CHAPTER 101: NOSTALGIC TIMES

When I logged off, the pod hissed open and spat me out into the gaming room, I laid there to yawn and stretched for a minute before finally climbing out with messy hair and sore neck.

"Uwaaaaaaa~"

I looked to my left to see Hailie’s pod still close, and I couldn’t see inside, but I do hope that she was still alive because... Looking from the outside really give people anxiety, I mean, who wouldn’tt be anxious about their love ones being stuck in a small, confined space and drifted to sleep?

I looked to the door and saw that Gerald, Hailie’s butler, was already sitting there. He was waiting, as always, for his little mistress to wake so he could take her to class when the time comes and she logs off.

Gerald sat with his back straight on a gaming chair turned towards the pods, on his lap was a small, pocket-sized book on hand that was probably a hassle to read in this dim light.

I waved at the guy with both hands, fingers spread.

He nodded at me.

For some reason, that interaction was enough to send me into a weird little giggle fit. Nothing funny had even happened, but I laughed to myself like an idiot all the way out the door and down the hall... Probably a instinctual woman thing.

Scouring back in my room, I flopped into my chair and flicked on my PC set, before looking up above the monitor... And looked at my newly installed webcam.

I had "borrowed" a little pocket change from Eirlys last week to buy this new bad boy, it was a large one that could cover my whole room, catching any criminal scum in my town.

BUT, of course, I’m not that dumb, I think. I knew for a fact that a webcam was literally the easiest thing to disable, just... Plop the lens down, remove it temporarily, or just put tape over, or literally throw it to the trash so that no one found out.

So guess what, it’s only a red herring.

The real security was already in place, I got a miniscule camera that costed me a fortune, and tucked neatly into the windowsill right beside my bed. From that angle, it had full view of my PC and my pod.

This one was costly and I would probably have to whore myself out again if I ever want to pay Eirlys back that debt... Why is it costly, you might ask? Well, every night at midnight, it would auto-end the recording, upload it to a cloud server via wifi, then wipe its own storage. This shit’s untouchable and tamper-proof, my ace against Anshur.

Not that she’d done anything these last five days... She’s too quiet, in fact.

Eirlys told me Anshur begged to stay on my service...? Apparently, she’d said, "Even though Cory hurt me, I still feel obligated to fulfill my duties when no other maids will take the task."

Translation: everyone else thinks I’m compulsive and stupid after my incidents at the mansion (barely any, but enough to stir up the only thing that they have to gossip around), and they don’t want to get scolded because of me, fair enough.

At least Eirlys bought it.

I shook it off and booted up the forums to cool down... An hour or two of pointless doomscrolling always did the trick after burning through my gold.

The Darkmoon Adventure Forum had calmed down a lot since launch week... Back then it was fifty "How do I equip a sword?" "How to do this quest" posts per day. But now, there was maybe ten, still unbearable, but acceptable, new players are... Welcomed, I guess, half of me was still a gatekeeping bitch.

It was a phpBB-structured forum model website with tweaks. With the most recently commented threads on the top, separated with another section called latest threads. And the top 3 most commented thread was just about random facts of the game and discussing lore and stuff that I generally didn’t care about.

Now... But when I checked the Player Discussion section, guess what the moderator-pinned post was?

The one that gave the 50 players ever their nicknames, and granted me the title of "The Primordial Sins" for no apparent reason... Great, just great.

I sighed, already tired of the idea of people starting to call me that, I clicked off, back out to the main page and scrolled down... When I spotted a new thread climbing the hot board.

It had thirty comments total, and the title was direct:

[What’s the deal with CJS69?]

"Oooh~ Look what we have here." I said as I clicked on the thread with one hand, the other drumming dramatically in the air like an office worker facing donuts.

The main post was a bit lengthy, but its gist was simple: Everyone that met CJS69 was confused.

Reports were flying around that the infamous toxic, racist, childish player (geez, thanks) had been username-squatted. Supposedly, the "real" one was CJS69Real, and a female, apparently. Which shocked everyone, unable to grasp that such an insufferable asshole would have XX chromosomes.

But then came the twist: in the Titan raid, a player named just CJS69 hit #3 on the leaderboard. Solo, against entire guilds, that begs the question to who the hell was who?

If it’s merely a username squatter, then that sure is a very strong one.

The comments were pure chaos:

"The only way to know is if CJS69 himself... Herself? Speak up, but they hadn’t said a word about any of this. Their forum account is still active, so maybe they’re not even in the VR version."

"Nah, CJS69 left a comment on the pinned nickname post, which was made a while after the VR version came out, so they must be around still."

"Could it be that both are fake?"

"Could be the same person with two accounts. Wouldn’t surprise me if the devs gave perks to a Top 3 player."

"Then why haven’t SeeOh (#2) or DarkHeavens (#1) said anything? Those guys are ghosts, nobody’s heard a thing."

Most of it was jokes, nothing serious. Just noises... And these insolent fools could not know the truth.

I stared at the blinking cursor in the comment box for a solid thirty seconds, then smirked.

I’m going to give them closure, if they so desperately begged. So... I stretched my fingers.

"Your mom" I wrote.

I leaned back, stretched, and let the glow of the monitor wash over me as I kept scrolling through other nonsense threads.

Besides, sometimes, a well-placed "your mom" really was all the commentary the world deserved.

Speaking of... Let’s check out the Darkmoon Adventure VR section on the popular streaming site, Tweak.