Real Life Sucks!

17

The rest of the game-con passed by with little incident, save for a couple of times when complete strangers spoke to him, making him want to run, screaming, from the convention hotel, scratching every single layer of skin from his body. He hadn't. Katie had stood by him at every step of the way and she had a knack for making the most excruciating circumstances only seem like a mild case of utter horror. He appreciated that.

Returning home, he had found the large house empty and he had sat there, in the living room, in pure silence for a number of hours. It felt replenishing. Soothing. It couldn't last, however, for Rory had a mission. A new quest that he could not put off for long. He had to prepare himself mentally and physically for the trials to come and the only way he could do that was to play the game, and play it like he had never played it before.

He couldn't use his double-super-secret account for what he had in mind. This required something so secret that, if it were at all possible, he would have his mind wiped after every upcoming session, only to have the memories return upon the use of a certain, specific, very personal trigger. Like reciting Pi to twenty-eight decimal places, or a complicated series of coloured flashes.

That wasn't likely, or possible, he suspected, but he had to create a new account. An Ultimate-Über-Secret account that not even Katie would ever see. And, on that account, he would create a character designed specifically for the purpose of duelling. A character so specific that it would fail utterly at anything but duelling. Something powerful only against other players' characters. Only two things could prove difficult in this endeavour.

The first, being that he was awful at duelling. Truly, mind-bogglingly awful. Awful in that he was so average at duelling that were anyone to create a graph that took in all the duels that had ever occurred within the game from the moment it first went into live beta, up to the present day, drew a line at the exact position of peak mediocrity, Rory would fall right on that line in every form of calculation. And Alice sat firmly in the duelling gods tier.

The second problem was that Rory simply had no idea what the best character build for duelling actually was. Searching online did nothing to ease his concerns, with, literally, hundreds of sites in the results showing dozens of builds, each guaranteed, guaranteed!, to prove the strongest in duelling situations and every single one of them contradicted the others. Wildly contradicted them.

Which meant it fell to Rory to work out for himself. Damage per second? A character designed to hit opponents with the largest number of powerful strikes, looking to take them out in the fastest possible way? Or, perhaps, a tank? A character with the ability to absorb the most brutal punishment while chipping away at their opponent's health, bit-by-bit? A healer? Allowing themselves to get hit, but flooding the duelling area with life-reviving magic?

He had stared at the character creation screen for so long, it threatened to burn the scene into the tv's pixels forever. Male or female? Orc or elf? Mage or warrior? Options. So very many options and not one of them pertinent to what Rory required. A character that could put up a decent fight against Alice and her vile character, DoomAh.

It took him several seconds before he realised that his phone had pinged. A text message, and he hoped that it wasn't Katie. Not in a bad way, or so he thought, but they had only a few hours before parted ways after spending a weekend together and he couldn't think of anything that needed saying that they hadn't already said. People did that, though. They communicated not because they had to, but simply for the adrenaline rush of actually communicating. Rory had no patience for that.

With the character creation screen awaiting him, he chose another female, staving off the inevitable boot to the start screen through inactivity, and leaned across for his phone. A phone that sat out of reach of his grasping fingers. A groan escaped his lips, prompted by the requirement to actually move and pick up the phone, but he had to. People got pointlessly irate if he didn't answer.