The blue flash of lightning and a subsequent loud crack of thunder were perfectly timed with Tara’s “
Mom
!”
I heaved a martyred sigh that rivaled hers, fighting to keep the smile from my lips at her look of righteous indignation. She might have my eyebrows, but her flair for dramatics came straight from her actor father. “Very well. I’m prepared to be generous. You have two minutes. Use them as you will.”
“
Your
problem,” she said, following me into the kitchen as I refilled my jumbo coffee mug with Espresso Roast, “is that you don’t know how to play.”
I gave in to the urge for a little eye roll and made sure everything that safely could be was unplugged. Another blue-white flash illuminating our tiny backyard heralded the onslaught of the storm.
“I’m serious, Mom. Free Spirit says that people like you use the excuse of work to compensate for the things that are lacking in their lives.”
“Free Spirit?” I leaned my hip against the counter and sipped my coffee, watching my daughter as she stood in front of me. She was looking more and more like me, her thick strawberry blond hair just as unruly as my own, defying all attempts by hair spray, styling mousse, and industrial-strength hair gel to form it into something other than a wild tangle of curls. Her blue eyes were a shade darker than my own, but those straight brows that refused to arch no matter how many trips to the beauty salon she made were all mine.
“Free Spirit Blue. Hello, she’s just my counselor! The one you talked to last month?”
“Oh, right; the one who wants to start her own commune and thinks I should encourage you to express yourself in artistic media rather than apply yourself to your schoolwork. Rather an interesting attitude to find in a school counselor.”
“Everyone loves her,” Tara protested, her hands gesticulating at she talked. That was another trait she got from her emotional father; generations of phlegmatic Scandinavian ancestors who preferred to keep their emotions tightly reined did much to give me control over mine. “She’s all that,
and
she knows the coolest people. She got me an interview with PC Monroe.
The
PC Monroe—I’m going to meet him next week. Sarah promised she’d give me the front page of the school paper for the interview.”
“Ah. Good. Er . . . who’s
the
PC Monroe? Singer? Actor? One of those guys on the reality shows who eat insects for insane amounts of money?”
She gave me a look that wouldn’t have been out of place had I been a five-headed alien that popped suddenly out of a potato. “He’s only the hottest thing online in the whole world!”
“Internet boy toy?” I asked, sidling toward the door. Although writing press releases for the conservancy organization I worked for wasn’t part of my job description as a financial analyst, I had volunteered to do it, and it irked me to leave any task undone.
“Try millionaire software genius,” she answered, swiftly moving to block my retreat from the kitchen. “He lives here, right here in Merida. He’s
only
created an inexpensive virtual reality unit that will revolutionize the Internet world by making fantasy real, and bring the unbelievable to the grasp of everyone with a computer and an Internet connection.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her. “Get that from a press release, did you?”
“Yeah.” She had the grace to look a little embarrassed but quickly covered it up with antagonism. “PC Monroe and his VR game are the hottest thing on the whole planet! He sent me a beta version of his new VR simulation. Everyone is talking about it. It’s due to be released in two months, and it’s going to totally blow every other online game out of the water. Don’t you pay attention to
anything
?”
“I’ve been busy trying to set up our lives.” By dint of a slight feint to the left, I managed to squeeze around her and out the door. She followed me down the hallway.
“You’re always busy; that’s my point!”
“Yes, I know; you think I need to play. I heard you the first time. Hold on a sec.” We paused to count between the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder. “Five miles. It’s getting closer. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to get this press release done before the storm hits, then I think I’ll do a little research for Robert. He’s never as prepared as he should be for staff meetings.”
“Free Spirit says people who work all the time and don’t give their inner child time to play die of heart attacks before they’re forty.”
“Ah?” I asked, sitting down at the computer.
“You’re almost forty,” she pointed out.
I shot her a narrow-eyed look. “I’m thirty-six, missy. That’s not even close to forty.”
The little rat smirked. “Four years, Mom. Four years, then ziiiiiiiip!” She made a gesture symbolic of imminent death. “Dead as road kill.”
The press release nagged at me, but behind Tara’s flip tone, I sensed real concern. I was well aware that I hadn’t been spending as much time with her as I wanted to, but starting a new life and a new job in a new town took a lot of work. “Point taken—you believe I need a few more leisure activities in my life.”
“
Any
leisure activities. You don’t do anything but work.”
I let that slide. “What would you suggest?
She took a deep breath. “Buckling Swashes.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Buckling Swashes. It’s the online game PC Monroe created, the one he’s converting over to a VR world. I told you that he sent me a beta VR unit. It’s part of the next-generation release, and I got to see it months before it’ll be made public.”
I frowned, absently counting the time between lightning and thunder, a horrible suspicion coming to my mind. “You wouldn’t be referring to that RPH that you were so addicted to during the summer?”
“RPG, not RPH. It stands for role-playing game and technically it’s MMORPG—massive multiplayer online role-playing game.”
The way she avoided my eye said a lot. “I see. That would be the same online game that I forbade you to continue playing because you did nothing else but pretend you were a pirate for three solid months?”
Belligerent blue eyes suddenly met mine. “You didn’t forbid me to play. You just stopped paying for it.”
I thought for a moment, mentally reviewing the latest credit card statement. “Ah. That would explain the rash of phone calls to your father when we moved here last month. You talked him into paying for that game.”
“It’s not just a game,” she said, her hands on her hips. “It has
layers
. And it’s about to become virtual reality.”
“Uh-huh.” I turned back to my desk. “As I recall from what you showed me, it was simply a simulation of some vaguely Caribbean pirate setting with a lot of murder and mayhem.”
“That’s only one part of it. Most players think that the goal of the game is to go pillaging—that’s attacking other ships to take their money and goods—but really the game is a complex social infrastructure of colonization and world building. Right now my crew is about to go into defense mode to protect our island from the evil Black Corbin, who wants to take it from us.”
“Your crew?” I asked, making a mental note to talk to Bill about feeding Tara’s unhealthy addiction to online games.
“Yeah, I’m the crew wench.”
My eyebrows rose as I envisioned the letter I’d send to the game’s creator about putting a minor in an adult situation.
“You can just stop with the Mom Brows. It’s nothing like that,” Tara said, the disgusted tone in her voice doing much to reassure me. She hadn’t yet expressed an interest in the opposite sex, something I was all too happy about. “Our crew is led by Bartholomew Portuguese. He’s based on a real pirate, by the way. PC Monroe said he did tons and tons of research on him to make the character believable.”
“I see. Still, I told you two months ago that schoolwork took precedence over world building. Playing a pirate won’t get you into college—”
“PC Monroe says the economical model that the game uses is a real one, and that to understand and be successful at it means I have a good head for business. I have a weaving shop. I sell cloth. I make money at it, Mom.”
Her calculated dig hit pay dirt, despite my better intentions. “What sort of economic model? How much profit do you make?”
“A lot.” The smile that blazed across her face was rife with pure satisfaction. “Enough to buy me three sloops. I even have a spreadsheet that I use to keep track of costs and profits.”
I narrowed my eyes at her again. “That was a low blow. You are an evil child to use my love of spreadsheets against me like that.”
Her grin turned up a notch. “You always say you have to be ruthless in business, and this is all economics. Buying and selling and profit margins and supply and demand. Only it’s set in a pirate world rather than this one.”
“Hmm.” I wondered for a moment what pirate finances would look like. How much would monthly grog expenditures run, and could you depreciate the costs of storing it?
“
You’d
make a killing there,” my little rat-in-child-form added in a persuasive tone of voice. “With your business degree and stuff, you’d be rich in no time. I bet you could even have your own crew.”
For a moment an image flashed on my mind’s eye of myself standing at the helm of a tall ship, the sails fully rigged, the bow of the ship cutting through the azure waters, salty sea air brushing my face as I ordered the cannons to fire on some helpless ship. A little voice deep inside of me let out a cheer, but it was quickly squelched as another rumble brought me back to the present and reality. I turned back to my computer. “Good try, Tara, but not quite good enough.”
The teasing light in her eyes died. “Dad would do it.”
I flipped a couple of pages of the symposium paper to find a quote I needed. “I’m sure he would. He has little else to do with his time while he is between acting jobs.”
“At least he spends time with me! At least he’s interested in the things I’m interested in! All you want to do is work, work, work. You don’t care about me or anything I want to do. I wish I was living with Dad instead of you!”
“I refuse to get into a comparison argument of my parenting skills versus your father’s,” I answered, quickly typing up a couple more sentences. “And I hardly see how my lack of participation in a silly game can be thrown in my face as depriving you of attention.”
“Because! If you were playing it, too, we could be on the same crew. And you could help me with my weaving shop, and I could teach you how to sail a ship.”
“I don’t have time to learn how to sail a ship, and besides, I get seasick easily.”
“You won’t even try! You won’t even look at it!” she wailed, throwing her hands in the air in a gesture of sheer frustration.
I’m not a monster. I might admit to being a bit more caught up in my job than was normal, but I took pride in the fact that I had a solid work ethic, and took responsibility for making sure that my job, and the jobs of those I could help around me, were done to the best of my ability. Despite all that, the underlying plea in Tara’s voice generated an unpleasant ripple of guilt within me. I had no intention of wasting my time playing a nerdy online game, but if it would make her feel I was more involved in her life, it wouldn’t hurt me to at least see what it was about.
“All right,” I said, forestalling the emotional eruption I knew that was soon to follow. “If it will make you happier, I’ll take a look at the game.”
She was silent for a moment. “You will? You’ll sign on? The whole thing, the VR unit version? It’s majorly cool.”
I frowned. “How much does it cost?”
Her stormy brow cleared like magic. “You can use my account. We get four characters per account, and I’ve only made one. You can make one, just to see if you like it. It won’t cost you anything. Here, I’ll write down my password and user name.” She snatched up a sticky notepad and scribbled out the name
Terrible Tara
and the name of our deceased dog. “Later on you can get your own account so we can play together at the same time. Maybe I can get a second VR unit.”
“Whoa, I just said I’d take a look. I have no intention of doing anything more—”
She stopped in the doorway, her eyes dark with mutiny.
“I knew it! You won’t go into it with an open mind! You’ll just look and say it’s a silly time waster!”
“Hey, now. I am just as capable as the next person of keeping an open mind,” I said, giving her my best quelling look. It didn’t do any good. It seldom did.
“You will not. Your mind is already made up to think it’s silly.”
I held up my hand to stop her. “I admit to being a bit biased, but I will promise to give the game every chance. Happy now?”
“No,” she answered, her face still stormy.
“Are you questioning my word of honor?” I asked, frowning.
“Yes. No. Maybe. It’s just that you are so . . . so . . .”
“Dedicated to my job?”
“Dead,” she answered, throwing her hands up in a frustrated gesture. “Honestly, Mom, you don’t do anything fun! This VR game has all sorts of things that you’ll like, if you just give it a chance. There’s tons of economy stuff.”
“I do have interests beyond those of a fiduciary nature,” I pointed out, vaguely insulted.
“Name one,” she countered.
I glared at her and ignored the challenge. “I have said I would give the game a fair chance. That’s the best I can do.”
Her eyes narrowed as she chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “I know! You have to make officer.”
“I what?” My gaze strayed back toward the computer screen and my work.
“You have to make officer. It’s a goal. You like goals; you’re always telling me to have them.” She hurried on before I could point out that the two things weren’t the same. “If you advance in the game to officer status, I’ll know you really kept an open mind.”
“How hard is achieving officerhood?” I asked, flipping to a spreadsheet of the current year’s budget.