You Can't Spell Funnel Without Fun

Chapter 14: Explaining to Geraldine

I woke up to find two of Geraldine's cats had snuggled into my body. I was tempted to doze off again with hope that this was a dream and I would wake up back in my bed at home, but someone lit a candle and the room glowed with light. 

"Suze?"

"No dear. It's me. Susana fell asleep sitting up. I've tucked her in. Let's speak quietly so not to disturb her." Geraldine had her black cat on her lap and sat cross-legged watching me. "At first I thought I was dead and this was the afterlife."

I nodded because the thought had crossed my mind.

"Then I thought it was a test by the devil or I am dying of carbon monoxide poisoning."

I again nodded in agreement with her.

"Whatever it is, I am going with the two of you and we are taking my cats."

I smiled at her and before I could say anything she held up her hand as if to stop me.

"And I am going to find a way to defend myself. I don't want to fight, but if it comes to that, then I will."

"I promise you that we'll do everything we can to protect you."

"It'd be nice to know what it is you'll be protecting me from."

"I can't tell you what we'll face, but I can tell you what we think about this. We think it's a game."

"A game? I play #Candy Crush and #June's Journey."

I hemmed and hawwed, "No. It's not like that. It's more like shows like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. Have you heard of Realms of Ifaneli?"

She furrowed her brow. "Is that the game with blocks my nephew's kid plays?"

"Not that one specifically. It's a MMORPG -- multiplayer online uhh. Massive multiplayer online roleplay game. Though the lore of this game seems kinda celtic? Or maybe Shakespeare." I said it with the hard 'k' sound in the c. "It's the same idea. In Realms there are two factions."

Suze mumbled from her pile of blankets. "We play the dark side."

"What Suze means is that we play as Dark Blight. It's kind of full of darker monster races."

"Kaylee chose it only because they have the hot elves. I wanted to play undead."

"I did not choose it for the elves."

"You switched sides when the hot elves expansion happened. All your characters are hot elves."

I got hot in the face. I switched sides because I met Matt on the server Discord and we'd hit it off. It'd been two years of voice chat flirting and PvP murdering one another before that. The expansion had just coincided with me switching over and so we started low level characters together. "I only have two Pirates of the Consort." I don't know why I felt peevish about this and so I switched tracks. "It doesn't matter about Realms. It's just an example of the kind of game I think this is. It seems like we have to decide between factions run by two big leaders. I don't know who would be the equivalent Dark Blight here and I don't know if that'd be a good choice right off the bat."

"Obermoron is Dark Blight. Titanic is Sun Paragon."

"Let's wait to pick if we run into some of our guildmates. Or at least get more information first."

I realised that Geraldine had not said anything for a bit and so I looked over at her. She had this blank look on her face as she sat now with her three cats in her lap. She just pet them.

"Have I lost you?" I asked.

"Yes, dear. I felt like I was listening to the adults in Charlie Brown."

I had no idea what she meant by that, but I tried to explain it in the way that I had explained it to my mother when I moved across the country to move in with a guy I met online in a video game. "Essentially it's collaborative puzzle solving and combat. You work with others to achieve goals and it's like a community. Like group chess."