Lidier's Game [Part Two]

Midnights were always a rough night for playing Dungeons And Dragons, yet it was an easy habit to indulge when she could not get any kind of writing done, no matter how much I thought about doing it. It had been many years since Lidier played as a pigtailed elf girl paladin with a scythe, but those days not writing were not one of those days. Most of my life like rolling a D20 for survival in general. With not every need to roll dice was obvious at every single moment.

When she was in her office, she would have to move different wires out of her way. For whatever reason manufactures did not managed to make the decision to make everything wireless, so my only options were to write about my life story away from the computer. She had already cut out of her life one website, that had the tendency to insert commentary while she was writing, rather than after the entire manuscript was complete. She had gotten into the routine where she slept on the couch to get the level of silence in her surroundings that she could personally feel comfortable with. But this had not always been the case, and that's why she generally arranged her deck and dice on her own terms. Not the terms of anyone else.

She made for her life specific terms, but generally people tended to ignore them. People like to make determinations such as "These are my boundaries, and you must obey them." But the way that they behave suggests that they don't have to obey others boundaries, only their own. You see it in current day politicians, but it's not a phenomenon that is unique to politicians. For one thing, even politicians sometimes feel like they have to obey others boundaries, if they're receiving a pay check from them. But when it comes to every day people, including if not especially those at art studios, they tend to ask you personal questions with impunity.

Whether it's inquiring about why it is you write about the things you do, and generally she didn't mind, except she preferred to ask them about them, since that's what she was there for. She indulged in other ventures elsewhere, whether that's individual paintings she painted, or in looking for subjects who wear Birkenstock clogs with thick wool socks, walking around at the local grocery store.

This was her story about life.

About everything, yet nothing.

When your growing up with a certain television program, you get used to having certain mysteries that never really get answered. Such as the mother of either of the main characters; for fighting television shows, this was almost to an epidemic scale, especially if they were an animation that came out of Japan. Thus for decades she gradually lost interest in that genre of animation, eventually preferring to play Japanese Role Playing Games rather than having to make sense of the plot as it was made available in serialized formats. She developed her own style of game play that was distinct from standard class building, preferring to get her abilities through grinding for many hours at a time. After a point she preferred grinding rather than the plot itself.

As a writer, she preferred other things that were more natural to her own variation of sexual fetish, something that the old fighting games and TV shows never managed to achieve, except for very brief kinks when she had an interest in girls with monkey tails. She also liked werewolf girls, but the only consistent interest she maintained beyond her teenage years, was her interest in vampires. She had had on line friends that made a big thing about what the definition of being Goth was, despite the fact that even they never seemed to pay attention to the fact that Gothic was a form of architecture, and also a genre of literary fiction for many decades beyond the Punk offshoot. Lidier was a classical goth, and not one of the Punk variety you say on the dance floor. This meant that, generally, despite the superficial quality of liking to where all black, she had nothing else in common with them. But she had a special interest that would freak out even the most hardcore of Goth Punks, a very literal sexual attraction to blood that carried her all the way through life. For Lidier, she longed for the girl decapitated on the guillotine blade.

But her interest was not out of spite, she simply wanted someone to kiss goodnight, with her soft yet sharp tongue. While reading Baudelaire, and drinking hot chocolate. She liked girls whose skin tone was that of the lightest of milk chocolate. And hair the darkest of dark chocolate rabbits. This interest, which for all she knew would never go away, except through death, were something that made her avoid dating until recently. Her recent move to the country she lived in now, was a matter of luck.

She carried a small hockey puck.

But it wasn't for playing with sticks.

Lidier, with rose in her hair and her skin the shade of burnt sweet potato, had blades in the pouch on her shin. Her stiletto blade in her leg pouch. She felt th winter sun lit under the blue skies, warming her face as she a leaf cut in two. The curls in the hair flowed like dark rose petals, long flowing Locks flowing in window. The curls in the hair against the winter sun lit under the blue skies.

She cuts another leaf in two.

In this specialized rogue like session, she had previously opted to wield a scythe, but had grown a preference for shorter bladed implements. She would navigate along the walls, careful to only walk through narrow corridors rather than through the wide open areas of the map: despite the areas being previously programmed to have a certain degree of randomness, there was some part of the gaming experience she felt seemed familiar. A certain part of that continued to be persistent regardless of the session she played. It seemed as if every time she entered a shop, the shop keepers would never speak a word to her. If it were a normal game, she would have attributed this to simply being bad AI.

Gone were the days when games were done in two dimensional sprites, gone were days when pixelized mothers spoke in vague lullabies to their pixelized les enfants. It was the era of virtual permanent death on the screen. Gone were the days when one could just barely scrape by with constant grinding and stat increases. When the goblins, giant cockroaches, and other vile things lurched at her, she bled real blood. For the game had been programmed with a different level of sensory perception. During the nineties, games were limited purely to the sensory details provided by graphics, and before this what your mind could imagine within the flow of chicken scratched notes.

Lidier remembered how her friends in special ed had poor hand writing skills, but this never stopped them from attempted to jot down whatever they could on the bits and pieces of paper they could find. This was before there was a thing called save points, among other tools of that trade. She remembered all the trouble it took, just to get some of them to even write anything down. Yet now she no longer scrawls notes, except for the notes she wanted to scrawl. Instead her hands went into other places, not all of which would aggravate the mind of sexual deviants whose minds were in the gutter.

She had found this game on an on line message board, a game that was separate from the others. The others were shelved together into a single thread, but this was had a thread devoted to this one individually, do to the fact that it was one of the few currently available that went beyond the normal sensory experience of normal rogue like sessions. Her blood, bled out from a cut by giant cockroach, dried it quickly enough on its own, but she had a spare bandage she found in a first aid kit. She pilfered the first aid kit from another dead traveler. Unlike in other games, where monsters simply dropped items. The game designer had a particular interest in making players do the hard work: selling the guts of the monsters, trading it for ZCash on the cheap.

In general things sold for much cheaper than they used to, back when games with procedurally generated dungeons and permanent death were still a relatively new thing on the market. But since the crash of twenty seven, prices jacked way high when Europe still traded in the dollar with the United States, yet now she traded in the Euro. And for how long this would last she was not even sure of this. Marine La Pen had won election after they had experimented with Macron for a while, whose popularity continued to sink after bringing up the possibility of a European Armed Service. It was very different from le Etats-Unis, that was for sure. It was only a matter of time before she would find out just how much.

She masturbated to girls in wooden shoes. Was a fine of different French painters, and when she would not plug her head in cardboard, would take much of her day wanking Daniel King's work. Among other painters of the period. The giant rats and cock roaches, though still not particularly appealing, did not make her completely lose her appetite for fetish subject matter.

The rain outside goes pitter patter.

Lidier disliked music from the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, because of a very definitive kind of sound quality. It wasn't specific to any particular band, and whether they were American or French bands never made much of a difference. The difference, if there was any, was regarding how the nineteen eighties seem to constantly feature synthesizers rather than actual professional instruments.

There were older bands that she liked, mainly ones that sounded vaguely folksy, but had enough decency to not be as folksy as possible. But with the music of synthesizers, it was entirely the flow of out of tuned music notes, the tune of songs that would make most bands sink. Not float, not tread water. Sink below the waves of distant ambiance, an ocean of acid and lye.

She downed the music with a slice of cherry pie for better songs, and a big tablespoon of salt for the worst. Ladies were bitches, men were bratwurst. And other kinds of sausage that would upset vegans. Unlike nineteen eighties music, she could never quite get rid of vegans, even among those nicer in the crowd. She liked chicken and apple sausage, and cooked it with Cajun seasoning: cayenne pepper, garlic powder, chili powder, among other spices in differing proportions. She stuffed her face fool of sausage, and other meat products. All to the tune of eighties Franco pop, with a side of Alsatian egg noodles and misplaced tomato sauce, under some vague pretension that her mother never could understand the appeal of the Alfredo paste.

She looked like a squirrel.

Her face stuffed full of nuts.