Love Games: A Lesbian Romance Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  1: Anticipation

  2: The Gathering

  3: Dread

  4: To the Gathering

  5: Digital Destruction

  6: First Night

  7: The Big Day

  8: Into the Field

  9: Captured

  10: Royal Raid

  11: Alone in the Woods

  12: End of Day

  13: Royal Passion

  14: Morning Betrayal

  15: Royal Captive

  16: Royal Concubine

  17: The Execution

  18: Long Live the Queen

  19: The New Consort

  20: Back to Camp

  Like What You Read?

  More from Mia Archer

  Girl on Geek Excerpt

  1: Mysterious Stranger

  2: A More Mysterious Stranger

  3: Digital Sleuthing

  4: Creative Writing

  5: Comfort

  6: Waiting Game

  7: Digital Date Night

  Get the full story!

  Love Games

  A Lesbian Romance

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2015 Mia Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Mia Archer, December 2015

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  1: Anticipation

  “I’m coming for you.”

  I blinked at the message. Okay, so that was a little melodramatic. It also wasn’t a very good idea to telegraph attacks like that, but I figured that’s why I was ranked so high in the game while Colin was still more or less riding on my coattails. Not that I minded. He was fun to have around.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You know what. Watch your back,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes and went back to looking at dresses in the ARealms online store. Most people came here to look at new accessories for the game. A custom set of glasses that popped up a pretty heads up display so you weren’t forced to look at your phone’s screen all the time while you were concentrating on the game. Extra add ons for your phone that were supposed to improve your game.

  I didn’t care about any of that stuff. I’d risen to the top of the biggest alternate reality game in the world, at least in our region, with nothing but my phone and a pair of wired glasses. No, I was far more interested in the pretty costumes they offered for live events. Pretty costumes that were a hell of a lot more expensive than anything I could ever afford.

  Finally I flipped over to an advertisement for the Alternate Realms Gathering. It was being billed as the biggest Alternate Realms gathering in the history of history, and it was within a short driving distance from where I was. Just five hours away by car. I sighed as I thought of getting away from the drudgery of cubicle life and coding and getting out there in the wilderness.

  Out there where hopefully there would be other players at my level. Players who could actually present a challenge. Players that wouldn’t crumple the instant I unleashed one of my patented spells that kept most people in the office from even bothering to challenge me these days.

  Most people but Colin. “Damn it!”

  I sighed as my phone started beeping. A low pulsing warning with the screen turning a dull red that pulsed in time with the beeps. That meant danger was getting closer. One of the warding spells I’d set up when I got into work this morning was doing its job and keeping me safe.

  “Your boss is going to kill both of us if she finds us doing this on company time again,” I shot to Colin via the work’s IM. Not that he saw it. No, if I was getting that warning on my phone that meant he was close. Definitely not back at his cube working like a good little cog in the corporate machine.

  I stuck my tongue out at him. If we were going to do this then we were going to do this. It’s not like I could ignore the challenge. Well, I suppose I could unflag myself and then Colin would be left high and dry trying to explain what the hell he was doing over here, but that wouldn’t be any fun. Part of the thrill of the hunt was that moment when the hunter realized they were the hunted.

  I stood and looked over the edge of my cubicle. Richard looked up at me, light reflecting off of his bald head, and cocked an eyebrow. “Having fun with Colin again?”

  “Shush. You’re going to give me away!” I hissed.

  Richard rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Sheila’s going to kill you if she finds the two of you playing the game on company time again.”

  Sheila might kill me if she heard about it, but I also noted that Richard reached out and swiped at his own phone. Hit a few buttons that unflagged his character who’d most definitely been logged into the game. I smiled. Rules were rules, but nothing could overcome the addictive power of Alternate Realms.

  “Sheila wouldn’t dare fire me over something like this,” I said.

  “You really think you’re irreplaceable? I mean you do good work, but plenty of kids graduating CS who’d love to have your job,” Richard said.

  “That’s true, but how many of those are a top player in Alternate Realms? She wouldn’t have anyone to be starstruck over if she fired me.”

  Richard rolled his eyes but he also smiled. He knew I was right. I’d become something of a local legend in the department. Except for that time I’d accidentally fried everyone when I was trying to keep Colin off my back.

  Oops.

  I looked back at my screen and then I glanced at a filing cabinet next to my desk. For a moment I thought about pulling out my glasses, a pair of cheap plastic wired glasses that attached directly to my phone. I hadn’t bothered upgrading because I figured if I could get to the top with old faithful then that was all I needed. Hell, I didn’t even really need the glasses to frag my friends in the office.

  So I didn’t bother getting them out. Partly because my ego told me I didn’t need them, but mostly because if I put them on that would be an obvious tell to Sheila that we were playing Alternate Realms if she happened to look out of her office.

  The beeping on my phone was getting louder and I reached out to hit the mute button on that spell. Some spells you could mute, like if it was something I cast that notified me there was danger sneaking up on me. Other sounds, like a spell hitting me or even the dreaded death noise, happily piped out of my phone’s speakers at top volume whether or not I had headphones in so every player around me would know what was going on.

  I really hoped Colin didn’t launch an attack that would register as a hit and play a loud sound that would definitely pull Sheila out of her office. That was the one feature of the game that made it really difficult to play in an office where it wasn’t exactly frowned upon, but wasn’t exactly encouraged either.

  “He’s going to get you this time,” Richard taunted in a singsong voice from the other side of the cubicle. I tried to tune it out, but not before getting in a parting shot of my own.

  “Yeah, you’d like that wouldn’t you? Someone succeeding where you’ve failed so many times?”

  Richard let out a huff from the other side of the cube wall and I could just imagine his shoulders rising and falling indignantly. It annoyed him that he’d never been able to get the drop on me even when he was right next to me all day long. Eventually he
’d stopped trying because he got tired of the death sound blasting out of his phone at all hours.

  Richard wasn’t very good at Alternate Realms.

  I popped my head over the cubicle wall again. This time I saw him. Colin. Walking towards me with a huge grin on his face. He had something up his sleeve. He always did when he was smiling like that. He also always found out that whatever he had up his sleeve usually wasn’t enough.

  I decided to test the waters. I pulled up a menu in-game on my phone and selected one of my nastier spells. A high level homing fireball that slammed into my enemies and pulverized them. At least in theory. It also created some splash damage, a lot of the spells in game had those pesky semi-realistic side effects, and so I ran the risk of pissing people off if they had their characters logged in and flagged as playing.

  Whatever. That was their problem. Not mine. They knew they were in a war zone if they kept themselves flagged near me.

  I didn’t have my glasses on so I didn’t see a crude representation of a fireball go streaking down the hallway towards Colin. On my cheap set of glasses it was just some simple LEDs that looked like one of those ancient handheld games my older brother played with when I was a toddler. I’d heard some of the newer more expensive sets could make the graphics look almost like the real thing as the alternate reality of Alternate Realms was laid over the real world.

  I couldn’t see the fireball, but I could flip the game over to map mode on my phone. I watched as the spell tracked a path over a satellite image of my office building. The developers weren’t so skilled that they had a detailed map of the building and I’d never uploaded one, though industrious gamers had added maps of various buildings that were popular hubs for the game over the past few years.

  I held my breath and resisted the urge to cackle with glee as the spell made contact with a dot that represented Colin. Or more accurately it represented Colin’s character. The spell hit him.

  And winked out. There wasn’t even the sound of it hitting his character and causing some damage as he moved inexorably down the hall like a geeky and woefully undersized Terminator that could feel one emotion judging by the smile on his face: glee.

  “Uh-oh,” Richard said. “Sounds like someone’s big bad fireball spell just fizzled out.”

  “Shut up Richard,” I said.

  I ran over the scenario in my head. Usually a fireball or a lightning spell or something like that was enough to take Colin out. He must’ve gotten tired of getting fried before he even got to me. Obviously the jerk had gotten his skinny little mitts on some sort of anti-magic spell or device or something. And he was coming right for me.

  I plopped down on my chair with a thud that had the thing protesting. I winced. It wasn’t that I was heavy so much as the chairs and equipment they kept in this place was right next to the definition of “barebones” in the dictionary.

  Colin was coming right for me. I had maybe a minute before he was right there. He had something that was preventing my magic spells from hitting him. I sighed and opened a panel in the game. My finger hovered over my phone’s screen as I closed my eyes and prepared for the inevitable.

  I turned off sound notifications, but the phone was still pulsing in my hand. The ward spells I’d set up were still telling me that a potential hostile was getting closer and closer. I might’ve turned the sound off, but the vibration was still working quite fine thank you very much. I waited until I could almost sense him standing right in front of me. Until the phone wasn’t pulsing. It was just a steady angry vibrating buzz in my hand.

  I pressed on the screen. Immediately there was an almost comical “schwing!” noise from my phone. Followed by a gargling shriek from a phone almost right in front of me and then the suitably morbid death song.

  I opened my eyes. Smirked up at Colin who was standing at the entrance to my cubicle with a shell-shocked look plain on his face. He looked down at his phone screen which was displaying bloody red splotches to let him know he’d been killed. By a good old fashioned melee attack.

  “How the hell did you do that?”

  I tried to make my smile look innocent. It was hard. How did you look sweet and innocent when you knew you were a big bad shark swimming amongst the minnows?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about Colin,” I said. I turned back to my computer, but not before I heard a throat clearing at the door to my cube. I squeezed my eyes shut. I knew it was too good to be true. I turned around again.

  “Something wrong Sheila?” I asked.

  She stood there, about forty years old and not looking a day over her mid-twenties. She had blonde hair flowing past her shoulders. Blonde hair that I sometimes wondered about running my fingers through. The boss lady was fucking hot. There was no getting around it. Not that she used her hotness at all. No, she ruled through a unique combination of fairness and an iron fist that I found admirable.

  Except for those occasions when the iron fist was descending on me.

  “I’m pretty sure I just heard the death song from Alternate Realms over here. You two wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” she asked. Her arms were crossed, but there was the barest hint of a smile threatening at the corner of her mouth that told me she wasn’t mad. At least not too mad.

  “Nothing like that going on here,” I said. “Just working hard!”

  “Working hard on making your reservation for the Gathering?” she asked.

  I turned and looked at my screen. Damn it. I knew I was forgetting something. The page for the Gathering was still up on my monitor. I figured there was nothing but to own it and go for sheer ballsiness at this point though. I twirled back and faced Sheila with a smile.

  “Nah. I made my reservation for the Gathering months ago, but you already knew that didn’t you?”

  This time the smile that was threatening really did turn up the corners of her mouth. Just a little. Enough to let me know I was in the clear.

  “Right. Well make sure you get everything done that I outlined in that email. I’d hate to have to call you in remotely while you’re off at the Gathering.”

  “Sure thing boss!” I said. What I wasn’t going to add was I had no intention of bringing my computer or my mobile hotspot along with me. There wasn’t a chance in hell that I was doing anything that even had a whiff of work attached to it while I was off on vacation.

  “And as for any wannabe heroes who are coming over here to kill the company Alternate Realms superstar, maybe you should think of ambushing your friend after hours when you’re not on company time?”

  Colin looked down, but I knew Sheila was just having some fun with him. Not that he had any way of knowing that since he didn’t work with her enough to know when she was bullshitting and when she was seriously mad. I figured I’d let him stew for a little while. It might save me some trouble the next time he decided to distract me from being distracted from work because he wanted to try and prove himself.

  “Right. It won’t happen again,” Colin said.

  “Sure it will,” Sheila said. “I’m not going to be an ogre about this. I remember when I started out DOOM was the big thing that hit productivity. That was an old video game, for you whippersnappers.”

  “I know what DOOM is!” I said, indignant. I remembered playing it with my brother. And being terrified because that wasn’t the sort of game a little kid should be playing, even if it looked quaint by today’s realistic standards.

  “Right. Just make sure it doesn’t affect your work too much,” she said, and then Sheila was gone. Colin breathed a sigh of relief, but I just rolled my eyes and turned back around to the computer to look at pictures from other live events ARealms had put on in the past. Let him think he was actually close to being in trouble there.

  “So are you going to tell me how you did that?” he asked.

  “Did what?”

  “Killed me!”

  “Well I put the pointy end of my character’s sword into the soft squishy end of your character’s
character. Then the game decided I won and you died. That’s how it usually works.”

  “But you’re not supposed to be able to do that! You’re a high level mage!”

  “So? Does that mean I can’t be a high level Fighter or Assassin or something like that too?”

  “Well I suppose, but that would take you forever to get skills in both on your character!”

  I turned and smirked at him.

  “You spent forever dual classing your character. Didn’t you?”

  “I’m not telling,” I said.

  I figured it was simple insurance. People in this game tended to think of you as fighting with weapons or magic. No one ever stopped to consider that someone might make a character who did both just because it took so long. Those people had no imagination, in my opinion. They also weren’t as good as me.

  There was a reason I was on top. At least locally.

  I turned back to my computer, back to a slideshow of pictures from past live events that was running past. I figured that was it for our little interaction, but my breath caught when I saw the most beautiful and stunning creature I’d ever seen in my life. I hurriedly clicked back to the picture of a gorgeous girl, about my age, wearing the most elaborate dress I’d ever seen someone in at an ARealms event and a crown on her head.

  “Who’s that?” I breathed.

  Colin leaned over my shoulder. “Oh, you mean the queen?”

  2: The Gathering

  “The queen? What are you talking about?”

  Colin moved over and leaned against my desk. He crossed his arms and looked down at me like I’d just grown a second head or something. I blushed. I hated it when he looked at me like I didn’t know something about the game.

  “You’re kidding me. Right?”

  “No? I didn’t know we had a queen.”

  “Well there’s a queen in the game,” Colin said.

  “But I didn’t vote for her!”

  Colin rolled his eyes and looked down at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world. I hated it when he did that.