Boy Meets Geek Read Free

always the mysterious elf princess who kept her identity hidden and then swears you to secrecy when she reveals who she truly is, or Mike who was always a stoic but goodhearted adventurer whose morals always overcame his desire for money by the end of whatever story we were working on.
    Boring. Typical. Predictable.
    No, the game was starting to get stale. It was starting to get boring. I sighed at my keyboard and my character sighed in the game. It was starting to feel like there were no new worlds to conquer, no new scenarios to explore.
    The door to the inn banged open. I looked over, but with nowhere near the hope I’d felt earlier when the first guy walked in.

2: A More Mysterious Stranger
     
    The human barbarian who walked through the door looked much the same as any other human barbarian in these parts. He wore a cloak that was tattered and torn in places, though he’d obviously taken care to repair it in other places. Perhaps he was just in from a long trip. Underneath the cloak he wore the once fine but now faded and threadbare clothes of a man who had fallen on hard times.
    As I looked him over I figured that no doubt he was a member of one noble family or another. They seemed to spring up constantly and fall just as quickly as they rose. Both because noble houses were a popular role-playing target for newbies who didn’t know what they were doing yet and because in the game lore there was the whole giant cataclysm that ripped the world asunder and sent humans scattering, nobles included.
    I sighed. No, there definitely wasn’t anything promising about a low level human who looked much the same as every other low level human. And he was making his way directly towards me. I suppose it couldn’t be helped. I was the only elf in the room.
    It really was my fault for drawing the wrong type. I was something of an oddity. Most elf players tended to stay in elf zones. It was amazing how quickly the pseudo-racist undertones of a book series could translate into pseudo-racist undertones in an online role-playing game. Sometimes I thought the people who spouted nonsense about being superior to humans half believed their crap, even though it was probably a human on the other side of the computer doing the role-playing.
    At least I was pretty sure elves hadn’t discovered computers and video games. Not yet.
    That was one of the reasons I’d come to human lands. The Hokuten Order was ostensibly an elf guild with a few humans here and there. If I stayed where most of our official role-playing events were held, where my guild held the most influence, then I’d almost never make it to human zones.
    So in a way I was adventuring here in the hopes I might find somebody who surprised me, though so far I’d found nothing to disabuse me of the commonly held belief that the people who hung out at this particular inn in the human territories were nothing but a bunch of shallow idiots who were more interested in getting their rocks off with a little bit of two way erotica improv than in constructing a genuine storyline and getting into real role-playing.
    The human stepped up to the bar and turned to face me. He had a winning smile and I had to admit he was sort of cute in a rugged sort of way. If you were interested in humans, which I most certainly was not. Well, which my character most certainly was not. I wasn’t one of those crazies who didn’t make a distinction between the character I role-played and reality. There were plenty of them out there, believe me.
    He leaned an elbow against the bar and immediately lost his balance. Immediately went flying and clattering to the floor sending several empty drinks that were waiting for the bartender to come and pick them up flying. I couldn’t help but giggle at this odd and pretty novel approach to an opening move.
    He stood and almost lost his footing again. It appeared that clumsiness was a trait with this one. I glanced to the sword by his side and wondered how he was able