At Any Price (Gaming The System) (5 page)

“Hilarious. Did you tell number two to go away yet or is he still an option?”

Heath’s mouth thinned. “Simmer down, now. Give it a day or two, okay? He said he’d e-mail you. Maybe he’ll be more polite.”

“He’s not paying to send me e-mails. I’m going to have to be alone with him all night…”

Heath shook his head and sent me a look that said, “I told you so.” I sighed and looked away.

“That’s the nature of the beast, Mia. It’s what you signed up for when you decided to go through with all this—‘Virgin Manifesto’ ideals or no. You claimed you were taking back the power that had been robbed from women for centuries. Find a way to take back the power from him. Don’t let him go all alpha wolf on you and start peeing on every tree. You’re stronger than that.”

“What about the other guy, is he an alpha wolf, too?”

“Sweetie, they’re millionaires. They’re
all
alpha wolves. For what it’s worth, his behavior with you was very different from what I saw with him when we spoke both times. Maybe it’s just a façade he uses around women. It would explain why he’s participating in this—what did you call it again?—‘new paradigm’ in the first place.”

The knot in my stomach twisted again. “It’s a bad sign if he can’t behave himself around a woman. How do I know I’ll be safe? What if he’s into some sadomasochist shit?”

“Yeah, that’s all in the paperwork. No fetish. No bondage. Nothing unusual. You’re a virgin for chrissakes, it’s not like you would be into any of that. He knows. He was the one who wanted it put into the language of the agreement, kept saying it was important to protect you.”

I remembered what he said when we were alone. That it was his sole interest to ensure my safety, physically and legally. Was this some sort of sting? Was he an undercover cop, in reality? Could Heath have been able to find that out?

We had arranged for this entire transaction to take place overseas, in countries where sex in exchange for money was legal. The web server had been stationed in Brazil, the auction run by proxy by Heath’s contact there. The actual act would take place in a legally friendly country.

Money would not actually change hands. Overseas bank accounts would affect the transfer. Heath’d had a gay banker friend set up an account in the Cayman Islands for me. It made me feel so clandestine and mysterious. Drake had one too (probably long before this transaction). And the money would soon be resting in a holding account before the transfer was made.

The only thing that was marginally illegal was our meeting on US soil to iron out the details of the deal. However my pride at the neatness of this deal was beginning to fade in the face of Drake and his alpha wolf asshat personality. As Heath and I got into the car to return home, I shot him a veiled look but was quiet the remainder of the way.

I had a decision to mull over. I had to learn more about who Adam Drake really was. But further than that, the reality of my ideals had just slammed me in the face and I had to see if I had the courage to continue with this plan. The way my nerves were tied up in knots, I doubted if I could.

Chapter Three

I Googled him the minute I got home and turned on my computer. Read a brief Wikipedia entry on him and spent the next hour with my mouth open in shock as I read article after article. I knew a whole lot more about him but I also had tons more questions.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I’d thought the name Adam Drake rang a bell. A distant bell, but a bell nonetheless. Adam Drake was founder and CEO of Draco Multimedia Entertainment, the parent company of one of the most successful and popular Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), Dragon Epoch. I played it regularly and wrote about it in a regular column on my blog. In fact, I was due for a new DE update sometime this week.

Something prickly formed in my throat. I saw pictures, press releases, reviews, interviews, write-ups. Pictures of him on panels at the San Diego Comic-Con. He was some kind of prodigy with programming and had developed a unique artificial intelligence engine within a game called Mission Accomplished before he’d graduated high school. He’d sold the program to Sony at the age of seventeen. For 3.2 million dollars.

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?

But then I’d posted the auction. We had argued about it and he’d all but disappeared. And even now he was still distant, hesitant. I had no idea what university he attended or what his real name was—he was that shy. I could have ruled these two instances—my auction and his disappearance—as coincidental if it hadn’t been for what came next in our conversation.

*FallenOne tells you, “You still going through with that auction?”

I grimaced.

*You tell FallenOne, “Yeah.”

*FallenOne tells you, “I know it’s none of my business, but is it really a good idea? You’ve been through a lot of shit this past year with your mom being sick and that big test. Maybe now isn’t the time for you to do something drastic like this?”

I sighed. Why didn’t guys understand that for a woman of my age, being a virgin was a burden more than anything else? I just wanted to dump it already. Why not profit from it?

*You tell FallenOne, “Everyone’s gotta lose it sometime. Why not go out with a bang?”

*FallenOne tells you, “Pun intended, I hope?”

I laughed. That “sounded” more like the Fallen I knew. We chatted for a few more minutes before we traveled to the same game zone—the place where our characters were located, the Misty Caverns, in order to go hunt bad guys together. Little more was said about the auction or our personal lives after that. Fallen didn’t promise to log in again on our regular game night and with no small amount of sadness I realized that this might be the end of our regular gaming relationship.

Our mutual friend, Persephone, would be sad. She’d been trying to play matchmaker for Fallen and me for months and she hadn’t been subtle about it. And me, well, I wasn’t sure how I felt. More confused than ever, I guess.

After a few hours, a few hundred oozing undead and several quest rewards, Fallen decided to log off. I kept going—a form of procrastination and avoidance of the things I should be doing and thinking about. The question of Drake, Mr. CEO of the game I so loved, and his arrogance was still on my mind. Killing monsters didn’t help so I resolved to go for a run later that evening.

But I never got there because less than a half hour after Fallen logged off, my door was nearly pounded off its hinges. I’d have recognized that knock at midnight in the middle of cyclone. With a smile I got up and jerked open the door.

My two besties—besides, Heath, of course—stood in the door, shoulder to shoulder. I grinned at Alex, the daughter of my landlady, who had her long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had beautiful olive skin and was wearing a tight T-shirt with a printed-on bowtie and the motto
Bowties Are Cool
across her ample chest.

Jenna, her best friend and roommate, with the brightest blond hair I’d ever seen on a person out of childhood—complete with a shock of brilliant purple—fidgeted beside her.

“Password?” I demanded.

The two girls glanced at each other and in unison they chanted, “I aim to misbehave.” I grinned at our favorite quote from Captain Mal Reynolds of
Firefly
.

Jenna sidled into the room, squeezing ahead of Alex. She held a Tupperware container that rattled and said, “Can we come in?”

As she was already mostly in the apartment anyway, I stepped aside with an exaggerated sigh. Alex grabbed my arm and gave me a dramatic shake, her dark brown eyes widening. “We are doing a
Dr. Who
marathon at our place tomorrow night. You gotta come. There’ll be a drinking game. We shoot tequila every time the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver. We do a beer bong when he says ‘I’m the Doctor.’”

I laughed. I loved
Dr. Who
but I knew I wasn’t up for that. Not this week. “I’ve got my study group—”

Alex stomped her foot and the sound of it echoed on the floor below, which was the ceiling of her mother’s garage. “Come on, Mia! There will be cute boys there. Cute boys who love
Dr. Who.
”

I snorted. “Yeah, and they’ll be even cuter after the beer goggles are on.”

Jenna shook her box again and it rattled as she plopped down on my half broken-down couch—the fabric was shredded and patched with duct tape. “Okay, so you don’t like to party. We get it. We’ve been asking you for months. But at least tell me you are going to come to my Dungeons and Dragons game next Saturday.”

I groaned inwardly. Not this again. “I’m sorry, Jen, I have to work a double shift on Saturday.”

She raised her pale—almost invisible—brows at me and popped off the cover of her plastic container. “You think you’re a gamer, punching around on your keyboard, hunched over your monitor? You haven’t
truly
gamed until you’ve used
these,
” she said, holding her palm open to display some tiny three-dimensional plastic pieces of all sizes and colors. Some were shaped like pyramids, others were multifaceted spheres. Some gleamed like gems in the late afternoon sunlight. All of them were covered with plain, white numbers.