Andy Bain
2 hourglass cycles ·
So to take a break again from the final Polefix story, I thought I'd go back a bit, to I think 1983, or 84. Richard A. Bartle might confirm.
I was breaking into MUD, which was, back then, the sort of Warcraft we have today. Massively Multiplayer, Advanced AI (for the time), and hideously expensive. I was learning the ropes of what would become the internet. You can still play it, here: http://www.mud2.com/CMS/index.php
I had played Dungeons and Dragons, and really liked the whole role-playing thing, so when I signed up, my main character was called "Dextrus", who was female, and effectively, lawful evil, if you know the parlance of D&D.
I wasn't doing very well in the game, so I decided to use my feminine charms to beguile a "wizard" (one of the top players) called "Nemesis". This progressed quite well, and messages (through bulletin boards at the time) and through MUD were sent, and it sort of transcended the "fourth wall" a bit and, well.. we started having cyber-sex (text-based don't forget).
I do have logs somewhere of this (On that green and white striped printer paper btw!), but I would never publish them without the other person's permission of course. I *think* this might have been one of the first instances of this, especially when the other person really believed I was not my actual gender.
So this continued for quite a while, and became quite steamy. Phone calls were made, whereby I enlisted female friends to answer, to keep up the charade.
I got so into the game and concept I saved up the money (how I don't know), and went to my first "MUDMeet". It was being held in the house of an Arch-Wizard (Sherlock, I think he was called), in London (Can't remember where).
Now in MUD, as I learned subsequently, most people played their almost opposites. Great powerful Wizards were actually skinny and spotty adolescents, and dim and ditzy characters were played, well, mostly by the co-creator of the game, but this seemed to be the way of it. It was new, and breaking boundaries. I was, after all, playing a female evil (Really evil btw) character.
I was unfortunate that this was not the case with "Nemesis", who always seemed to portray a manly and powerful attitude.
I turned up at the door, and a *massive* black geezer answered.
"Hello, I'm Dextrus", I said.
There was a long pause.
"I'M NEMESIS!".
Luckily he didn't beat me up and we got along fine after that. Sort of.