TROIS:Le_Vautour

I always wound up in the library, playing that game Sparrow hated so much on my dinky little laptop on the marginally-better-than-at-home library wifi. PeaceBreak. She'd never liked it- insisting that it was miserable, slow, and uninteresting. A neverending nest of fetch quests or wasted time, surrounded by men in their forties who had refused to outgrow it. She wasn't wrong, per se, but if anything was reduced only to its worst affects, everyone would think the people who liked it seemed insane.

Sparrow liked cars. I could complain about all the things that were terrible about them. How was it any different?

We bickered like children. Bickered like siblings. Bickered like bickering like bickers like bitches like bitchers like buckers like fuckers like bickering.

The game never changed, developing new issues. I used it to help seat myself permanently in a state of never knowing the time. School- yes, during the school year, I would be taken places at times, but I never managed myself. What days, what times- none of them at all.

During the year, I would never manage myself. I would be woken by someone else. I would be taken places by someone else. And I would never break those structured routines and systems and the wheels that ran the gears that ran the machine that ran the days that ran the nightmares that produced the filth that I lived. "Go to school", and "School's over" seemed to all happen in moments. Dissociations and dark days and histories. Secret, broken histories. I hated those histories.

In the game I played, there was a system for making guilds. My guild was called Tire Adieu Mon Amour. I'd used an online translator to convert it, but the meaning was simple. "Say farewell my love." Maybe the grammar was broken. Maybe it sounded goofy. I couldn't know. But I wanted something to communicate in the language of romance. The idea of heartbreak and loss. It fit.

The game was an MMO. Well, more like a BMO. Barely Multiplayer, with how few people ever played. It was understandable. The game wasn't that great. Enemies didn't work properly. Character models lost their textures. Servers crashed. The chat never worked very well, constantly falling to disrepair somehow.

But it was mine. It had seared itself into my mind, branding me like beef. It scraped its nails over my eyes and carved its best scenes and such grand memories into me. My avatar stood still in the middle of something meant to be a forest. It was a woman in armour. A knight with angel's wings. Under the armour, my character was a blonde woman, who stood tall. Her wings didn't really let me fly, but they looked cool.

Over her floated my handle, VoyeurVoluese. I had wanted to mean something like Thieving Voyeur. Unfortunately, I was rather bad at french, and the actual word for thief was "Voleuse."

I was a bit of a dumbass.

My guild was small, but incredibly active.

I lead the group, pretending to be mute to explain why I couldn't be on voice chats. I played all the time, so my character was somewhat higher level. I had all sorts of event gear.

ExhibitU was my alt. I mostly just used it to grind items and events.

The other members of the guild were all a mixture of roleplayers and friends, meshing into a nice collective. HighPlainsWalker, who I always just called Walked, was the most mature of us. He had come only to roleplay and he was good at it. A writer so dedicated. Unfortunately, he was also one the least active of our group, so busy with the real world. Jobs and all the like. That curse of adulthood.

JazzYouLike- he was a great strategic player, and always committed to acting in the roleplay scenes. Truly one of the best types of people to have around. He also had a taste for shit memes.

But the most important of them all, who outshone all the rest was my best friend. VultureCulture707. He was into exactly what his name meant- vulture culture, bone hunting, skulls, everything of that sort. And he was always on. We were always talking. And it was the damn best person to be talking to, too. To, too. Tutu. Tuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.

Though my pet was a bird with no wings, the best bird in my life was a vulture. Which must have been fitting, with where I was headed in life.

Just as the real vultures will get great use out of a body like this, pecking it apart, taking the lame leg and the lame heart and the stupid mind and make and remake and feed, he makes good use of me. And I make good use of him. I'm certain that I do. I think so?

Vulture had made a storyteller out of me. That was perhaps one of the more bizarre and surprising things that had ever been done to me. Despite myself…

His avatar hacked uselessly at a tree. His sword clipped right through it. He sent a message in chat. A bubble appeared over his head, and a line appeared in the chat box on the side of my screen. "This sucks. The attacks are still broken. Now what? No boss?"

"Probs not," Jazz replied. He began to type something, before stopping, and leaving whatever else he was going to say on the cutting room floor.

"Isn't there sever maintenance today?" Walker asked.

"Server maintenance =/= glitch fixing."

"Yeah, what Jazz said. We can just do play by post on Order instead, if you guys want?" Vulture suggested. His avatar spun in a slow circle, sword clipping into the ground.

Jazz sent a thumbs up into the chat. I hesitated for a moment, before responding. "Yeah, PbP sounds good to me. Let me see if things start working before the servers go down for maintenance though. I'm last in the turn order anyway lol."

I closed my eyes. The library's AC hummed, a mechanical wheeze that did nothing to cut the summer's fever. Outside, the world moved on. Inside, there was nothing. The pixels flickered, and my cursor froze for a moment. I tensed. Soon enough, the pixels flickered back to life, and the group of us were at our usual. Or something close enough to our usual.

Outside of us, the majority of the game was just dead.

Our group moved past obvious bots that the mods had no interest in intervening to remove, and a handful of players. The majority of them were new accounts that only stuck around for a day at most. People reminded of the game by an offhand memory, making a fresh account just to revisit it. We'd joked that they were ghosts.

The majority of them weren't very interested in sticking around, and often either way, their avatars mostly just stood motionless in random spots, left frozen as their player left the keyboard, or kept the tab open in the background, forgetting about it in a mass of other things. Abandoned, but never important enough to be destroyed. Or maybe it was too sentimental to destroy. Or maybe, because the game was sunsetting soon enough anyway, they didn't care.

After all, it had been losing money for years. The servers were intended to close in only a few months. Even the news of the sunsetting hadn't gotten enough attention from nostalgia nerds to revisit it. Instead, what it mostly got, was an uptick in desperation by those of us who were still here. Somehow, in a place where the world had a finite end, we remained. Machines remained. Something remained.

I sometimes watched the bots. Most of them didn't do much other move around aimlessly. Some of them grinded for rewards, servants of someone too drunk on the game to leave, but too disinterested to always play. The people who insisted they could never let the game be forgotten, but at the same time, were far from liking it.

I exhaled through my nose, trying one last time to take a swipe at something, in the hopes the collision was back on. It was not. Soon enough, the notification came. System Alert: Server maintenance in 30 minutes.

I minimized the game and opened a new browser tab, typing with slow, deliberate presses. It would take some time for the others to get their messages in, so I had to keep myself entertained somehow. Even I, in all my delusion and stupidity, could tell that there was no fun to be had when the game was so dysfunctional.

I searched up things that were random thoughts to come to mind. At first, things like the source of the glitch. Other times, for things relating to my character in the roleplay. And in others, I simply let my wandering mind return to its usual grimness.

'How to disappear completely' didn't net many useful results. Mostly things like amateur writing. Poetry. Song lyrics. Philosophical ramblings about ego death. Nothing practical. Nothing that told me what I actually wanted to know. No actual answers, because the world was flooded with cowards. People who had no interest in answering real questions.

I rested my forehead against the keyboard and waited for the world to end.

The keys pressed into my skin, leaving tiny indents in it. The screen flashed with a notification on the side of the screen. "You still there, corpse?" Vulture asked.

"No more. Dead. Deceased. Death. Deatheacedead."

"So just barely, basically."

"Yeah, barely's a good word for it."

"Good. Stay that way."

I chuckled at the sight. Vulture was always the best at cheering me. Not because he was good at it. In fact, he was by far terrible. But he didn't lie to me. He never told me things would get better.

He never peeled back my lips and spat saccharine bullshit into my mouth the way everyone else did. He let my mouth be filled only with the taste of my own saliva. And for some reason, that worked.

"Are you up to something, or are you just waiting for a response from Jazz?" I asked.

"No one's replied yet. But I wanted to ask you about something."

"What is it?"

"Me and my friends are working on a game, and I was going to ask if you wanted to maybe join?" He paused, before hurriedly sending another message. "It's a closed test and not finished obvs."

"Yeah, obvs. That's no problem, it sounds cool. Didn't know you could do that."

"I'm just an artist. My friend's programming it."

"That's still cool."

"And a lot of it is stolen code and assets from PeaceBreak."

It couldn't be heard in text, but it was easy to tell he was a bit embarrassed about the fact. Unable to stop clinging, even now. It wasn't as if anyone would object. The game was dead anyway. A corpse couldn't care if something picked its pockets, and certainly not for some small side project made by a few tech wizards.

"So you're making a bootleg?" I typed back.

"The same thing with a new coat of paint. I'm drawing everything new," Vulture explained. I'd always known he was an artist. He loved to show off his work.

"It sounds cool. Are you gonna keep the same janky combat?"

"Worse, we're adding fall damage."

"OMG. Fucking evil." I grinned, fingers hovering over the keys. It was so stupid. "Send me a way to join. Rn."

Vulture sent a grinning emoji, pixelated and crooked. "Knew you'd say that. Check your email."

Somewhere in the library, a chair scraped against the floor. A book thumped onto a table. The real world, insisting on existing. I tried to ignore it. Pressing on and pressing the button for a new tab. It was there exactly as Vulture had said it would be, sitting in my inbox like a neat little present.

He'd sent it an hour ago. He knew me too well. I couldn't help my own laughter.

From a dead thing with coffin worms under its fingernails, a daisy had been pushed up. I set it to download, and stared at the screen. At the green bar moving slowly from left to right.