Page 44 of Looking for Group
[Group][Solace]: Wednesday’s raid night
[Group][Orcarella]: thurs?
[Group][Solace]: It’s a date.
[Group][Orcarella]: cool
And it was only later, after they’d said an awkward goodnight and Drew was lying in bed running over the conversation in his head, that he tripped over the d-word.
He knew he was probably overthinking, but that didn’t stop him from overthinking.
It was probably just a turn of phrase.
But if it wasn’t, then that was…
…good?
Chapter Four
Drew was pretty determined not to get himself into a tizzy over a nondate with an imaginary elf on the internet, but he couldn’t really help it. He managed to get on with things, and people didn’t seem to notice he was slightly distracted, or if they did, they didn’t take the piss. He made decent progress on his project and rolled along to Sanee’s birthday thing on Tuesday night. Andy couldn’t make it and Tinuviel had shown up with a random philosophy student called Ocean, which, Drew was depressed to realise, left him as the only one without a date. Well, there were a bunch of people from the course there too, some of whom were probably single, but they didn’t count.
It was a pretty good evening, though. It basically went the same way as it had last year. Steff had baked a cake withThe cake is a liepiped delicately over the top in bright-green icing, and Sanee got into a really bitter fight aboutThe Stanley Parablewith a random guy. Sometimes Drew thought Sanee liked arguing about video games more than he liked playing them. Eventually people drifted off and the survivors found themselves trying to play Twilight Imperium, drunk, at three in the morning.1
Drew passed out sometime around his third turn and woke up just in time for lab, with several plastic spaceships embeddedin his face. He survived the day but was kind of out of it for the raid that evening. It was all a bit of a blur, and he got through it on Pepsi Max and muscle memory. Despite having a tank on his way down from a cheap-wine-and-board-games bender, the guild took the next three bosses down relatively easily. They wiped a few times but Drew was pretty sure none of them were his fault.
He left the guild celebrating, face-planted into his pillow, and woke up the next morning missing Solace. They hadn’t talked much during the raid, and he’d got strangely used to hanging out on a rock in Alarion.
That afternoon, when he should have been shading a chair, he caught himself freestyling with the drawing pad, and his doodles grew into the outline of an elf and an orc sitting next to each other by the ocean.
Sanee leaned over from his terminal. “Are you drawing fanart?”
“Fuck off.”
“Looks good.”
“Thanks,” he replied. He meant,Die in a fire. There was no way Sanee was going to let this slide but He tried to head him off anyway. “It’s just myHoLcharacter and a guildie.”
“I don’t think the world’s ready for girl-on-girl, orc-on-elf action.”
“We’re just friends.”
Sanee gave him a look. “Yeah right, because I always sketch pictures of my friend’s video game characters.”
“Leave it alone. I’ve been trying to make a chair that doesn’t look crap for an hour. It’s this, or Bejeweled.”
“Oh man, step away from the PopCap. But, seriously, you should totally send this to her. Chicks really go for this stuff.”
Drew eyed his screen dubiously. It’d actually come out pretty well in a fanarty kind of way. “Wouldn’t that be creepy as hell?”
“It’d be creepy if they were naked.”
“Thanks, that’s really helpful.”
“Stop being a wuss, and go for it.”
It was probably a bad idea, but Drew opened the guild forum and PMed the picture to Solace. He tried to come up with a nonweird message, failed miserably, so he sent it without comment.
“You do realise,” said Sanee slowly, “you probably just sent a cute picture to another dude.”
