Page 41 of Looking for Group
The next day he woke up with a slightly bad back from the futon, and a plan he’d thrashed out in the small hours of the morning.
He’d been thinking a lot about what Sanee had said and what Kit had said, and his time with Anni and his time with SCDD, and he’d come to the conclusion that he’d spent far too long worrying about stuff that was basically meaningless.
He’d thought he left Anni because he didn’t want to be the sort of person who got angry about a virtual axe in a video game, but actually he’d left Anni because he’d finally realised that nobody there cared about anybody else.
And he thought he’d been worried that Kit spent so much time in HoL because he didn’t have anything else, when really he’d been worrying about—what exactly?
What his mates would say? What his old guildies would have thought?
The judgement of an anonymous cloud of strangers he vaguely thought of as “everyone.” And wasn’t that the stupidest thing of all?
He’d been so down on Kit for caring about people he rarely met in person, but Drew’d spent all this time obsessing about the opinions of people he hadn’t met at all and who probably didn’t even exist.
When you got right down to it, killing imaginary pigs with a bloke who lived on a different continent was no worse or sillier a way to spend your evenings than throwing a piece of plastic around with a bloke who lived down the corridor.
The really silly thing was that he’d ever believed there was a difference.
As long as you cared about what you were doing and who you were doing it with, then it didn’t matter if you were in a pub or your living room or on a virtual rock in an imaginary kingdom in a video game.
And now he just had to show Kit he’d finally got it.
But he couldn’t do that without help. Unfortunately, the people best placed to do that probably had good reason to believe he was an irredeemable prick.
Nevertheless, he used Sanee’s wi-fi to log on to the guild forums and send a PM to Jacob.
He would have asked Tiff as well, but given what Kit had told him last night, he really didn’t think she needed to be bothered with his problems right now.
Then he folded up the futon, gathered his belongings, and hurried back to his room.
He took a quick shower and pulled on his serious gaming tartans before turning on his computer.
Technically, he should have been at a lecture, but frankly he was in no fit state to sit through a long talk on visual design.
This was more important than his degree. This was more important than pretty much anything.
Jacob had already messaged him back with some ideas and promised to catch him before the raid to help with Operation Say Sorry For Being A Dick.
Inspired by Jacob’s unending enthusiasm for obscure HoL trivia and the fact he hadn’t said anything about the plan being pointless, terrible, or doomed to fail, Drew logged into HoL .
What with it being before lunchtime on a weekday, the guild was basically dead.
Mordant seemed to be around doing whatever it was he did when he wasn’t raiding, and there were a couple of others Drew didn’t really know that well.
He said hi for the sake of politeness and hit the auction house, where he picked up a [Delightful Red Bouquet] for slightly more in-game gold than he was really comfortable spending on something he would have been unable to avoid acquiring for free during the Valentine’s event.
He lost about an hour browsing for other cool stuff Kit might like, but it was all either far too common or far too expensive.
He did, however, grab some [Very Romantic Fireworks] and a bottle of [Overpriced Elvish Wine] and stashed them in his inventory along with the [Elegant Tuxedo] Kit had tailored for him.
Then he jumped on an airship and flew between continents to the mighty underground city of Koboldeep.
While he was hunched in the prow, waiting for the load screen to pop up, he experienced an unexpected rush of affection for this strange, invented, and occasionally hard to navigate world he shared with so many people he’d never meet.
The long-awaited loading screen appeared and flashed away again and the airship juddered to a halt at the top of a rickety tower outside of the kobold capital.
You have discovered Koboldeep.
Jacob had pointed him here. Apparently, an obscure quest in one of the game’s least popular dungeons would supply him with a vital component for any big romantic gesture.
He horsed-up and galloped through the twisty, steampunk-inspired streets of Koboldeep until he found the swirly portal entrance to Koboldeep Deeps.
As far as he could tell, the kobolds used to be slaves to the orcs, and they’d worked in this big mine, but they’d used their technological know-how to build giant warbots so they could fight back.
And now the robots, like so many beings in HoL , had gone nuts and they needed level thirty-four to thirty-eight adventurers to sort them out.
Being level ninety and the best-geared tank on the server, Orcarella basically steamrollered it.
It was still a bit of a pain to navigate because it was from vanilla, when they’d designed dungeons to feel like places that might actually exist instead of places it might actually be fun to visit in a video game.
As Ella jogged through the corridors, trailing about thirty malfunctioning death bots, none of them capable of harming her, Drew realised he’d got used to playing in company.
Kit would have wanted to stop and look at all the giant wheels and steam vents, and Jacob would probably have known all the lore ever, although Drew suspected the lore for this place wasn’t much more than “there were some robots, they went evil.”
Following Jacob’s instruction, he ducked down an easy-to-miss side tunnel, where he found a small, cowering kobold called Sir Yips-a-Lot, who gave him a quest called I Like Big Bots And I Cannot Lie.
It involved fighting an endless conveyer belt of giant warbots, which would have been a massive pain to do at level, but which Ella handled with little more than Circles of Corruption and patience.
Eventually Drew had harvested the required number of [Intact Warbot Crankshafts] and returned to Sir Yips-a-Lot for his reward.
He couldn’t be bothered to actually finish Koboldeep Deeps, so he activated his bindstone and bamfed back to the City of Stars.
From there, he jogged down to the docks, where he recognised the high elf that his medusa had snubbed.
There was another ship farther along, which Drew remembered from back when he first started playing.
It was a huge longship crewed by angry-looking teddy bears and it took players to what, a few years ago, had been the brand-new continent of Nifelbard, home of the Asbjorn and the Cult of the World Serpent.
He hopped aboard and waited for it to depart.
Unlike the journey from Minea, this one was fully animated, at least for a little while.
He had just enough time to grab a Dr Pepper as the old world faded into the far clipping plane.
Drew was slightly surprised by how nostalgic he was as he rocked up on the shores of Ursa’s Spear.
Arriving in that zone after the expansion launched had been the first time he’d felt like he was playing the game everyone else was playing, not ahead of the curve yet, but definitely not behind it either.
It hadn’t aged so well, but Drew was weirdly comforted by the rough cliffs, the snow, and the northern (or he supposed technically southern, if he remembered the world map right) lights.
He was here for a quest chain that had been legendary back in the day and was only accessible if you’d achieved Exalted reputation with the local population of berserk warrior bears.
Drew had only ever done rep grinds that led to gear he needed for raiding, and this happened to have been one of them.
He was totally loved by violent teddies, and that meant he could purchase an [Invitation To The Althing] which took place in the Frostharrow Woods, and eventually, when he had completed several bizarre quests—including digging through bear droppings, disguising himself as a bear, and stealing sandwiches off other bears—culminated in the hard-won reward of an [Enchanted Picnic Basket].
By the time Drew had accomplished this, he was exhausted and had a slight headache but had dropped into the farming and grinding zone. It was also late enough that Ialdir had come online.
Ialdir has invited you to join a group: y/n
Ialdir is now group leader.
Heurodis has joined the group.
[Group][Heurodis]: whats this about jacob?
[Group][Heurodis]: hello drew
[Group][Orcarella]: hi
[Group][Ialdir]: Much as it pains me to say it
[Group][Ialdir]: Help us Bjorni-Wan-Kenobi
[Group][Ialdir]: You’re our only hope
[Group][Heurodis]: what do you need?
[Group][Heurodis]: uncle bjorn is here
[Group][Ialdir]: Do you still have the [Bejeweled Music Box] for MC?
[Group][Ialdir]: I junked mine years ago
[Group][Ialdir]: Bank space crisis
[Group][Heurodis]: of course i have
[Group][Heurodis]: ive been playing since vanilla
[Group][Ialdir]: I had no idea
[Group][Ialdir]: You never mention it
[Group][Heurodis]: so why do you want to get your hands on my box
[Group][Orcarella]: i’m trying to get the ruby golem thing
[Group][Orcarella]: i want to craft it for Kit
[Group][Orcarella]: to say sorry for being a dick
[Group][Heurodis]: you must have been substantially cocklike drew
[Group][Heurodis]: if you have to go to the second-worst raid in vanilla
[Group][Heurodis]: to get the recipe for the most needlessly inaccessible vanity pet in the entire game
[Group][Orcarella]: yeah kinda ?
[Group][Ialdir]: Say it with [Diminutive Ruby Golem]s
[Group][Heurodis]: okay im in