Girl on Geek: A Lesbian Romance Read online

  The sort of role-playing that he was looking for was against the rules, to be sure, but it was also well known amongst the people who did that sort of role-playing that the game moderators never did anything about it unless they got a complaint. Of course once they got a complaint that could quickly lead to an account being temporarily suspended or permanently banned since a record of everything typed in the game was held back. I'm sure this guy was well aware just how much of a threat to his account that was. Even if he was pretty low level I knew there was a good chance he also kept his regular higher level character on the same account and he was putting all of that at risk by cruising an inn just outside the main city gates for a little two-person erotica.

  He paused and looked at me and then to the rest of the room. More than a few people had turned towards us. I’m sure most of the people who were sitting in this room were sitting in here looking for the very same thing this guy was. Most of them were probably just as nervous as he was at the prospect of a game moderator being pulled into a fight. I rolled my eyes and let out another disgusted noise. This is what I got for coming to a general role-playing area.

  The asshole faded away, no doubt logging out of the game rather than sticking around to risk more humiliation. Of course he was logging out of the game under the false assumption that if he wasn’t logged in then the moderators wouldn’t be able to do something about him. They could ban him just as easily if he was in game as if he was out. Not that I actually had any intention to report him. I was actually more mad at myself for losing control like that and breaking character in public chat. That was violating one of the biggest rules of being involved in the role-playing community.

  I sat down at the bar and buried my head in my hands, despairing of ever finding somebody who was worth role-playing with in a public area like this. I needed to just logout for the night or send a private message to somebody on my list who was passably decent at writing who'd be a sure thing instead of hoping to find a nugget of gold amongst all the crap role-players to be found in the general population.

  Only all the people I usually role-played storylines with were either offline or they were the kind of people who churned out the same repetitive crap every time. The last thing I wanted was to spend another night wasting time with someone like Cara who was always the mysterious elf princess who kept her identity hidden and then swears you to secrecy when she reveals who she truly is, or Mike who was always a stoic but goodhearted adventurer whose morals always overcame his desire for money by the end of whatever story we were working on.

  Boring. Typical. Predictable. Not what I was looking for.

  No, the game was starting to get stale. It was starting to get boring. I sighed at my keyboard and my character sighed in the game. It was starting to feel like there were no new worlds to conquer, no new scenarios to explore.

  The door to the inn banged open. I looked over, but with nowhere near the hope I’d felt earlier when the asshole I'd just chased off walked in.

  2: A More Mysterious Stranger

  The human barbarian who walked through the door looked much the same as any other human barbarian in these parts. She wore a cloak that was tattered and torn in places, though she’d obviously taken care to repair it in other places. Perhaps she was just in from a long trip. Underneath the cloak she wore the once fine but now faded and threadbare clothes of a woman who had fallen on hard times.

  As I looked her over I figured that no doubt she was a member of one noble family or another. They seemed to spring up constantly and fall just as quickly as they rose. Both because noble houses were a popular role-playing target for newbies who didn’t know what they were doing yet and because in the game lore there was the whole giant cataclysm that ripped the world asunder and sent humans scattering, nobles included.

  I sighed. No, there definitely wasn’t anything promising about a low level human who looked much the same as every other low level human. She was pretty enough, to be sure, with striking green eyes that seemed to draw my attention long after everyone else in the room had gone back to whatever they were doing before she walked in. Green eyes that would've been striking if I was into that sort of thing on a girl, which I totally wasn't even though I found myself losing myself in that face once more for some reason and had to shake myself out of my strange mental funk. It didn't help that she was making her way directly towards me. I suppose it couldn’t be helped. I was the only elf in the room and that tended to draw attention.

  It really was my fault for drawing the wrong type. I was something of an oddity. Most elf players tended to stay in elf zones. It was amazing how quickly the pseudo-racist undertones of a book series could translate into pseudo-racist undertones in an online role-playing game. Sometimes I thought the people who spouted nonsense about being superior to humans half believed their crap, even though it was probably a human on the other side of the computer doing the role-playing.

  At least I was pretty sure elves hadn’t discovered computers and video games. Not yet.

  That was one of the reasons I’d come to human lands. The Elven Order was ostensibly an elf guild with a few humans here and there. If I stayed where most of our official role-playing events were held, where my guild held the most influence, then I’d almost never make it to human zones.

  So in a way I was adventuring here in the hopes I might find somebody who surprised me, though so far I’d found nothing to disabuse me of the commonly held belief that the people who hung out at this particular inn in the human territories were nothing but a bunch of shallow idiots who were more interested in getting their rocks off with a little bit of two way erotica improv than in constructing a genuine storyline and getting into real role-playing.

  The human stepped up to the bar and turned to face me. She had a winning smile and I had to admit she was stunning under that bedraggled first impression. If you were interested in humans, which I most certainly was not. Well, which my character most certainly was not. Or if you were into women, which I most certainly was not. I wasn’t one of those crazies who didn’t make a distinction between the character I role-played and reality. There were plenty of them out there, believe me.

  She leaned an elbow against the bar and immediately lost her balance. Immediately went flying and clattering to the floor sending several empty drinks that were waiting for the bartender to come and pick them up flying. I couldn’t help but giggle at this odd and novel approach to an opening move.

  She stood and almost lost her footing again. It appeared that clumsiness was a trait with this one. I glanced to the sword by her side and wondered how she was able to use the thing without accidentally cutting her head off. Then again that was a sentence that could apply to humans and just about any piece of technology more advanced than fire. Oftentimes it could apply to the fire as well.

  She finally managed to regain her footing and didn’t even bother sketching a bow. She just plopped her lithe and inviting frame down on a bar stool and took a deep breath. I took a deep breath too. Lithe and inviting frame? Where the hell had that thought come from?

  “Well that definitely wasn’t a good way to make a first impression,” she muttered.

  In the game, in character, she was probably right. Only speaking from a strictly out of character perspective it was a wonderful way to make a first impression. I pulled away from the keyboard and blinked. “Now that’s interesting…”

  “What’s that?” Megan asked.

  “Oh nothing,” I said. “Get back to your raid. I’m sure they’re counting on you to click your mouse at just the right moment or whatever it is you do.”

  Megan stuck her tongue out at me. “It’s a little more complicated than that, O mighty queen of the role-playing wordsmiths!”

  I stuck my tongue right back out at Megan. Then I turned my attention back to the game and raised an eyebrow. Looked at this strange avatar before me. Stumbling and causing a mess like that was definitely novel. It was definitely something I’d not seen before. Us
ually this inn was filled with people role-playing for the first, and they were almost universally the type whose characters were secret gods or half dragon or some other nonsense.

  Which was pure poppycock. There were no dragons in Tales of Elassa. If there was one thing I hated more than people who used the game’s role-playing community as an excuse to do a little bit of one-handed two-person erotica improv, it was the people who brought in elements that were outside of the world's established lore.

  That made me see red.

  So this mysterious person standing before me with her striking green eyes that had that strange ability to hypnotize me was refreshing. Her character had a vulnerability. Her character wasn’t another stoic hero just returned from slaying thousands of her enemies. No, she was just a little clumsy. And that that was enough of a hook that I was intrigued. It was enough to make me want to know more about her. It was enough that she was already more promising than the first asshole I ran into and we hadn’t even started properly talking.

  She looked at me again and my breath caught. This human really did have the most piercing green eyes. Piercing green eyes that were unlike anything I’d ever seen on a human before, though that might just be because I wasn’t looking rather than it not being a trait humans possessed. Obviously it was a trait humans possessed if she was looking at me with those gorgeous blinkers. I was getting scatterbrained. My thoughts were running away from me. I needed to get myself under control.

  “So what brings you to human lands? That’s a dangerous journey for a young elf such as yourself,” she said.

  I threw my head back and laughed, and yet secretly I was delighted. She called me young. A common misconception, but it also meant that if she was reading my character sheet, and she definitely could since I could see the same mod installed with an indicator over her head that led to an impressively detailed character history, she wasn’t bringing it into the conversation. That was so refreshing. That was such a change from what I was used to.

  “I guarantee you I was probably fighting off scarier monsters than you could imagine before your great-grandfather even looked at your great-grandmother with a twinkle in his eye,” I said.

  A hundred years ago I would have been able to show off my age to a human by referencing their kings, but that wasn’t the case anymore. The humans hadn’t had a unified kingdom in at least half a century. Just another way that their world kept changing while mine stayed the same. Except for the Sundering, of course. That affected everybody. Still, there was far more potential for intrigue with a good human player. Perhaps that was one reason why I was so drawn to humans. It allowed for a richer role-playing experience than sitting around whining about how much it sucked to be immortal which is what your typical elf role-playing scenario boiled down to.

  Assuming you could find somebody good. I desperately hoped this gorgeous woman in front of me was good. Wait. Gorgeous? Where were these thoughts coming from? I needed to get control. I needed to stop losing myself on ridiculous tangents about how attractive this girl was, particularly considering her "attractiveness" boiled down to an avatar and the way she described herself in that character sheet. And yet there was something compelling about her writing, about that description and the way she hooked me initially, that had me shifting in my seat out in the real world.

  “My apologies lady elf,” she said, seeming genuinely sincere. “But a pretty face on an old soul isn’t going to protect you from creatures with sharp teeth any more than my clumsiness would protect me.”

  My character blushed in game and out of the game I felt a flush rising to my cheeks. A surprising flush rising to my cheeks. What was going on with me tonight that this girl was able to get that sort of reaction out of me with just words on a screen?

  Focus. Get back in the game.

  I held up my fingers and allowed a flame to dance from finger to finger. She raised an eyebrow, but otherwise didn’t react. Obviously this was a woman who’d seen magic before. Or at least she’d heard of it. Either way she didn’t react with the wide-eyed surprise that usually accompanied that display. A slight disappointment, but behind my keyboard I was secretly jubilant. I was so sick of people who thought that wide-eyed surprise was the only way to react to magic, as though anybody who lived in a world where magic was a commonplace thing would be surprised by the damn stuff.

  “Ah, I see,” she said. “A sorceress, I presume?”

  I winced at the human word.

  “If you want to reduce calling down the very forces that power this universe and bending it to my will “sorcery” then I suppose you could call me that,” I said.

  “Impressive,” she said.

  She dug into her pocket and pulled something out. I saw a flash of black and then the flames dancing on my fingers winked out. The tingling sensation that let me know I was drawing upon the magical forces that powered the universe disappeared at the same time. I blinked, looked at the object in her hand, and then my eyes widened in surprise. I hated that I reacted like that, but it was the only thing I could think to do in this situation. I did a quick inspect of her character just to be certain.

  “Is that…”

  An Elassa Shard,” she said. “It’s been passed down in my family, though I’ve never had occasion to show it off before. I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to show it off to someone who would actually appreciate it.”

  The way she leaned against the barstool with a cocky smile on her face was only slightly ruined when she slipped in a puddle of something on the floor, no doubt left over from her spill a moment ago, and nearly sent the Elassa Shard flying across the room. I cried out and held my hand out trying to catch it, but she did a surprisingly nimble dance and snatched it out of the air before it went flying too far. It appeared being constantly clumsy has given this strange woman one hell of a set of reflexes.

  And a good thing too. If that really was what she said it was then it was more valuable than the combined wealth of the entire city. They were so rare in the books that kingdoms rose and fell based on possessing one. I didn’t even know they were in the game.

  I opened her character window and did a quick inspect. Sure enough equipped right there in her offhand was an item labeled as an Elassa Shard. Huh. I didn't realize they'd added them into the game. I closed out the character window and went back to the chat window.

  “How did you get that?”

  She blinked, cutting those delicious green eyes off from me for a moment. Her delicate jaw line worked for a moment and she fixed me with an expression that told me she was wondering if I was entirely right in the head.

  “I told you,” she said slowly. “It’s been passed down in my family.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not what I mean. How did you get that? I didn’t know Elassa Shards were even in the game! At least I’ve never seen one before…”

  Of course that didn’t mean they weren’t in the game. It just meant I hadn’t seen them in the game before. I wasn’t really a big fan of the higher level dungeons, and they were always releasing new toys to entice people to go through that particular treadmill over and over. Megan was a perfect example of the type of personality that was perfectly willing to run the leveling treadmill as long as a shiny new in-game item was dangling tantalizingly just out of reach. It was entirely possible this was just some new bit of end game content I didn’t know about because I didn’t ever play end game content. It wouldn’t be the first time the developers took an all-powerful item from the books and reduced it to a trinket with a fun animation.

  Of course if that was the case then how did a lower-level player get her hands on one? She wasn’t even halfway to the level cap and she was walking around with something that shouldn’t exist. Even if she had a higher level character and this was her role-playing alt there was no way to transfer items like that between characters. Color me intrigued.

  She shook her head and now she really was looking at me as though I’d grown a second head. Or as though I’
d sprouted fangs like some of the bloodsucking creatures that totally weren’t vampires even though they sucked and blahed like a duck lurking along the paths to human lands after dark.

  “Game? What game are you speaking of? Are you quite all right my lady elf?”

  I pulled away from my keyboard and shook my head. Damn! Here I was complaining about people breaking character, complaining about people pulling in information they’d have no idea about, and I’d been so surprised by this strangely compelling woman that I went and did it myself! I never did that. I never lost control. That never happened to me. What was going on here?

  And yet I couldn’t deny the way I was feeling talking with this woman. There was something about her prose that went straight to my heart. There was something about her prose that went straight down to other areas in a way that few women ever had before. There was just something about her that was so compelling, so fascinating, so mysterious. And she was just some pixels on a screen with a particularly well written character sheet!

  I put my hands back on my keyboard.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I forgot myself for a moment.”

  She chuckled, a melodious rich sound that rolled over my body and sent a bolt of pleasure running through me as it hit my ears. “All is forgiven my lady elf.”

  I sighed in contentment. There was something about the way that sounded. “My lady elf.” As though she was claiming me for her own. I blinked. What the hell was I thinking? Wanting someone to claim me? Wanting a woman in particular to claim me for her own? Now that was entirely out of character both in game and out! That was dangerously close to the sort of thoughts that led to the sort of role-playing the first asshole I'd threatened was into.