I shuddered as the council chamber fills and the guildmates I’ve known for years take their seats. During these tribunals in this cold, stone room, I am never the center of attention. I’ve judged many during my time in this guild but today it’s my turn to be judged. In reality I sat in front of my laptop, at a desk in my dorm with Mason mere feet from me. In the game I sat in the wooden chair at the center of the council chamber with my guild members staring at me. In a moment they would read the charges, as was standard with members of the guild who had committed transgressions, and let’s face it, the one I was charged with was pretty severe.

It was Balthar who spoke first, our guild leader. In real life I always imagined him as some kind of nerd, just like me, but here he played this…hulking nord type character with a massive beard and an axe to grind. Literally. He carried an axe as large as he was, strapped to his back. Had he been a real person he probably could have torn my character in half.

“Audri, you are charged with colluding with none other than the Standard of the Dain, allowing them to gain access to the Dain’s Respite. Admittedly it is a public zone, but the access quest required to unlock the chamber for the purpose in which it was used, well, that’s entirely another matter. Only our guild has completed the quest, and we’ve stopped every other guild short of completing it themselves. I think my question, first and foremost, is what the hell?” Balthar didn’t seem angry after all. More confused.

“I would like to speak for a moment,” Regnum interjected. Regnum was played by my roommate, Mason, who was just a few feet from me. In real life he’d seemed a little pissed. Okay, maybe more than a little.

“You may speak,” Balthar granted his permission and I waited for Mason to give some long winded speech, which he did.

“I’ve known Audri for a long time in real life, since we were kids. I know he would never do anything like this intentionally. I know it seems really, really weird, but I think this was just a stupid mistake. He explained the entire thing to me in person, it sounds pretty damn plausible.”

“I think I’m willing to accept that Audri is just an idiot,” Gooshy, another tribunal member said with a shrug. “We all know he’s a little special.”

Behind my desk I cringed at them calling me ‘he’. God dammit, there was nothing I could do about it. They had no idea that this female avatar I’d been playing for years actually represented the person I really, truly was. The only people who know could be found at a sorority house down the street and one of their members had gotten me into this stupid mess.

“Then,” Balthar said. “If we assume that it was a stupid mistake for now, what are we going to do about it? How do we fix this? You all know the stakes. If the Dain is awakened then we lose access to the source of the Magelite and our ability to make Zate armor comes to a standstill as soon as our stores run dry.”

“The Dain hasn’t been awakened, yet,” Regnum said helpfully. “They have to reach the Horn of Schar first and the location is randomized on every server. When she played the song, we knew it was in the Kandor region, somewhere to the southeast, but exactly where? That’s anyone’s guess. All we have to go on is a general location. We have guild members out there combing every inch of the place now, and if we can find it, we can bring it back to the hall. They could attack our hall, obviously, but we’d be ready.”

“I pay way too much to play this stupid game,” Gooshy muttered. “I miss the days when we could just go out and kill eachother. Can we do that again? Seriously?”

“How I wish,” I sighed. “Okay, so maybe from here on out we should have some transparency. I know we’ve kept up the anonymity, but I think we should at least know a little bit about eachother. We’re about to get into some shit, so what are our names? I’ll start. My name, in real life, is…Todd. I’m a student at Woodcrest University in North Carolina. What about all of you?”

There was a pregnant pause in the council chamber; I thought for a moment they were going to laugh in my face. You know, this was a game, honestly, and it was impossible to read facial expressions. I remembered how Tiffany had turned her game’s facial tracking on so that you could actually SEE her facial expressions, but almost no one did that. The problem there was that the game hadn’t really been optimized for anything above a single core processor and so certain sacrifices had to be made on the client end to keep it running smoothly. The fact that she’d been able to turn on facial tracking meant that her computer was powered by the damn monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Finally, the silence was broken.

“My name is Melvin,” Balthar said. I heard some snickering over the voice chat. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly the name we’d expected from our mighty guild leader. “I’m a factory worker, I stand on an assembly line and put car parts together. I know, not really exciting but it’s putting me through school.”

“Great,” Gooshy said. “Well, my name is Jacqueline. I’m an ER nurse, I work at St. Josephine’s in Kentucky, near Bartville. I'm not going to school or anything, already did all that, heh.”

“My name is Mason,” Mason said. “Obviously, Todd here knows me. But for the rest of you, I’m also a student at Woodcrest, studying the arts, so to speak. I’m a pretty boring person, a scotch drinker, actually. If that tells you anything.”

“Tells us you’re a prude?” Gooshy said playfully. There was nervous laughter throughout the chamber. Clearly I wasn’t really in trouble here, thanks to Mason, but this was all really, really awkward nonetheless.

“I’ll have you know that scotch is a refined drink for a gentleman,” Mason said firmly and confidently.

“Just crack open a beer like everyone else,” Balthar said condescendingly. That illicited more snickers from the chamber, from everyone but me. I was still hung up on the fact that I had to pretend that I was a guy. It was moments like these that I realized how much I truly hated my life. I loved playing Dark Pantheon with Mason, but being here just made me miss the GAT house, and being a girl. Jesus, I had to do something. I had to tell someone. I wanted to blurt it out, I wanted to scream it. I already was screaming it on the inside. In the throes of Dysphoria, no one can hear you scream. No one even knows you’re alive.

“What about you?” Mason suddenly asked Agather. “What’s your name?”

A sudden jerking motion from Aagathar’s character showed that he was awake, alert, and moving his mouse. We waited for him to speak. It took a long moment.

“My name…my name is Miles,” He said, kind of softly, thoughtfully. “I’m a student, at Bellcrest University, well, I will be. I’m starting in the Fall. My entire family went there, well at least my mom and sister so…luck of the draw I guess.”

“Well then,” Balthar said. “Now that we’re all properly acquainted, I have a job for you and Todd here. How do you feel about orcs?”