Irena - Vacation 1

It was late in the evening when Irena pulled into the cheap hotel. She grabbed her bag, the bottle of Aquavit, and paused with her hand near her laptop bag. She had planned to take a break from the chat rooms and social sites when on vacation. Lately the flame wars and snarking had grown and a number of her friends had dropped off the sites. She turned on the TV and tried to find something to watch, however, she couldn't forget the disks in her bag.

After five minutes of the sappy movie, the best thing she could find in the wasteland of channels, she turned it off, fired up her laptop, and slid the first disk into the drive. There were directories filled with image files, hyper-linked text files, program executables and assemblies. On the last disk was an index file, close enough to the top that looked like a starting point, but when she tried a couple of links, they were broken. She waited impatiently for the time it took to copy all the directories to her laptop, then tried again.

Hours passed while she followed links, read pages, scanned images, and slowly immersed herself in the designs Sophia had been working on. Some of it she remembered from Jaime's tabletop role playing game. Much of it was expanded details and concepts for turning the bare bones of that early campaign into a world rich enough for a massively multi player environment. Other sections contained character write-ups and creature descriptions, linked to sketches, found images, and concept art to help with development.

It was four in the morning when she remembered to look at the clock. She was going to shut the machine down when another heading caught her eye. Suddenly she was immersed in the politics and power struggles of the campaign. The tabletop game had only scratched the surface, even after three years of playing once a week. Page after page detailed factions, power brokers, minions, and themes. The deeper she went the broader the scope became, until the final conflicts were being waged on a multi-versal scale, crossing times, parallel worlds, and the planes of existence as defined in many of the various gaming source books on the market.

Irena looked at the clock again and it said eight in the morning. She shook her head, stood unsteadily, and reserved the room for another night. She called the friends she was meeting and gave a flimsy excuse for a late start, promising to be to their place the next day. She had been planning to sleep, but tossed fitfully for a long while before turning the computer back on and continuing her research.

Stomach cramps pulled her away at noon, forcing her to consider the food she had skipped the night before as well as in the morning. Her hands flew to the keyboard first, then with a raw chuckle, she grabbed the handful of fliers the hotel had left in the room. She ordered from the first one that had delivery service.