Boy Meets Geek

The heavy wooden door to the inn slammed open and everybody turned to look. The human who stepped through the door stopped for a moment, his hands on his belt, and surveyed the room as though he owned the place. He exuded power and authority. He had the calm confidence of someone who was in his element, someone who knew that nobody in this room would dare cross him.

This close to the city I’d say he had all the cocky swagger of an enforcer, though he wasn’t wearing their uniform. Perhaps he was an officer. Perhaps he was off duty. Perhaps he was simply working in secret and doing a terrible job of keeping that secret.

Whatever it was, everybody immediately paid attention to their drink. Paid attention to what they’d been eating. The conversation that had filled the large room was gone.

I sighed. Humans and their petty squabbles.

The man looked around the room one more time and then did a double take when his eyes ran across me. I fought the urge to smile. It wasn’t very often that my kind traveled in the human realms. It definitely wasn’t very often that my kind graced a simple tavern in the city.

Apparently my uniqueness was enough to draw his attention. I was immediately on guard. My fingers crackled with the energy of several magical surprises I’d worked up just in case it turned out he wasn’t a member of the enforcers. In this city somebody with that cocky swagger could just as easily be a member of a local criminal syndicate. Crime families seemed to spring up and disappear on an almost nightly basis in this place.

No matter what the circumstances, whether he was enforcer or criminal, I’d found it was always a good policy to be on guard when traveling through the human realms. Better to fireball first and ask questions later.

He moved over to the bar slowly which gave me plenty of time to and give him a cursory inspection. He had a tunic that was made of fine materials, though not so fine that it would mark him as a member of one of the local human noble houses. Those also seemed to spring up and disappear on an almost nightly basis around here. Part of the turmoil in the human lands. He had a sword at his side and from the way he moved with a dangerous coiled grace like a cat about to spring it seemed that he knew how to use it. He was ruggedly handsome, though not too pretty. Nothing like the men from my homeland. He had a scar running along one cheek and a nose that looked like it had been broken on more than one occasion.

Yes, definitely an enforcer or a criminal. The question was, which one? I would just have to wait and see.

He leaned against the bar and it creaked under his massive weight. He really was enormous. Not fat, just big. Broad shoulders, heavy chest, a stomach that was perhaps a little larger than most in this area which once again made me think he was working for somebody with the means to provide a regular meal. That was a rare luxury in these lands since the Sundering. He definitely didn’t have the lean look of someone who spent their time out in the world adventuring.

He grinned down at me. One of his teeth was missing. His eyes openly ran up and down my body and I fought the urge to reach out and smack him. Reaching out and smacking him was the last thing I probably needed to do at the moment. With the magic that was just itching to be released from my fingertips I was just as likely to embroil him in a column of flame or disintegrate him where he stood as actually physically smack him.

Occupational hazard of working with powerful magic.

Stranger finished his inspection and chuckled. The inspection made it clear he was the kind of man who had to categorize everything as to whether or not it was a threat. The chuckle and the way he smiled at me made it clear I’d been dismissed as no threat at all. There was a time when that would’ve made me bristle with anger. There was a time when I was out to prove myself and my ability when I might have been tempted to teach him a lesson.

But that time passed while his great grandparents were probably still children. Experience taught me that having somebody dismiss you out of hand like that could be an advantage rather than a liability. Especially with meatheads like this who thought a sword at their side was the only thing they needed to make their way through the world.

He returned his attention to my eyes for a moment, then moved down to my chest. That was another move that would’ve made me bristle once upon a time. How dare a human look at me like that! Only now it was just one more thing I welcomed as a potential advantage, a potential weapon in my arsenal, and I have to admit that feeling his eyes on me like that did send a thrill running through me. A thrill that I’d never admit even to myself because that was definitely not the sort of thing I was looking for in these taverns. That was definitely not the sort of thing I would ever do with a barbarian human like this for that matter!

“I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before,” he said.

His voice was deep and gravelly. It promised danger. It promised quick death to anyone who crossed him. I had to fight the urge to giggle as he stood there trying to look imposing and threatening with no idea that I could disintegrate him with the flick of a finger if I wished it.

“I sometimes have reason to travel in human lands,” I said.

“Oh?” An elf is rare enough, but it’s even rarer that we see an elf maiden from the Hokuten Order traveling these lands.”

I bit back a curse. He wasn’t supposed to know that. Wasn’t supposed to know who I was, what I was, who I represented, and yet he was here he was saying it plain as day for everybody in the tavern to hear. Talk about bad manners! Poor form and bad manners!

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

There was still time to salvage this. Still time to hope he’d take the hint. This had been off to a promising start, and I didn’t want to be disappointed now.

“Of course you do, elf,” he said.

“Why would you think I was in the Order?”

He grinned. “I just have a way of knowing these things.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes. Of course he’d say something like that. Of course he wouldn’t have any good reason why he knew what he knew. He just expected me to take it on the face of things that he was some super genius fantasy Sherlock Holmes who could immediately tell everything about a person’s background from looking at them. Of course I knew he could tell everything from looking at my profile and the guild tag over my head, but he wasn’t supposed to bring that into our conversation. It was supposed to flow naturally. It was supposed to come out in the back and forth. Now for the first time I regretted ever using one of those role-playing profile plugins in the first place. They caused more trouble than that they helped in my experience.

“I think our conversation here is done,” I said.

That grin on his face grew even wider. It was definitely ruined by more missing teeth that became obvious as his mouth opened.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about! So are we going out to the edge of the zone or what? Maybe a little fun?”

I pulled away from the keyboard let out a noise that was halfway between a frustrated angry cry and a strangled retching noise. I should have expected this. I leaned back in my chair and stared at the screen for a moment, tried to collect myself, tried to think about how I was going to respond to this asshole.

“Something wrong?” Samantha asked.

I wheeled my computer chair around to face my roommate. She also had Tales of Elassa up, but her gaming experience looked way different from mine. She had a massive gaming rig set up on her desk that glowed with various LED lights. It also seemed to positively hum as various fans turned on and off to make sure all the expensive widgets she’d put in the thing to make sure the game ran at maximum settings at all times worked.

I wasn’t really big into computers. As long as I could load the game and go to some of my favorite zones and role-play that was enough for me. She was a power gamer in every sense of the word though, and apparently that necessitated the kind of computer that looked like it could gain sentence at any moment and try to wipe the human race from the face of the earth in a desperate act of self-preservation.

Not that I could complain too much about Samantha’s obsession with having the biggest and the best. Her constant pursuit of the biggest and the best meant she was always upgrading my computer with the castoffs from whatever she’d just picked up. She was in grad school just like me, but the big difference was that she had rich parents and a trust fund to help her with her costs while I was going to school on scholarships and student loans.

Not that I could complain much about Samantha’s trust fund either. The only reason I got to live in this awesome and huge off campus house as cheap as I did was because she would rather have a friend and roommate to hang out with and play video games with than live all alone in this giant rental her parents bought her.

“What’s wrong?” Samantha asked.

“I was having a promising session with some new guy at the inn and then he comes out and asks for it,” I groused.

I didn’t have to tell her what “it” was. The main reason Samantha was on a role-playing server rather than some other server was because I happened to play on this one. That and she said the “care bears” on this server wouldn’t know decent raiding if it bit them in their prose spewing butts which made it easier for her to dominate the endgame. I knew those words meant something when she strung them together like that but I had no idea what the meaning was. She seemed happy so I didn’t ever press. Her lectures on endgame content and theory could get pretty boring.

Anyways, I’m getting away from what’s important. Nobody could play on this kind of server for any appreciable length of time and not know what “it” was. “It” was the thing that made these kinds of servers infamous, even though most people weren’t really interested in that sort of thing.

There was role-playing. Building a story with other people. Developing a character. And then there was “role-playing” where people got together with an avatar of the opposite sex, or the same sex depending on their preference, and went to a quiet corner of the zone or some private dungeon for some fun that amounted to little more than poorly written two player erotica improv.

Samantha shrugged and grinned. “I don’t know what you expected, dressing yourself up in that ridiculous bikini outfit and going to a general role-playing area.”

I rolled my eyes. “Is it too much to expect the people in the general role-playing population to have some integrity?”

Samantha rolled her own eyes and laughed. “Jessica, sometimes I think you wouldn’t be happy unless Sean Taylor himself walked through those inn doors and started having a one-on-one writing session with you.”

I giggled. “As if! Besides, Sean Taylor is probably so old he doesn’t even know what an online game is!”

“Isn’t he only supposed to be like ten years older than us?”

Oddly enough I really didn’t know. I’d never bothered to look up anything about the man who wrote the books that spawned the media empire. Which, now that I thought about it, was a little odd considering the impact his books had on my life. I was always happy to read the books and play the game, though lately I didn’t even get to read the books since the great Mr. Taylor seemed to be having trouble getting the next one out.

The Tales of Elassa books were the reason I got into creative writing. They were the reason I was getting my MFA in Creative Writing. And of course they were also the reason why I started playing Tales of Elassa, which, ironically enough, could very well also be the reason why I ended up flunking out of my MFA program if I didn’t start spending more time actually writing for class and less time writing new storylines for my character in the game.

We lived in a world with the Internet though. I could just look up Sean Taylor with a couple of clicks and find out all about him. It was weird considering the impact his books had on my life that up until now he’d just been a name on a page. There wasn’t even a picture with his author blurb. I made a mental note to look up more about him, but later. After I’d put this particular digital asshole in his place.

I made a lot of mental notes to do things later since I started playing Tales of Elassa seriously. A part of me worried about that, but that worry wasn’t strong enough to overcome the dopamine portions of my brain that shot out plenty of fun and relaxing chemicals as soon as I put my hands back onto the keyboard, as soon as I was transported back into that addictive world.

My eyebrows lowered and my face darkened as a storm cloud passed across it. I was amazed that this asshole couldn’t see the danger he’d just ignited. I reached my hand back and smacked him with all the force I could muster, sending him flying across the tavern with a very surprised look on his face as magical energy crackled around him. Everyone else in the room who was busy off in their own little world continued to not pay attention to the altercation. A few heads looked up, casually interested, but most weren’t concerned with our business. Especially when one of us was using magic and the other looked like an undercover enforcer.

He picked himself up from the shattered table he landed on and stalked towards me, a storm cloud on his own face. “What’s the big idea you bitch?”

I stood and stared up at him, held out my hand and allowed a fireball to dance between my fingers. He looked down and his eyes widened when he saw that. They widened even more when they heard what I had to say.

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