Intervention

Disclaimer: If you don't play World of Warcraft (or any other online RPGs), you probably won't get this. Proceed at the risk of feeling like you wasted your time at the end.



"Honey, can i talk to you?"

"Just a sec, i'm almost done with my dailies," i replied vaguely, not even aware that it wasn't my husband addressing me.

We were sitting in my living room together, playing WoW, as usual. I glanced over at her to see if she was almost done, when it finally sunk in that it was not Jim's voice speaking to me. I turned around to find both of our families gathered behind us, myriad emotions playing across their anxious faces. I turned back to my screen to send Jin a tell.

You tell Jinsha: Hey, Rob and your kids are here.
Jinsha tells you: Rly? What do they want?
You tell Jinsha: Idk, maybe you should ask them.
Jinsha tells you: Just a sec, boss fight.
You tell Jinsha: Kk, i'll tell them you're afk.
Jinsha tells you: Ty!

I decided to go and sell before finding out what they were all standing behind me for, when i remembered i'd gotten some BOE blues that i wanted to put up on the auction house and some greens i still needed to disenchant ("i'm running SO low on infinite dust, and . . . .")

A less-than-subtle-throat-clearing reminded me that i had company. I decided to sell later.

"Jinsha is in a boss fight, she'll be right with you," i said matter of factly to Rob, turning my office chair to face him. I hoped that he caught the tiny note of irritation i'd intentionally coloured my tone with.

"Yes, i can see that. And her name's Angie, not Jinsha."

"You know what i mean."

Our screens simultaneously went dark, and Angie's head jerked up, her face a dark storm of rage. Jim stood there with the plug of the power strip dangling from his hand, annoyance and sadness warring on his face.

"Wtf, babe?!" i demanded.

"This is an intervention."

"For what?!"

"Your WOW addiction," Liz answered sadly, "You don't even tuck me in anymore!"

And with that introduction, the litany of grievances began. One after another, each of them unloaded their pleas, their complaints, their tears, and then, finally, their judgments. They'd already booked our stay at a rehab facility for recovering WoW addicts.

"But i'm not addicted," Angie burst out next to me, cutting Ryan off in mid sentence. I looked at her, sitting in her computer chair in her comfy clothes and her Depends. I realized i, too, was wearing Depends.

Huh. Maybe they had a point.


They dropped us off the next day.

"Gay," Angie remarked as the car pulled off.

"Inorite," i responded, picking up my suitcase. I wondered briefly how long i'd be in that dreary looking building we stood outside of.

"Look, it's not just a rehab facility, it's a Weight Watcher's fat farm too!" she noted.

"Oh, well that's a bonus."

We checked in and looked around us. Wandering aimlessly throughout the facility were people talking into unplugged microphone headsets; raid planners were furiously carving their schedules into table tops, occasionally blurting out demands that the DPS "pick it up"; PvPers threw random items of clothing at each other, yelling "I got you! That was a crit, you're a dead motherfucker!"; people were walking slowly and jerkily down hall ways, obviously accustomed to slower connection speeds. Angie looked upon these in pity.

"Lag sucks," she lamented. I /nodded at her.

"These people are freakshows, let's room together," i suggested. She /agreed. We set off to unpack our things.

As i was putting the last of my clothes away, annoyed at the people who drifted in and out of my room doing ridiculous things, a small girl wandered in. She was about four years old and so skinny she looked like she hadn't eaten a thing in her entire life. She followed Angie around the room, telling her, "I'm so fat. . . i can barely stand to look at myself. How can you stand to be in the same room with all this fat? How can you even LOOK at me without throwing up?!" She burst into tears, and i said "Ditch the kid before i kill it." Angie murmured comforting things to the little girl, then shoved her out the door and slammed it behind her.

"Why are all these people so fucking irritating?!"

"Right?! i can't wait to get out already. Let's get something to eat, i'm starving. I only got to eat 3 points this morning," i complained.

She looked at me, horrified. "We can't go to the dining room! Don't you remember?? We have to go through The Gauntlet to get there!"

"Oh, right, i forgot!"

I crept to the door, opened it a crack, and peered both directions down the hall way. It looked clear enough, though extraordinarily dreary. The walls were institution-green, and the paint was peeling off in small patches. The windows that lined the hall were grimy. I thought briefly that if you rubbed away some of the grime, you'd be able to count the dirt layers like tree rings to determine the age of the last cleaning. After a moment, i realized this was extremely odd, given how crowded and loud it'd been in the facility up till just now. It smelled like a trap, but my stomach was growing steadily more aggressive.

"The coast looks clear," i offered.

She looked at me like i'd just grown another head. "Of COURSE it looks clear! That's what they WANT you to think!" Her exclamation was punctuated by a sharp protesting sound coming from the vicinity of her stomach.

"You have stomach aggro too," i pointed out. She didn't reply.

I slowly opened the door and crept outside. Nothing happened. I took a few steps down the hall. Still nothing. I started jogging slowly down the hall when i got the feeling i was in danger. I broke into a dead run as people burst through those ancient windows and began attacking me. I started fighting them off, but i couldn't take a hit worth a damn and started losing health rapidly after i killed the sixth one. "HELP, ANG, MY DPS SUCKS ASS!!!" i screamed. I realized these weren't even mobs, they were just other residents trying to get to the dining room.

"I'm coming!"

She landed a crit heal on me and helped me take out the remaining people. We staggered into the dining room, bloodied and exhausted.

"Killing people is excellent cardio," she remarked.

"Good resistance training too," i agreed, noting the other triumphant Gauntlet runners stumbling into the dining room. I looked past the other would-be diners and saw with a sinking feeling that dinner would be a buffet.

"Great, what a waste of time and effort," i grumbled, "I hate buffets."

I sat down at a table to order our beverages, and Angie called back to me, "It's even worse than you thought. . . come look at this." I went over to check it out, and all hope for a satisfying meal left me. There was about 800 varieties of sugar free Jello, cut to look like regular food.

"Great. I'm going to the bathroom," i muttered as Angie heaped some yellow corn-on-the-cob shaped jello onto her plate. I walked across the room and opened a door with a large W C painted on it, and was immediately confused by what i saw. There was no toilet; just a slotted bench sitting on a tiled floor with a large drain in the center. On the wall facing the bench was a shower head that ran continuously.

"What the hell is this?!" i fumed as another bruised diner walked past me with his jello selection piled high on his plate. He looked inside and looked back at me.

"Didn't you read the door? It's a water closet, what's it look like?"

"Where's the toilet?"

"No, you just take off your pants, sit on the bench, and do your business. The water will rinse it down the drain."

". . . but where's the toilet?"

"There aren't any. We can't have toilet paper, or people will eat it and get fat."

"What do you do if you have to. . . you know, Number Two?"

The diner looked at his plate of jello and back at me, and burst into hysterical laughter as he walked away. It took me a minute to understand what was so damn funny.