At Any Price(13)

A millionaire at seventeen years old by his own doing.

From there it just got worse. He’d attended the California Institute of Technology but had dropped out after a year and founded his own company, Draco Multimedia, out of a warehouse in Irvine. Eventually that company built its own multi-complex campus in the same city. They produced several games—the culmination of which was currently Dragon Epoch, a subscription-based fantasy environment that millions of players worldwide paid for the privilege of playing. Including me.

Now I knew exactly what Heath had meant when he’d said that Drake and I had things in common. Or maybe it was his own starry-eyed gamer worship that had gotten in the way. If I was a hardcore gamer, Heath was worse. He was the one who’d gotten me into the whole thing in the first place.

Now I was growing skeptical about Heath’s judgment. No doubt he was fan-geeking during those “multiple interviews” where he and Drake had spoken for hours both in person and on the phone.

I brewed myself a pot of tea and glanced at the clock. I had hours yet before work, no desire to study and tons of blog posts to write—at least three reviews, one interview and a couple of spotlights.

And yes, my weekly report on Dragon Epoch. But I wondered how I could keep that completely neutral—as if I didn’t know he was watching.

Then again, while my blog was quite popular in the gaming community, I doubted a child prodigy genius CEO had time to regularly read the tripe I wrote. His game was far larger than the trivial comments I made on it. He’d probably been alerted to the auction by one of his underlings. Maybe he’d even glanced over the blog once he’d won.

I’d criticized his game all over my blog. I loved playing it and found it a deeply immersive and fun experience but, as with practically every fantasy-based role-playing game in the industry, it was ripe with misogyny. After all, the companies knew who their main customers were: young, horny guys in their late teens and twenties, suffering through college and all types of social awkwardness. Why not create female avatars and nonplayer characters that were all lithe, sexual and scantily clad? Anything to sell game subscriptions…

My objections were mostly mild and sarcastic. I’d make scathing comments like, “Come on boys, can you imagine your local half-elf healer jaunting down to the pond to collect herbs in her chainmail bikini? Hope she got her Brazilian wax before she donned that thing or else, ouch.”

Sometimes I got hate mail, but usually my snark amused the male readers and got a lot of “here, here!” from my female readers.

I wondered if Drake had ever seen the column. I wondered if Drake, himself, was a misogynist. His behavior this afternoon had not led me to believe otherwise.

Flustered and distracted, I had the choice of engaging in one of my two favorite activities when I had things on my mind: running or playing on the game. With a sigh and a flick of the computer switch, I picked the easier one—once I’d changed out of that dreadful skirt and into my forgiving yoga pants. I needed to get my mind off of that afternoon’s weird encounter and logging into Dragon Epoch was the best way to do it.

I was all set to go slaughter a horde of monsters when my notification list lit up.



Your friend FallenOne is online.



I was shocked, pleasantly so. He hadn’t been on in weeks. A pang of some feeling I couldn’t describe resonated in my chest—longing, excitement.

Before I could start the chat, my screen flashed.



*FallenOne tells you, “Hey.”

*You tell FallenOne, “Hey, stranger! Where have you been?”

*FallenOne tells you, “Haven’t logged on in forever. School is kicking my ass.”

*You tell FallenOne, “Should be over soon, no? So glad I don’t have classes this semester.”

*FallenOne tells you, “Lucky. Had to get on the game to blow off some steam. Wanna go kill stuff?”

*You tell FallenOne, “Always. You going to be on for our regular game night? Fragged misses you, too.”



Fragged was the name of Heath’s Barbarian Mercenary. I waited. Fallen didn’t reply for a few minutes and I wondered what was going on.

Fallen and I had had a friendship, as with Heath and our other friend from Canada, who used the character name of Persephone, for over a year. Fallen had never wanted to join our guild but he played with us regularly even though he never used in-game voice chat and only texted in game. He seemed shy and unwilling to come out of his shell. Still we’d joked around and spent hours LOLing and giggling at the stupidest things. For a while, there, I really thought I had a bit of a crush on him. Sometimes I still felt the pangs of it even though my logical thoughts ruled that as being ridiculous. I hardly knew anything about his real life except that he was on the east coast somewhere and in college. I wasn’t in danger. You couldn’t fall for someone over an online game and long IM chats, could you?