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"Alright, we're gonna get her down this time!"
The familiar southern twang sounded through my headphones, causing me to flinch away. He still hadn't gotten the new headset that he had promised he would get the last time we ran a dungeon. It crackled and popped, causing me to pull off my own set away from her head. Only after the little green light flickered off of the voice chat did I return the headphones to their prior position.
"Tim, didn't you say that you were going to Walmart to get a different microphone?" Ah, finally someone with some sense. The voice was similarly male, though deeper and with less of an accent. He was our leader, the one who spent hours upon hours taking care of our guild, organizing raids, making sure that no one is getting loot if they're not pulling their weight, etcetera, etcetera. His character had moved forward, the human's limbs awkwardly moving with the all the grace of an already outdated model in a new game.
Granted, all the character models were outdated. The humans and orcs more than others, but the game would never be known for its gorgeous graphics. Art design, world design, sure. Just not for the number of polygons in each little object. "Cortal, did you look up the fight this time? I swear if you didn't..."
A little musical laugh. "Chill, Zor, we got this. I know what I'm doing now, I promise." I grimaced, keeping silent in fear that they would hear me banging my head on the desk through the microphone. The human stopped moving, twisting around to face a dwarven priest. Zortag had once played an orc on a different server before getting tired of the community. His original plan had been to take a break and come back. Like all addicts, however, he couldn't stop. He had become a phoenix in a way, reborn in the fire that was the character creation. The Horde was abandoned, and he joined the Alliance.
Cortal, on the other hand, had always been part of the faction. "Always wanted to be a dwarf in a fantasy land. Hell, I was born to be Alliance." She was very opinionated, very loud, and often butted heads with Zortag. He never kicked her though, at the time I thought it was just because she was a priest and very valuable to our ranks. Looking back, though, I believe he harbored some sort of fondness for the woman, as we all did. We just didn't know it at the time.
Tim spoke again, causing me to twitch. "Well, I was gonna, but then my pa's car broke down so I couldn't. Sorry 'bout that!" He also played a dwarf, though his was less traditionally named. Wizardofcool - obviously a mage. Of course, Zortag wouldn't accept that. He claimed he wouldn't address him if he didn't give him another name to go by. So he became Tim to us all. I'm still not sure if that was his real name or not. Sometimes, I really think I just don't want to know.
A ping sounded, and then another night elf female - not unlike my own character - appeared beside us. "Sorry about that, guys. My dad was using the phone, but I'm free now." This was Amora, who could have been my literal twin. She was a night elf hunter, just like me, her character's gait just as awkward. We both had on the same gear, both held the same weapons... If it wasn't for the nameplates above our pixelated heads and the different pets at our side, we could have easily been mistaken for one another.
At her hip was a gray wolf that she had tamed in Feralas, his - Amora had always referred to her pet as a 'he', so I shall as well - name the same as when she had first tamed him. Longtooth let out one of his periodic howls, three-toed feet reaching up and scratching behind his ears before shaking. It was a sharp contrast to the ghost cat at my own character's side, Softstep. It had taken hours to get that blasted cat, having to grind through the spirits to get to the various Glowing Cat Figurines, which were hard to spot even without a bazillion of the fast-respawning mobs on your tail.
Back then pets didn't level with you, and if you were level sixty taming a level one boar would give you the gift of having to train a level one boar. Amora and myself did that once, naming them Porky and BaconBits, but that was later. Years after this very raid.
Beyond similar characters and not-so-similar pets, however, we had another thing in common that we didn't learn until, again, much later. We were only two years apart in age, both underage at the time when we started playing the game. I was ten, and she was twelve. I had started playing because of my love of the computer game that my father had given me - Warcraft III - and Amora because she was bored and needed a distraction. Our guildmates were fine with that, seeing as we played competently and never tried to cheat the DKP system.
"No problem, 'Mora. We haven't started yet. We're still waiting on a few more." Zor's voice was gentle and soft, unlike the tone he had been using earlier. He looked upon Amora and me as though we were his daughters of sort. It turned out that his own daughter had died in a car accident along with his wife years before the game was released. Though he had gotten over more of his grief by then, he still played the game like a drunk with too many drinks. It was his way of distracting himself from the real world, so full of pain and the media's everyday-is-doomsday broadcasts.
Of course, there were more of us. Our guild was huge, as all guilds wishing to be the next Ascent. Sad thing is, I bet not a single one of you reading remembers them. I'm not even sure they're still around, that's how low they've fallen on the ladder. Nowadays it's about Paragon and vodka, though like Ascent, they'll fade out of existence. Just like we did, eventually. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Atleast We Aren't Orcs was and would never be the hardcore raiding guild that Zor wanted. We raided, of course, and we had two teams of forty people, but that was nothing compared to the massive guilds that had four or five teams. I'll be honest, the forty man raid system was fun but stupid. It was fun to be with everyone, to know everyone by name and laugh at stupid jokes and just escape from the reality that you were in actuality just a human playing a computer game instead of a mighty elf killing dragons. Waiting for forty people, as we were doing then, was a pain. Half of those people would drop because of lag, disconnecting as we pulled the boss, causing a wipe. Five of those people would be distracted by school work or their wives or girlfriends or children or cats, and would not be of any help at all to the raid.
I say that out of experience, not exaggeration. It had happened before this raid and Zor had prepared himself for the worst for this one. We would replace the lagged out people with others from Team Two. And then the cycle would continue viciously throughout the night as people were dropped and added, and the race was on before lag caught up with us all.
 Cake and Grief Counseling · Sun Sep 25, 2011 @ 05:31pm · 1 Comments |
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