Slow-Motion

Everything is lagging.

I turn my head. In slow-motion, it blurs across the screen. My cat dashes through the room;

you see: cat, empty space, cat;

you hear: some kind of loud noise, like thundering hooves,

then silence.

This is your brain on

drugs

dial-up.

This is what becomes of the real world when you have been living at a 16,043 latency for hours. Suddenly, you’re dead and wondering if maybe you lag-kited one of those crazy dragons into your living room.

Curled up in an over-sized chair, laptop balanced on my knee, I blink.

“What do you mean, ‘it’s snowing?’” I think, staring at a friend’s message. “Didn’t it just do that? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it just did that.”

I shake my head and return to trying to get across Honor Hold.

“Gryphon master…so…close…” Disconnect. “NOOOO!” I have been attempting this journey for ten minutes.

“I’m just trying to get back to an AH!” I type furiously to another friend. The text doesn’t even appear on my screen before -

Disconnect.

When I log back on, my buddy is still standing by the inn mailbox. He waves at me. I start to type a “c’ya when I have a better connection” -

Disconnect.

DENIED!! You have attempted an unauthorized disconnect! Die, bitch, die!

…

The power goes out.

My mother walks in and says, “It’s snowing.”

 

A Cozy Tavern

I am playing World of Warcraft. This means, of course, that I have no idea what is going on around me. Because when I am playing a game there is no “around me.” You could shoot me in the chest and I wouldn’t even flinch.

“It’s stopped popping,” Kalissa’s voice echoes somewhere from the abyss. “We should probably take the bag out now…”

“Uh…uh…huh? Yeah. Okay.” I glance at her without registering the motion.

I’m sitting on the ground, leaning against the mini-fridge. The microwave is right above my head and I am “keeping an eye on it.” You ask, which eye? The one that cares more about popcorn than Warcraft… Hahaha…ha.

Trying to open the bag, Kalissa rips it wide open, spilling burnt popcorn all over the floor.

“Smooooooooth,” I laugh and look back at my game.

…

My head snaps back up. “Is…that…going to set off the smoke detector?” She looks up in horror at the smoke detector three feet above her head. She stumbles away from it.

Phew, I think, we’re-BLEEEPBLEEPBLEEEEEEEEEP!

Not again. Oh God. Not again. PLEASE.

I clutch my hands to my ears. My first thought is, ‘Is my character on Warcraft stopped in a safe place?’ I pause.

I care more about Aoisa’s safety than my own.

My mind returns to the present crisis as I envision the building being evacuated. I envision the irritation, the questions, and the confession. This has to be a felony, this burning of popcorn in a crowded college dorm. My thoughts race.
Others on the third floor are beginning to emerge from their rooms to investigate. There is no evacuation, but they give me a scare. The story travels throughout the entire building in a few minutes. As I run around, trying to find an R.A., strangers laugh with me. “Burn some popcorn?” they joke. “Haha, yeah,” I reply and keep running. The conversations are all the same. And there are half a dozen of them.

I find an R.A., but he tells me that…well, they’re too frikin busy right now and we’re just going to have to wait it out.

Ehem. Okay.

I deliver the bad news to Kalissa and Tony. We hear the sirens coming up the road. We retreat down the hall, away from the noise. The noise stops. We return to the room and hastily clean up the popcorn on the floor, only to discover that much stepping upon has occurred. We’re partially deaf now, but there is a new noise…

“Is that…did I… Ha! I left the sound on,” I laugh as I turn my laptop around and see my character AFK-ing in the middle of a cozy tavern.

Two seconds later, there is a knock on the door. “Fire department,” says a deep, husky voice that knows it’s just popcorn.

The firefighter and a policeman make a quick investigation: they take a few steps, try to open the windows further but fail, and accept our profuse apologies. They leave.
“I was going to abandon you guys,” I tell Kalissa and Tony, “if we evacuated.”

“Yeah, we don’t blame you.”