We were both laughing too hard to say anything. Eventually, I would have to explain to Chantal why we’d gone tumbling around on her floor, but for now, I was too preoccupied basking in the bright future spread out before us to notice anything else.
Drew
Dragoncorewasn’t the best game in the world.
Okay. It wasn’t even a particularly good game, as far as games went. The combat was clunky, the storyline was nothing original, and the graphics often made old PlayStation II games look like Renaissance paintings.
However, despite all of these obvious flaws, it was still one of my favorite games. I’d been playing it since I’d first picked up a video-game controller.
It was also a cult classic, with a large, dedicated fanbase. This mostly boiled down to four main reasons.
One, the game had been one of the first to introduce the concept of mass-multiplayer-online, almost before the Internet could support such a thing. Because of this, even when the game looked a little janky, it always ran as smooth as butter no matter how many millions of people were logged on at once.
Two, unlimited customizable options. A player could customize their character down to the smallest detail, which turned the game into more of a fantasy themed creative outlet.
Three, sex. There was an option in the game where if both parties consented, then their player-characters could engage in sex. I didn’t really understand the appeal of watching a bunch of small blurry pixels grinding together, but to each their own. I’d turned down the few offers that had been made to my character over the years and chose not to think about it any further.
Four, dragons. The appeal of this part of the game was self-explanatory.
Because the actual story of the game wasn’t very interesting, it was just an excuse for people to hang out in a vast fantasy setting.
That was exactly what I was doing now. My gaze drifted toward the clock on my desk. Its face glowed with a bright 3:00AM.
A time when any sane, healthy person should be sleeping.
My gaze moved toward the other side of my desk, where several pill bottles sat, all neatly arranged into an orderly schedule.
I snorted to myself and turned back to my screen.
“Healthy. Yeah, right.”
At least in games likeDragoncoreI could run around like a badass action hero. My character wasn’t as bulky as some people made theirs, but the little animated man on my screen had an unmistakably strong physique. The kind I knew I could never have.
A new chat request popped up on my screen as off in the distance I saw another character approaching across the digital landscape. I recognized them immediately. The long ponytail that their character had fell all the way past their knees and was hard to miss. It was completely impractical for combat, but it looked really cool whenever it streamed out behind them when they ran.
Just to be sure, I checked the username above the new chat request.
Yep.DualGuardian. I knew them.
I first metDualGuardianin the game about a year ago, and since then we’d gone on several in-game missions together and hung out regularly. I wasn’t sure if their username was a typo, or if it was a joke I didn’t understand, and I was too embarrassed to bring it up now.
Quickly accepting the chat request, I typed out my response.
:Hey DG. Haven’t seen you online in a while:
Their character shrugged, one of only a few physical responses the standard avatar was capable of.
Their response popped up underneath mine in the chat.
:Been busy:
DualGuardian’s model was technically female, but they’d designed the character to be on the more muscular side than a typical woman.
They were also taller than my male character, which I’d kept on the shorter side so that it matched me in at least one aspect.
Every movementDualGuardianmade caused their long ponytail to jerk around like an electrified snake as the graphics struggled to render the physics of their hair. It created an oddly pleasant aesthetic around them, like their character was so full of energy that the very world we stood in couldn’t contain them.
Their hand clipped through a nearby bush as they pointed back in the direction that they’d just come.