Boy Meets Geek Read Free Page A

to use the thing without accidentally cutting his head off. Then again that was a sentence that could apply to humans and just about any piece of technology more advanced than fire.
    He finally managed to regain his footing and didn’t even bother sketching a bow. He just plopped down on a bar stool and took a deep breath.
    “Well that definitely wasn’t a good way to make a first impression,” he muttered.
    In the game, in character, he was probably right. Only speaking from a strictly out of character perspective it was a wonderful way to make a first impression I pulled away from the keyboard and blinked. “Now that’s interesting…”
    “What’s that?” Samantha asked.
    “Oh nothing,” I said. “Get back to your raid. I’m sure they’re counting on you to click your mouse at just the right moment or whatever it is you do.”
    Samantha stuck her tongue out at me. “It’s a little more complicated than that, O mighty queen of the role-playing wordsmiths!”
    I stuck my tongue right back out at Samantha. Then I turned my attention back to the game and raised an eyebrow. Looked at this strange avatar before me. Stumbling and causing a mess like that was definitely novel. It was definitely something I’d not seen before. Usually this inn was filled with people role-playing for the first, and they were almost universally the type whose characters were secret gods or half dragon or some other nonsense.
    Which was pure poppycock. There were no dragons in Tales of Elassa. If there was one thing I hated more than people who used the game’s role-playing community as an excuse to do a little bit of one-handed two-person erotica improv, it was the people who brought in elements that were outside of the worlds established lore.
    That made me see red.
    So this mysterious person standing before me was refreshing. His character had a vulnerability. His character wasn’t another stoic hero just returned from slaying thousands of his enemies. No, he was just a little clumsy. And that that was enough of a hook that I was intrigued once more. It was enough to make me want to know more about him. It was enough that he was already more promising than the first asshole I ran into and we hadn’t even started properly talking.
    He looked at me again and my breath caught. He had the most piercing blue eyes. Piercing blue eyes that were unlike anything I’d ever seen on a human before, though that might just be because I wasn’t looking rather than it not being a trait humans possessed. Obviously it was a trait humans possessed if he was looking at me with those gorgeous blinkers. I was getting scatterbrained. My thoughts were running away from me. I needed to get myself under control.
    “So what brings you to human lands? That’s a dangerous journey for a young elf such as yourself,” he said.
    I threw my head back and laughed, and yet secretly I was delighted. He called me a young. A common misconception, but it also meant that if he was reading my character sheet he wasn’t bringing it into the conversation. That was so refreshing. That was such a change from what I was used to.
    “I guarantee you I was probably fighting off scarier monsters than you could imagine before your great-grandfather even looked at your great-grandmother with a twinkle in his eye,” I said.
    A hundred years ago I would have been able to show off my age to a human by referencing their kings, but that wasn’t the case anymore. The humans hadn’t had a unified kingdom in at least half a century. Just another way that their world kept changing while mine stayed the same. Except for the Sundering, of course. That affected everybody. Still, there was far more potential for intrigue with a good human player. Perhaps that was one reason why I was so drawn to humans. It allowed for a richer role-playing experience than sitting around whining about how much it sucked to be immortal which is what your typical elf role-playing scenario boiled down