Boy Meets Geek Read Free Page B

to.
    Assuming you could find somebody good. I desperately hoped this gorgeous man in front of me was good.
    “My apologies lady elf,” he said. He seemed genuinely sincere. “But a pretty face on an old soul isn’t going to protect you from creatures with sharp teeth any more than my clumsiness would protect me.”
    My character blushed in game and out of the game I felt a flush rising to my cheeks. A surprising flush rising to my cheeks. What was wrong with me that this guy was able to get that sort of reaction out of me with just words on a screen?
    Focus. Get back in the game.
    I held up my fingers and allowed a flame to dance from finger to finger. He raised an eyebrow, but otherwise didn’t react. Obviously this was a man who’d seen magic before. Or at least he’d heard of it. Either way he didn’t have the wide-eyed surprise that usually accompanied that display. A slight disappointment, but behind my keyboard I was secretly jubilant. I was so sick of people who thought that wide-eyed surprise was the only way to react to magic, as though anybody who lived in a world where magic was a commonplace thing would be surprised by the damn stuff.
    “Ah, I see,” he said. “A sorceress, I presume?”
    I winced at the human word.
    “If you want to reduce calling down the very forces that power this universe and bending it to my will “sorcery” then I suppose you could call me that,” I said.
    “Impressive,” he said.
    He dug into his pocket and pulled something out. I saw a flash of black and then the flames dancing on my fingers winked out. The tingling sensation that let me know I was drawing upon the magical forces that powered the universe disappeared at the same time. I blinked, looked at the object in his hand, and then my eyes widened in surprise. I hated that I reacted like that, but it was the only thing I could think to do in this situation. I did a quick inspect of his character just to be certain.
    “Is that…”
    An Elassa shard,” he said. “It’s been passed down in my family, though I’ve never had occasion to show it off before. I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to show it off to someone who would actually appreciate it.”
    The way he leaned against the barstool with a cocky smile on his face was only slightly ruined when he slipped in a puddle of something on the floor, no doubt left over from his spill a moment ago, and nearly sent the Elassa shard flying across the room. I cried out and held my hand out trying to catch it, but he did a surprisingly nimble dance and snatched it out of the air before it went flying too far. It appeared being constantly clumsy has given this strange man one hell of a set of reflexes.
    And a good thing too. If that really was what he said it was then it was more valuable than the combined wealth of the entire city. They were so rare in the books that kingdoms rose and fell based on possessing one. I didn’t even know they were in the game.
    “How did you get that?”
    He blinked, cutting those delicious blue eyes off from me for a moment. His perfect jaw line worked for a moment and he fixed me with an expression that told me he was wondering if I was entirely right in the head.
    “I told you,” he said slowly. “It’s been passed down in my family.”
    I shook my head. “That’s not what I mean. How did you get that? I didn’t know Elassa shards were even in the game! At least I’ve never seen one before…”
    Of course that didn’t mean they weren’t in the game. It just meant that I hadn’t seen them in the game before. I wasn’t really a big fan of the higher level dungeons, and they were always releasing new toys to entice people to go through that particular treadmill over and over. It was entirely possible this was just some new bit of end game content I didn’t know about because I didn’t ever play end game content. It wouldn’t be the first time the developers took an all-powerful item from the books and reduced