Shit. I had a crush on my boss!

“Apes, you need to be careful. You’re in a very vulnerable state right now.”

I turned away, embarrassed, and pretended to be engrossed in my search. “I have this project I have to work on,” I mumbled, motivated to change the subject.

Sid angled her head to glance at my monitor, brows raised. “Just what are you trying to find?”

“I’m trying to get a better knowledge of the game so I know my product. I have no idea what project design I can come up with. And he wants three.”

“Well, you could ask me for help, you know, since I spend approximately sixty-two hours a week playing it.”

I shook my head. “Girlfriend, we have got to get you out more.”

She shrugged. “I love my homies in the guild. We hang out virtually. It’s a lot of fun.”

“So all these people from all over the world who are logging into the game…how do you find people to play with and how do you make new friends?”

“Sometimes you just call for people to help you with a certain quest. If you end up grouping with cool people, you keep doing it again and again. Or you’ll get invited to a raid or asked to join a guild.”

I shook my head. “You might as well have just spoken Martian to me.”

“Instead of sitting around Googling it, why don’t you roll a character and start playing?”

“Hmm. Are there any good blogs or online magazines to look at?”

“What the hell did you do all those months you worked in marketing?”

I shrugged. “Mostly I made coffee and did some graphic design work for internal memos and newsletters and whatnot.”

Sid rolled her eyes. “Okay, so…blogs. There are some really good ones. Unfortunately, my favorite, Girl Geek, is no longer writing on hers. Her stuff is archived, though, over at GameGlomerate. She’s awesome…snarky. She blogs about feminist issues and gaming. Like…why the women are always scantily clad in chainmail bikinis or why male gamers have issues with women being as geeky as they are.”

I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down Girl Geek. “Why isn’t she blogging anymore?”

Sid shrugged. “She cited life issues that have come up recently, although I think that it’s because GameGlomerate bought her out. Her blog was by far the best, but there are some others that are still producing.”

“Hmm. I’ll find her blog and read her old posts then. But for now, I guess I need to form a character.”

“Roll a character. Although it’s not really rolling. They just say that because it comes from the old-school type of games where everything was randomly generated by a roll of the dice.”

I frowned. “Uh, okay. Jordan gave me a key code I can use to log in.”

Forty-five minutes later, after loading up the software, opening an account and downloading game patches, I was ready to create my own character.

“Are you sure you want to play a man?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

Sid shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t matter. Most of the women running around in the game are played by guys.”

“I can see why. They all look like Victoria’s Secret Angels.”

“Okay, so you want to be a male human. You get to choose features like hair color, eye color—”

“Medium-brown hair. Hazel eyes. Tall. Nice muscular body…”

“You have quite the clear picture of what you want him to look like.”

I shrugged. I get to watch him die. Over and over. Might as well get some enjoyment out of it.

“Now you need to come up with a name for him.”

Hmm. Jordan. Jordyn. Joldan? I shook my head. “I just want to call him ‘Beast.’”

Sid gave me a puzzled look and instructed me to type the name in.

I admired him for a moment, dressed in a bland pair of brown trousers with no shirt. He didn’t look exactly like his inspiration, but it would do.

“Okay, so now that I’ve created my own monster, aside from rubbing my hands together and shouting, ‘It’s alive!’ what do I do?”

Sid let out a long-suffering sigh. “You are really going to need me to baby you through this, aren’t you?”

“Girlfriend, I upload sex videos to the Internet without even realizing it. I’m sure that if I press the wrong button on this game, all of Draco Multimedia Entertainment is bound to blow up. So, yes, talk to me like I’m a first grader.”

“Like I don’t already do that.”