Page 11 of Violet Spark
Really cool? Anicegirl? That purple haze clouded my vision again. “You drove forty-five minutes across the valley”—over an hour in traffic—“to see anicegirl?”
The kiss must have been really, really bad. Like the worst ever in the history of kisses.
“You said it’d be cool to come by any time, so I did.”
“IsaidI’d like to meet…” I choked off the rest. Because it didn’t matter what I liked. Just a few months ago I would’ve said fuck it, whatever. But this had been the onenicething I had going for me, a little flirting in my imaginary world that could’ve become something real. And he’druinedit.
Somehow he managed to open the door behind him without turning around—nifty feat—revealing his waiting white stallion. He hastily retreated, never turning his back on me. SunSummoner was a jerk, but he wasn’t an idiot.
I followed him and stood in the shadow of the building, grappling with my outrage. I couldn’t believe it. He was running away from meagain.
“Yeah, well,” I called to him, “I’m afraid I don’t have any stamps anyway, so…”
Whatever he’d left behind was definitely going in the trash. Yeah, I was throwing the whole man away.
“I’ll text you,” he said, mounting. He spurred the stallion, and his cloak whipped in the wind—showoff—as the upgraded, customized horse reared majestically.
“Don’t bother, asshole!” I shouted…
…as I was jumped from behind. The high-pitched cackles told me I was in the grips of a bunch of bog gnomes. Only stupid beginners were killed by bog gnomes in Questown.
They were fast, slippery suckers, biting into me with flashing gray teeth. Through a red spray of my EldWitch’s blood, I caught a glimpse of SunSummoner watching from the back of his stallion.
Muscle memory had my index fingers and thumbs forming an expanding circle to conjure a simple energy blast.
My EldWitch was falling. Gobbling noises joined the cackles as I transferred the energy into my dominant hand—which tingled wildly. As I hit the ground, the bog gnomes swarmed over me.
My energy blast went wild with a…boom!
Something yowled indistinctly, sounding far away. Had I hit SunSummoner’s horse?
I couldn’t tell. My vision inside my headset went blood-red and gray, then darkened as I was eaten alive.
The acrid smell of smoke pinched my nose…
I didn’t have Smell-o-Vision.
With the inside of my visor blinking “You died”, I yanked up the headset to perch on my head.
Purple haze danced in the air around me, slowly dissipating. But on the wall opposite me, a black scorch mark the size of my head was still smoking.
Holy shit.
“Imogen?” My mom burst into the room. “What was that noise?!”
“I dunno.” My hand itched inside my glove. The back of it, where I’d cut myself, burned. “Electrical overload?”
Within my headset, which was balanced like a crown on my head, I could hear the corpse crows singing. “Here lies MojiMaiden, a tasty EldWitch too clumsy for questing…”
Mortified, I focused on my system to log off. Everything went dark.
Except the teeny red cyclops eye of my webcam.
No. Oh no. No no no no no no!
“Get the fire extinguisher,” my mother was saying. “I told you, you play around too much on these silly games when you should be in school…”
Could I please,pleasedie in real life too?
