“He’s down to 15% health, Tiffany, use something, ANYTHING other than your base attack! Hit him where it hurts!” I watched Tiffany, out in front of me swinging her sword wildly as she tried to take down the third boss. We were almost there. We’d been down here for three hours and I didn’t know how much longer I could keep it up. The Tri Pi’s would be back soon and they’d want to...do whatever it was they were going to do. They said there would be low carb muffins tonight. I kind of liked the pampering, actually, and they’d given me all kinds of advice on transitioning but only if I wanted to go in that direction. They’d even brought in a few trans girls to talk to me about the future. Overall my stay here had been really amazing but what was happening right now? That was less than amazing. We’d almost died at least fifty times, and Tiffany HAD died once. Thank god I’d been carrying a few resurrection scrolls but I felt like our luck was about to run out.

“Maybe you could actually attack for once?!” Her voice crackled over the speakers and if I hadn’t been so intent on keeping us alive I might have actually rolled my eyes.

“Tiffany,” I said. “I have a limited amount of MP and 1017 potions to recover it. I know that sounds like a lot but they go fast, we have one more boss, and a ton of monsters to fight before we get there. If I stop protecting us to use any of my frost abilities the shield will drop and we’ll die. Please, for the love of god, just keep hitting him.”

“You don’t have to be so condescending!” She shrieked as her own health bar dropped below 10%. I fired off a scroll of Celestial Mitigation and watched as her health bar was filled with a transparent red, supplementing what she had left with a shield. I recast the wall of shielding and breathed a sigh of relief as she struck the final blow and the boss crashed to the floor. Thank god.

“Any loot?” I asked as I walked toward the center of the room.

“Just leather armor,” She said, sighing. “It’s a level below what I have on.”

“What a shitty dungeon,” I muttered.

“Hey, what’s with the doors?” She used the /point command to make her character indicate a set of four doors behind the boss, all of which were sealed tightly shut. They wouldn’t open of course, not on this sever.

“It’s uh…Okay so this dungeon has two purposes, the first is to get you that stupid class hat, which we’re going for, the second is to awaken the Dain. See um, in the game, ten thousand years ago the world was ruled by the Dark Pantheon, but they disappeared. The developers revealed later on that the Pantheon had been defeated in battle and were forced into a sort of hibernation. All over the game world there are these…crypts, each one containing one of the ten members of the Pantheon – one for every class in the game. We don’t know where the others are, but we know that the Dain is in this one. He’s a dwarf that represents the bard class.”

“Wait,” Tiffany said, the motion tracking from her webcam picking up a bit of confusion “If it’s a questline to wake him up then why hasn’t anyone done it?”

“A few reasons,” I said. “First of all, even though we know where he is, there’s a year-long quest to access the tomb behind those doors. Secondly, awakening the Dain would destroy this dungeon which happens to be the only source of Magelite – the material we use to craft Zate armor. If the Dain is awakened, the loot tables change, forever. It’s happened on the other servers but this is a Player vs. Player server – we need the armor. There’s a group called the ‘Standard of the Dain’ that’s trying to wake him up, but we’ve stopped them at every turn.”

“Then I guess we should avoid that,” Tiffany agreed.

“Well no one’s done the quest, we’re too busy killing eachother on this server,” I pointed out. “And, even more importantly, because The Dain is a bard, only a bard can awaken him. Part of the access quest is finding the song that will awaken him. I’m a mage, you’re a brigand, I don’t think either of us can play a lute. ”

She chuckled a little and we moved on, leaving the boss behind us.

“So…what are you doing over at Tri Pi?” Tiffany asked. I couldn’t decide if she was trying to make small talk or pump me for information.

“They um…they’re teaching me how to girl…I guess they’re worried about how I eat. Oh, and…they taught me some cool makeup things.”

“Is that all?”

“I mean…no,” I said nervously. “They asked me if I wanted to transition. They bought some other trans girls in to talk to me.”

“Who? Anyone I know?”

“Uh…one of them was Kari, that girl from the Omega house. She was really nice. They told me a lot of things I didn’t know. Like…what’ll happen with hormones…and stuff. It’s all really complicated but I mean, it’s a lot more…in reach than it was if you know what I mean.”

“Wait so you DO want to transition?” She asked curiously as we turned the corner and stood in front of another hall full of monsters. We fought our way though, this time easily. It was all pretty much the same through here, despite it being stupidly hard.

“I think I do, yeah. Before this I would have said no, definitely, but…now…I mean like you said, you guys took things a little far but you showed me so many things. When I’m at the GAT house and when I’m dressed up I feel like myself. I don’t want it to end, but then it does, it always has to end because I can’t be Audrey outside. I feel like it’s just not enough anymore. I don’t know…what to do.”

“Have you thought about telling Mason?” She asked me seriously as we approached the final boss chamber. It was a round space with a domed ceiling, I could see the giant minotaur standing in the center. This was a fight meant for eight people, and even then it could barely be handled. This was a mistake. I knew that at this fight we were going to lose out characters but I just didn’t have the heart to tell Tiffany. She’d made a mistake and I already felt bad that she was going to hate herself for it.

“I can’t do that,” I said, kind of sadly. “You saw what happened with Chastity, I don’t know if I can handle that happening twice.”

“But if it does happen again, was he really your friend?”

I sat there in silence for a second. I hated that she was right.

“I don’t know,” It was all I could say.

“Audrey?” She said softly.

“Yeah?”

“If you ever do tell him and if he…does what Chastity did, I’ll still be your friend, no matter what happens, okay?”

“Wait, you mean we’re friends? I thought you-“

“I don’t hate you,” She said firmly. “I’m hard on you because I think you can do better than you’re doing. I know you want to be a woman and I want you to be the best you can be, but I don’t hate you. I want you to remember that no matter what happens now, ten minutes from now, or ten years from now, you can always call me, and I’ll always answer, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, not really able to process what had just happened. “Let’s uh…let’s just…finish this.”