“I should have used the god damn Axe of Draining,” Nick thought as he sat in his cheap studio apartment. The walls were once a milky white, now a sour yellow after one too many grease spattered meals. Nick had no pictures on his piss yellow walls and no personal items that marked the man for who he was.
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Nick sat cross-legged, staring out a snow-frosted window as he lamented his use of the aforementioned god damn Axe of Draining.
Nick’s teeth chattered. His heat had been turned off the night before, but he wasn’t worried about the cold so much anymore. He rarely thought about anything that wasn’t some new event or downloadable content in the game.
Nick had once been a young man most considered Nickal, often rather fortunate. Just a few short months ago, Nick lived in a beautiful apartment home in the suburbs with his fiancée, Maria, while she finished college. Nick had graduated the fall before and jumped right into a job that few people dream of, but the pay was outstanding.
Each day, Nick awoke in his luxuriously comfortable king-sized bed. He opened the shades to see a gorgeous view of the woods outside his home. It used to make him happy, but sometime after the New Year it all seemed to turn to ash in his mouth.
As always, he would shower and put on the gray suit his fiancée had laid out for him. He would brush his teeth in the shower, humming Eleanor Rigby off key to himself, and thinking about everything and nothing all at once. What did any of it mean anymore?
As he dressed and headed for the kitchen, Maria would always have some dry wheat toast and two eggs sunny side up prepped and ready for his consumption. Maria served him his coffee in a thermos, which he would grab along with a sweetly tender kiss before leaving for work. Why didn’t he feel the same way he did about his soon-to-be wife? She was working hard, finishing her teaching degree and planning a wedding all at once. She was still the same funny, quirky girl he had fallen in love with on campus. What had changed?
At the office, Mondays with his coworkers always started the same, with careless queries about weekend goings-on. Most gave the answer of, “Good. Not long enough.” All his coworkers accompanied the joke with throaty, fake laughter.
Sometimes Nick would imagine himself responding with unintelligible spitting and yelping, like the old Tasmanian devil cartoons, and he would be able to join in the laughter.
Day after day of number crunching on his computer came and went. He worked less and less each day.
Nick wondered when it would end. He was no longer thankful for his lovely fiancée who made him breakfast each day before she trekked off to school; he had come to expect it and she too had put a depreciating level of effort into helping him.
While watching videos online, Nick received a pop up in bright, stylized letters with the question, “Are you ready for adventure?”
Nick normally clicked out of that sort of ad and ran a virus scan just to be sure. But that night, he felt his heart skip a beat as he clicked the pop up.
The ad navigated him to a computer game called Castle Keep.
The game details intrigued him. It described eight races of creature and he could choose between a dozen different job classes.
There were videos of adventures, boss battles, and even romances between players.
Nick turned down the sound of his speakers, closed his office door and pulled the blinds.
The grand trumpets of the sword and sorcery game entranced Nick as he perused the different races he could be. The trolls were strong, but ugly; the elves were far too pretty despite their skill with magic. Nick decided a half demon was the best choice as they offered both raw power and an aesthetically pleasing exterior.
To fit his character, Nick chose the profession of Dark Knight. He named his character Astaroth50, a name more stylish and fitting for the conquered he created.
The hours passed as he wielded his heavy blade through hordes of imps, leveling his knight up faster with each swing. It was around seven o’clock that he realized he was due home an hour ago. Could he play things off as a late night working?
He had reached level 52 in only a week. The community log buzzed about the Dark Knight who, alone, claimed the head of Dagaron the Frost Giant.
Nick felt a sense of accomplishment that he’d never felt from his work. He felt important and respected and, most importantly, powerful. Nick relished his new found status. Players of all races and classes were looking to party up with Astaroth50.
On a drive one late night, Nick drifted off, thinking about travelling to the continent Edenfeld and trying out his Sword of Soul Breaking on the water spirits who lived there. He had heard that the water spirits, the Undine, explode into beautiful droplets when killed. He would have liked very much to see that.
What he didn’t see was the deer in the middle of the road until it was almost too late. He swerved, pulling out of his daydream to barely miss the beast. His car rocked and jostled, sliding into a guardrail.
Nick breathed heavily, honked his horn, and crawled out of the car. The damage had taken out his passenger-side headlight, crumpled his front bumper, and scraped the paint job on the whole right side. The guard rail had probably saved his life, but he wasn’t thinking about that ditch he had almost ended up in. Instead, Nick thought, “Never would have happened if I was Astaroth, riding a griffin mount!”
Still, he drove more carefully the rest of the way home.
As Nick entered his dark house, he saw his dinner sitting uncovered and cold on the table, a symbol of Maria’s disapproval of his late nights. He went upstairs and peeked in on her. She laid in bed asleep, looking lovely as ever though Nick hardly took notice.
Instead, what Nick saw was an opportunity to log back into Castle Keep. He booted up his computer and continued his hack-and-slash journey through the game.
He began taking more sick days, eventually telling his boss he would get more done from home. That worked for a while, and Nick even believed it himself for a time. He would turn on the computer first and then set out his paperwork, but the pile would go untouched. After all, Astaroth provided the muscle for every party he joined and insisted on landing the final blow on every newly spawned boss. He couldn’t miss those opportunities.
Nick told Maria that working from home would give them a chance to spend more time together. She liked that idea a lot. She told him that things had grown really cold and stagnant between them. But despite how Nick made promises that they would meet up with her college friends for game nights or take the train into the City for lunch, Maria never could convince him to step out of the office long enough.
Days bled into weeks into months. In all that time, Nick’s work slowed to a crawl until he wasn’t doing more than punching in and clocking out.
Nick was neither shocked nor impacted by the pink slip when it came in the mail. But Maria cried for hours.
Nick didn’t hear her though; the noise-cancelling headphones which he had purchased only the week before, blocked out her cries quite well.
It wasn’t until days later that he realized he was home alone. Nick had just completed the 74th floor of Egrath’s Tower. He stopped to take a bathroom break and grab a grilled cheese from the kitchen. Sitting on the counter, he found the note.
Nick read Maria’s hand-written goodbye note, and placed it back on the counter, and continued flipping his grilled cheese in a pan.
Nick had finally reached level 80. He had cleared most of the dungeons except the final boss, Fenris the Sabre Wolf. He felt he was ready and formed a party of Clerics, each who agreed to buff Astaroth and heal him, but allow him to do all the damage to Fenris.
Nick checked his equipment. He made sure all of his armor was repaired. When he came to his weapons, he hesitated. Which would he use for this fight?
His Axe of Draining could siphon hit points from Fenris and restore him. But his Putrid Blade could add damage to the creature.
Nick settled on the Putrid Blade, then he and his party set off to the creature.
The clerics healed and protected the group as Nick slashed away at the ravenous, giant white wolf, blood dripping from the beast’s fangs. The clanging of swords to fang rang out as the battle raged on.
Nick barely blinked as he slashed the monster, barely dropping his hit points to the yellow zone. The clerics took a formation to perform a protection spell to allow Nick to heal.
But just as Fenris broke the barrier, so too did the police break down Nick’s front door.
They escorted Nick from the apartment that was no longer his own, having missed several rent payments.
Nick became unresponsive, even as a social worker tried explaining to him that he would be staying in low-income housing until he could get back on his feet. The social worker’s name was Sandra, he remembered because she looked like one of the Elven warriors he had partied with, pointy ears and all.
Nick sat in his partially government funded apartment. He stared out into the snow. He didn’t think of his ex-fiancée or his old job and former life. Nick thought of the deathly white hairs of Fenris and how he could have taken him down if had only used the Axe of Draining instead.