When last we signed on to level this fic, Eric and Pam posed as Duke Nukem and hacked into Bill's Ventrilo server, supposedly to "assess Bill's online interaction" and gain insight into his "gaming persona." Were they just tormenting the brooding and WoW-addicted vamp, or did they have a master plan?

As a reminder, the events of this fic take place between Books 2 and 3, so some characters who show up here wouldn't yet be known to Sookie. However, because pretending that the period between Books 2 and 3 occurs in the present day means Eric can have a nicer computer, we're in 2009.

Special thanks to Mairemor and her sons for coming up with the name I ended up using for Eric and Pam's guild and to DK and FDM for their feedback on this chapter! Happy birthday, DK!

*************

"What do you mean, 'that went well,' Pam? Bill was about to blow a gasket! If he were human, I would have wanted to check his blood pressure."

"Sookie, we learned a great deal by listening in on Bill's guild," Pam huffed.

"Oh, yeah? Like what?"

"Bill's gone bonkers," she responded. "Plus, you say he isn't even feeding from you, or having sex with you at the moment?"

Fan-friggin-tastic. I had come to Fangtasia for help with my boyfriend situation, and now, not only had we pissed off Bill, but it looked like I was in for a Dr. Ruth moment with Pam. I did have to admit that the thought of a pleasantly-wizened Pam with big hair and thick glasses, holding a dildo and offering sage advice on how to get my groove back, was actually a little amusing. Still, I wasn't about to engage in slumber party girl talk with her—especially not in front of Eric.

"Can we stay constructive, here?" I asked, trying to change the subject.

"It's actually an important question," Eric interjected. "What has he been feeding on in recent months?"

"He usually just runs to Wal-Mart and picks up whatever they have: True Blood, or Red Stuff if they're out of True Blood."

Eric visibly shuddered at the mention of Red Stuff. "I've heard of humans developing similarly poor eating habits when they are addicted to gaming—something about Hot Pockets, Mountain Dew, and nachos from 7-11."

It was my turn to be disgusted. I'd seen Jason eat those nachos from 7-11 before, and he never listened to reason when I pointed out that they looked and smelled unspeakably vile. The chips were like cardboard, the cheese was only vaguely cheese-like, and the optional "chili"? Well, perhaps it was just Gran's culinary influence, but I held a profound conviction that no good could ever come of eating ground beef dispensed from a pump. I shook my head and brought myself back into the moment. "So you're saying Bill basically has the vampire equivalent of a junk food hang-up?"

"Yes. Sookie, you must understand. Even when your blood was tainted by the maenad's poison, it was clear that you are… a treat." Pam nodded, clearly agreeing with him, and Eric continued. "No amount of mainstreaming can take away the fact that when you have a delectable feast available and choose instead to subsist on synthetic abominations, something is very, very wrong."

"Such a waste," Pam said wistfully, brushing her fingers lightly over my neck.

I tried to get the productive part of the conversation going before Pam could continue with that train of thought. "Well, then… what's the plan?"

"The plan, Sookie, is for you to start your own WoW character," Eric announced. "As you might know from seeing Bill play, there are two warring factions in WoW: the horde and the alliance. Within those factions, each player chooses a race and class combination. The race affects your character's appearance, as well as a few of your abilities. Your class basically defines your role in the game and your style of play.

"Bill isn't aware that a number of the Louisiana vamps, and even a few of the shifters and Weres, all have a horde guild on the same server where Bill is currently playing on the alliance side. If Bill won't pay attention to you in person, you can always confront him in the medium where he's spending most of his time these days. We'll start you off tonight, and then you can level up at your leisure. We'll invite you to our guild and give you a pair of headphones. That way, you can access our Vent server so you'll be able to talk to us without typing, like Bill's guild mates were doing when Duke Nukem interrupted their raid. It will help you learn how to play more effectively."

"And then you'll pwn Compton!" Pam exclaimed. I looked at her blankly. "Beat him down. Make him cry for his nineteenth-century momma. Make him fear and respect you," she explained.

Noticing the skeptical expression on my face, she added, "Honestly, Sookie, we'll have you melting faces in no time. For better or for worse, Bill currently values in-game skills. If you show him that you're a force to be reckoned with in game, he might be reminded that you're a force to be reckoned with outside of the game, as well."

While I had to guess that Pam's grasp of vampire psychology was more thorough than mine, there was still one major problem: I didn't have a computer. When I told Eric and Pam as much, they had already anticipated the problem and come up with a solution.

"You can use this laptop," Eric said, sliding it across his desk. "It already has the game loaded, so you won't have to spend the next sixteen hours wrangling disks and downloading the last 12,000 update patches."

"I can't just take a computer from you," I objected. "That wouldn't be right."

"It's not a problem, Sookie, I assure you. I've switched to a new system for use while I'm here in the office. It's an Alienware desktop with an overclocked Intel Core i7 975 Extreme processor, two 1.8-gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce video cards, and 24 gigabytes of Triple Channel DDR3 memory at 1333 megahertz."

I stared at Eric for a long moment. "Was that English? I have no idea what any of that means." Eric's computer looked like something off the X-Files set, and the lingo he had just used to describe it was as impenetrable as the later seasons' plot lines.

Pam decided to help me out. "It means, Sookie, that the computer he's letting you use is fine, but his is better."

And with that, I soon found myself picking a race: I'd be undead, which, as far as I could tell, meant mostly that I'd look like a zombie. I then picked a class: priest, since Pam told me I could "go shadow" and choose abilities like "Vampiric Embrace." I wondered if there was also a spell called "Artery Breach," but I managed to corral that thought in my head before it moseyed on past my lips.

The two Fangtasia owners let me know that we'd be on a player versus player, or "PvP" server, which would allow horde and alliance members to beat each other up whenever they happened to be in the same place. Playing on a PvP server was thus more hardcore than playing on a server where players don't build the fortitude and keen instincts that inevitably result from free-for-all brawling and wholesale slaughter.

After making a few final changes to my character's appearance—Pam made me amp up the boob factor, claiming I'd have a hell of a rack even as a fake zombie—I started questing with "MightySmitey," my new undead shadow priest. I had rolled my first hordie.

*************

At first, I didn't really get what the big deal about WoW was. Basically, it seemed like I had been conscripted as an errand girl for a bunch of really demanding screenie guys.

"They're called NPCs, Sookie—non-player characters," said Pam.

"Whatever," I told her. 'Screenie guys' has the same number of syllables. "All I know is they've got me collecting a zillion armbands from these scarlet jerks and delivering secret messages to people standing like 50 feet away. They really need a courier for that?"

It took me a while, but I caught on: I played with new spells as I leveled, checked out the Undercity, hopped on a big balloon that took me to another city called Orgrimmar, and got hooked up with some storage bags, gold, and gear from Eric, Pam, and other members of my new guild, Bloodsports. I was grateful for the help, and I went back to Bon Temps with my borrowed computer in tow.

I made steady progress with MightySmitey over the following week. Eric helped me through a couple of tough instances—he invited Chow, but the former Yakuza member said he wasn't signing on to baby-sit lowbies—and soon I found myself questing in an area called Duskwood. It was then that I had my first real experience with what it meant to be playing on a PvP server.

The zone's on-screen chat channel had been full of the usual mindless banter among players, but then it exploded: "PELT ALERT. TAKING OUT LOWBIES ON THE ROAD TO THE CEMETERY." "She's here again?" "God damn it. Switching toons."

Seems like an awful lot of fuss, I thought to myself—and then I saw her. Unfortunately, it was a little late, because she was a human rogue, and she didn't come out of stealth until she was stabbing me repeatedly in the back with her little pixelated daggers.

I died in about two seconds. I figured it was no matter; after all, it wasn't the first time I had died in-game. Then she followed me to the graveyard and killed me three times in a row after I resurrected.

"Who is this bitch?" I asked in Vent.

"What bitch, Sookie?"

"Her name is StealthyPelty. I keep trying to rez, but she's killing me over and over again. It looks like she's unguilded."

"I'll take care of it," Eric said simply. "Just stay dead for a bit, but rez every once in a while so she doesn't lose interest. The person playing that rogue is Debbie Pelt. She's a shifter, and she's the best-known ganker on the server. She harasses lowbies constantly."

"She's really good," I observed unhappily.

"She's really not," Pam said. "If she were any good, she'd take on people her own level. Instead, she hangs out in places like Duskwood, because people 45 levels below her don't present much of a challenge. Wait until Eric gets there. You'll see."

By that time, Eric had invited me to a group, and I saw him headed my way with his Death Knight, "Thorcue."

He kicked her butt, completely and utterly. The fight lasted a little longer than it had when she was killing me, but not by all that much, though Eric did mutter something about how Cloak of Shadows was bullshit, and he couldn't believe Blizz just let every rogue train that spell.

"Eric," Pam chided, "really. It's been two years since they made that change in game. I'd think you'd be used to it by now."

"I am. I'm used to it being bullshit."

The ganker known as StealthyPelty had now changed strategies. Instead of engaging Eric directly, she was just trying to get me over and over again, hoping she could kill me before Eric killed her. I was trying to foil her plot by adopting the advanced gaming strategy of running around like a chicken with my head cut off until she stunned me. The stun would leave me immobile, but it also left her wide open for Northman-style ass-whoopings.

"Alcide has joined the channel," said the mechanical guy on Vent who announces comings and goings.

"Hello, Alcide," said Eric.

"Hello, Eric, Pam... and Smitey," the new guy returned, obviously reading my name off the list of people in channel. "Look, I'm at Debbie's right now, and it seems she's giving somebody's alt a hard time. I'm really sorry. I'm trying to get her to stop, but she's on her fourth double bourbon, and it's a little hard to get through to her."

"That's not an alt, Alcide," Pam broke in. "That's Sookie, and Smitey is her main. Eric has taken a special interest in helping her level up."

"Oh, shit," I heard over my headset, and then, in a barely-muffled tone, "Jesus, Debbie, would you knock it off? You're hassling Eric Northman's girlfriend. Are you trying to get yourself killed, like in real life?"

"He's not my boyfriend," I objected, which was immediately followed up by Eric saying "close enough" and Pam pointing out that Alcide "might want to start using a push-to-talk key, champ," because we really didn't need to be party to his domestic disputes.

Our new visitor, deciding to ignore both of us women, addressed Eric directly. "Eric, I apologize on Debbie's behalf. She's leaving now," and indeed she was. I saw her skulk away reluctantly, if you can read things like reluctance into the body language of a cartoon. "I'll offer the usual compensation?"

"That will be fine, Alcide." And then, Debbie Pelt's boyfriend left the server.

"What was that about?" I asked.

"Debbie committed an in-game blood offense against one of our guild members," the sheriff explained. "Blood offenses, even in World of Warcraft, require compensation from the offending player or one of their representatives, if the player is a supe who is known to us. Alcide can hardly keep up with all the gold farming he needs to do to cover Debbie's abuses."

Huh. I guess they took this code of honor thing a little seriously in our corner of Louisiana.

In any case, it was time for me to log out and head to bed, so I thanked Eric for his help with the ganking ho and started to say good night, but Eric had a question.

"Will you come to Fangtasia again soon so I can help you in person? There are many things I would love to show you, Sookie."

Eric had a way of rendering even simple acts of speech as borderline pornography, and since I hadn't enjoyed Bill's attentions for a good three months, my libido was wound tighter than a new girdle. My voice stuck in my throat like hair in a biscuit, but I managed to croak out an agreement to come to Fangtasia on Thursday, my next night off. I wondered how this next visit was going to go. I wondered how many levels I could put behind my priest between now and then.

And I wondered what the hell Eric meant by "close enough" when I said on Vent that I wasn't his girlfriend. Guess I'd have to wait until Thursday to find out.

TBC