14 What are you doing?

Michael looked around at the brightly coloured neon lights and rows upon rows of computers. This had to be the most impressive looking cyber cafe he'd ever seen.

"Pretty cool, right?" Jeremy beamed.

Michael nodded, his eyes wide and mouth still agape. "This is so cool."

"I thought you'd like it. It hasn't officially opened yet, so we get to hang out by ourselves for another few days. Let me introduce you to someone. Hey, Ben!" Jeremy waved at a tall young man in a golf shirt behind the counter. Ben looked up and rolled his eyes as Jeremy approached.

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"Hey Jer. Back again, are you? Hey Valeria. How's your brother?" Ben greeted Jeremy and Valeria. He then noticed Michael still standing near the door. "Who's the new guy?"

"That's Michael. He's in a bunch of our classes, and seems cool. Michael, this is Ben, my cousin. He's in charge of this shop," Jeremy introduce the two.

"Hi Michael. Nice to meet you. And yeah, Jer, I AM in charge. So don't think you can just bring whoever you want and play for free all the time, okay?" Ben spoke a bit sternly to Jeremy before faltering under a pleading look from the latter. "I'll make an exception today since we aren't actually open yet. Consider it 'product testing'. We still haven't put all these machines through their paces."

"Well, we'll definitely do that!" Jeremy said, grinning. He motioned to Michael and made his way over to the closest bank of computers with Valeria. "Have you ever played Adventure Eternal, Michael? If not, we can get you a trial. Valeria and I are working on a specific quest, so we can't help you out, but by the time you get through the starter zone, we should be finished."

Michael followed him over to the row of computers and took the third one. "I haven't," he replied, "but I've always wanted to." Jeremy came over and turned on the machine and logged in. He signaled at Ben, who rolled his eyes and tossed a cardboard-wrapped plastic card over to Jeremy, who stumbled a bit but caught it in the end. After glaring at his cousin, Jeremy proceeded to peel off the top of the package and the card slid out.

Michael quickly created an account and entered the key on the back of the card, then found himself at the character creation screen. "Valeria's a Paladin, and I'm a Bard, so pick a damage dealing class, like a Rogue or a Mage. Ooh, or a Warrior - that'd work too, and you get to swing a huge axe! So domineering!" Jeremy began to get excited as he guided Michael through the interface.

Though he wasn't familiar with this specific game, Michael still felt that choosing another melee character would probably get in Valeria's way - something he had a feeling would be a very bad idea. That narrowed his choices to the Ranger, Machinist, or one of the casting classes - Summoners and Warlocks used pets that could still gum up the works, so Michael opted for the Mage class. Besides, the image of slinging huge fireballs at his enemies, or shooting bolts of lightning out of his fingertips like a villain from a movie seemed really appealing.

Michael opted for an idealized version of himself as the look for his character - with the beginning gear provided, he looked a bit like what Michael hoped he'd look like in his 20s - long dark brown hair, tall, brilliant green eyes, and a knowing smirk. All he'd need was a pair of glasses to pull off a perfect scholarly air. After finalizing his character selection, he was dropped in the starting zone for Mages - the apprentice dormitory at the wizard tower.

The introduction sequence introduced a bunch of missions through which the apprentice mage would learn their basic spells while performing menial tasks, like fetching a bunch of firewood to get the first level spark spell or mopping the main hall to get your basic water spell. After about 90 minutes of this, Michael had collected all of the entry level spells and was working his way through the quest chain that would open up the main world.

It was at this point that he realized that he should probably call the house so that he could let his siblings know not to expect him til dinner time. He tabbed out of the program reflexively and made his way to the front desk to ask to use the phone. Ben placed it on the counter and continued on with his work. After a quick chat with Anne, Michael returned to his computer, only to find that things seemed to have gone awry while he was away. He sighed, looked at the error message on the screen, and opened a browser.

---

Ben finished up the last of the paperwork needed before the official opening on Saturday and looked over at the three teens. Jeremy and Valeria seemed wrapped up in some sort of high-stakes encounter, but when he saw what was on the new kid's screen, alarm bells started ringing in his head. "What are you doing?", he asked rather loudly.

Jeremy jumped a bit and turned, seeing that Ben was walking over to the computer next to him. However, a terse "Focus!" from Valeria to his left had his eyes back on the screen just in time to interrupt an attack from the boss they were fighting. They were at the tail end of the fight, so it only took another minute before the boss went down, at which point he returned his focus to Ben, Michael, and the computer they were crowded around.

"What's going on?" he asked, more than a little concerned since he'd vouched for his friend. "When I tabbed out of the game accidentally, the application crashed due to an error with the video card. I just checked their site online for a patch, tested and was in the middle of applying it when Ben came over," Michael explained as he continued to stare at the progress bar on the screen. Seeing that the loot on his screen had been collected, Jeremy decided to tempt fate and pressed the same key sequence on his computer. Sure enough, the application immediately crashed and up came an error dialogue box, causing him to grimace. "Yeah, that's not a great user experience. How's the patch?" he asked.

"Almost done, but it should be fine. Based on the description on their site, and the error in the box, this should do it," Michael replied, pointing at an open notebook next to him with a hastily scrawled message that matched the error dialog still on Jeremy's screen. "There we go, done. Just have to reboot," Michael said, quickly keying through the process and returning to the login screen. He looked up at Ben and Jeremy expectantly. "Can one of you two do the honours?"

Ben looked at Jeremy, eyes still full of consternation, and begrudgingly logged in to the system. Michael thanked him, then proceeded to log back in to the game, at which point he promptly attempted to reproduce the crash. After multiple transitions in and out of the application, there were no complaints from the graphics card. The patch seemed to have done the trick. Michael nodded and grunted in satisfaction and continued with his quest.

While he was doing so, Jeremy and Ben were looking at each other. After the former raised an inquiring eyebrow at the latter, who shrugged as if to say 'do what you want', he initiated a conversation with his friend as casually as possible. "So, that seemed pretty easy, I guess?", he said, feigning a lack of interest. "Sure," Michael replied, his eyes never leaving the screen, "Nothing even to troubleshoot - just patch and move on." Jeremy nodded, a glimmer of mischievousness in his eyes. "Yeah, just patch and move on. Mind doing it on my system?", he continued. "Sure, just let me hand this quest in," Michael replied.

A few minutes later, Michael quickly repeated the steps from earlier on Jeremy's machine. The two cousins had been looking over his shoulder the whole time, and after he finished, they seemed to have another silent conversation between the two of them before Jeremy grinned and Ben sighed and turned to Michael. "Can you run this on the rest of the systems?" he asked.

Michael was stunned for a moment, before he smiled and replied. "Sure, and I can even run the rest of the needed updates, and give them a once over before the official launch. My hourly rate is $25. I normally subcontract through my parents' company when I do this kind of work, but we can handle it directly if it's only once or twice."

The two cousins were a bit surprised by the easy response. Then, they both chuckled. "If you're good at something, never do it for free, right? I can definitely respect that. Fine - we'd wanted to hire an IT consultant to maintain the systems, anyway. We can consider this a trial, and if your credentials check out, I don't see why you can't take on that role part-time. Can you do this before Saturday?" Ben asked.

Michael looked around and did a quick count of the machines. It helped that the systems were all identical, so he could put together a script that could handle most of the work and then deploy it across the network - something he'd done a couple of times before. Considering the upgrades to the bathroom he wanted to do, and the likely cost of ingredients - plus some new hardware he'd been eyeing - Michael decided he could do with a bit of extra money. Slowly, he nodded. "Yeah, I can come tomorrow and Friday, that should be enough time. Considering all of the systems, it will probably be four or five hours work in total. Does that work?"

Ben agreed, and they shook hands. With all of that sorted, Michael returned to the game and the task of advancing his Mage.