wrong, and sounded all intense and creepy.
[Group][Orcarella]: I like the way you play games
[Group][Orcarella]: you seem to get a lot out of them
[Group][Solace]: You don’t think it’s weird?
[Group][Orcarella]: well maybe a bit at first
[Group][Orcarella]: but what’s weirder? playing a game because you like it or playing a game because you feel you have to?
[Group][Solace]: Is that how you feel?
[Group][Orcarella]: sometimes
[Group][Solace]: :(
[Group][Solace]: *hugs*
[Group][Orcarella]: but i enjoyed tonight
[Group][Orcarella]: reminded me how it used to be
[Group][Orcarella]: and i liked running that heroic with you
[Group][Orcarella]: and this is nice too
[Group][Solace]: Yes, it really is
[Group][Solace]: Um
[Group][Solace]: If you wanted, we could maybe roll some alts
[Group][Solace]: Go all the way back to the beginning and say good-bye to the old world before they nuke it in the next expansion
[Group][Orcarella]: they’re really doing that?
[Group][Solace]: I saw something on MMO Champion this morning
[Group][Solace]: It’s going to be called Genesis and crazy machine gods are going to rise up and try to remake the world
[Group][Orcarella]: what? again??
[Group][Orcarella]: i thought we stopped that shit two patches ago
[Group][Solace]: No, that was foreshadowing
[Group][Orcarella]: lol
[Group][Orcarella]: so what’re we going to roll?
[Group][Solace]: Something new? For both of us
[Group][Orcarella]: my old main’s a human
[Group][Solace]: And I’m not playing a high elf on principle
[Group][Solace]: They betrayed my people man
[Group][Orcarella]: kk, that leaves kobolds medusas or dorfs
[Group][Solace]: Also I kind of want to be hot
[Group][Orcarella]: so no kobolds then?
[Group][Solace]: How about medusas?
[Group][Solace]: I’ve never seen the starting area
[Group][Orcarella]: me neither
[Group][Orcarella]: so when’s good?
[Group][Solace]: I can do whenever
[Group][Orcarella]: how about tomorrow
[Group][Orcarella]: o wait shit
[Group][Orcarella]: got a thing
[Group][Solace]: Wednesday’s raid night
[Group][Orcarella]: thurs?
[Group][Solace]: It’s a date.
[Group][Orcarella]: cool
And it was only later, after they’d said an awkward goodnight and Drew was lying in bed running over the conversation in head, that he tripped over the d-word.
He knew he was probably overthinking, but that didn’t stop him from overthinking.
It was probably just a turn of phrase.
But if it wasn’t, then that was . . .
. . . good?
Drew was pretty determined not to get himself into a tizzy over a nondate with an imaginary elf on the internet, but he couldn’t really help it. He managed to get on with things, and people didn’t seem to notice he was slightly distracted, or if they did, they didn’t take the piss. He made decent progress on his project and rolled along to Sanee’s birthday thing on Tuesday night. Andy couldn’t make it and Tinuviel had shown up with a random philosophy student called Ocean, which, Drew was depressed to realise, left him as the only one without a date. Well, there were a bunch of people from the course there too, some of whom were probably single, but they didn’t count.
It was a pretty good evening, though. It basically went the same way as it had last year. Steff had baked a cake with The cake is a lie piped delicately over the top in bright-green icing, and Sanee got into a really bitter fight about The Stanley Parable with a random guy. Sometimes Drew thought Sanee liked arguing about video games more than he liked playing them. Eventually people drifted off and the survivors found themselves trying to play Twilight Imperium, drunk, at three in the morning.
Drew passed out sometime around his third turn and woke up just in time for lab, with several plastic spaceships embedded in his face. He survived the day but was kind of out of it for the raid that evening. It was all a bit of a blur, and he got through it on Pepsi Max and muscle memory. Despite having a tank on his way down from a cheap-wine-and-board-games bender, the guild took the next three bosses down relatively easily. They wiped a few times but Drew was pretty sure none of them were his fault.
He left the guild celebrating, face-planted into his pillow, and woke up the next morning weirdly missing Solace. They hadn’t talked much during the raid, and he’d got strangely used to hanging out on a rock in Alarion.
That afternoon, when he should have been shading a chair, he caught himself freestyling with the drawing pad, and his doodles grew into the outline of an elf and orc sitting next to each other by the ocean.
Sanee leaned over from his terminal. “Dude. Are you drawing fanart?”
“Fuck off.”
“Looks good.”
“Thanks.” He said, Thanks. He meant, Die in a fire. There was no way Sanee was going to let this slide. He tried to head him off anyway. “It’s just my HoL character and a guildie.”
“I don’t think the world’s ready for girl-on-girl, orc-on-elf