At Any Price (Gaming The System) by Brenna Aubrey Read Free Book Online

“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