’d taken her quite a while to become accustomed to the idea of a boyfriend, but Dylan, if anything, had been very patient with her. She appreciated that.

  Which was why she was so anxious, she realized as she stood at the entrance of the Rainforest Cafe. After all he’d done for her, and continued to do, the last thing she wanted was to screw it all up.

  She looked down at the dress she wore. It felt weird and fun at the same time, something she wasn’t accustomed to. She was a jeans and sweater girl normally, with the exception of when she worked out. A summer dress and sandals? It felt odd. Fortunately, Orlando was warm almost year-round, and the sandals and dress were more than enough. The concierge had saved her from overdressing but had decided to forgo the skirt and shirt combo after realizing she wasn’t the type to usually wear a dress in the first place.

  “You want to wow him, go with a cute dress,” the woman had said as she handed the article of clothing over to her. “He’ll never see it coming.”

  She stopped at the door of the restaurant and took a deep breath. She steeled her nerves and walked in.

  “Hi,” she said as she approached one of the hostesses who were gathered around a small pedestal. The woman looked up at her and smiled. “I’m meeting my boyfriend here…he said he’s at the macaw?”

  “Macaw…oh wow, that guy,” the hostess giggled. “He must be super-excited to see you.”

  “Oh God,” she muttered under her breath. The hostesses’ smile, if anything, grew.

  “Oh, it’s not bad,” the hostess tried to reassure her. “He’s completely adorable.”

  “Ohhh…” her voice trailed off as she sighed in defeat. She knew she loved the boy, but sometimes he was just a little too overeager about things. She felt her face heat up as the hostess leaned over and nudged her two companions.

  “This is that one guy’s date,” she told them. They looked confused for a moment so the hostess clarified. “The guy by the macaw.”

  “Ohhhhhh…” they exclaimed simultaneously. Her cheeks were practically glowing now. The sudden urge to bolt out of the restaurant and keep running until she was exhausted hit her, and she struggled to stay in one place. She managed to hold her ground but it was a near thing.

  “What…did he do?” she hissed in a low, terrified whisper. The women exchanged looks and giggled.

  “He’s such a sweetie,” the first hostess said.

  “I’m going to kill him,” she growled as the second hostess led her through the dining area. It was a fairly crowded evening, filled to the gills with gamers and their families. At more than one table she spotted team shirts for different groups and clubs who were either in the tournament or there to support their members. It looked like a giant party with everyone in the restaurant to celebrate WarpSoft.

  For a brief moment she wondered if this was what Leo and his crew had intended all along. She knew the company’s public relations had taken a huge hit after the Crisis Incident and Leo had been doing everything in his power to get it back to looking good once more. Social media, as always, had been one of his most useful tools, and WarpSoft had used it extensively. Even Tori, in a secondary role, had helped.

  Having the only girl in the history of gaming to win twenty million dollars as the posterchild for the second rendition of an online gaming world was immensely helpful. While she hadn’t actually gone out and helped with the public relations spree, she had accepted the money from WarpSoft after a few months of thinking about it and they, in turn, had used her likeness to help promote Warp 2.0 and the updated realms within.

  Initially she’d been horrified to see her avatar plastered all over every single online ad that popped up in her newsfeed. Granted, the avatar wasn’t real, but it did bear a striking resemblance to what she actually looked like. She was a celebrity whether she wanted it or not. It was part of the reason she’d dyed her hair—the more people looked at the girl with weird hair, the less they see her semi-famous face.

  She saw the giant macaw first, and it eased her nervousness slightly. Anybody who was sitting near the enormous eight-foot animatronic parrot couldn’t possibly be drawing as much attention to themselves as the macaw did. Her hopes did sink a bit when she saw the first balloon hidden slightly behind it. They went down further when she saw it had a dozen others accompanying it.

  Dylan sat at the table and beamed from ear to ear. He’d combed his lanky brown hair and actually wore a collared shirt for once, forgoing his typical t-shirt and shorts look. He’d left his glasses on, though, something she adored on him but he personally hated. He’d also shaved the scraggly beard he’d been trying to grow and now looked much younger. In front of him on the table lay the largest bouquet of flowers she’d ever seen. There also appeared to be a wrapped gift next to the flowers.

  She was conflicted. On one hand, she wanted to strangle him for going above and beyond the normal call of duty for being a boyfriend. On the other, her heart skipped a beat and fluttered in her chest as it dawned on her just how much effort Dylan had made just to come see her on such short notice and get her something as well. She quickly measured the two against one another before she decided her boyfriend had just unlocked the mastery badge in boyfriendry. It was a grand achievement, she decided, one that merited a badge.

  He stood up as she approached and promptly almost fell flat on his face as he struggled to get out of the booth. She giggled and helped him stay upright. He raised an eyebrow and smirked.

  “Totally meant to do that,” he declared. She rewarded him with a quick peck on the cheek.

  “You’re an amazing boyfriend,” she said. “Not sure how I got so lucky.”

  “Trapped in a life-or-death situation with no way out?” he teased. She stuck her tongue out at him and slid into the booth. He followed her in and suddenly she realized why he’d selected that particular table.

  The booth overlooked the waterfall setup situated near the far back corner. With the wings of the giant macaw spread, the booth also enjoyed a bit of privacy from its surroundings as well. The table, designed to appear as part of a larger branch at first glance, overlooked almost their entire half of the restaurant. From their spot she could see the customers and wait staff milling around, eating, laughing, and talking.

  She felt the tension in her shoulders ease, and, for the first time in days, she began to relax. The waitress came and brought them drinks, then they ordered. Tori leaned against Dylan as much as she could with people watching. She let out a contented sigh.

  “Everything okay?” Dylan asked her. She nodded.

  “Everything is more than okay,” she replied. She motioned at the balloons and at the flowers, which had been moved to the seat next to her. “I was embarrassed for some reason. But this…this is nice. I didn’t know what to expect from a first real date, but this is pretty good.”

  “Pretty good?” he asked her in mock horror. “I shall not settle for ‘pretty good.’ Maître d'! Sir! I must make this night even better!”

  “Shut up.” She giggled and snorted through her nose. This caused more giggling on both their parts.

  After a delicious meal and returning all of her balloons and flowers to her hotel room, they decided to walk around Disney Springs and enjoy the sights. She had yet to explore the area and see the shops, so they browsed like tourists. They grabbed some popcorn, stood on the bridge leading to her hotel, and watched the fireworks set off above Epcot, each silent as they stood close to one another. She shivered slightly as a gentle breeze washed over them. Dylan took off his hoodie and offered it to her. Grateful, she slipped on the oversized sweater and leaned in closer to him.

  “I was fourteen the first time Gavrie hurt me in the game,” she said
in a hushed whisper as she looked out across the small lake. Small gondolas ferried passengers to and fro between the park and the hotels, but, surprisingly, the path and bridge the duo occupied was clear of most pedestrian traffic.

  “You…you sure you want to talk about this?” he asked, his tone gentle. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “No? Yes? I don’t know,” she admitted. “Does it bother you?”

  Dylan was silent for a moment before speaking. “It bothers me that I can’t go back and stop it from happening.”

  She nodded. “I understand. I wish I could, too.”

  “Is it true you didn’t want me in RebellionZ when I first applied?” he asked, referring to their former clan within The Warp. After Sergio’s betrayal of her to Gav during the Crisis incident, the clan, like many others, had folded and been absorbed into other clans.

  “Yeah,” she stated. “I saw another guy joining the clan, and I was still mad at Gav, so I voted against it. But Sergio wanted you so he ignored my vote.”

  “Guess I need to thank him,” Dylan said after a pause.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t have met you otherwise.”

  More time passed. The fireworks show ended, so Tori and Dylan moved along the bridge and into her hotel. They went up to her suite, and Dylan slid the couch over to the window overlooking the bay below. They got situated on the sofa and cuddled in long silence, watching the Disney World skyline light up anew as more fireworks went off at the Magic Kingdom.

  “I thought it was a game between us at first,” she told him as she pressed her face into his arm. “Me and Gav. It was cute at first, teasing and everything. We’d sneak off and torment each other, see who’d break first when we were playing. Crisis wasn’t meant for that stuff but it doesn’t mean it never happened. But then one day he didn’t stop when I told him. It took me using a teleport code to get him to stop.”

  “You teleported away?”

  “No, I teleported him,” she corrected. “Into a lake. He was mad at first but laughed about it later. Said he was sorry, that he got carried away in the moment. I believed him. We kept…playing. Teasing. He started to press on things. I backed off. He slowed down and I came back. Rinse, recycle, repeat. Everything stayed the same until we were in one of the bigger industrial cities…I don’t remember which one. Probably Vol.”

  “Hated that place,” he muttered. “Stupid dragons didn’t belong in that realm.”

  “He pushed and I…I didn’t stop him,” she said in a halting voice as she shifted again. Dylan let her get comfortable before he wrapped an arm around her shoulder, careful to keep his hands in safe places. She appreciated the gesture. “He didn’t stop, and I finally realized what he wanted…and I tried to stop him. He wouldn’t listen—he just kept saying if I loved him I’d let him. I mean, everything…in the game, it’s not real, but it felt real. I cried. I didn’t play for a week. He kept messaging me and emailing me, even hit me up on some of my apps trying to get me to talk to him. I came back into The Warp…and he was as sweet as can be. He was nice and kept saying he loved me, and he was sorry he hurt me. I took him back. Again.

  “One day Stephanie caught him pressuring me and…well, I thought she was going to delete his character right then and there. She had a sword to his throat and everything. I panicked and tried to stop her, but she was definitely going to remove his head. I distracted her enough, and he managed to get away. He took off and Steph, well, she told me what he was doing was wrong. It finally dawned on me that this was what my dad had been telling me about when he warned me about boys harassing me in the game. All those things he said and everything he promised was nothing but a lie so he could get what he wanted. Knowing what I know now, I’m glad I never gave him my home address or phone number.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dylan said.

  “You didn’t do anything,” she said. “Don’t be.”

  “No, I mean, I’m sorry he was an ass,” Dylan corrected.

  “Then everything happened with the terrorists, and he found me somehow,” she continued after a minute of silence. She blinked and closed her eyes. “No, he didn’t find me. He knew where I was the whole time. Sergio had been telling him. He pulled me out of the ravine and saved me. Gavrie I mean. I was confused, hurt, cold, tired, and scared. It was familiar, you know? I let him take charge of getting me to safety. I didn’t even bother contacting any of you. I don’t know why. It was low-key stupid.

  “I don’t remember who suggested we go to Denegul. Might have been me; I don’t know. But we went, and I fell for it again. He got me alone and he…” she stopped speaking and shuddered as memories welled up from deep within. She took a few calming breaths before continuing. “He raped me, and then he beat me up. Yeah, I know, it wasn’t real. But to me, it was.”

  “Despite what the courts said, I think it was real,” Dylan stated. “I don’t know how the law works with stuff like this, but my dad said something about the intent being there. I didn’t really understand it though.”

  “I told Leo once sometimes the game just felt too real,” she said. “Some of the injuries and deaths people go through in The Warp are just brutal, you know? I once saw a guy get impaled on a spear, and the game couldn’t decide whether or not he’d die quickly or slowly. He stayed like that for twenty minutes in-game before it finally killed him. I doubt he ever played again.”

  “I don’t know why everyone in the game has their junk anyway,” Dylan commented. “There’s no need for it in worlds like Crisis and Kadashter. Cupid? Okay, yeah, maybe. Back in the day, all the old school gaming didn’t have stuff below the waist.”

  Tori shifted and yawned. She was exhausted, and the emotional baggage she was unloading onto her poor boyfriend was taking even more out of her than being in The Warp ever could. She knew tracking the glitch should take priority, but for some reason her mind drifted back to Gargoyle, and what he’d said to her while in Ganymede. She wanted to know why he was back in The Warp and why nobody had arrested him yet.

  “Thinking dark thoughts?” Dylan asked her.

  “Kinda,” she admitted. “More about Gargoyle.”

  “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “They’ll catch him sooner or later.”

  “I feel like I’m at the edge of an abyss right now,” she told him.

  “Yeah, you’re thinking way too dark.”

  “When you look long enough into the abyss, the abyss looks back,” she said as she snuggled into the crook of Dylan’s arm. “Hopefully then the abyss blinks because what’s in you is darker and deeper than anything it can handle.”

  “Dark angel of mcdarkness,” he observed as he shifted his body so she could get more comfortable.

  “That’s life,” she said with a contented sigh. “Dark, darker, or despair.”

  “There’s always light,” he reminded her. “Without a light there can’t be a dark, right?”

  Tori considered that. It was eerily close to something her psychiatrist told her once. She snuggled against his chest and pulled her knees up. Her fingers intertwined with his, and she closed her eyes. She could hear the steady beat of Dylan’s heart and was comforted by his closeness. He still smelled wonderful, and she could feel his outer strength and inner peace envelop her.

  She fell asleep like that and slept soundly for the first time in months, her nightmares held at bay by a shining knight in golden armor.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 11

  Tori appeared within the Nexus and looked up at the Board. There she could see all the Moderators and Gamers who were currently logged on within The Warp, their names posted for all to see. Some had their profiles marked as “private,” though the majority of them were easily readable and public. From there, it was easy for someone like her to locate her friends and see if they wanted to team up for missions or just simply crawl through a world and have some fun.

  She winced and rubbed her neck. The solid night’s sleep had left her feeling more hopeful than sh
e had in a very long time, but it’d also left its mark. Her neck had a horrible crick in it, and even in The Warp she could still feel the lingering effects of falling asleep on the couch with Dylan.

  The memory made her blush slightly. If her dad ever found out a boy had spent the night, he’d blow a fuse. Even though nothing happened, it was still one of those rules he was very strict about. Her agreeing to the “no boys in dorm room” policy was one of the primary reasons he’d let her go to school in Newport News instead of the Technical University of Munich, which was a lot closer to his office in Ramstein. Christopher Newport’s computer science classes were on the cutting edge of everything she wanted, and away from all the stuffy academia stuff she disliked so much. It was just a small part of the reason she chose it over MIT and Brown.

  She shook off the happy memories of Dylan and focused on the task at hand. She immediately spotted the logon information for both Shane and Stacey. She nodded to herself. While not a part of her original plan, after seeing the craziness that had occurred when they rescued Shane from the furballs, she was no longer taking any chances. Small groups within The Warp, at the moment, apparently weren’t safe, although she wasn’t certain whether it was because of Gargoyle or the Chaos code being especially vile to anyone within the tournament zones. Either way, she thought as she commed them through the Nexus’ communications system, small groups are out of the question for now.

  She glanced around the Nexus and thought for a moment. Everything within was still running perfectly normal. If anything, it was running smoother and faster than it’d been when she’d watched the livestream back in Virginia. She now had to decide which team to activate and send in, as well as which world she’d hunt in herself. She felt a strong pull to explore Hel, the Norse mythology-based player versus player zone, but if she truly wanted to be thorough, she knew she should explore Kadashter first. Kadashter, the dark fantasy world within The Warp, was an ideal locale for her and her team members if Gargoyle managed to go into it. It was smaller than even Ganymede and not nearly as complicated. Plus, with only Sparta and Hel left to search afterward, if the Nexus issue wasn’t found in Kadashter then the potential problem was narrowed down to one of the last two realms, both of which were little and easily explored in comparison. Not exactly tiny, but still a simpler search than Ganymede, which had two complete areas within it.