The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Read online

  To be fair, Charice was also sated by the story of my getting $10,000, which admittedly packed a wallop. Also, she got rent money, which continued to cheer her. I even told her about Clara and the mints. She had never heard me mention Clara before, but I was riding high. She cleared out the séancers and celebrated. I drank a gin and tonic, retreated to my room, and tried playing a round of Dota, a computer game that marries my triplet loves of deep strategy, quick reflexes, and collecting clothes for the walrus. After I was throughly buzzed and I had made a reasonable dent in my MMR, it was time to get to work.

  I had business in Zoth to arrange.

  I needed to create a new character, but my fingers were now pleasantly numb. Not frostbite-victim numb, just cheerfully floopy. Like a giant squid attempting to play an Elton John song.

  I was done with my archer, though. I did not want Tambras connecting me to that particular interview. I needed something new, and because I was a little floopy myself, I wanted someone who would express me.

  This general light-headedness is probably why when I attempted to name my character “RedRadish” it came out as “RedRasish.” I did not realize this until much later, when a sugarplum fairy instructed me that gathering ten dumblemoor flowers from the Fetid Swamp would bring glory to the RedRasish family name. I read that initially and thought, Is this fairy drunk? It was then that I realized that I was the drunken fairy.

  Of course, if I had spelled it correctly, I would muse later with the benefit of sobriety, the game wouldn’t have let me in, as the game already had a RedRadish in it. Which was me, a year earlier, under my ex-boyfriend’s account. RedRadish was a happy, carefree ogress, with dreams of financial gains and a certainty that her boyfriend was not cheating on her with a dental hygienist. She also had tremendous facial scarring and an enormous tree trunk that she used as a sort of club. This was because the old me wanted to be badass. The dreams of youth.

  Despite the fact that I had no intention of really playing the game—my business here was to meet up with other guild members and do a little reconnaissance—I found myself taking an inordinately long time picking out my character. First impressions were important.

  RedRadish had been an ogress with a facial scar. RedRasish was a delicate-looking fairy, with rosy-pink skin and on whom I spent ninety-nine cents for especially elaborate hair. Yes, this was the gin, but ninety-nine cents for candy-colored hair with thick curls that coiled on the top of my head like a luxurious apostrophe seemed appealing at the time. I was looking for the girliest starting class I could find, which I assumed to be dancer, but then I discovered a new god named Usune, (new gods crop up in Zoth relatively frequently), and by becoming her priestess, I would get to carry a harp.

  So it was in this way that a drunken harp-wielding fairy with fabulous hair entered the Kingdoms of Zoth. Clovemince, a surprisingly stern-looking sugarplum fairy, gave me a brief but efficient description of the current state of the fairy kingdom and strongly suggested that I would be doing both myself and Usune a favor by wandering into a deadly swamp to gather flowers for our people.

  I ignored her request, as well as that of a handsome green fairy man who wanted to know if I was a girl in RL, and looked for the guilds tab. I needed to find Jonah’s guild so I could interrogate its members. I could have just sat there and queried names, but I wanted more of a personal connection this time around.

  And I did not feel like putting off the provocations of a green fairy man, who seemed to want to sit on me.

  “Ur hot,” he was saying.

  I certainly didn’t want to gather flowers while battling the mud people who would shamble out of the swamp. I just didn’t. I realize that this was a privilege that other people paid for (and that technically I had paid for), but as far as I was concerned, RedRasish was just an elaborate, badly spelled disguise. Squashing mud people was just not part of my wheelhouse. Besides, what was a harp going to do to them, anyway?

  I dialed Kurt Campbell, whose phone number Jonah had given me, “in case of an emergency.” I had fully expected it to go to voice mail, and then I would end up in the swamp after all, but lo, there he was.

  “Hello?” he said.

  He must have seen my Saint Louis cell number and assumed that I was someone who knew him.

  “Hi, Kurt. This is Dahlia.”

  Silence.

  “Dahlia Moss? The—” I was going to say “detective,” but I remembered Detective Maddocks and rethought it. “… The woman you ignored at dinner on Sunday?”

  “Why are you on my phone?”

  The way he phrased it made me sound like I was some sort of insidious lolcat. “I in ur iphone, calling ur contacts.” But I was not having this. Why shouldn’t I be on his phone? I was a somewhat legitimate businesswoman.

  “Well, I’ve logged in to the Kingdoms of Zoth and I was hoping you could show me around.”

  “You’re what?” That got him.

  “I’m on the edge of a swamp. Some fat purple fairy is trying to get me to gather flowers.”

  “Do you know about Jonah?”

  “I do. In fact, his parents have hired me to manage his online affairs.”

  “Jonah’s dead and you’re still after that damned spear?”

  Something about Kurt suddenly made me think of Clara. Not that I thought Clara was involved—although it was a fun idea—but in the same sense that he did not want me to succeed. I found myself briefly wondering if he didn’t want me finding the spear, or if he was just generally bad tempered. Our text-filled dinner together certainly didn’t give the impression of him being a people person.

  “Primarily, I’m here to arrange a funeral for him online. Some sort of open service, I was thinking. Of course, if you know anything about the spear, I’m sure that Jonah’s parents would be happy to learn of it.”

  “Sylvia hired you?”

  It was nice, for once, to hear the question with the emphasis somewhere other than the word “you.”

  “Indirectly,” I told him. “I was hired by their lawyer.”

  This seemed to relax Kurt, although I couldn’t tell you why. Did he not want me speaking directly to Jonah’s mother? Why?

  “I’m glad that’s settled,” I told Kurt. “So, how about this swamp?”

  “I’m not going to game with you, Dahlia.”

  “I’m not looking to play, Kurt. I just want to talk to other people in the guild.”

  Kurt sighed—not a real sigh, actually. The sort of audible stage sigh you would make so the people on the back row would know that you were sighing.

  “Go talk to them, then. We have a webpage. I’m sure you can look everyone up.”

  “I could do that, or you could introduce me to everyone and explain that I’m a friend of the family who’s putting Kurt’s affairs in order.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “It will sound better coming from you.”

  “That’s why you would want me to do it; why would I want to do it?”

  It was like dealing with Clara. I don’t know why I hadn’t realized it before. Weirdly, even as I made this realization, I decided to try an approach that I would never dare to take with a battle-hardened bank teller.

  “To make amends? You were a real jerk to me over dinner.”

  “You accused me of a crime.”

  “You were rude well before that. And besides, this is a good thing to do. Don’t you want Jonah’s affairs settled? Wouldn’t you like to see some sort of remembrance for him online?”

  Kurt paused for a second, and I took it to mean that the conversation was going even worse. But his response sounded rational and even.

  “Fine,” said Kurt. “Meet me in two hours. Let’s say… at the Broken Sickle Bar in Hochstein. That should be easy enough for you to find.”

  And he hung up on me. I’m not sure if smirking makes an audible sound, but if it did, that was definitely the sound I heard before the click.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Something about the ten
or of that conversation—perhaps coupled with the memory of my ex huddled over his laptop while vampirically draining bottles of Mountain Dew—made me realize that I had better alcohol down and caffeine up. I was going to meet a bevy of gamers, one of whom was possibly a thief and a murderer. This was a time I not only wanted my wits about me; I wanted them styled with cute blond streaks and smelling like echinacea and hibiscus.

  A quick trip into Charice’s cabinet of wonder had me drinking coffee with butterscotch, which pairs great with ramen. Once I was fortified, I did some wiki searching and I figured out why I had the vivid image of Kurt smirking into the phone.

  Visiting the Broken Sickle Bar as a level-one character was a little like a four-year-old visiting the top of Mount Everest. Good luck with that.

  Hypothetically, I could get there. All I had to do was hike south for a few minutes, hop aboard a flying Chinese dragon that would carry me to another continent, follow the shoreline for another several minutes, then cross the water at some shoals, hack through some jungle, visit a fortune-teller and breathe in her “magic herbs,” go back through the shoals, and walk through a newly visible cave until I came upon the Field of Ghosts, from which Hochstein, a sad little mountain in the midst of a barren field, was clearly visible.

  It would take me two hours to do this, but I figured it was a kind of test and I wasn’t about to be shown up. I got killed a few times on the way to the Chinese dragon, but I eventually realized that if I stuck to the roads, I’d be mostly okay. The worst were the shoals, which were filled with horrible crab-men and -women that would pull me beneath the water and strangle me. This happened, like, six times. I only got by when some other schlub came along and got through while they were strangling him. The fortune-teller was also dead when I got there, which struck me as another murder to solve, but after a few minutes her body vanished and then later respawned.

  By the time I got to the Field of Ghosts, I had been skewered, drowned, burned, buffeted with arrows, poisoned, and killed by an evil doppelgänger of myself who hit me in the head with my own damned harp. I had also been mocked by lots of gamers, mostly on horseback, who would dash by me with shiny suits of armor and particle effects, laughing.

  One woman was driving a giant winged snake and told me, “lol. get out of this zone, noob.”

  The aggravating thing about the Field of Ghosts was that you could clearly see the Broken Sickle Bar. But you could also see that it was separated from you by an insurmountable number of the walking dead. Presumably, characters who belonged here could fight their way through, but these were ghosts that killed me not by breathing on me but just by contemplating the idea.

  I know it’s unbecoming for a gamer girl to do this, but I /sat down on the ground and decided to /cry. Frankly, RedRasish’s cry was not very moving. It sounded a little like the noise you get when you poke the Pillsbury Doughboy. But for my own private disappointment, it was a good a soundtrack as any.

  A harpy came swooping down by me, I assumed to eat me, which isn’t actually a death I had experienced yet. Instead she sat on the ground next to me and started a campfire.

  “Why the long face, little lost fairy?” she typed.

  Her name was Vothvoth, which I knew not from detective work but because the letters were floating over her pointy, misshapen head.

  “I’m not lost. I’m trying to get to that inn over there, and I’ll never get across this field of undead. I’ve been walking for, like, two hours.”

  “Oh,” said the harpy, who was now cooking a live bird. “Did you run out of invisibility oil?”

  The whatnow oil?

  “Here,” she said, giving me five stacks of invisibility oil. Then she bit the head off her cooked bird and flew off.

  Fuck this shit. I mean, that had been one nice harpy, but there’s fucking invisibility oil? I had to fight a fire-breathing camel at one point, and there’s invisibility oil? This is the kind of thing I hated about these sorts of games. Everything’s obvious once you already know it, but woe unto the private dick who has to cross a shoal of angry crab-people and doesn’t know about invisibility oil.

  By the time I made it to the Broken Sickle Bar I was already tired and wanted to stop. But of course, this was the reason I had come here. In this case, the getting there was not part of the journey at all. In this case, it had just been a horrible trial along the way.

  Given the ramshackle appearance of the bar—a run-down shack in an abandoned ghost town—and the fact that it took freaking forever to get here—I found myself shocked at how many people were squeezed into this bar. It was packed. I had been to nightclubs with less action—good ones.

  I had assumed that meeting up with Kurt would have mostly been a matter of saying hello to the only person around, but now there was all of this. Plus, I didn’t know what his username was, or what he looked like in-game. I did know that he was a ninja. But what did that look like?

  Also, I was invisible, which is not useful when you intend to rendezvous.

  I yelled, which meant that everyone in the room could hear me. “DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO TURN OFF INVISIBILITY OIL?”

  I realized that it was an irritating thing to do; but I had spent much of my evening being devoured by crab-people and irritating was feeling more promising than irritated, which is where I had been. Still, there was karmic payback, because I was helped by the worst possible person.

  His name was Atheun, and he was a tall, handsome elf with revoltingly nice cheekbones.

  I knew Atheun. Atheun was the name of my ex-boyfriend’s character. I knew the name well because Erik had written a song for him. In retrospect, it should have been easy to see that our relationship was in trouble given all the presents Atheun got that I didn’t. Atheun was on T-shirts, imprinted on custom action figures. No one’s ever written a song about me.

  What was agonizing was that he actually looked like Erik. He had the same ridiculous ’90s haircut, the same tiny body with loose-fitting clothing, the same smirk on his face, even. Only Athuen looked charming and mysterious, whereas Erik had looked… Ah hell, who am I kidding? Erik had always looked charming and mysterious too.

  But his cheekbones hadn’t been that good.

  Atheun came up to me and typed, “you should be able to right-click on the invisibility buff to take it off.”

  Which was straightforward enough. Although now I was less certain that I wanted to be seen. I hadn’t actually spoken to Erik in months, and then under somewhat arranged circumstances, and meeting him here in a fairy costume was not the image I wanted to convey.

  “It’s not working,” I typed at him. “Thanks for helping anyway!”

  And then I thought I would hide. Which was ridiculous, given that I was already invisible.

  But Atheun would not leave well enough alone. He had to be helpful. In three years, he had never washed a dish, but when it came to invisibility oil, he was Johnny-on-the-spot. Three years I dated this goon.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got some vapor of appearance,” he said, and a puff of pink dust appeared around me.

  “Oh, hello little fairy,” he said. “You’ve wandered pretty far, haven’t you?”

  I /curtsied. This was worse than Facebook stalking, but I had come by it honestly.

  “RedRasish? Is that an Indian name?”

  “I wanted to be RedRadish, but someone had taken it.”

  “Oh. Ha ha.”

  I honestly don’t know what I wanted to happen here, or what I was afraid of happening. There probably exists some alternate universe, sitting very close to this one, in which Erik confesses to me that his wonderful ex-girlfriend whom he was missing terribly used that name, and how his dental hygienist is a pale shadow of what a wonderful girl she was. And from that alternate universe, there are branches in which I tell him off and RedRasish flies off on her gossamer wings while he cries into his drink. And there are branches, probably multiple branches, in which I take him back and have his babies. And there’s that universe that I’d r
ather not consider, in which he confesses that RedRadish was this awful hag of an ex who could never play games like this and had chosen a scarred ogress for her avatar, which was truthfully not that far off the mark.

  All of those could have happened. And probably more. And, forgive me, they’re all more interesting than what occurred in the actual universe, in which Atheun then said:

  “Oh well, off to go raiding! Good luck, little fairy!”

  And he was gone.

  It had certainly been a more friendly communication than the evening in which we had broken up. I could have used a “good luck, little fairy” then. I seemed to be getting them in spades now. Something about being a fairy, I suppose. I had never gotten a “good luck, little ogress.” Perhaps this was how pretty people went through life. On little gossamer wings.

  My pontifications on beauty and race were quickly interrupted by an old bald man with facial scars of his own. If I had to guess his class, knowing nothing about Zoth, I would have led off with Beggar. He was shabby-looking. People in this bar were decked out in all manner of shining zoot suits and glowing plated mail. Not this guy.

  “Dahlia. This is Kurt.”

  He bowed at me. For some reason, even though I knew full well that it was Kurt, and I knew what Kurt sounded like, I imagined the voice of a wizened sensei. If you had a long white Fu Manchu, the long flat vowels of a Midwesterner should not be coming out of you.

  “I’m impressed you made it this far.”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  The old man, whose name was “Disfigurement”—which I again knew because it was floating over his head—waved his hands at me in order to suggest that it had been obvious. He did not look like a ninja, nor was he especially disfigured.

  “You mentioned the Fetid Swamp, which is part of the fairy homeland. No other fairies here. Plus you’re level two. Also, you’re carrying a harp.”