Looking for Group - Alexis Hall Page 0,85

to his room. He took a quick shower and pulled on his serious gaming tartans, before turning on his computer. Technically, he should have been at a lecture, but frankly he was in no fit state to sit through a long talk on visual design.

This was more important than his degree. This was more important than pretty much anything.

Jacob had already messaged him back with some ideas and promised to catch him before the raid to help with Operation Say Sorry For Being A Dick. Inspired by Jacob’s unending enthusiasm for obscure HoL trivia and the fact he hadn’t said anything about the plan being pointless, terrible, or doomed to fail, Drew logged into HoL.

What with it being before lunchtime on a weekday, the guild was basically dead. Mordant seemed to be around doing whatever it was he did when he wasn’t raiding, and there were a couple of others Drew didn’t really know that well. He said hi for the sake of politeness and hit the auction house, where he picked up a [Delightful Red Bouquet] for slightly more in-game gold than he was really comfortable spending on something he would have been unable to avoid acquiring for free during the Valentine’s event. He lost about an hour browsing for other cool stuff Kit might like, but it was all either far too common or far too expensive. He did, however, grab some [Very Romantic Fireworks] and a bottle of [Overpriced Elvish Wine] and stashed them in his inventory along with the [Elegant Tuxedo] Kit had tailored for him.

Then he jumped on an airship and flew between continents to the mighty underground city of Koboldeep. While he was hunched in the prow, waiting for the load screen to pop up, he experienced an unexpected rush of affection for this strange, invented, and occasionally hard to navigate world he shared with so many people he’d never meet.

The long-awaited loading screen appeared and flashed away again and the airship juddered to a halt at the top of a rickety tower outside of the kobold capital.

You have discovered Koboldeep.

Jacob had pointed him at this place. Apparently an obscure quest in one of the game’s least popular dungeons would supply him with a vital component for any big romantic gesture. He horsed-up and galloped through the twisty, steampunk-inspired streets of Koboldeep until he found the swirly portal entrance to Koboldeep Deeps. As far as he could tell, the kobolds used to be slaves to the orcs, and they’d worked in this big mine, but they’d used their technological know-how to build giant warbots so they could fight back. And now the robots had gone nuts and they needed level thirty-four to thirty-eight adventurers to sort them out. Being level ninety and the best-geared tank on the server, Orcarella basically flattened in there.

It was still a bit of a pain to navigate because it was from vanilla, when they’d designed dungeons to feel like places that might actually exist instead of places it might actually be fun to visit in a video game. As Ella jogged through the corridors, trailing about thirty malfunctioning death bots, none of them capable of harming her, Drew realised he’d got used to playing in company. Kit would have wanted to stop and look at all the giant wheels and steam vents, and Jacob would probably have known all the lore ever, although Drew suspected the lore for this place wasn’t much more than “there were some robots, they went evil.”

Following Jacob’s instruction, he ducked down an easy-to-miss side tunnel, where he found a small, cowering kobold called Sir Yips-a-Lot, who gave him a quest called I Like Big Bots And I Cannot Lie. It involved fighting an endless conveyer belt of giant warbots, which would have been a massive pain to do at level, but which Ella handled with little more than Circles of Corruption and patience. Eventually Drew had harvested the required number of [Intact Warbot Crankshafts] and returned to Sir Yips-a-Lot for his reward.

He couldn’t be bothered to actually finish Koboldeep Deeps, so he activated his bindstone and bamfed back to the City of Stars. From there, he jogged down to the docks, where he recognised the high elf that his medusa had snubbed. There was another ship farther along, which Drew remembered from back when he first started playing. It was a huge longship crewed by angry-looking teddy bears and it took players to what, a few years ago, had been the brand-new continent of