Authors: Arielle Archer
I arched a curious eyebrow at this delicious man and he looked me up and down as I did so. Normally I didn’t go for this sort of scene, but there was something about this man that was making me enjoy this thoroughly. Far more thoroughly than I’d enjoyed a role-playing scenario in quite some time. I blushed and told myself it had nothing to do with the way my hair was standing on edge all over my body, the way my nipples were straining out, with that impossible delicious feeling between my legs that he was somehow able to elicit with just a few words.
“Interesting name,” I said. “Hubris?”
Conlan fixed me with that easy-going grin. That deliciously sexy grin that made me want to run my lips across his face. That made me want to kiss every inch of his lips even though that was completely out of character both in character and out of character, if you catch my meaning. And suddenly there was none of the clumsiness about him. Suddenly he was every bit the cocky role-player coming here for the first time, only with him it was somehow different. With him I got the feeling he could back it up.
“Not hubris,” he said. “Just the truth. Or a version of the truth. And it’s a family name.”
Well that was an answer and not an answer at the same time. Not sure what I was expecting. Either way I needed to know more about this mysterious stranger.
“Will I see you again?” I asked.
I bit back a curse as the words flew unbidden from my fingers to my keyboard and into the chat window. That wasn’t how this worked. If you liked role-playing with someone then you added them to your friend list. You kept an eye on their location and tried to engineer a “chance” meeting. After a couple good role-playing sessions you’d maybe start sending them out of character private messages. Maybe start working on a collaborative story. But at the beginning everything was supposed to feel organic. It was supposed to seem like you were stumbling into one another by accident even if it was nothing but.
At least those were the role-playing principles that my guild lived by. Those were role-playing principles I’d helped draft as the mistress of role-playing. And here I was throwing my own rules out the window because I was intrigued by a mysterious man who I didn’t know anything about!
And yet as I sat there at the keyboard, as I thought about this session, the mysterious object he held, and most of all his incredible skill with the written word, I realized I didn’t give a damn.
Fuck the rules. Some of them were stupid anyways.
He grinned one final time as he faded away. “Perhaps?”
I pulled back from my chair and concentrated on just breathing. If I didn’t do that then I was worried I might actually forget to breathe. That I might pass out at my computer chair, and then that would worry Samantha and pull her away from her raid which always made her cross.
I looked over my shoulder to Samantha. It looked like they were in a lull. I’d learned to read the patterns of those high-level raids even if they didn’t interest me at all, if for no other reason than so I could get a word in edgewise with my roommate.
“Hey Samantha, quick question.”
Samantha pulled her headphones down and laid them across her neck. Turned and smiled at me. “Shoot.”
“Did they ever add Elassa shards as a high-level item or something?”
Her face scrunched up. “Elassa shards?”
I rolled my eyes. Samantha was so obsessed with Tales of Elassa that there were times I forgot she hadn’t ever bothered to read the book series that had taken the fantasy world by storm in the past five years and caused the game to be created in the first place. I ran into a lot of people like that. I even ran into people who were into the role-playing scene who didn’t know anything about the world’s lore.
It was a point of mild personal shame that my own roommate hadn’t read the books despite trying time and again to get her to. Of course at the same time I’m sure it was a small point of personal shame for her that her roommate wasn’t a hardcore raider.
“They’re items from the books that negate all magical power. If anyone tries to throw a magical spell at someone carrying an Elassa shard the spell disappears as though they’re in some sort of anti-magic bubble. And if you get near someone using magic then it stops them from casting whatever spell they were working on,” I explained.
Samantha thought about that for a moment, tapping her finger against her lip. “Nope, nothing like that in the game.”
Huh. That was interesting. Samantha knew everything about everything in game, and if she said an item wasn’t in the game then the item wasn’t in the game. And yet I couldn’t deny what I’d seen with my own two eyes. He pulled that out and my character’s spell animation stopped immediately. As though I was being surrounded by some sort of anti-magic field. Although I suppose it was actually my character coming in contact with some ones and zeros that some clever programmer had put together to make the magic animation stop when that item got close to me. Whatever. I tried not to reduce the magic in game to its component programmable parts.
I’d even inspected his character. There was clearly an item equipped in his left hand that was labeled as an Elassa shard. I wished I’d gotten a screenshot of the thing now, because I was starting to think I was going crazy. Or at the very least I was imagining things.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty damn sure,” Samantha said. She leaned back in her chair. “Something like that would be a game breaking item. Being able to interrupt any magic spell? The implications for dungeon runs, for PVP, would be incredible! Anyone who has something like that would be like a god in game!”
“You’re absolutely sure?”
“I’m absolutely sure,” Samantha said. “Look, I’ll pull it up in the Elassa item database.”
She alt tabbed out of the game and pulled up the item database. There was a plug-in that worked in game, but she never used it because she claimed it affected performance. That was all stuff that was beyond me though.
I stood and moved over to her computer. Watched as she clearly typed in Elassa. Plenty of things came up. There were a lot of items in the Tales of Elassa database that had Elassa in the name.
Samantha narrowed it down. Elassa shards. Zero results. She modified the search so she was just looking for shard. There weren’t nearly as many results as what had come up when she typed in the name of the game, but there were also no combinations of the name of the game and the word shard.
I blinked. Was I really going crazy? Had I hallucinated that item?
“Nothing like that in the game,” Samantha said. “Like I said, anyone who had something like that would be a major game breaker. They’re either a developer having some fun or a hacker doing one hell of a cheat that’s going to get them caught eventually.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“Why do you ask?”
I shook my head and blushed. The last thing I wanted right now was to explain my encounter with Conlan. The last thing I wanted was for her to think I might potentially be going insane thinking I saw items that didn’t exist. The last thing I wanted was to think this guy was actually some sort of cheater or hacker. Partly because something told me he wasn’t the type, and also because I didn’t want him to get banned from the game. I wanted to see him again.
Now there was an odd emotion. I wanted to see him again? He was just an avatar and some text on screen!
“Oh nothing,” I said. “Just some low-level role-player bragging about something I figured wasn’t true.”
Samantha shrugged. “That’s what you get from people who think it’s more fun to spend time making up stories about the game than it is to actually play the game.”
I fixed her with a sour smile. That dig wasn’t lost on me, but I was too adult and too confused at the moment to give as good as I got. I logged out of my own game.
“You’re logging out already?” Samantha asked.
I jumped. I hadn’t realized she’d come up behind me.
“I have class early in the morning,” I said. “I figured I’d better turn in.”
Samantha looked at me long and hard. “Are you sure you’re okay? You had class every other day this entire semester and you’ve never gone to bed before 2 o’clock. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Well I need some sleep now,” I said as I got up and made my way towards my room.
To be perfectly honest I needed some time away from the game. I needed some time to think. I needed some time to process what had just happened and why I’d thrown every rule I had about meeting people in game out the window. I needed time to think through why I couldn’t stop thinking about somebody that I only knew as a few words and a game avatar on screen.
I felt like I was going crazy, and it had absolutely nothing to do with an item that seemed to not exist.
“Magic? Really?”
I blinked. I wanted to reach across the table and smack that smarmy look off of that asshole’s face. I don’t know why I expected anything different from a critique from the great literary master Ryan Arnold, at least he was a great literary master in his own mind, but there it was.
“Do you have a problem with magic?” I asked.
“I have a problem with genre fiction,” Ryan said. “You’re getting an MFA in creative writing. Why are you wasting your time with this garbage?”
I balled up a piece of notebook paper in my hand and concentrated on crushing that rather than reaching out and trying to crush Ryan. Not for the first time I cursed the day he’d ever sat at the same table as me.
“I don’t know, I thought it was okay and that stuff seems to be really popular right now,” Devon said, though the way he hesitated, glanced down at the short story I’d presented for a critique, told me he was thinking the same things but he was too polite to say them out loud. It wasn’t exactly the best defense in the world.
“Just because something sells well doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile,” Ryan said. “And besides, we’re here to expand our writing ability. We’re here to learn new things about the craft. We’re not here to write about witches and wizards fighting goblins or whatever the hell this is about.”
I rolled my eyes. He hadn’t even bothered to read the damn thing! And to think I’d wasted valuable time I could’ve spent playing Tales of Elassa a couple of nights ago reading that crap he’d vomited out on the paper about divorced parents or something like that. I’m sure he thought it was all very literary and mysterious, but the only thing I could think the entire time I read those twenty pages of crap was boo-hoo, baby’s still upset that mommy and daddy got divorced.
But I wasn’t going to be violent. I wasn’t going to rise to what he was trying to start here. I was going to be the better person.
“Do you actually have any constructive criticism?”
“Yeah, stop writing this fantasy crap,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. There wasn’t a chance I was going to stop writing this “fantasy crap” as he called it. For one it was my favorite kind of book. For two I was spending so much time playing Tales of Elassa these days that I’d started taking some of the role-playing scenarios I’d worked up in world and changed some of the names, reworked some of the settings, and presented them to my class as original works rather than the stuff that was based on a videogame I happened to be spending way more time than was strictly healthy playing.
Genre fiction was already a four letter word in this class. They’d have kittens if they realized the stuff they were reading was fan fiction as well as genre fiction. Of course I still thought it was damn good even if it did start its life as role-playing scenarios for a video game.
“What’s your problem with this anyways? It seems like this goes a lot deeper than not liking what I wrote,” I said.
“You’re right,” Ryan said. “It does! I have to see this crap on TV, I have to see this stuff taking up space on the book store shelves while real writing by real writers…”
He punctuated that sentence by smacking his own short story which was on the table in front of him. “Real writing like this barely even gets a shelf at the bookstore. The public doesn’t even know what’s best for it! It’s ridiculous that crap like this sells so well and literary stuff barely gets a mention!”
“Well if they had a Nobel Prize in whining about literature then you’d certainly win it…” I muttered.
“What the hell was that?”
“What seems to be the problem here?”
Like a guardian angel professor Timms stepped in. She was an older woman with auburn hair that definitely looked like it came off of the shelf at Target or Walmart. Probably Walmart considering what the average college professor, even one with tenure, pulled these days. Not that I was judging or anything. I actually really liked her most of the time. She had a way of cutting through bullshit that only an older battle scarred prof who’d been through more than a few dances with undergrads could. Like right now as she stared down at us over her glasses.
She didn’t look happy.
“Ryan here seems to have a problem with genre fiction,” I said. “Such a big problem he can’t even follow the critique guidelines.”
She looked down at Ryan and he actually looked down. One thing that could get him to shut up was a glance from professor Timms. Then again I had a feeling that a rampaging bull would probably stop and apologize if she fixed it with that glare. She was just that kind of professor. Fair, but very severe if she thought you were stepping out of line.
“Is this true Ryan?”
“She keeps writing this genre crap,” he muttered.
Professor Timms arched an eyebrow. That was never a good sign. “Genre crap? Did you really just say that?”
Ryan looked up and some of the anger he’d directed towards me was directed towards professor Timms. Only that anger seemed to crash over her like a wave slamming into a mountain for all the effect it had on her. She stared down at him tapping an irritated finger against her arm, the only sign other than an arched eyebrow that showed she was irritated and a sure sign that whatever student she was talking to needed to shut the hell up if they knew what was good for them. She had the unflappable calm demeanor of a woman who’d been teaching creative writing to artistic types for decades, and she’d seen everything at this point.
Professor Timms turned to me. “And what do you think of this Jessica?”
I was so angry. I was seeing red. I was starting to not care about consequences. I got that way when I got really angry. Like so angry that I saw stars dancing in front of my vision. Like how angry I was right now when I looked at Ryan’s smarmy face.
I wasn’t going to launch myself across the table and smack him a couple of times like I wanted to, but I was going to lay into him.
“I think if Ryan has a problem with something then he should probably follow the guidelines we were given for critiques at the beginning of the semester,” I said.
A hint of a smile played across professor Timms’ face. “Such as?”
I picked up Ryan’s story and flipped through it. I thought about looking at the notes I’d made. The red marks I’d jotted down while I was doing a proper critique. I noticed he had none of that on the stuff he printed out for my work.
“Well he could come after me on technical grounds if he had a problem with the way I wrote. For example if I were to say something to him about craft then I might tell him that commas and dashes aren’t an appropriate replacement for proper punctuation. Or I might tell him that tossing an adverb after every line of dialogue is something that he probably should’ve gotten out of his writing system back when he was in middle school. I’m surprised that grumpy old Mrs. Ericson, the teacher with gray hair who was divorced and not exactly happy about teaching English at her age, didn’t beat that out of him back in the day.”
His mouth opened and moved, but he didn’t say anything. I glanced up to professor Timms and her smile was growing wider. The tapping on her arm stopped. I figured that was all the permission I was going to get, so I kept going. I held up his story and waved it in the air.
“Or if he was going to attack a story he could go after the substance. For example if I was to say something about his story then I might go on about how a story dripping with thinly concealed teenage angst isn’t exactly deep nor is the prose particularly literary. Unless playing fast and loose with punctuation like we mentioned earlier is your idea of being literary.”
“Very good,” professor Timms said. “All valid critiques. All getting at the substance of the story without actually attacking the person who wrote the story or the genre the story’s written in.”
I was really on a roll now. And the support from professor Timms was egging me on. “Exactly! If I was going to be so low as to attack something just because of the genre it was in then I might say something about how a story about a kid being upset because mommy and daddy are getting divorced isn’t exactly original, nor would anybody care to read it even if it was well-written.”
That tapping started again and I knew I’d gone too far. Only it was so worth it. It was worth it to see the utterly pissed off look on Ryan’s face. It was worth it to give as good as I’d gotten. Let the asshole stew for awhile.
“An astute observation,” professor Timms said. “That last remark probably isn’t quite in keeping with our critique guidelines in this class, though it might be deserved considering what prompted this conversation. Carry on, and I trust we won’t have any more problems at this table.”
That last bit was said with a pointed glance at Ryan, but she also looked over to me and I blushed. Okay, so when I got angry maybe I got a little too angry. Maybe I got carried away. But he’d really pissed me off. He deserved it! Always flitting around the room like he was the bad boy of the creative writing program. He wasn’t even hot enough to be the bad boy of the creative writing program, and it definitely didn’t make him dark and mysterious because he was still upset five years after the fact that his mom and dad got divorced. If I had to read one more boring story…
“Bitch,” he muttered.
“Hack,” I whispered right back.
“Fine,” he said, low enough that he couldn’t be heard by anybody else. Not even by anyone else sitting at our table. “You want a critique? I’ll give you a critique. This stuff reads like trash. It reads like something somebody who’s trying to write a trashy pulp novel from the ‘50s might come up with. It reads like you’re doing some sort of cheap fan fiction or something. It’s no good, your writing is no good, and you’ll never amount to anything!”
I knew I shouldn’t let him get to me. I knew he was trying to get a rise out of me. And yet what he was saying hit so close to home that I couldn’t help it. Every time he finished a sentence it felt as though he was stabbing straight into my heart. I felt moisture gather in my eyes, and I hated that I was letting him get to me like this.
“Oh yeah asshole?” I said as I stood.
I picked up my bag and threw it over my shoulder. I was reacting badly to this, I was really angry and about to do something very stupid, but I couldn’t help myself. It was as though I was in the middle of a wreck that I could stop before it really started, but I was going to see it through to its messy end. “Sorry I can’t be more “literary” like you are. Maybe I’ll ask my dad to divorce my mom’s ass and leave us out in the cold for his new family so I can be as great a writer as you are asshole!”
I was yelling at the last part. I looked up and every eye in the room was on me. Professor Timms was looking at me and her finger was tapping furiously on her arm. I blushed and turned to run from the room. My only consolation was the look of shell shocked surprise on Ryan’s face. Good. At least I’d finally got through to that prick!
The waterworks finally came when I got out into the hall. I wiped the tears from my eyes, but I couldn’t help it. I was proud of my writing. I thought I did good stuff. I also wasn’t very good at dealing with harsh critiques like that. I knew he was just trying to get a rise out of me, I knew he was just pissed off about getting called out by our teacher in the middle of class like that, but there was a gnawing dark doubtful part of my soul that was whispering to me that he was right. That I was no good. That I would never amount to anything and I was wasting my time in a creative writing program.
It was a dark part of me that I tried to ignore. It was a dark part of me that I chased away by playing Tales of Elassa and enjoying my time in there where I could get positive feedback. And yet that dark part of me always whispered that I was just running away from reality. That I was just seeking approval from people who were going to be nice to me no matter what because they were my friends.
Luckily I managed to get out of the English building before the waterworks really started. Then there was no stopping it. I’m sure I got a few weird glances from people watching the crazy girl walking down the sidewalk crying. Not that it was entirely odd to see that sort of thing on campus, but I hated that I was the source of the spectacle.
I needed to get home. I needed some comfort.