CHAPTER SEVEN

Something about the tenor of that conversation—perhaps coupled with the memory of my ex huddled over his laptop while vampirically draining bottles of Mountain Dew—made me realize that I had better alcohol down and caffeine up. I was going to meet a bevy of gamers, one of whom was possibly a thief and a murderer. This was a time I not only wanted my wits about me; I wanted them styled with cute blond streaks and smelling like echinacea and hibiscus.

A quick trip into Charice’s cabinet of wonder had me drinking coffee with butterscotch, which pairs great with ramen. Once I was fortified, I did some wiki searching and I figured out why I had the vivid image of Kurt smirking into the phone.

Visiting the Broken Sickle Bar as a level-one character was a little like a four-year-old visiting the top of Mount Everest. Good luck with that.

Hypothetically, I could get there. All I had to do was hike south for a few minutes, hop aboard a flying Chinese dragon that would carry me to another continent, follow the shoreline for another several minutes, then cross the water at some shoals, hack through some jungle, visit a fortune-teller and breathe in her “magic herbs,” go back through the shoals, and walk through a newly visible cave until I came upon the Field of Ghosts, from which Hochstein, a sad little mountain in the midst of a barren field, was clearly visible.

It would take me two hours to do this, but I figured it was a kind of test and I wasn’t about to be shown up. I got killed a few times on the way to the Chinese dragon, but I eventually realized that if I stuck to the roads, I’d be mostly okay. The worst were the shoals, which were filled with horrible crab-men and -women that would pull me beneath the water and strangle me. This happened, like, six times. I only got by when some other schlub came along and got through while they were strangling him. The fortune-teller was also dead when I got there, which struck me as another murder to solve, but after a few minutes her body vanished and then later respawned.

By the time I got to the Field of Ghosts, I had been skewered, drowned, burned, buffeted with arrows, poisoned, and killed by an evil doppelgänger of myself who hit me in the head with my own damned harp. I had also been mocked by lots of gamers, mostly on horseback, who would dash by me with shiny suits of armor and particle effects, laughing.

One woman was driving a giant winged snake and told me, “lol. get out of this zone, noob.”

The aggravating thing about the Field of Ghosts was that you could clearly see the Broken Sickle Bar. But you could also see that it was separated from you by an insurmountable number of the walking dead. Presumably, characters who belonged here could fight their way through, but these were ghosts that killed me not by breathing on me but just by contemplating the idea.

I know it’s unbecoming for a gamer girl to do this, but I /sat down on the ground and decided to /cry. Frankly, RedRasish’s cry was not very moving. It sounded a little like the noise you get when you poke the Pillsbury Doughboy. But for my own private disappointment, it was a good a soundtrack as any.

A harpy came swooping down by me, I assumed to eat me, which isn’t actually a death I had experienced yet. Instead she sat on the ground next to me and started a campfire.

“Why the long face, little lost fairy?” she typed.

Her name was Vothvoth, which I knew not from detective work but because the letters were floating over her pointy, misshapen head.

“I’m not lost. I’m trying to get to that inn over there, and I’ll never get across this field of undead. I’ve been walking for, like, two hours.”

“Oh,” said the harpy, who was now cooking a live bird. “Did you run out of invisibility oil?”

The whatnow oil?

“Here,” she said, giving me five stacks of invisibility oil. Then she bit the head off her cooked bird and flew off.

Fuck this shit. I mean, that had been one nice harpy, but there’s fucking invisibility oil? I had to fight a fire-breathing camel at one point, and there’s invisibility oil? This is the kind of thing I hated about these sorts of games. Everything’s obvious once you already know it, but woe unto the private dick who has to cross a shoal of angry crab-people and doesn’t know about invisibility oil.

By the time I made it to the Broken Sickle Bar I was already tired and wanted to stop. But of course, this was the reason I had come here. In this case, the getting there was not part of the journey at all. In this case, it had just been a horrible trial along the way.

Given the ramshackle appearance of the bar—a run-down shack in an abandoned ghost town—and the fact that it took freaking forever to get here—I found myself shocked at how many people were squeezed into this bar. It was packed. I had been to nightclubs with less action—good ones.

I had assumed that meeting up with Kurt would have mostly been a matter of saying hello to the only person around, but now there was all of this. Plus, I didn’t know what his username was, or what he looked like in-game. I did know that he was a ninja. But what did that look like?

Also, I was invisible, which is not useful when you intend to rendezvous.

I yelled, which meant that everyone in the room could hear me. “DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO TURN OFF INVISIBILITY OIL?”

I realized that it was an irritating thing to do; but I had spent much of my evening being devoured by crab-people and irritating was feeling more promising than irritated, which is where I had been. Still, there was karmic payback, because I was helped by the worst possible person.

His name was Atheun, and he was a tall, handsome elf with revoltingly nice cheekbones.

I knew Atheun. Atheun was the name of my ex-boyfriend’s character. I knew the name well because Erik had written a song for him. In retrospect, it should have been easy to see that our relationship was in trouble given all the presents Atheun got that I didn’t. Atheun was on T-shirts, imprinted on custom action figures. No one’s ever written a song about me.

What was agonizing was that he actually looked like Erik. He had the same ridiculous ’90s haircut, the same tiny body with loose-fitting clothing, the same smirk on his face, even. Only Athuen looked charming and mysterious, whereas Erik had looked… Ah hell, who am I kidding? Erik had always looked charming and mysterious too.

But his cheekbones hadn’t been that good.

Atheun came up to me and typed, “you should be able to right-click on the invisibility buff to take it off.”

Which was straightforward enough. Although now I was less certain that I wanted to be seen. I hadn’t actually spoken to Erik in months, and then under somewhat arranged circumstances, and meeting him here in a fairy costume was not the image I wanted to convey.

“It’s not working,” I typed at him. “Thanks for helping anyway!”

And then I thought I would hide. Which was ridiculous, given that I was already invisible.

But Atheun would not leave well enough alone. He had to be helpful. In three years, he had never washed a dish, but when it came to invisibility oil, he was Johnny-on-the-spot. Three years I dated this goon.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got some vapor of appearance,” he said, and a puff of pink dust appeared around me.

“Oh, hello little fairy,” he said. “You’ve wandered pretty far, haven’t you?”

I /curtsied. This was worse than Facebook stalking, but I had come by it honestly.

“RedRasish? Is that an Indian name?”

“I wanted to be RedRadish, but someone had taken it.”

“Oh. Ha ha.”

I honestly don’t know what I wanted to happen here, or what I was afraid of happening. There probably exists some alternate universe, sitting very close to this one, in which Erik confesses to me that his wonderful ex-girlfriend whom he was missing terribly used that name, and how his dental hygienist is a pale shadow of what a wonderful girl she was. And from that alternate universe, there are branches in which I tell him off and RedRasish flies off on her gossamer wings while he cries into his drink. And there are branches, probably multiple branches, in which I take him back and have his babies. And there’s that universe that I’d rather not consider, in which he confesses that RedRadish was this awful hag of an ex who could never play games like this and had chosen a scarred ogress for her avatar, which was truthfully not that far off the mark.

All of those could have happened. And probably more. And, forgive me, they’re all more interesting than what occurred in the actual universe, in which Atheun then said:

“Oh well, off to go raiding! Good luck, little fairy!”

And he was gone.

It had certainly been a more friendly communication than the evening in which we had broken up. I could have used a “good luck, little fairy” then. I seemed to be getting them in spades now. Something about being a fairy, I suppose. I had never gotten a “good luck, little ogress.” Perhaps this was how pretty people went through life. On little gossamer wings.

My pontifications on beauty and race were quickly interrupted by an old bald man with facial scars of his own. If I had to guess his class, knowing nothing about Zoth, I would have led off with Beggar. He was shabby-looking. People in this bar were decked out in all manner of shining zoot suits and glowing plated mail. Not this guy.

“Dahlia. This is Kurt.”

He bowed at me. For some reason, even though I knew full well that it was Kurt, and I knew what Kurt sounded like, I imagined the voice of a wizened sensei. If you had a long white Fu Manchu, the long flat vowels of a Midwesterner should not be coming out of you.

“I’m impressed you made it this far.”

“How did you know it was me?”

The old man, whose name was “Disfigurement”—which I again knew because it was floating over his head—waved his hands at me in order to suggest that it had been obvious. He did not look like a ninja, nor was he especially disfigured.

“You mentioned the Fetid Swamp, which is part of the fairy homeland. No other fairies here. Plus you’re level two. Also, you’re carrying a harp.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know. You seem like someone who would carry a harp.”

Although it may detract from the narrative, may I briefly espouse the virtue of everyone’s names floating over their heads all the time? People who have not played MMORPGs may find it disquieting, but I feel that this should be happening all the time. Every party I attend should have this technology. Google Glass, get right on that.

Meanwhile, Kurt was throwing silly guesswork at me. Was this the same kind of thing as fairydom? When you’re a fairy, everyone wishes you well. When you’re a detective, everyone shares random theories with you.

He was right, though. I was the kind of woman who carried a harp. Ideally, I’d bring them to the parties with the floating names, and if there was alcohol involved, you’d have your whole evening worked out right there. But I digress.

“It was hell to get here. You were completely putting me on, right? You thought I would get lost along the way.”

“I thought you would make it, but just find it very challenging. And I was putting you on a little bit. Welcome to Zoth.”

It was strange how much faster Kurt could type responses to me than he could speak them. In real life, he was off-puttingly slow. In Zoth, he was Chatty Cathy.

I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t my first time here, but truthfully RedRadish’s excursions were nothing special. Mostly they consisted of me jamming at buttons ineffectually while Erik yelled things like “Turn off your goddamned bloodlust” at me from another room. Instead I said:

“So you’re going to introduce me to the rest of the guild?”

Kurt ignored the question. “Why do Jonah’s parents want the spear?”

“I’m just a gun for hire, Kurt,” I said, issuing from my mouth the least plausible combination of words I had ever delivered. And yet it just rolled right out. “I don’t grill my clients about their motivations.”

I couldn’t help but notice the gorgon sitting at the bar drinking wine. Probably she was afk, but something about the black gaze of her dead eyes made me feel that she was eavesdropping on me.

“Shouldn’t we be whispering?”

Disfigurement /whispered in response:

“You know a little about Zoth after all. But are you really that paranoid?”

I responded in kind:

“I’m more than that paranoid. I’ve got a lot of money on the line here, and I want to make sure my clients are satisfied. They want the spear, and I don’t want things getting derailed.”

I’m sure it was the caffeine, but for a moment I could have sworn that Disfigurement winced, for just a second.

“I’ve met Jonah’s parents. They don’t need a digital weapon. You’re telling me that they’re going to create Zoth accounts, and, what? Run around the hillside battling imps?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. I’ll probably just send it to Jonah’s account through the in-game mail. Whatever they ask for.”

“He can’t log in! You’d be sending it to oblivion!”

Even with his ninja face hiding Kurt’s own, it was clear he was pretty testy about the spear. I had pegged early on that he hadn’t taken it, and though it might still have been folly, I was pretty sure I was right. But he cared about it a lot more deeply than he had let on before. Was this just an academic’s interest, the way a geologist gets upset when someone tosses an unusual pebble down the garbage disposal? (I’ve had some odd boyfriends, and this observation comes firsthand.) Or was it something else? I’d come back to it later.

“It’s really not my problem,” I said. “So can I join your guild? I obviously need to talk to a lot of people.”

“No. I don’t actually have permission to add new members. Only Oatcake and Clemency do, and they’re not online right now.”

“Well, I assume you’re all on a vent server or something, I’m sure you won’t mind if I join that.”

He wasn’t expecting that I would know about that, clearly. A vent server, in case you’re not in the know about these things, is a server where people in a game can get together and speak to one another as they play. I imagine this involves yelling, “Turn off your goddamned bloodlust” a lot, but I have a somewhat limited perspective. The trick about them, however, is that they are never a part of the game you are playing on. This is by design, because if the game crashes, it is still useful to be able to speak to one another. Thus, there is absolutely no reason I shouldn’t be allowed on their vent server.

Save for Kurt not wanting me to talk to anyone.

“I don’t want you to talk to anyone.”

Well, so much for subtext.

“And why not?”

“No one actually knows that Jonah’s been killed yet.”

It was my turn to type /surprise.

“You didn’t tell them?”

“Oddly, I haven’t been playing much lately, after having lost my job and home.”

“You’re here now,” I told him.

“It’s difficult to bring up.”

“Haven’t they been asking about him?”

“A few people asked where he was, and I said I wasn’t sure. Philosophically speaking, that’s technically true.”

“Let me speak to them,” I typed.

“No,” said the old ninja, who was fading from Kurt’s voice in my mind, back to my stock sensei. “You’ll just make everyone feel weird. I’ll spread the news and let them know that you plan to ask them questions.”

“You brought me all the way out here for nothing.”

“Not for nothing.” The old man smiled. “Have a drink.”