Authors: Arielle Archer
Samantha didn’t even hesitate which made me grin. Emergency meetings weren’t something we took lightly. Usually they were for big events like a breakup or something like that, but the deal was any time one of us called an emergency meeting we dropped everything immediately.
It looked like Samantha was in the middle of a raid. Probably something important at this time of night, but she typed something and then she was pulling her headphones down and coming over to me with a worried expression on her face.
She glanced at my screen but I’d minimize the game. I didn’t want her to see my conversation. I didn’t quite believe what was happening. I couldn’t quite believe that I was about to have this conversation with her.
“Living room,” I said.
Samantha nodded. “That’s fine.”
We walked the short distance to the living room and Samantha flopped down on the couch. I flopped down on the other side and sighed. Samantha raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, out with it.”
I opened my mouth tell her everything and then closed it. Opened it again, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell her what had been going on over the past couple of weeks. I couldn’t quite bring myself to explain my situation to her.
“Is it really that bad?” Samantha asked.
I rolled my eyes. “You have no idea!”
“Jessica. I just ruined the entire night of raiding because you called an emergency meeting,” she said. “If you can’t tell me what it is then I’m going to go back and try to salvage the night.”
I looked down. Looked back up. Smiled a smile that must’ve looked pretty sickly from the worried expression that crossed her face.
“Would you want to go to Elassa Con next week?”
Samantha blinked. And she fell back rolling on the couch laughing.
“That’s good Jessica! But really, what’s going on?”
“I figured you’d react that way,” I said. “But I think we really did just get an invitation to Elassa Con. All expenses paid.”
Samantha sat up and locked eyes with me. Her eyes moved back and forth searching for any sign that this was a joke.
“Bullshit.”
“That’s exactly what I said at first!”
And so I sucked it up and laid it all out for her. I told her how I’d met Conlan in the game. How we’d been talking with each other over the past couple of weeks. I went into almost everything, how great he was, though I left out the bit about what we’d gotten up to in our dungeon run the last time we met up. I even pulled up his picture on my tablet which was sitting on the coffee table. She looked him up and down with an appreciative whistle and raised an eyebrow.
“Well he’s definitely a hottie,” she said. “But the question is, is he really who he says he is or is he just a guy getting some jollies online? Or a girl getting some jollies online?”
“That’s exactly what I was wondering,” I said.
And it surprised me to realize that the only problem I had with this whole scenario was the question of whether or not he actually was who he said he was. There was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted to meet him. There was never any doubt in my mind that I had to meet him. There was just a quiet terror that if I did meet him he’d turn out to not be as advertised. He’d be just another story of online dating gone wrong, albeit a story of online dating gone wrong featuring a guy who apparently had much deeper pockets than most people in those sorts of horror stories.
“You really like this guy, don’t you?”
I smiled. “Yeah. Is it that obvious?”
“You have that ridiculous look on your face that you get whenever you’re reading one of those cheesy romance books.”
“Hey! Those aren’t cheesy romance books! They’re cheesy fantasy books. Big difference,” I said.
“Is there a difference? Heaving magic? Heaving breasts? Same stories, different fixation.”
I shook my head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“But seriously,” Samantha said. “What do you have to lose? I haven’t seen you look like this about a guy in awhile, and if it turns out you don’t click what’s the worst that happened? You got free tickets to the hottest convention in the country!”
“I know…”
“And if you get there and it turns out that he’s just as awesome as you expected then that’s even more of a win!”
“I know,” I said with a sigh.
“So what’s the hesitation? Free tickets either way, just make sure you get round-trip tickets instead of a one-way ticket to the pit in his basement or whatever.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “You’re horrible Samantha!”
“Hey,” she said. “If I’m going to be going along with you then it’s my job to make sure you don’t wind up getting tossed in some creepy pit in a basement. Hell, it’s my job to make sure both of us don’t wind up in a pit in a basement somewhere.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re starting to sound like me and my worst-case scenario problem.”
“Whatever Jessica,” she said. “I really don’t see what the hesitation is. Either you get free tickets to the convention and a great guy or you get free tickets to the convention and it turns out that lover boy is a complete slob. Either way all I’m hearing is free tickets.”
“You mean all you’re hearing is that you get free tickets because you’re coming along as my chaperone?”
Samantha shrugged. “So what if that enters into the equation just a little bit? Can you blame me?”
“Selfish much?”
She fixed me with the most wide-eyed innocence she could muster, which wasn’t much. “What can I say? If I’m selfish and my selfishness helps your love life then I’m all for it!”
I rolled my eyes. “So we’re really doing this?”
Samantha nodded. “We’re really doing this!”
I sighed. “You do realize, of course, that what’s probably going to happen is I agree to meet this guy and it’ll turn out he’s completely full of shit and we don’t get plane tickets or anything.”
Samantha shrugged. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “Okay, well it’s decided. I guess that means the emergency meeting is over!”
“That was quick,” Samantha said. “Mind if I go try to salvage raid night?”
“Sure thing,” I said. “Besides, I need to log back into the game myself.”
My fingers tingled as I logged back into the game and looked at my friends list. Sure enough he was still there. Apparently he’d been confident that I was going to make a decision pretty fast. I smiled. His name lit up and then my chat window started blinking.
“So?”
“We’re game if you are,” I said.
“We?”
“My roommate,” I said.
“Oh, right! Let me check something here real quick…”
I waited. I was definitely curious how this was going to work. How was he going to just pay for this? And then another thought occurred to me. In order to get a plane ticket you needed to provide identification, an address, that sort of thing. How was he going to pull this off? Because I wasn’t particularly comfortable giving him that information.
“Okay, all taken care of,” he said. “You should have email.”
“What?”
“Oh, and one more thing,” he said.
One more thing? As if all of this craziness wasn’t enough?
“Bring that costume. Can’t wait to see it! I’ll have one of my own ready to go.”
I blinked. My costume? Oh, right. Though I wasn’t sure that costume was first date appropriate…
“I have to get going, more work stuff, but check your email. Trust me.”
Only he wasn’t going to give me time to get out of that. Crap. I needed more information here.
“That’s it? What about how we’re going to meet once we get there?”
“Just keep your messenger up. I’ll take care of everything.” And he left with a smiley face. He was gone. I sat at my computer fuming for a minute. This was all very peculiar, and it was making me wonder if he’d gone crazy. If I wasn’t about to be the butt of an elaborate joke.
Curiosity burned though. I flipped out of the game client and fired up my email. I was expecting to see something from him, but nothing prepared me for what was actually waiting for me. An official communication from Elassa Corp. What the hell?
The subject line was an Elassa Con all-in-one VIP package. I clicked to open it. I gave it a once over, and then I gave it a second over. I double checked the email headers to make sure it wasn’t spoofed or anything, but everything look official and it wasn’t coming from some strange server in Nigeria or anything. Still, there was absolutely no way this could possibly be real.
“Samantha! Emergency meeting!”
Samantha let out a frustrated sigh, but once more she typed something and pulled her headphones down. It sounded like she’d been talking to somebody, but she dropped it as soon as I said the magic words.
“Most everybody logged off anyways,” she muttered. “What’s up?”
“Look at this email, does that say what I think it says?”
Samantha looked and as she did her eyes grew wider and wider. Apparently she was having just as difficult a time believing what had appeared in my inbox as I was.
“No way,” Samantha said.
“Way.”
“That says all expenses paid VIP trip to Elassa Con courtesy of Elassa Corp,” Samantha said. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get those? Forget expensive, this is invitation only shit right here! You don’t get this unless you have one hell of an in.”
“It has to be a mistake.”
“Well there’s a phone number down at the bottom. Call’em and find out what’s going on.”
So I called the number, but not before looking at the Elassa Corporation website just to double check that the number was actually an Elassa Corp phone number. They definitely matched up. Either this was somebody who was going through an elaborate con, or it was somebody who didn’t expect me to actually call the number. So I dialed. After a few minutes on hold, after a few minutes talking with a very nice representative, I’d confirmed that yes, everything was absolutely one hundred percent true. I was now the recipient of an all-expenses-paid trip for two, VIP package, to the convention.
I put my phone down and I must’ve looked shell shocked.
“It’s real?” Samantha asked.
I nodded. “They confirmed everything. It’s all real. We just have to fill out our information and Elassa Corp gets everything squared away with the airlines and hotel.”
“Damn,” Samantha said. “Who is this guy? And how did you get so lucky?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m really looking forward to finding out more about this mystery guy.”
“Me too. Think he has a friend?”
The Indianapolis Airport was a hell of a lot busier than I’d expected, though I guess that shouldn’t have been a surprise considering there was a major convention in town that was supposed to easily draw in a hundred thousand people if not more. There were a lot of Elassa fans throughout the country, all over the world, and they were all converging on this town in the middle of nowhere that happened to have a big convention center because of some sports game a few years back.
Though I guess it wasn’t entirely fair to call the place the middle of nowhere. The place was definitely a lot bigger than my hometown up in Wisconsin. It was even a hell of a lot bigger than the university town where I went to school. And from the looks of things at the airport pretty much everybody streaming through were people planning on going to the convention. There were a few people who were watching the people who were going to the convention with disbelief, but there weren’t many normals.
I was sure the TSA was having a field day with this particular crowd. Some people were walking around with obvious prosthetic elf ears on. Others had their convention badges out already even though we weren’t anywhere close to the convention center.
“Were not in Wisconsin anymore,” Samantha said.
I shrugged. “We’ve replaced one state covered in cornfields for another,” I said. “Not much difference as far as I’m concerned.”
Samantha smacked my shoulder. “Come on Jess? We’re two girls in the big city!”
“The big city?” I asked, looking around. Outside the windows there seemed to be a whole lot of nothing except for planes and runways. No tall buildings or anything in evidence.
“Well big enough,” Samantha said with a shrug. “Definitely bigger than anything we have in Wisconsin, that’s for sure!”
“I suppose you have a point there,” I said.
Samantha looked around. “So I know we’ve been busy trying to figure out how we’re going to get to the airport back home and everything, but it did you ever stop to think about how we were going to actually get to the hotel from the airport?”
I stopped and blinked. “No, actually I hadn’t thought about that at all.”
“So you mean I’m going to be getting a cab for us?” Samantha asked.
I turned and smiled. “I’d be ever so grateful if you did, because I definitely don’t have that kind of cash.”
Samantha rolled her eyes. “Well it’s not like I’m paying for it either if it’s my dad’s credit card. I don’t suppose he can be too mad anyways. His little girl being stranded at the airport sort of qualifies as an emergency, right?”
“Something like that,” I said.
We made our way out of the baggage claim and luckily nobody lost our bags on the flight down. That would have been a real pain in the ass, especially considering I’d stuffed my old con costume in there. Conlan and I were planning on going out in costume together and I don’t know what I would’ve done if they lost that bag. Not that I’d ever actually been in a situation where an airline lost bags. There were times that I wondered if that was just a contrivance from Hollywood writers that painted the airline industry in a bad light.
When we got to the airport there was one thing straight out of Hollywood. A line of people holding up signs, just like in the movies.
“Look at those high rollers!” I said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to get to the hotel in a limo?”
“Easy there girl,” Samantha said. “I’ve got money for a cab, but dad’s definitely going to be pissed off if I spring for a limo!”
I sighed. “I know. It’s just nice to dream.”
I glanced past the row of people holding up signs and sighed. There was a glimpse into a world I was probably never going to experience. Sure there were super rich writers in the world. Stephen King. JK Rowling. Sean Taylor. Writers who pulled the kind of money that got them the royal treatment wherever they went. Only I had no illusions about my own prospects of getting a book deal that’d ever be able to pay for the whole “limo waiting for me at the entrance” treatment.
Samantha slapped my shoulder. I kept walking. She slapped me again. I turned and fixed her with an irritated glare. “What?”
“That limo person over there is holding up a sign with your in-game name!” Samantha said.
I followed her finger to where she was pointing. I squinted at the sign. I blinked. Sure enough, she was right. The guy was standing there with an iPad held up with my name on it. Well, with my character’s name on it. There it was, Maia, plain as day. Okay, so it was a rare name but that couldn’t possibly be for me.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s part of the VIP package?” Samantha asked.
It was a very nice package. It included airfare, a stay at the hotel for the entire time we were at the convention, admission to the convention and all of the after parties, and VIP access to everything. We checked on the Elassa Con website and the total cost would’ve run in the thousands of dollars if someone tried to buy it all, but it couldn’t be bought in one package. As far as we could tell our package wasn’t for sale. It made me wonder exactly who Conlan was that he could swing that package.
But it didn’t include transportation from the airport which is why I didn’t have money for a cab. Why bring money if everything was paid for?
“I don’t think so. That has to be for someone else. I don’t remember reading anything about a limo in that package,” I said.
Only that didn’t stop Samantha from walking over to the driver. I rolled my eyes and followed, and to my surprise his face lit up when he saw me. “Maia?”
“Yeah? How did you know?”
“Let’s just say my employer provided me with a picture,” he said. He leaned in and whispered. “It was actually quite funny to see a lady of the Bendai Sisterhood sticking her tongue out and grinning like that.”
I rolled my eyes and groaned. Someone had been into my Elassa profile. And I had no idea of knowing if that somebody was Conlan or somebody from Elassa Corporation. Obviously they had to know something about my profile if they set me up with the VIP package. So I guess it stood to reason that somebody would pass on my information. And yet I still didn’t remember anything about a limo when I read over the package, and I’d read over it quite a bit in the past week.
“Are you taking us to the hotel?” I asked.
“Sure thing!” The guy said.
“Is it a long drive?” Samantha asked.
“Not really,” the driver said as he took our bags and led us out to the arrival area where a limo was waiting. “That’s the nice thing about Indianapolis. No matter where you’re going it usually only takes thirty minutes. Unless you’re driving in rush-hour. Then it takes forty-five minutes.”
And so I found myself being loaded into a limo and driving down the interstate in style. The driver was friendly enough and pointed things out to us as we approached downtown. The buildings were appropriately tall enough, though nothing compared to when I visited Chicago. Basically it seemed like your average Midwestern city, maybe a little bigger than normal.
“I can’t believe this!” Samantha said drumming her feet against the bottom of the limo. She looked over and saw that there was alcohol set out. She turned towards the driver. “Is this stuff free?”
“Not free ma’am,” he said.
“Oh,” Samantha said.
“But it is included in the cost, and I’m sure my employer wouldn’t mind if you enjoyed yourself. Especially since you’re not paying for it,” he said.
Samantha squealed and poured herself a drink. I smiled and figured what the hell. I might as well enjoy myself if it was paid for. Besides, everything was working out strangely well, and so I figured I should probably get some alcohol for when the other shoe inevitably dropped.
We had another surprise in store once we got to the hotel. The place was a huge blue glass monstrosity, but apparently it had a connection to the convention center and was one of the nicest places in the city. The lobby was definitely pretty intense.
The place was full of people who were obviously here for the convention. There was a wide variety of ages, gender, and body types on display. I even saw a couple of people wearing ridiculously elaborate costumes which made me blush as I thought of my own costume packed away in my luggage. Another reason why I was glad the luggage hadn’t been lost. I’d spent more time than I cared to think about putting the thing together for a smaller regional con, and I was damn proud of it. If the airline lost the thing I might’ve killed somebody.
The only problem was I got ridiculously embarrassed every time I thought of actually putting the thing on it. It was, how to put it, just a little skimpy. An armored a bikini, definitely not the kind of thing that you’d wear out to dinner and drinks with friends, but as I had a look at the convention people in the lobby I felt better. I had a feeling I was going to fit right in.
Most everybody already had their convention badges out and I wondered if there was some sort of early registration that I wasn’t aware of. I’d have to look into that, maybe mosey over to the convention center and see what was going on.
Samantha was staring wide-eyed at the hotel.
“Damn,” Samantha said. “We’ve made it!”
I felt my phone buzz as she said that and I stopped and reached down to fish it out. Our driver stopped with us and waited for a moment. I pulled out my phone and glanced at it. It was a message over Elassa chat. I pulled up the app and had a look. I smiled. Conlan.
“Enjoy your surprise at the airport?”
“It was nice,” I said. “But you’re being too nice.”
“Just wait.”
“What do you mean?”
Only it appeared the messages from Conlan were done for the moment. I glanced around the hotel and wondered what fresh surprise could possibly be a waiting for us, but there was nobody holding up a picture with my name on it. Whatever. Time to check in anyways. I had a feeling the rooms at this place were going to be pretty swank.
I moved up to the desk and gave the receptionist my name. The girl was nice enough with the same checked out vacant smile on hospitality workers around the world. Only her eyes grew wide when she typed in my name and she looked up with a genuine smile. I blinked. I wondered if this was the next surprise Conlan had been referring to.
“Welcome to the hotel ma’am!” she said. “It looks like you’ve been upgraded to our rooftop suite!”
I blinked. “Is there an extra cost associated with that?”
“It’s all been paid for and taken care of ma’am,” she said. She pulled out our key cards and handed them over. Samantha looked down at the thing as though she couldn’t quite believe it.
“To use that you’ll have to use a special elevator. Take the express elevators up to the top floor, and then go down the hall to the dedicated elevator for the suite, the girl said. “That elevator is keyed to only open with your cards, so you’ll be the only ones who can get up there.”
“We’re the only ones staying in the suite?”
“The only ones ma’am,” she said.
I was just a little irritated by the ma’am thing. After all, I didn’t think I was much older than her. In fact as I looked her up and down it was entirely possible we were the same age, or I might even be a little younger. But apparently finding out that I was staying in the suite was enough to upgrade me to ma’am, and I wasn’t in the mood to get in an argument with someone on hotel staff over something that stupid. Especially when she was apparently giving me an upgrade to the nicest room in the whole place!
Of course I also smelled a rat.
“You’re absolutely certain nobody else is booked up there?”
“Only one booking, and that’s for you,” she said.
Samantha elbowed me in the ribs and I let out a yelp of surprise. “The nice girl said we were upgraded to the rooftop suite,” Samantha muttered under her breath. “Why don’t you just let her go ahead and upgrade us and not look a gift horse in the mouth!”
I sighed but decided to go along with it. A limo driver meeting us at the airport was bad enough, but I was starting to think that somebody had really gone above and beyond! My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out.
“Surprised?”
“When do we get to meet? I have a few questions for you mister,” I said.
“All in good time,” he said. “I’m a little occupied right now, but I should be available for lunch in about an hour or so. Sound good?”
“That’s fine with me,” I tapped into my phone. “Where?”
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “Just keep an eye on your phone.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. I was really starting to get tired of all this cloak and dagger stuff, but if he wanted to play mysterious then I guess I go along with it for a little longer. Especially considering the ridiculous VIP treatment we’d been getting so far. Not for the first time since we started this trip I found myself wondering exactly how much this was costing Mr. Conlan, and exactly what it was he did for a living that he could afford all of this stuff!
I was starting to wonder if I hadn’t inadvertently run into a multimillionaire while I was playing that videogame. I knew stranger love stories had happened, but I still couldn’t believe it would happen to me. Not that I particularly cared if somebody had a lot of money anyways. I was so used to living the life of a poor college student, and before that my parents hadn’t exactly been rich, that the idea of spending all this money almost felt wasteful to me. Samantha seemed more than happy though.