Page 16 of Looking for Group

Drew liked to keep Fridays clear just on the off-chance something came up, which meant, in practice, hanging out in the pub with his course mates because none of them had anything better to do.

That said, he was pretty sure Sanee would still rip the piss out of him for going on a raid when he could, theoretically, have been at a trendy nightclub or gate-crashing an Embassy party.

In Sanee’s estimation, raiding was basically one step up from speed-dating.

But he pushed all that stuff aside, got himself a six-pack, and settled down in front of his keyboard.

He’d expected it to be a sort of undermanned, overgeared, half-arsed business, but actually, it seemed really popular.

There were even people who weren’t on the raid hanging out in Mumble chatting as they levelled or played other video games or, in Caius’s case, worked from home.

And, to his surprise, Drew found he was having a good time.

Solace had posted him an [Elegant Tuxedo] set, so for the first time since he’d started playing, Drew actually put something in Ella’s cosmetic slot.

She kind of looked like a really angry butler, but he was glad he’d bothered, because everyone else was in an equally silly costume.

Solace, as promised, was wearing a [Lovely Red Dress] from the Valentine’s event, Morag had a pumpkin head from Halloween, Ialdir was wearing a set of elven chain Drew suspected had some kind of deep lore significance, and Bjorn had somehow managed to polymorph himself into a mushroom, which Drew was pretty sure was one of the really heavy faction rewards from vanilla.

They made a strange party as they burst through the gates of Traitor’s Spire in pursuit of Maladreth the Betrayer, the elf responsible for the schism in the elvish people, who, to be fair, was dressed almost as ludicrously as they were.

He was sort of this OTT bishi sorcerer with ankle-length black hair, swirly black robes, massive eighties shoulder pads, and a pointy helm that had been the subject of many cock jokes down the years.

They scythed in a leisurely manner through what had once been top-tier raiding content, bickering affectionately over which drops looked coolest or silliest or most like a wang.

They were constantly stopping to take screenshots for the guild photo album, look at cool things, and listen to Bjorn and Ialdir trying to out-lore each other.

People, including Drew, got steadily drunker and louder as the evening progressed.

There was even singing, led by Bjorn, who had a surprisingly impressive baritone.

What there wasn’t, was anything from Solace.

At least not on Mumble, at least as far as Drew could make out.

But then it was hard to tell because there were a lot of people chipping in all over the place.

It was something he’d been low-key aware of for a while.

Different guilds had very different voice policies, and it was hard to keep track of who was saying what in the middle of a raid anyway, but it was getting to the point that it was A Thing.

And he felt bad that it was A Thing. After all, it was pretty normal for some people not to talk in Mumble.

The truth was, Sanee’s jokes about chicks on the internet had opened up a whole can of gender-related worms that Drew had been very careful to keep closed.

Then again, maybe he’d been right to. Whatever was going on with Solace, they were just hanging out in a video game.

And obviously it was better for Drew to imagine this cute, lonely gamer girl instead of, well, someone like him.

But basically whether Solace really looked anything like her avatar was none of his business.

Also, Tinuviel would have pointed out that assuming everyone on the internet was a middle-class white man was totally sexist. And, now he thought about it, SCDD had a pretty high proportion of women. Especially compared to Anni, which was a legendary sausage party.

So, really, there was no reason Solace couldn’t be a girl IRL. She was into, y’know, looking pretty and being quirky and having feelings about things. That was girl stuff, right? And thank God Tinuviel couldn’t hear him thinking like that. She would have torn him a new one.

Drew went to sleep far too late and woke up completely hungover.

When he finally peeled himself out of bed and turned on his computer, his desktop was papered with screenies, most of which were him and Solace.

He’d basically never taken a screenshot before that wasn’t for his course. He stared at them, feeling weird.

It had become blatantly obvious that the “don’t fancy imaginary elves” rule was kaput.

And he had no idea what to do about it.

In a panic, he scrambled into his clothes and ran down the hall to Tinuviel’s room. There was usually a message on her door if she had company or didn’t want to be bothered, but since there was only a picture of a happy llama, he knocked and stuck his head in.

Tinuviel was the only person Drew knew who actually decorated their college room.

He had a couple of posters and a duvet cover that didn’t look like he’d nicked it from a hotel, but that was about as far as it went.

Tinuviel had things like throw pillows and a lamp.

She was lying on a pink sheepskin rug, fiddling away on one of those razor-thin MacBooks, the sort Drew wouldn’t have been able to afford in a million years.

She waved him in, and he collapsed gratefully into the beanbag chair.

“Ramen?” she offered, bouncing to her feet and heading over to her goodies shelf. “Wagon Wheel? Biltong?”

“Uh. Pass.” Drew’s stomach churned unhappily. “Fragile.”

Tinuviel tore open a packet of noodles, emptied them into a rainbow-patterned bowl, sprinkled a sachet of flavouring over the top, and stuck the kettle on. “Good night?”

“Yeah, I mean, no. I mean, kind of. I mean, that’s kind of what I want to talk to you about.”

She blinked. “It does sound confusing.”

“Don’t laugh, okay?”

“Okay.”

Strangely, that was one of the things Drew liked about Tinuviel. She had this habit of taking the oddest things completely at face value. “I’ve kind of met this girl on the internet.”

She poured water onto her noodles and mashed them down. “We do walk amongst you.”

One of the things Drew found slightly harder to take about Tinuviel was that he couldn’t always tell when she was joking.

“I think I really like her, and she goes to Leicester, so she’s close, so it’s like possible, but…

I only met her a week ago, and like on the internet, so I feel like a crazy person. ”

“Why does that make you feel like a crazy person?”

“Well, it’s the internet. And I don’t really know who she is or if she really exists.”

“Do you know if anybody really exists?” 1

Drew sighed. “That’s kind of the opposite of helpful, T.”

She curled up on the rug, with her noodles cradled in her lap, like a strange, redheaded Yoda. “Well, I think what you’ve got to remember is that we all sort of construct ourselves based on the identity we want to present to other people, so, in a very real sense, nobody can ever know anybody.”

“Still not helping.”

“Okay, let’s put it another way. If you’d met this girl in a bar or a nightclub, the only thing you’d know about her was what she looked like, and the fact you had no idea what sort of food she liked or what music she listened to or whether she was a serial killer probably wouldn’t have been a problem for you.

So, really, your issue can’t be that you don’t know anything about this girl.

It must be that you’re worried she might not be hot. ”

“Hey. How shallow do you think I am?”

“Well, if that isn’t your concern, I don’t see what you’re worried about.”

Drew thought about it for a moment. “Like you said, she could be a serial killer.”

“So could anybody. So could I. People on the internet aren’t more likely to be serial killers than people in general.”

“I get the feeling you’re not taking me seriously.”

Tinuviel pulled a pair of extendable chopsticks out of her top pocket and started on her noodles. “I’m taking this very seriously. I don’t understand why you think I’m not.”

“If you told me you’d fallen for someone you’d met on the internet, and especially if you’d met them in a video game—not, like, through a dating app—I’d be way more worried.”

“Why?” She frowned in a noodle-y kind of way.

“The way I see it, when you meet someone in”—she did air quotes—“‘real life,’ all your initial assumptions about them are based on their physical appearance, but these are extremely likely to be ignorant, prejudiced, and misleading. When you meet somebody online, your initial impressions of them are based on what they say to you. This can’t be any more misleading, and it’s only social conditioning that makes you accept the validity of relationships initially based on nothing but physical response.

Online relationships are based on intellectual and emotional connection.

If anything, it’s a better way of doing it. ”

This was all a bit much on a hangover. He worked through it like it was a particularly chewy piece of biltong. “Yeah, but what if what they say isn’t true?”

“My mum said she once had sex with a woman because she, the woman, not my mum, thought she, my mum, not the woman, played the alto sax.”

Drew was definitely way too hungover for this. “Uh?”

“That was long before the internet. People misrepresent themselves, consciously or otherwise, all the time.”

“Can we come back to the bit where your mum tells you stories about her lesbian affairs?” 2

“You know your parents have had sex right?”

He put his hands over his ears and rocked. “I don’t like to think about it.”

“It’s just sex.”

“It’s your parents.”

“Sometimes you have a very strange attitude to things, Andrew.”

“If Sanee was here, he’d understand.”