Hand of Glory
By DeAnna Knippling
Copyright © 2011 by DeAnna Knippling
Published by Wonderland Press at Smashwords
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Warning: Strong language.
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Table of Contents:
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Georgia’s brother didn’t hang himself for being gay or for being bullied about it. He was murdered over something that happened in the game—possibly over a mysterious hacker’s item called the Hand of Glory or Butler’s Candelabra, that lets you go anywhere, kill anyone, and steal anything. And now it belongs to Georgia.
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When you’re playing the game, you don’t think about ethics. You don’t think about right or wrong. Kill a unicorn? All right. Bring back eight unicorn hearts, still beating, never mind the drop rate. All right.
You do the job, and the next job, and the job after that. You level. You raid. You bring home the blues and the purples and you sell them at the auction house. You donate to your guild. You build up honor and reputation, both the kind you get points for and the kind that means when you say you’re going to show up on a Saturday night for a raid, you do it. You don’t wig out.
That’s the ethics of the game: don’t wig out.
They said Charlie finished the raid, wrote a suicide note, and hung himself off the back of one of the support beams in the basement. Meanwhile, upstairs, I was still logged on because I had some crafting to do.
Two floors below me, my brother was thinking, “Gosh, that was a great instance that I just ran with my little sis; we didn’t wipe once. What better time to kill myself for being gay?”
Bullshit.
Okay, the fact was, his Facebook was filled up with posts from his classmates at high school calling him a faggot and a queer and threatening to expose him to the world. Like he wasn’t already exposed. He didn’t try to hide it; the only secrets he kept were other people’s. For example, I wasn’t supposed to know who his boyfriend was, but I did: Gary Martin.
Gary was in my grade. I’d known him since we were little. In a world where kids waved at you their last day of school saying they’d see you again in the fall, then disappeared forever, Gary was a fucking rock. He didn’t live down the street, but he was within biking distance. I was kind of embarrassed at first when I found out he and Charlie were together, because neither one of them had told me. I felt like Gary didn’t trust me. The guy who swapped homework with me. The guy who lied for me about being at the library. The guy who told me to get my hair cut and stop staring at my feet and dragged me onto the dance floor to make my super secret crush jealous (that last part didn’t work as planned, but I got to dance with him anyway). Charlie, well, he always had his secrets; I’ve always spied on him.
We didn’t find him that night. He swayed back and forth in the basement from that piece of wood, on a piece of clothes rope. In the morning he didn’t follow the routine of getting ready for school. It was loud; the sound of not running out of hot water was loud. I was late getting out of the shower because it took longer for the water to get cold and Mom yelled at me and I was surprised: I had water temperature vs. time down to a science.
So I tore off downstairs to see what the fuck Charlie was up to. I ran down the stairs two at a time, thinking, “That’s it, this time I’m going to tell him I know about Gary.” I kicked open the door, because it wasn’t me who was going to get blamed when he moved out next fall for college if there was a hole in the drywall. The door hit the wall so hard it punched a hole through it and stuck.
By then he wasn’t swinging.
Oh God I fucking screamed. I don’t remember breathing.
The last thing he said to me was:
Hiromage: Don’t stay up too late.
MOMONONO: Not like I wasn’t planning to sleepwak thru my lcasses anyway.
MOMONONO: *sleepwalk through my classes
Hiromage: LOL Nite, sis.
Not exactly the words of someone who was planning to kill himself.
I skipped school. After the paramedics cut him down, I sat at the computer and logged in before I could think that maybe I should remote in instead, in case of fingerprints. I searched his computer and found the email that he’d sent out to everyone in his address list—relatives, ex-girlfriends (back when he was still trying to figure things out), mailing lists, coworkers from his summer job last year. It was too indiscriminate. When I checked my email later, I found a copy in my inbox, too.
The phone was ringing off the hook already.
I started dumping a copy of everything on his system over to my backup drive. I wish I’d left the keystroke tracker hooked up to the back of his box; I figured I was pushing my luck after three months and had taken it off a month ago.
It didn’t matter whether he’d done it himself or not; someone else had killed him.
His Facebook dingled at me:
Gary Martin: Georgia? Is that you?
Charlie Campbell: TTYL.
Gary Martin: What?
I didn’t answer. My heart went out to him, but I didn’t need to be leaving more evidence than I already was. You know what they say. If you don’t want the whole world to find out that you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be doing, keep it offline.
Charlie’s stream started filling up with messages of condolence. Shock. Hurt. The news was spreading fast.
I had to stop when I saw the email in his trash from the game admins: right after he’d logged off, they’d sent him an email saying that he’d violated his terms of service and had locked his account. He must have been hacked. I sent them a message, pretending to be him, claiming that someone had hacked his account, and they unlocked it within a couple of hours, wonder of all wonders.
Meanwhile, I got everything I could off his hard drive and Internet history: then I logged into the game.
I had a perfectly plausible excuse to do so. We’d been joking around at the time, but we had had an agreement that if anything happened to either of us, we were supposed to pass out the other’s online stuff from our Last Will and Testament folders. I never wrote mine. But Charlie’s, the whole thing was handwritten and stored in a cardboard filing box under his computer desk, along with some comic books of questionable value, action figures, a signed picture of Nathan Fillion, etc. I didn’t know how long I had before the admins found out he was dead and locked his account again, so I pulled out the papers and set them in front of me.
They were arranged like a diary, with some lines crossed out, dated, and noted: Sold for 160 gold. Gave to naked elf dancing on top of elephant statue, Remington007. G. hacked account and sent to self, the brat.
The last entry was from a month ago.
I bequeath the Hand of Glory to Georgia Campbell. Hot shit.
I looked through his items on Hiromage. Nothing named Hand of Glory showed up, so I followed the instructions on his gaming will, going line by line, until I had Hiromage taken care of (including sending MOMONONO a lot of gold; you gotta pay your estate lawyer, you know?). Then I switched over to one of his alts, Raffletix.
Raffletix had an unusual purple that I didn’t recognize, something for his thief to hold in his off-hand.
Now, if you know anything about the game, you know that thieves don’t hold things in their off-hands. They hold two blades, preferably daggers, and cut your throat with one hand while stabbing you in the back with the other. Filling that slot with something else is not a winning proposition.
Yet that’s what Charlie had done. It was a candle holder called “Butler’s Candelabra.” The description said it was supposed to reveal traps on your mini-map. Okay. I could see carrying it around and using it from time to time, but...
I went online and did a search for Butler’s Candelabra. Nothing. Then I did Hand of Glory.
Ugh. Okay, a hand of glory was a candleholder made literally out of someone’s hand, lit by candles made out of the rendered fat of their corpse. And not just anybody; it had to be a murderer or a thief. The hand could unlock any lock, stun anyone who you showed it to, and made the holder invisible.
You know, an item like that would be pretty valuable. I went back to the game and took Raffletix out for a spin.
Our guildies knew what was going on; I’d already given them the heads up and begged them not to tell the admins until I was done passing things out the way Charlie had wanted. I signed up for an instance with a pickup group, still carrying Butler’s Candelabra.
About midway through the dungeon, which I could have run in my sleep, I activated the item.
Suddenly, the chat dialogue filled up with text about me dropping so suddenly: I’d vanished.
Hm. The name of the item had changed, too—now it read Hand of Glory.
I conked one of the other members on the back of the head with the candelabra. His character froze, and the others asked him if he was lagging or something, but he didn’t respond.
His character highlight—which is normally green, for people you can’t attack—turned blue.
I clicked on him.
His inventory opened up, with an empty box and a button marked “Steal.” I riffled through his stuff until I found a nice cowboy hat, a total vanity item, and dumped in the box and clicked the button. Plip! It was gone.
I looked through my inventory and didn’t see it...until I noticed an extra tab underneath marked “Stash.” I clicked the tab—and there was the hat.
After I clicked the button, his character “unfroze,” and he apologized for his computer lagging.
In the real world, I stuffed both of my hands in my mouth to keep from screaming. Oh. My. God. They still didn’t know I was there. I clicked on the character again, and his highlight turned red.
I could attack him.
I did so.
It took longer than normal (me only having one knife), but I never broke stealth. Never. None of them had any idea I was there. The chat dialogue filled up with...horror. Watching their teammate (nevermind that it was only a pickup group and they probably didn’t know the guy) being cut to death, unable to defend himself, by nothing.
I giggled.
A couple of other things I should note: when I tried to look up the item in the online guides, I couldn’t find it, either under the name “Butler’s Candelabra” or “Hand of Glory.” And when I sent it to MOMONONO, I discovered another feature:
A list of character options.
At the top: Butler.
Second: Rixnaldo.
Third: Hiromage.
Fourth: Raffletix.
Fifth: MOMONONO. That is, me.
I selected Raffletix from the list...and suddenly I was Raffletix. At least, I had his character ID. I had his slotted items, as far as I could remember, and I had his skill set, which was different than mine. I switched over to Hiromage: MOMONONO was suddenly a mage, with mage robes and mage powers. Of course, I couldn’t play mages for shit, but there he was.
There he was. My brother’s character. As though he were still alive.
I can’t say why that hit me worse than anything, but it did, and I spent the rest of the day curled up in a little ball around the stuffed animals I should have given away years ago, or in the bathroom, puking out my guts. I didn’t get to Rixnaldo or Butler; it hurt too much to log back on.
The medical examiner ruled it a suicide, and they held the funeral too fast. Nobody came out and said it, but I think everyone in authority assumed that it was pretty normal for gay people to kill themselves after being bullied and teased. I mean, it was in the news all the time, wasn’t it? Okay, I can see where that might be a tempting solution to the problem of trying to figure out what had happened to Charlie, but they were wrong, and they should have listened to me.
Despite the screaming.
When I finally went back the following Wednesday, school was the worst. After ten minutes of condolences, people started to ask me who the bullies were who had tipped Charlie over the edge.
Even one of our guildies, Kylie, who happened to be in the same grade as me, just...assumed it. She walked next to me down the hall from English to Chemistry, holding an armload of books. “Was it Bullsworth?”
“Was what Bullsworth?” Bullsworth is what we called Todd Farnsworth, because he was a bully and had been for years.
“Who made Charlie kill himself?”
I rolled my eyes. “Charlie didn’t kill himself.”
“He didn’t? I thought he hung himself.”
“I don’t know what happened for sure. But it wasn’t suicide.”
“Well,” Kylie said carefully, “was it Bullsworth who did whatever it was that happened?”
I shook my head. “Charlie? Let Bullsworth get to him? Come on.”
Something grabbed me by my shoulder, hard. Felt like a piece of cement slamming down on me, spinning me around. Suddenly, I was looking up at Bullsworth. He was a big guy with a lot of black hair on top and hands like...uh...pieces of sidewalk. Played a lot of football. Smelled funny. Didn’t like you if you were a smartass. In Charlie’s grade when they were kids so he should have been a senior, but he was a junior now. We didn’t get along.
“Say that again,” he said.
I stood up as straight as I could with that weight on one shoulder. If I was going to die, I was going to die deserving it. “Charlie didn’t give a shit about your bullying, Bullsworth.”