Ganked: Geeked Out Mysteries #1

1: Critical Hit

 I was riding my bronze dragon when someone crushed Lincoln Rensk's skull with a computer monitor. They found him with the flat screen still wedged onto his head. He was hit that hard. Landon said it gave a new meaning to Graphic User Interface. Rasheed said Landon was sick. I agreed with both of them.

Thinking about Lincoln's death still sends shivers along my own skull. And I didn't even see the body. I've smashed my fair share of zombie brains, so you'd think I'd be one of those tragic kids you hear about in the news. You know, immune to violence and all that. Lincoln's murder messed me up for a while and it nearly messed up my brother's life for good. Of course, I didn't know any of this as I flew high above the golden wheat fields of Elemir Forest. None of us did.

 There must have been a couple of thousand of us packed into the auditorium, soaring through the air over the fields toward the city of Anglimar. Cheers echoed through the place when the walls of the capital appeared on the horizon. Rasheed and I added our voices to the noise. Even Landon let out a whoop when the royal guards in their signature red plate mail came into view along the city's thick granite turrets.

 We had all been here many times before, of course. Everyone in the auditorium had hunted in the forest below, fought in those fields and died along those battlements. I might have been watching with thousands of other fans, but if I slouched down low in my seat and zoomed my focus totally on the screen, everyone else disappeared. I was alone at the heart of the action. This wasn't a cheesy Hollywood blockbuster with some overpaid movie star. This was the Kingdom of Strife and I was the star. My bravery would defeat my foes. My magic would heal all wounds and my name would be added to the Books of Legend. Some dismiss it as merely a video game. For me, and millions like me, it was more than a game. It was my world.

 Having my world projected onto a screen taller than a house was sending me into geek overload. I was used to seeing it through my old computer monitor, no bigger than a microwave oven and running just as hot. It was actually my dad's old rig, then it became mine. Dad didn't seem to mind the monitor's washed-out colors and broken contrast settings. He loved games too, but he preferred pen and paper to bits and bytes. That didn't stop him from helping get that old rig fixed up to play Kingdom of Strife when it first came out. Together we overclocked the motherboard, maxed out the RAM and pushed the graphics card to its limit. When we finally got KoS running on the old beast, we celebrated nerd-style with a giant bottle of pop, an extra-large pizza and an all-night session. We pretended not to hear Mom's complaints about it being way past my bedtime. Dad even ran my avatar around the starting levels with the other noob players. It was one of the best nights of my life. It seems like ancient history now. Two expansion packs, eighty levels and one funeral ago.

 Onscreen, the dragon's strong wings sliced through the air, carrying me out of my thoughts and beyond the capital city. We flew across a barren, scorched landscape.

 “Dalarth's Blaze!” Rasheed gasped. “That's on the boundary to the —”

 “Shh!” Lan said. His eyes were glued to the screen. His long arm reached across me and batted Rasheed. “Give us the geography lesson later.”

 Stuck between my two gaming pals, I caught more of Landon's swat than Rasheed did. With his movie star good looks and reputation as a game-saving quarterback, not many people knew Landon Ferguson was also a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplay Gaming über-nerd. And he liked it that way. He talked all touchdowns and end zones, but inside he was armor specs and aggro meters. Coming here was actually his idea. Lan might not have time for the lore of Kingdom of Strife but he still loved the game, just different elements of it. Put Landon in charge of an epic twenty-five-man raid with multiple bosses and more strategy than a Grand Master chess game, and he'll guide you safely through without getting a single player killed. But give him an elven minstrel singing the sad ballad of her fallen clan and he'll be clicking through that text faster than a button masher in his first PvP fight.