Pwned (2 page)

2. More I
ntricate Than a Steampunk Dream

Saturday was a welcome relief from the long week at school. I had told Zane that I would be busy most of the day, which suited him just fine. He wasn’t a hovering kind of boyfriend. He was more than happy spending a day with the guys doing whatever guys did.

Well . . . . doing whatever
popular
guys did, anyway. I knew exactly how nerdy guys spent their Saturdays, since I was with them most of the time.

Tawny was a bit harder to convince. She had apparently tried to plan out a whole day of fun for us, but I informed her in the morning that I had some chores to do. Technically this wasn’t a lie, since my mom had asked me to put the dishes away only minutes before Tawny called.

“Your life is a bummer,” she said very seriously on the other end of the line. It sounded as though she’d come to this conclusion after many hours of pondering and was now revealing it to me like a doctor telling a patient they had some awful disease.

“I know. My mom’s a real slave driver, huh?” I responded sarcastically.

“I’m just saying, haven’t they ever heard of a maid?”

“I don’t know. Have your parents ever heard of a vacuum? Supposedly they’re not that difficult to use.” I heard Tawny snort a suppressed laugh over the phone.

“Touché,” she responded. “Well, call me when you’re done being the family servant, all right?”

“Kay, I will,” I said as I slid my phone shut.

I did feel a little bad telling Tawny I had loads of chores to do when I really just had to put the already-clean dishes into the cupboard, but I couldn’t abandon my guild in their time of need. And besides, I had this raid set up way before Tawny called to do “fun things” all day.

“Who was that, Reagan?” my mom asked from the other room as I put the last plate in the cupboard.

“Tawny,” I replied, popping a strawberry into my mouth.

Normally I’d sit at my desk with a bag of chips and a soda when raid time came around, but since it was cheering season, I had to make sure I actually looked like I was in shape. Picking up my bowl of strawberries and a huge glass of ice water, I headed to my room.

“Are you going out with her today?”

“Nope,” I replied quickly, my mouth full.

“Oh,” my mom answered, sounding confused. “Are you going out with Zane later?”

“No, I’ve got some stuff I need to do on the computer,” I said elusively before retreating into the safety of my room.

Once inside, I set up my official raid station. I had everything I needed—food, drinks, my headphones (complete with microphone), and my computer. It looked like paradise. To top the experience off, I had my proper raid wardrobe on: sweat pants, a tank top, hair in a ponytail, and not one speck of makeup on. It made the whole raiding experience so much more enjoyable when you were comfortable.

“All right, let’s get this started,” I said to myself, booting up the game and smiling as I typed in my username and password.

My character screen popped up and I scanned the names guiltily. I had a bad habit of getting bored with my higher level characters and creating twenty low-level characters, just to see what the class was like. My mouse hovered over my highest level character, Xandris. She was the one I’d take into the raid today.

Xandris was my hunter, which pretty much meant she rocked at killing things. She got to stand back and kill stuff with a bow and arrows while everyone else in the guild got hit by the boss. I always loved the intricacies of raiding; how everything worked together to make a perfect machine.

We had me, the Hunter, who did massive damage per second, or DPS as we said in game. Then there was Rekrap, our Necromancer. He did quite a bit of DPS as well, but he was much easier to kill than me . . . . I liked to call him squishy because if you hit him a few times, then bam, he was dead. Then we had our tank, Kaydinn. He was our Paladin, so he took most of the hits but pretty much never died. Sovay was our Rogue, which meant she stabbed people in the back before they ever saw her coming (kind of like Tawny, actually). And last, but not least, we had Eilarae. She was super squishy, but she was our Priest, so she never got hit anyway . . . well . . . as long as we did our jobs right. She just kind of stood back and made sure we all got healed and didn’t die.

Together we made up this perfect team. We had people doing the damage, people taking the hits, and people keeping us alive. It was a potent combination.

The second I signed on, I was bombarded with people talking over chat.

“Xandris, where have you been?” I heard
Rekrap ask.

“Sorry, I had to do some stuff outside of the game . . . you know . . . in reality . . . where I live?” I replied with a laugh.

“Oh yeah. Reality. I forgot what that’s like.”

Rekrap
was my favorite one in the guild. His screen name was just his real name spelled backward, which he apparently thought was really clever when he first made it. Since that was about five years ago when he was eleven, we forgave him for that little faux pas.

“Okay, that’s enough chit-chat. Hurry up and get here, Xandris. I’ve got someone to port you so we can get this started,” Kaydinn said loudly.

Kaydinn always had a bad habit of yelling during raids. Not because he was particularly angry or anything. Just because that’s what he did when we raided. It was like he couldn’t turn his volume down in real life.

“Is everyone else already there?” I asked, slightly shocked. The raid was supposed to start in fifteen minutes. It wasn’t like I was really late.

“Xandris, we don’t have lives, remember? We would have been signed on even if we didn’t have a raid, so yeah . . . we’re all here . . . except Sovay, who
just
got here,” Rekrap said happily.

Sovay had a bad habit of not showing up for scheduled raids. It drove Kaydinn nuts.

I didn’t know a whole lot about my guild members in real life. I knew Rekrap’s name was really Parker and that Kaydinn and Eilarae were married in the real world even though they were both pretty young, but that was about it. I didn’t actually know
anything
about Sovay, since she was very adamant about not revealing any personal information online and only used text chat, never voice. I wasn’t sure if that was part of her character as a Rogue, or if she really didn’t trust us. I couldn’t say I blamed her. Online people could be creepers.

“You guys make me
lol,” Eilarae chimed in, her sweet voice always making me smile.

She had a ten
dency to use in-game abbreviations like they were how people really talked, so instead of actually laughing, she would just say “lol.” It was actually funny and endearing.

“All right, I got the port, I’ll be there in a sec,” I informed them, popping another strawberry into my mouth.

I adjusted my headphones so that they sat comfortably on my head, with the microphone positioned strategically at my mouth.

“All right guys, while we wait for Xandris to get here, let me just remind you all that today
is a progression day. We’ve tried to kill this boss a few times already, but we’ve been pwned every time,” Kaydinn said a bit too loudly. “Xandris, are you all stocked up on flasks already? We’re pretty much overstocked over here if you need anything.”

I quickly checked my bags to make
sure I had everything I needed for the raid. I had wasted enough time already, apparently, even though the raid didn’t start for another fifteen minutes. “I’m pretty sure I have everything I need,” I replied distractedly.

A private typed message appeared in my chat box. I was used to getting private messages from
Rekrap throughout the raid. The two of us would keep a running commentary going about our guild members, the raid, or just life in general. He was definitely my best in-game friend.

In this message, he was proposing that we get right up to the zone for the raid and then tell Kaydinn that we forgot something in a city all the way across the zone. The idea of how Kaydinn would react to this made me smile, but I knew I
wouldn’t do it; not on a progression day.

I guess we could always say that the other guild messaged me that they weren’t coming . . . and I just happened to forget to mention it until now,
I typed with a wicked grin, just imagining how mad Kaydinn would get.

Typically five people weren’t enough for a full-on raid. You needed at least ten people for normal raids, and twenty-five for the seriously intense ones. Since our main group of friends in-game only consisted of the five of us, we usually grouped up with another guild.

We could . . . But I’m guessing that’s not going to happen, since you’re just so nice, huh?
Rekrap messaged back. I shook my head at the computer screen.

Not a chance
.

At that moment, my computer was pulling up the load screen, indicating that I was being ported to the general area where the raid would start. Once I entered the city where the players had ported me, my screen filled up with the hundreds of avatars populating the city.

This was why our little group had their own vocal chat room. Already my text chat box was being filled with people selling, buying, begging, and just generally being obnoxious.

Oh, the joys of
Voyager’s Quest
on a Saturday.

All the ten-year-old little boys who needed attention that their parents weren’t giving them or were making up for being bullied at school were online being rude to one another.

“Are you in the city yet, Xandris?” Kaydinn asked in his usual overly loud timbre.

“Yeah, on my way; just have to pick through about twenty million
noobs parked outside of the auction house,” I said as my avatar made her way through the throngs of people.

Once outside of the large city, I got on my flying mount (a very pretty glowing blue bird that I was very proud of) and sped away toward my waiting guild.

As I flew, Kaydinn’s voice pinged in again, always ready to re-brief us on what we were doing that day. You see, raiding wasn’t just like slashing at a boss until it died. You actually had to strategize. That was what so many people didn’t understand about these kinds of games. It wasn't some mindless computer game where your brain turned to mush as you stared at a screen. It actually made you think.

Of course, if I ever tried to explain that to Zane or Tawny, they would just make fun of me . . . Who am I kidding? I wouldn’t get far enough to start explaining raiding . . . They’d start making fun of me the second I told them I played computer games.

For today’s raid, we had to stand in certain parts of the room at very particular points of time. The boss would give signals that meant he was about to do something, and that’s when we’d all move like clockwork into the positions that would keep us alive. Some bosses would cast a spell that you had to try to avoid; others would pound the ground, and if you didn’t jump just at the right time, it would stun you and you’d be a goner.

Like I said, it could be intricate.

“All right, so this boss, as you guys know from the fifteen times we’ve tried to kill him, will shout ‘desecrate’ right before he swipes his giant arm in front of him. Right when he starts saying that, you run up against the wall to avoid the blow. I don’t care what you’re doing at the moment—Xandris,” he added.

I looked at my screen with my mouth wide open in indignation.

“What? I was casting a very important spell last time he shouted that. I couldn’t just start running away and have it interrupt my casting!” I said a bit too loudly in an attempt to justify my actions.

“You’re right,” Kaydinn replied, sounding almost sympathetic.

Almost.

“Because it’s much better to die and leave us there without our main DPS than to interrupt one spell, which, if I may remind you, was actually a spell we didn’t need y
ou to cast in the first place.”

I could tell Kaydinn
was half in earnest and half joking. He took the game very seriously, but luckily for us he was never a jerk about it.

“My mouse may have slipped and accidentally clicked on the ‘sense animals’ button instead of the ‘killing shot’ button.
Sue me,” I stated matter-of-factly.

At least you didn
’t accidentally “summon drink” instead of “heal party” like Eilarae did a few raids ago,
Rekrap typed to me, always ready to make me feel better about myself.

Since I had exited the city, my textual chat box had stopped getting clouded up with people’s trade talk and I could actually see what he was typing to me again.

Very true,
I replied with a smile.

It’
s seriously so hot here I don’t think I’m going to make it through the whole raid. I may just die of heat stroke before we even get to the boss,
Rekrap remarked.

Well that was random! Where are you that it’s so hot right now? I’m freezing here!

As I said this, I pulled my bare feet up on my chair and folded my legs. I guess freezing wasn’t exactly the word I’d use. I was in a tank top, but that was only because I’d lived in Oregon my whole life. I was pretty used to the winters now . . . and besides, we did have a heater, so it was only freezing outside of the house.