I'm really terrible with spelling. This assignment was difficult because I really wanted to check to see what errors I hadn't caught during proof reading. Hopefully I caught many of them before posting. I went over reading each line and was surprised at how many errors I had missed just rereading the story. I hope y'all enjoy.


Meeting Rocky

I've always loved puzzles and brain teasers. If I don't feel challenged in my activities it doesn't feel like it is worth doing. I know that's why I never did well in school. It never felt like a challenge, but that is another story.

I had been playing games on Popcap and Yahoo and other sites for a while when I first saw the ad on the Penny-Arcade site. Players wanted for Beta testing of a new online game. The ad proclaimed, "Puzzle based play set in a pirate setting!" fittingly called Puzzle Pirates. My interest was peaked, but I knew that my older computer already struggled to even play games like the SIMs. My dialup connection took forever to even load websites, let alone be able to download a large client and then run the game online. I muttered under my breath and navigated away from the site, quickly forgetting about the ad.

Several months passed. The winter holidays had come and gone and Valentine's Day had just passed. I made plans to spend the weekend up with my boyfriend, Scott, at his college apartment in York. I had made a number of trips over to his college since we'd started dating, but very few of which I can remember most of the details of. Life is strange in that sense. The drive over was uneventful. We spent Friday evening and Saturday morning laying around watching movies and playing video games.

I was laying on his bed playing my favorite Zelda game while he talked with a few friends online. I had just beaten the Fire Temple in the game for perhaps the billionth time when I glanced over at his screen. "What's that you're playing?" He glanced over at me and said, "Its called carpentry. It's part of some puzzle game I found this week." I sprung out of the bed and leaned over his shoulder watching. For some reason it looked familiar. The game he was playing looked like a cross between Tetris and a traditional jigsaw puzzle. I watched as he moved the pieces around, "Oh that looks like fun, let me play?"

He kept playing, "No. You'd get too addicted to it." I stood with my hands on my hips, breathing down his neck. "Please? You know how quickly I get bored with a game once I figure it out." He ignored me. While he was playing a screen popped up over his game. I glanced over it, "Which one are you? What does Booched mean?" "Jaggedfel and I don't know," He replied as the screen went away and the puzzle was visible again.

Obviously he didn't want me to play the game. What about it did he know that I didn't know? I lay down again and tried to focus on my Zelda game. Honest I did, but when He got up to use the bathroom I rocketed off of the bed and quickly sat down at the desk. I started moving the pieces around, trying to figure out how to rotate them. "Use the mouse wheel." I glanced over at Scott standing in the door way grinning at me. "Sorry hon! I couldn't help it!"

He plopped down on the bed and started playing my Zelda game while I stared intently at the computer screen, when suddenly a different puzzle popped up. "Hey! What's this? I didn't press anything." Scott chuckled and said, "That's called swordfighting. See those little sword pieces that match the colored blocks? Use that to remove the blocks from your screen. Use the space bar and arrow keys to move and rotate pieces. The reason that puzzle has popped up is cause You're doing something called Pillaging. It's how you make money in the game."

I spoke more to the screen than to Scott, "Cool. So wait, the other people on my side are other humans? What is this game called anyway?" He sighed loudly, "Yohoho Puzzle Pirates." No wonder it was familiar! Suddenly I couldn't wait to get home and install the game onto my own computer.

I confess that I stayed up that night playing. I know I shouldn't have driven home Sunday afternoon, but I did. As soon as I got home I turned on my computer and started downloading the game. While I waited I started to read documents on the game's website about how to play. Six very long and annoying hours later I held my breath as my computer finished installing the game client.

"Welcome aboard! Yer pirate needs a user account." I clicked on the button to create an account. Once I had filled out the standard form of account name, email, password, I clicked the button marked "Set Sail!" A screen popped up, "Create your pirate!" I started by changing her hair and skin around till she resembled myself as closely as possible. I needed a name. I sat there thinking for a while before it came to me. If Scott was playing as Jaggedfel, I could play as Jainasolo. I held my breath as it checked for the availability of the name. Suddenly the screen changed and the character I had created was standing on an island.

The little tab on the right side of the client showed words I only understood half of. "Guava Island in the Emerald archipelago." By clicking my mouse on the ground, I found my character could walk around this "Guava Island." To my surprise, as I moved for the first time, a white thing came walking over to me. It didn't look like a human character, and its name confirmed my suspicions. "Sheepish Rocky" followed me as I walked around the island. When I stopped moving around, he stopped as well, sometimes in front or behind me, usually next to my side. As I sat in front of my computer giggling, white text appeared in the chat area. "Sheepish Rocky says, "Bah." It was love at first Bah.