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Greenberg knew that his mom was right, he needed more friends he could spend some time with off the computer and not just his WoW buddies. But then he figured that if anyone at school was going to like him, it would have happened sometime in the last three years. So when he saw the flyer at the community center blackboard – local Ally guild LF melee dps/tank offspec – he’d known. WoW was going to be the answer and he had a kitty druid alt who fit the bill nicely.
After a promising exchange of emails with one of the officers, JoanofArchery, Greenberg finally got his vent interview with the guild master and his second. He knew he was good and they were taking him into a dungeon he knew well so he could concentrate on the other stuff. The people stuff.
“Archie tells us you’re from Beacon Hills,” one of them said. The voice belonged to LemonLupus, which was kind of an odd name for a gnome rogue, but Greenberg wasn’t about to insult his new GM. “Are you still at school?”
Greenberg hesitated. It was possible this was the kind of mature guild that frowned on anyone under 18, but he was close enough not to matter much. “Yeah, a junior at the local high school.”
The other guy snorted and something about it was vaguely familiar. When he spoke though, he sounded like he had a sore throat from hell. Odd. “Okay, uh, just so you know, we’ve got a couple of people you may know, but we’ll leave the outing to each individual. If you want to tell us your name, you’re welcome to it, but it’s not a requirement.”
The GM grumbled. “Some of our members prefer their privacy. We’ll usually address each other by some form of our ingame names. I’ll answer to Lupus, or LL, or Alpha.”
Greenberg rolled his eyes. An alpha dog, of course. Most GMs were the type. The co-GM laughed. “Yeah, we usually call him Alpha. I’m Earpmaster, but everyone just calls me Em most of the time. Unless they call me Puppy, because they think they’re hilarious.” Earpmaster was a worgen holy priest and Greenberg could see why they might reference that. Except the laugh from the GM kind of implied a different story. They bickered a little as the notification for the dungeon popped and Greenberg typed a short hello to the two randoms.
As they started in on the first few trash mobs, Greenberg got in the groove and conversation picked up again. Em had sort of lost his earlier throatiness, but over the din of the game sounds and with his attention divided, Greenberg gave up trying to figure out if they knew each other. “So, why’d you want to be in our little guild?”
Greenberg clawed at the ghosts around him and grinned. “My mom is always on my case about making real life friends, so this is not a terrible alternative.”
Alpha huffed. “We’re not your play dates.”
[Earpmaster] whispers: don’t worry about it, if you can get people to trust you, we’ll invite you to Saturday pizza raids
[Earpmaster] whispers: it’s awesome we get pizza and then we slay dragons
to [Earpmaster]: okay!
The prospect of raiding and pizza with friends? Seriously fucking awesome. Like this was what everyone always talked about when they said MMOs changed their social life. “What made you look for a new member anyway?”
“Yeah,” said Em, “see, there’s this thing where I’m not sure I should tell you about this, but…”
There was a shuffling and some laughter over the mic, actually over both of them, and Greenberg realized that Alpha and Em had to be in the same room. How cool was that?
“Okay, see, we used to be ten people but now one of our number has off and disappeared on us and we’re tired of looking for randoms to fill up the spot. Our raid times are kind of erratic and sometimes real life happens and we have to cancel on short notice, so we have a bit of a reputation on the realm.”
Alpha grumbled. “Everyone hates us.”
“And whose fault is that, Mr. Grumpy Wolf?” Em sounded amused, like it was an old argument. “Anyway, we figured someone local would be more understanding about stuff, like animal attacks. You know?”
Greenberg nodded, headset scratching his cheek a little. “Yeah, of course.” They had blown past most of the bosses of the dungeon in the past fifteen minutes and one of the randoms had requested a break.
“Alright. You’re doing pretty well. If you don’t mind, we’d like to try you on a raid finder run some time next week when everyone’s got some time. You’ve already talked to Archie, and please for the love of god, don’t mention her spec. We let her run as a beastmaster because she outperforms anyone else blindfolded and naked.”
Greenberg tried hard not to imagine the female hunter in underwear, because he had a feeling she was the kind of girl who’d feed him his own balls for breakfast. “I won’t.”
“Goodie! You’ll meet everyone else later, then.”
There were rustling sounds again and a high pitched squeal that Greenberg had heard before. He blinked and hit mute on his speakers. Holy shit, those had been kissing sounds at the end there, and he was pretty sure he knew who Earpmaster was.
to [Earpmaster]: sorry dude, youre mic is still on
[Earpmaster] whispers: ah fuck XD sorry, hope your ears are still intact? Alpha gets a bit carried away sometimes
And okay, so apparently Stiles Stilinski was a gay raid leader whose boyfriend sounded a fair bit older than him, but Greenberg had no problem with that. Because Stiles’ healmeter was pretty fucking impressive and who was he to judge someone’s life choices? Coach had pretty much made Greenberg into a pariah at school and if all it took for him to actually connect with the freaky kids everyone talked about instead of those everyone ignored, like him, was to shut up and claw pixels to death on a regular basis, that was worth every moment.