Authors: Arielle Archer
“If you’re going to god mode then I can do the same thing,” I said. “And if you’re going to treat a role-playing session with somebody as nothing more than an excuse to solicit them for a little fun then I’m going to break character! Now I suggest you get out of here before I report you to a game moderator and see what they think about your chat logs. You are aware that what you’re trying to do is against the rules, right? Very against the rules.”
He paused and looked at me and then to the rest of the room. More than a few people had turned towards us. I’m sure most of the people who were sitting in this room were sitting in here looking for the very same thing this guy was. I rolled my eyes and let out another disgusted noise. This is what I got for coming to a general role-playing area.
The asshole faded away, no doubt logging out of the game rather than sticking around to risk more humiliation. Of course he was logging out of the game under the false assumption that if he wasn’t logged in then the moderators wouldn’t be able to do something about him. They could ban him just as easily if he was in game as if he was out. Not that I actually had any intention to report him. I was actually more mad at myself for losing control like that and breaking character in public chat. That was violating one of the biggest rules of being involved in the role-playing community.
I sat down at the bar and buried my head in my hands, despairing of ever finding somebody who was worth role-playing with in a public area like this. I needed to just logout for the night or send a private message to somebody on my list who was passably decent at writing.
Only all the people I usually role-played storylines with were either offline or they were the kind of people who churned out the same repetitive crap every time. The last thing I wanted was to spend another night wasting time with someone like Caitlin who was always the mysterious elf princess who kept her identity hidden and then swears you to secrecy when she reveals who she truly is, or Mike who was always a stoic but goodhearted adventurer whose morals always overcame his desire for money by the end of whatever story we were working on.
Boring. Typical. Predictable.
No, the game was starting to get stale. It was starting to get boring. I sighed at my keyboard and my character sighed in the game. It was starting to feel like there were no new worlds to conquer, no new scenarios to explore.
The door to the inn banged open. I looked over, but with nowhere near the hope I’d felt earlier when the first guy walked in.
The human barbarian who walked through the door looked much the same as any other human barbarian in these parts. He wore a cloak that was tattered and torn in places, though he’d obviously taken care to repair it in other places. Perhaps he was just in from a long trip. Underneath the cloak he wore the once fine but now faded and threadbare clothes of a man who had fallen on hard times.
As I looked him over I figured that no doubt he was a member of one noble family or another. They seemed to spring up constantly and fall just as quickly as they rose. Both because noble houses were a popular role-playing target for newbies who didn’t know what they were doing yet and because in the game lore there was the whole giant cataclysm that ripped the world asunder and sent humans scattering, nobles included.
I sighed. No, there definitely wasn’t anything promising about a low level human who looked much the same as every other low level human. And he was making his way directly towards me. I suppose it couldn’t be helped. I was the only elf in the room.
It really was my fault for drawing the wrong type. I was something of an oddity. Most elf players tended to stay in elf zones. It was amazing how quickly the pseudo-racist undertones of a book series could translate into pseudo-racist undertones in an online role-playing game. Sometimes I thought the people who spouted nonsense about being superior to humans half believed their crap, even though it was probably a human on the other side of the computer doing the role-playing.
At least I was pretty sure elves hadn’t discovered computers and video games. Not yet.
That was one of the reasons I’d come to human lands. The Hokuten Order was ostensibly an elf guild with a few humans here and there. If I stayed where most of our official role-playing events were held, where my guild held the most influence, then I’d almost never make it to human zones.
So in a way I was adventuring here in the hopes I might find somebody who surprised me, though so far I’d found nothing to disabuse me of the commonly held belief that the people who hung out at this particular inn in the human territories were nothing but a bunch of shallow idiots who were more interested in getting their rocks off with a little bit of two way erotica improv than in constructing a genuine storyline and getting into real role-playing.
The human stepped up to the bar and turned to face me. He had a winning smile and I had to admit he was sort of cute in a rugged sort of way. If you were interested in humans, which I most certainly was not. Well, which my character most certainly was not. I wasn’t one of those crazies who didn’t make a distinction between the character I role-played and reality. There were plenty of them out there, believe me.
He leaned an elbow against the bar and immediately lost his balance. Immediately went flying and clattering to the floor sending several empty drinks that were waiting for the bartender to come and pick them up flying. I couldn’t help but giggle at this odd and pretty novel approach to an opening move.
He stood and almost lost his footing again. It appeared that clumsiness was a trait with this one. I glanced to the sword by his side and wondered how he was able to use the thing without accidentally cutting his head off. Then again that was a sentence that could apply to humans and just about any piece of technology more advanced than fire.
He finally managed to regain his footing and didn’t even bother sketching a bow. He just plopped down on a bar stool and took a deep breath.
“Well that definitely wasn’t a good way to make a first impression,” he muttered.
In the game, in character, he was probably right. Only speaking from a strictly out of character perspective it was a wonderful way to make a first impression I pulled away from the keyboard and blinked. “Now that’s interesting…”
“What’s that?” Samantha asked.
“Oh nothing,” I said. “Get back to your raid. I’m sure they’re counting on you to click your mouse at just the right moment or whatever it is you do.”
Samantha stuck her tongue out at me. “It’s a little more complicated than that, O mighty queen of the role-playing wordsmiths!”
I stuck my tongue right back out at Samantha. Then I turned my attention back to the game and raised an eyebrow. Looked at this strange avatar before me. Stumbling and causing a mess like that was definitely novel. It was definitely something I’d not seen before. Usually this inn was filled with people role-playing for the first, and they were almost universally the type whose characters were secret gods or half dragon or some other nonsense.
Which was pure poppycock. There were no dragons in Tales of Elassa. If there was one thing I hated more than people who used the game’s role-playing community as an excuse to do a little bit of one-handed two-person erotica improv, it was the people who brought in elements that were outside of the worlds established lore.
That made me see red.
So this mysterious person standing before me was refreshing. His character had a vulnerability. His character wasn’t another stoic hero just returned from slaying thousands of his enemies. No, he was just a little clumsy. And that that was enough of a hook that I was intrigued once more. It was enough to make me want to know more about him. It was enough that he was already more promising than the first asshole I ran into and we hadn’t even started properly talking.
He looked at me again and my breath caught. He had the most piercing blue eyes. Piercing blue eyes that were unlike anything I’d ever seen on a human before, though that might just be because I wasn’t looking rather than it not being a trait humans possessed. Obviously it was a trait humans possessed if he was looking at me with those gorgeous blinkers. I was getting scatterbrained. My thoughts were running away from me. I needed to get myself under control.
“So what brings you to human lands? That’s a dangerous journey for a young elf such as yourself,” he said.
I threw my head back and laughed, and yet secretly I was delighted. He called me a young. A common misconception, but it also meant that if he was reading my character sheet he wasn’t bringing it into the conversation. That was so refreshing. That was such a change from what I was used to.
“I guarantee you I was probably fighting off scarier monsters than you could imagine before your great-grandfather even looked at your great-grandmother with a twinkle in his eye,” I said.
A hundred years ago I would have been able to show off my age to a human by referencing their kings, but that wasn’t the case anymore. The humans hadn’t had a unified kingdom in at least half a century. Just another way that their world kept changing while mine stayed the same. Except for the Sundering, of course. That affected everybody. Still, there was far more potential for intrigue with a good human player. Perhaps that was one reason why I was so drawn to humans. It allowed for a richer role-playing experience than sitting around whining about how much it sucked to be immortal which is what your typical elf role-playing scenario boiled down to.
Assuming you could find somebody good. I desperately hoped this gorgeous man in front of me was good.
“My apologies lady elf,” he said. He seemed genuinely sincere. “But a pretty face on an old soul isn’t going to protect you from creatures with sharp teeth any more than my clumsiness would protect me.”
My character blushed in game and out of the game I felt a flush rising to my cheeks. A surprising flush rising to my cheeks. What was wrong with me that this guy was able to get that sort of reaction out of me with just words on a screen?
Focus. Get back in the game.
I held up my fingers and allowed a flame to dance from finger to finger. He raised an eyebrow, but otherwise didn’t react. Obviously this was a man who’d seen magic before. Or at least he’d heard of it. Either way he didn’t have the wide-eyed surprise that usually accompanied that display. A slight disappointment, but behind my keyboard I was secretly jubilant. I was so sick of people who thought that wide-eyed surprise was the only way to react to magic, as though anybody who lived in a world where magic was a commonplace thing would be surprised by the damn stuff.
“Ah, I see,” he said. “A sorceress, I presume?”
I winced at the human word.
“If you want to reduce calling down the very forces that power this universe and bending it to my will “sorcery” then I suppose you could call me that,” I said.
“Impressive,” he said.
He dug into his pocket and pulled something out. I saw a flash of black and then the flames dancing on my fingers winked out. The tingling sensation that let me know I was drawing upon the magical forces that powered the universe disappeared at the same time. I blinked, looked at the object in his hand, and then my eyes widened in surprise. I hated that I reacted like that, but it was the only thing I could think to do in this situation. I did a quick inspect of his character just to be certain.
“Is that…”
An Elassa shard,” he said. “It’s been passed down in my family, though I’ve never had occasion to show it off before. I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to show it off to someone who would actually appreciate it.”
The way he leaned against the barstool with a cocky smile on his face was only slightly ruined when he slipped in a puddle of something on the floor, no doubt left over from his spill a moment ago, and nearly sent the Elassa shard flying across the room. I cried out and held my hand out trying to catch it, but he did a surprisingly nimble dance and snatched it out of the air before it went flying too far. It appeared being constantly clumsy has given this strange man one hell of a set of reflexes.
And a good thing too. If that really was what he said it was then it was more valuable than the combined wealth of the entire city. They were so rare in the books that kingdoms rose and fell based on possessing one. I didn’t even know they were in the game.
“How did you get that?”
He blinked, cutting those delicious blue eyes off from me for a moment. His perfect jaw line worked for a moment and he fixed me with an expression that told me he was wondering if I was entirely right in the head.
“I told you,” he said slowly. “It’s been passed down in my family.”
I shook my head. “That’s not what I mean. How did you get that? I didn’t know Elassa shards were even in the game! At least I’ve never seen one before…”
Of course that didn’t mean they weren’t in the game. It just meant that I hadn’t seen them in the game before. I wasn’t really a big fan of the higher level dungeons, and they were always releasing new toys to entice people to go through that particular treadmill over and over. It was entirely possible this was just some new bit of end game content I didn’t know about because I didn’t ever play end game content. It wouldn’t be the first time the developers took an all-powerful item from the books and reduced it to a trinket with a fun animation.
Of course if that was the case then how did a lower-level player get his hands on one? He wasn’t even halfway to the level cap and he was walking around with something that shouldn’t exist. Color me intrigued.
He shook his head and now he really was looking at me as though I’d grown a second head. Or as though I’d sprouted fangs like some of the bloodsucking creatures that totally weren’t vampires even though they sucked and blahed like a duck lurking along the paths to human lands after dark.
“Game? What game are you speaking of? Are you quite all right my lady elf?”
I pulled away from my keyboard and shook my head. Damn! Here I was complaining about people breaking character, complaining about people pulling in information they’d have no idea about, and I’d been so surprised by this strangely compelling man that I went and did it myself! I never did that. That never happened to me. What was going on here?
And yet I couldn’t deny the way I was feeling talking with this man. There was something about his prose that went straight to my heart. There was something about his prose that went straight down to other areas. There was just something about him that was so compelling, so fascinating, so mysterious. And he was just some pixels on a screen!
I put my hands back on my keyboard.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I forgot myself for a moment.”
He chuckled, a deep rich sound that rolled over my body and sent a bolt of pleasure running through me as it hit my ears. “All is forgiven my lady elf.”
I sighed in contentment. There was something about the way that sounded. “My lady elf.” As though he was claiming me for his own. I blinked. What the hell was I thinking? Wanting a man to claim me for his own? Now that was entirely out of character both in game and out!
“I’m sorry to cut this short,” he said. “But I’m afraid I have some work to attend to.”
“Certainly,” I said. “It was nice making your acquaintance…”
I trailed off and hoped the question was obvious. He grinned and shifted, his rippling muscles moved this way and that and I found myself swaying back and forth hypnotized by the sight. “My lady elf may call me Conlan, if it pleases you.”
I grinned. So maybe there was a little bit of hubris to this one. Conlan was the name of the great human king who unified all their kingdoms in antiquity and who forged treaties with the elves and other races. Of course it was also ironically enough Conlan’s alliance that ended war long enough for scholars to turn their focus from fighting and delve too deeply and too greedily into arcane arts probably best left alone, but I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about some crazy mages shattering the world a thousand years after his reign when he consolidated political power in this world. In my experience humans didn’t tend to think beyond their lifetime, though his reign was still within living memory for my people.