Synopsis: While wondering if the previous night was a horrible dream, Todd gets a text from Aleah.

“Todd, Todd wake up!” I slowly opened my eyes, using a hand to rub the sleep from my crusted lids. A splash of light from the dorm room window invaded my vision, causing me to squint and shield my face with my free hand. “Come on, wake up, we have a raid in ten minutes!”

“Oh my god,” I grumbled. “Can it wait?”

I lay there in my bed trying to recall the previous night. What had even happened? I remembered Aleah, but honestly, I remembered her from class too. Had I really been in her house? Had all of that really happened?

“Come on!” Mason roughly shook my shoulder, finally causing me to sit up. “You have to log on!”

I glared at him and then diverted my attention to the other side of the room.

“What the hell, Mason?” I demanded as I stared at the mess on his side. A mountain of soda bottles and food wrappers littered the entirety of his space, from the foot of the desk all the way to the top and around his chair. He glanced sheepishly over toward the mess and shrugged.

“Sorry dude, I had an all-nighter. We had to craft the potions for today’s raid. SOMEONE had to; you slept all night!”
“That’s…that’s what normal people do,” I said, defeated as I tossed my blankets aside and put my feet on the carpet. “You’re gonna ruin the carpet in here.”

“Yeah yeah, whatever,” Mason said quickly as he bolted across the room and planted himself at his computer desk. I heard a soda bottle crinkle.

I made my way over to my own desk which was spotless in comparison and took a seat. My computer hummed as I moved the mouse; it was already switched on. Thanks Mason. I immediately double clicked the icon on the desktop and a splash screen reading: ‘Dark Pantheon’ appeared before my eyes.

“Okay, “ I said, finally sort of awake. “What are we doing?”

“What do you MEAN what are we doing?!” He demanded. “We’re raiding Eletar Deep!”

“Please don’t be this dramatic this early in the morning,” I muttered as I logged in with my mage. “Send me a port, would you?”

I guess I should explain what this was all about. Mason had gotten me into this game, Dark Pantheon; an online MMORPG, that’s Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game to you. Thousands of players cooperated in a persistent fantasy world to either live, or to fight monsters, or even get together to take down massive bosses. I had been sort of interested at first, but over time I got in deeper and deeper. There was something about it, maybe the fact that I could play as a girl and no one would get suspicious. I made a character that was, I guess, roughly what I wanted to look like in real life. I’d wanted to name her Audrey, but the name was taken, so I went with Audri. When Mason asked about it I’d laughed and told him I’d rather stare at a girl’s butt for hours while I played than a guy’s. He’d laughed too. I guess that answer was acceptable.

“I sent you a port,” Mason said, sipping from what had to be his thousandth energy drink. I wondered how long he’d been awake; no matter how much I was into this game, he always seemed to be way more obsessed.

The port request appeared at the upper right of my screen; I clicked it, and my character immediately appeared beside his at the gates of Eletar Deep. “

“Your character is HOT!” He said as he shoved a piece of beef jerky into his mouth.

I glared at him. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Where’s everyone else?” I asked. For a raid you needed at least twenty people – only the two of us were standing before the comically large dungeon entrance.

“They’ll be here, they’ll be here!” He said. “Stop being so impatient!”

I sighed. This was going to be a long day. Or maybe not. Just as I was thinking that, my phone buzzed beside my keyboard. I picked it up and swiped to see a text from Aleah. Her name was in my phone; I guess last night hadn’t been a dream after all. The text simply said: ‘Library: 2:30’. I checked the clock on the phone – 2:18. I could choose to ignore it, but Aleah could choose to release all of those pictures she’d taken of me. I sighed and shut my laptop.

“What are you doing?!” Mason demanded from across the room.

“Got something to do,” I said as I stood up and pulled on a pair of pants. “You can find one more person, don’t worry about it.”
“You’re an ass!” Mason shouted after me as I bolted through the door.

The dorm room door opened straight onto a balcony and I rushed down three flights of stairs, past a vending machine and onto the sidewalk. I glanced at my phone: 2:20. There wasn’t any time. My feet pounded the pavement and the campus rushed by in a blur. I arrived in the library at 2:27 and realized I had no idea where to go – the building was huge. Tables lined up to the right, students checking out books to the left; where was I even supposed to go?

“Hi,” A voice cut through the crowd behind me. “Are you Todd?”

I started to turn but from the corner of my eye I saw her walk around. It was a shorter girl, a brunette with freckles wearing a blue track jacket over a green t-shirt. For a moment I had difficulty believing that a girl was even talking to me but then I remembered that it probably wasn’t for anything good.

“Um..yes…?” I said apprehensively.

“Hi!” She said, her hand shot out and I instinctively shook it. “I’m Lauren, I’ve heard SO much about you.”

She giggled. No doubt she’d heard I was some kind of pervert.

“You…you have?” I was caught completely off guard, there was no recovering in this conversation.

“Mhm!” She said. Every one of her sentences came standard with an upward inflection. “So…I need help with something and one of the sisters said you could do it…could you come with me?”

“I…guess?” I said, completely unsure of where this was going.

“Great!” She grinned, taking my hand in hers and guiding me through the library. I stared at the back of her head, watching her perfectly straight brown hair swish with the motion. God, why couldn’t mine look like that? “Here we are!”

She pushed through a door into a private study area. It was a pretty bare room; wood paneling like the rest of the library and a table in the center with a laptop standing at the far end.

“Okay,” So I need some help with my laptop,” She said. “I turned it on this morning and…it’s just a black screen?”

“You…brought me here to fix your laptop?” I said incredulously. For some reason I’d thought this was going to be a lot worse.

“Uh-huh!” She said, practically skipping toward the laptop. I followed.

“Um..” I said, pressing a few buttons and trying a reboot. “I think…a file got corrupted? I guess a system restore?”

“I don’t even know what that is,” She said, biting her bottom lip and staring intently at me.

“I mean…I just have to press F8 as it starts up and hit restore.”

“You won’t lose my homework, right?”

“Your…no, it should –”

“I put it in the One Drive thing?”

“Okay,” I said. “Then it’s in the cloud, it’ll be there when the computer comes back up.”

“You’re pretty good at this, huh?”

I wanted to tell her that I knew how to follow on-screen instructions like any other idiot but I simply allowed myself to smile briefly and said yeah.

“Hey,” She said. “I have to go to class, I’ll be back after to pick this up, okay?”

“Oh!” I said. I hadn’t been expecting her to leave. “I…okay—”

By the time the words were out of my mouth, she was already gone. I was a little surprised, it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to do this. I wondered why she hadn’t called me earlier. Glancing at the laptop screen, I watched the recovery progress bar as it crept across the screen, finally reaching the halfway point and stopping. I wasn’t concerned, it happened a lot during system recoveries. I sat down in the cushioned chair and waited, and waited, and waited. After about thirty seconds I frowned. Nothing was happening. I instinctively reached my hand toward the power button and then stopped myself; what if a hard reboot fried the recovery partition? I had backup discs at my dorm, but what would she think if she came back and her laptop wasn’t here? On top of that, I kind of got the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to leave this room.

I checked my Facebook and wandered around the room for a bit, coming back to the laptop every few minutes to check. The progress bar didn’t move, at all. I peered out the window onto the courtyard and watched students coming and going. Over time, I noticed the noise outside the room grow quieter. People were leaving. My phone’s clock read 3:21. Finally, I resigned myself to sitting in the chair and leaning back to stare at the progress bar – still stuck at the halfway point with the laptop’s CPU light blinking.

I closed my eyes for just a minute, or at least I thought. The next moment I jumped, lurching my head forward. The windows were nearly dark – how long had I been asleep? I squinted and checked my phone, 5:25. What the hell.

“Lauren’s laptop is notorious for slow restores,” Aleah said. I must have jumped three feet in the air. As my stomach worked its way out of my throat, I stared at her like a deer in headlights; she was sitting in the chair caddy-corner to me at the table, nonchalantly looking through her phone, long black hair brushed off to one side. “She just didn’t want to spend all day working on it.”

“So, you…so you suckered me into doing it?” I asked incredulously.

“I sent you a text,” She said. “You didn’t technically have to show up.”

“Okay, but you have all of those pictures of me—”
“Deleted,” She said sharply, without glancing up from her phone.

“Wait, what?”

“Would be a little messed up to keep them around, considering the situation,” She said, finally looking up at me, her hazel eyes locking with mine.

I started to speak and say ‘what situation’ but I stopped myself short. I knew what the answer would be, and I was too embarrassed to even talk about it.

“What happens next is up to you,” She said curtly. “Come by the house at 7:30 AM tomorrow, if you want. If you don’t show up, we’ll forget any of this happened. You go back to whatever you were doing before, we forget you exist. But, if you do that, you don’t come to the house again, you don’t talk to any of us. Are we clear?”

I nodded.

“Good,” She said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a hamburger wrapped in foil, setting it down in front of me and taking the laptop. “Eat.”