━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Chapter 1 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
It all started the night I got home from visiting my grandmother. I had taken the weekend to visit which led to me spending a night for two days and enjoying the warm morning and cool nights. The warm breeze of that last night I would be there again felt so warm, like a blanket cuddling you almost as if it wished to suffocate you with heat, however it wasn't all that bad as some would say or express, I rather enjoyed the feel… Like a lost lover coming to wish me farewell or more like I knew would never exist. Sad as it sounds, I never really felt loved in whatever relationship that presented itself to me. You could say it was more like a lesson on being in a relationship that I never wanted yet, I was always being volunteered as the extra, ironically it has been that way since I was young and I never said a word about it nor complained about it either. On the other hand, let me tell you a story of how I fell in love with someone I never knew I could truly love so much.
The smell of chicken being fried made its way into my room as I laid there on my bed finally smiling as I hummed with excitement as my mouth watered and my stomach flipped as I imagined the crunchiness of the fried chicken, I could hear my mother screaming for me to come and eat, I dashed out my room and into the kitchen with a smile and eyes that looked as if they could devour the world. My mother spoke with a smile and twinkle within her eyes that told me she was genuinely happy.
"Grab some plates and help me serve the food while I finish checking on the chicken, I don't want to serve you's raw meat,"
I smiled and nodded as I did what I was told and began to set the plates for my mother, father and me. She poked my side and laughed and she spoke and looked towards me.
"Go tell your father that dinner is done and that if he doesn't put that laptop down and get off the game and come to eat that laptop will be in two pieces."
I couldn't help but laugh at the stern look and scrunched forehead that appeared upon my mothers face as she mentioned that 'game' with disdain. It was funny because I never really understood why she hated the game so much but oh well, I guess each person has their own likes of games. I could surely tell you that DarkOrbit was not one of the games she liked at all.
A few months and a year had passed by and I had finally come home, back to Puerto Rico, the place I felt was like a prison more like I felt that I was a prisoner in my own head. Fake smiles fake laughter, although that was who I was before I met him... Him, the person I would one day love. Two years had passed by once again and my father one day had asked me if I would like to play a game with him and me being the gamer that I was and still am to this day, I said yes. My dad laughed and told me how to reach the site and that it is an online game and I was excited to actually play the game that had my fathers attention and see what was so good about it. My father and mother and I had finally moved back to Chicago to be closer to the family we had and one could say it was the best the feeling in the world but why did it feel like it wasnt, usually one would happy about the situation but it was, so I laid there in my room just wondering if it was the best idea.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Chapter 2 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I was excited the moment the game appeared upon my screen as I could hear the music of the game as well playing in the background, my dad sat in the living room as he played and gave me a quick review of the game itself. I had to make a login as well with an email and password to secure the game information so I was not to lose it, on the other hand I had finally finished and logged into the game as it prompted me to choose between MMO, EIC or VRU as I sat there for a moment trying to choose my father had appeared at my side asking "that I join EIC" as he did and so I did just that. I was okay with it because I had no clue about the game or what it really was about, I was considered a noob being my first time playing the game and I was okay with it. To my surprise, I actually liked the game and what it was about. I know my dad liked the game since he was interested in space games and what not, I was also the same kinda.
It was my fourth month playing the game and I could say I was finally getting the hang of it, I was still a noob with only level 5 flax drones and that was that, no one knew I was girl at the time but then again I had no friends on the game except my dad who at the time barely played anymore, I remember I was in 5-3 collecting palla to finally learn how to spine gates. Day after day night after night I was popped by enemy clans or ppl from VRU or MMO and it sucked, like I mean I hated it and I was so close to quitting the game till I met my first friends on the game, Scout was the first person I met and seemed pretty chill most ot the time and then I another friend named Chillz who was also pretty chill and laid back, always drinking but the man was one hell of a friend. It didn't take long for them to figure out I was a girl and for them to invite into their discord to chill in voice chat with them and so I did and honestly after that day I was enjoying the game more often and I wanted to play more and more and on some occasions I did, there were nights I stood learning how to play the game and I began to meet new people. One being Cujo aka Speedbird, that man bullied me to the point where I had to legit learn how to fight to defend myself and honestly it was a blast, I would pvp with cujo almost every night till I was able to take down his first configuration and I did finally. Around that time one of the most shitty clans existed ENVY man them people thought they were the greatest clan but they had failed to realize there was a clan that was growing and making a name for themselves, BOO clan appeared and it was a done deal, envy was no more.
You know those guys you always hear about or you hear everyone else talking about them, well that's how I found out about this one person in particular that went by the name of Chris or Supreme, he was the leader of BOO clan and they reigned before merge happened and they were the best, now okay I know you're like here's where all the juiceness happens and i'd be lying if I said yes but sorry no juiceness yet flokes! I don't know how to explain it but have you ever liked someone you never met? It's like the moment you hear his name like your whole body begins to feel light and you start to feel hot and your eyes get glossy and I could keep on describing but anywho let's get back into the story.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Chapter 3 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
It was him, since day one that I heard about him that I had a sudden feeling I had to get to know him or at least someday talk with him… It's an attraction that I never felt before and if I was to be completely honest all that mattered to me was to at least try and get to know him for who he really was, on the occasion I would usually see him in global chat or as others would have called it world chat, it's like wanting to be noticed by your crush and never being noticed only to be left watching from the sidelines and hoping one day you would get noticed but it would never happen.
I can remember a time I was in 5-3 and I was flying around picking up palla, ironically at that time I didn't know about the pet nor a chip that you can add onto the pet so it can collect palla for you as others would do or work with you, but as I was saying I was picking up palla and reading world chat that I noticed BOO clan was in search for ENVY and within a blink of an eye I noticed my life going down on my ship and what can you expect from a noob like me at the time, I froze but I didn't die, true story! It just so happened BOO clan saved my ass that day, and you wouldn't believe who I saw fly by that I felt my heart flutter once I saw that ship's name, it was Chris, and queue me fainting as I say this! I can honestly say I fangirled hard to the point Scout would say. "Really Quinn, chiiilll."
Coming home I remember I was slightly sleepy as I took the bus from work, I stood waiting by the train station as I watched for the next train. I heard a small noise that reminded me of my ringtone which came from my phone but it was so cold that night that I couldn't care less to even reach for my phone within my pocket, the cold breeze could be felt all around as it blew as I would take each breath of air, it was the first night of snow and did it really snow. I stepped onto the train with headphones on listening to the music I was playing as my phone started ringing, cutting off the music that was playing but I could only smirk as I sat down on an open seat that was available as I saw my dad's name appear on the screen. I picked up the call as I could hear my dad say.
"Hi beba, are you almost home? Your mother has the food warming up for you so by the time you get here you can eat and relax but."
If I were to be honest, I already knew what my dad was going to ask me, I had a feeling it was either him who sent me a message or my friend Scout. And I can say right now I smiled as a thought went by if a certain person would be on and I was more than excited, feeling energized as the sleepiness left me with just the thought of him being there on the game. I made it seem like I wasn't interested in playing the game but I knew better and so I spoke with boredom laced within my voice.
"Sure dad, i'll play the game with you I guess. I think I got a message from Scout anyway asking soooo, yeah i'll play i'll be on."
I had cut him off rather quickly since I already knew the question he was going to ask, my phone soon vibrated and I looked towards my screen with the confirmation that yes the first message did indeed come from my friend scout as well as the second and as I thought he was also asking if I was going to play the game tonight. So as I had spoken with my dad I quickly sent a message to scout letting him know that I would be on the game as soon as I got home, ate and showered.
I started to laugh as I heard chillz's daughter giggling so cutely as I began to focus on the training pvp match I would have with scout and chillz almost every friday and saturday. It started with me going against scout going all out and chillz would randomly jump in and out of nowhere and attack us both or just one of us. This went on a lot but it was fun and then we started to finally do free for all, it would start off as a 1 vs 1 and after a few rounds it would jump to a 2 vs 1 or a free for all as I soon started to get the hang of it. They were both like family the more time I spent with them learning how to hunt in a group of three but soon after that group of three changed to 4 then more and we would go hunting for bases or whoever we saw as an enemy. Soon after I knew some of the other players from different clans and got the chance to hangout with them.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Chapter 4 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I was sitting in my living room watching a horror movie. Yes I'm a horror fan anyone who knows me will tell yah I was cuddled into the corner seat of the sofa with a blanket and pillows, it was my day off and I could care less about going out that night. It was cold and dark and honestly to me it was the perfect night to sit back and relax. However, as the usual my phone rang and it was a discord call, Scout who had asked me if I was willing to join a clan and join there discord and for a moment I was kinda iffy about the subject, I had already been in 5 clans and I decided to just leave since some people on that game were just hella cringe.
A friend who I met on the game borrowed me one his accounts and I felt like I had all the power in the world, I wasn't a basic space pilot anymore I was a major and this time the ship I played on was built to fight and I loved it, I had so many names that I would switch to, Pariah, Quinn and a few others I can't really remember. The last name i actually stood with at the end of the day was Quinn and it was with that name that I had met a person by the name of Mariah, we had bumped heads a few times here and there but nothing would come out of it and till this one night I stood trying to figure out what was it I had wanted to do. I was bored and was waiting for scout and chillz to come game but to my surprise one other was with them and he went by the name of reaper, I had met him a few months earlier as well as another friend of his who was really chill and funny to hang with, sadly it was so long ago, we were flying around but this time I wasn't in my ship, I was in a friends ship and I was cloaked popping peoples pets in 4-4 and to be completely honest I didn't notice whos pet I had locked on and took the advantage to pop it. So I did what any sane person would do, I went for it and little did know I wasn't the only one cloaked, there were two others sitting there, I had popped the pet and before I knew it I was being popped by two that sat there cloaked, one name I didn't recognize but the other I did and my face was completely red the moment saw who had killed me, my heart was racing and for a moment I wanted to laugh, however I didn't because soon after I received a whisper from Mariah that said i'm never alone so I had whispered back that's good to know. I figured that would be the end of the conversation but it wasn't and it ended up with me telling who I really was and that I was in a ship that was borrowed to me, she didn't seem like a bad person so we added each other as friends once I had gotten on my ship, once she realized who I was once I was in my ship she had sent me a whisper.
"I've seen you around and sorry if I popped you, I was really just doing what they told me to do and having fun :)"
It didn't bother me at all because I was a noob and I was basically still learning more about the game itself and ships I was flying so I told her.
"Its okay im still a noob on this game lol so it's no probs xD"
We messaged each other for a bit till I was finally getting off and I said to her in a whisper cya laterz, it was also around this time that I didn't realize Mariah and Chris were a thing and at that time I didn't bother to ask but if you think I failed to notice that she was rocking BOO clan at the time then your right.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Chapter 5 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I was in my room laying on my bed in a voice chat on discord hearing music and talking with scout and chillz, I was trying to figure out some personal issues I had at the time and and I couldn't put my finger on it or how it started but it did, I hear chillz laughing and so I asked him a question.
"Chillz why do you sound so cheese, sounds like someone just gave you a cheese burger, with yo cheese ass bruh "
"Quinn you need to hop on this game asap I got someone who's an ez kill, trust me Quinn you can't go wrong you got this and if you do go wrong me and scout got you no ifs no whats no buts cmon quinn get on game."
Now mind you through that whole conversation that me and chillz are having, Scout appears out of nowhere and starts to laugh as this man was literally quiet the whole conversation.
"Yo chill, how you gonna put Quinn against that man, he's just gonna bully her."
Sooooo, if you're me and you've been around me to know I don't back down from a challenge then you would already know I was already logged into the game and ready to go…. However if you also know me then I'm pretty much sure you know my reaction to who I was supposed to pvp against, I stood stuck trying to figure out who I was apparently going against because I didn't recognize the ship nor the name. I felt lost till I heard chillz ask me if I was ready and I said yeah.
We stood going back to back a few rounds and it was 2 to 4 and I was trying my hardest and at the last minute I cloaked healed up with my pet and my solace ability and I was back at it and the only reason I won the last round was because he passed right on top of my smart bomb and it was done, 3 to 4 was the results and this person whispered me and said gg. After a minute of just flying around I went to world chat and realized that the person I had just finished doing a couple rounds of pvp was actually cujo, so out of nowhere I seen he was on and I decided to say " hi Cujoooo xP " in world chat and I couldn't help but laugh at the conversation I was reading as he said hi back. I had closed world chat for a second and when I reopened world chat I noticed someone had said hi to me and I noticed that it was Mariah but the more I scrolled down I saw that she had misspelled my name and that someone else had corrected her and it made me laugh. So I typed in world chat.
" Hiiii mariah :) " At that point I didn't think she would say anything back and I could hear scout and chillz going against some people in 4-4 for the base, that's when I noticed that someone had whispered to me and it was her mariah, so I sat there and read her message.
"Hey quinn how are you, I have a big favor to ask you"
"I'm doing good, how are you? ask away"
In more ways than one I didn't get a good feeling when she asked me for the favor, it felt like I was being thrown in a pit with a bunch of wolves and I was the bait, if I were speaking honestly about the situation it really wasn't that bad once she told me what it was.
"So I want to know if you could go out with nightwatcher, he's always third wheeling it with us and he needs a girlfriend."
The funny thing was I knew who nightwatcher was, I had no attraction towards the man and therefore my answer was no, for a split second I got distracted with something else and totally zoned out on what mariah had asked me before and for a moment I said the funniest thing ever.
"So you want me to go out with chris?" I waited for her reply which took a moment. The moment I saw her reply had me laughing so hard that I choked on the water I was drinking,
When I say I choked on my water, I'm telling you I was really choking but it was also how I had imagined how her face was when she read my message to her Evil smirk YOU can say what you want but at that time she had someone I wanted and yes, I KNOW it's not right but Sue me he was someone I wanted to get to know and honestly I saw her as rival even though she really wasn't because I at the time still did not know him at all, I had only heard about him from other people but it was enough for me to feel attracted to him on level I couldn't understand at the time and still can't explain till this day.
Chris' Point Of View During This Time
During this time that you have been reading about I had no idea that Quinn liked me at all, I didn't even know who she was at the time. At this time I was in a pretty toxic relationship that at the time I thought was good, however now that I look back at that time I realize that the relationship was so toxic that I feel it was a waste of about a year of my life. Time in life is priceless to say the least, I daily wish I could go back and change this, however that is not possible. Even all of my friends that I was talking to at this time all told me that I needed to end this relationship, they all saw that it was hurting me but I just didn't want to believe them at the time because at the time I felt that the relationship was good, however when I look back on it now that was nowhere near correct.
I was running a clan called BOO in Darkorbit at this time, my clan was owning the server we played on every single day. I absolutely loved running my own clan, my members would depend on me to set up the fighting and all of that. Not many people have the ability to run a 50 person clan in a game, and I was just happy that all of my members respected me, and would listen to me no matter what I had asked them. Each day we would get about 10-15 people on a night and do these things called bases, they were pretty much little battlestations for our clan and they would give you power ups the longer you kept them alive. This was pretty much the only fun we had during this time because the clan we would fight didn't want to fight just for fun, the only way they would fight is if we had bases. However this was all before the server merge, once the merge happened I secured myself an alliance with the top clan on west, and my server was east 3 at the time. Together we wanted to own the server merge and be the best of the best. Therefore this only lasted about a month, then something I never would have expected happened. About 90% of my clan had left the game because they saw that this new fall clan and my clan were just owning everything the server could offer. We didn't have many fights anymore so my members just got bored and decided to leave the game. I only had a few people during this time that would still login and help if we needed.
About a few months after my clan had decided to stop playing, my few members I still had joined Fall with me, and I became one of the top 4 leaders. The leaders were Chevron, Intense, Twizz, and I, therefore I still felt as if I was running a clan which I absolutely loved. Fall clan took me in as if I was already in their clan for years. I was also making Youtube videos of all the fights we had, I grew a small fan base of about 250-300 people which also kept me motivated to keep playing, let alone all of the other people that watched the videos too. The fights I would upload were normally fights like 20 people versus 20 people, these were the fights I really enjoyed, I used to be really into 1v1's however they got boring to me after I started group fighting more. The group fights really took you and your members being really coordinated, and this was a really big part in me liking the group fights. It actually took skill to coordinate a group of about 20 people. It was like a part of the game that was new to make and a part of the game I really liked. I really enjoyed making these videos, it felt that I was just making memories that I could always look back on if I ever wanted to. I was still in a relationship with Mariah at this time also, which was just getting worse and worse, I was constantly getting talked into buying her stuff even though I knew it was wrong. I had never met the girl in person and for me to just keep buying her stuff it was like I was being used, which is not how any relationship should be.
I would say about a month or two has passed now, I had finally broken up with Mariah. My life was finally starting to go back to normal like it should've been this whole time if I just had listened to my friends about her, but it is what it is I can't go back and change that now. I would say about another month or two has passed now and I started talking to this girl jaguar, we didn't really connect on anything other than games so I figured we wouldnt become anything more than friends, but I was okay with that. I wasn't looking for a relationship at this time nor did I want to get into a relationship, I at the time just wanted to keep myself focused on things that would keep my mind off of the breakup, so the one game we played a lot was Destiny 2. She was the one who introduced me to Destiny 2, and still to this day I play the game. We were friends for a while, but then a friend of mine named nightwatcher was trying to get together with her. He was trying to buy her things like a ps4, games, ext. I was trying to tell him not to do this and then she just disappeared and still to this day haven't spoken to her since. During this time I also had first met Quinn, we didn't really talk about much other than music, she also didn't make it known that she liked me at all, so I still had no idea. I just thought that she wanted to be friends and such, not really anything more. I don't really remember much during this time, this was still about two years ago from when i'm writing this. I believe all that we really talked about was music, and we connected a lot within the music.
Another bad thing happened at this time also, when I was smoking with my neighbor I suddenly had a seizure. While we were smoking I was standing up around a glass table, and then everything in my eyes had turned grayish and fuzzy. After this happened I ended up waking up on the floor and I fell through the glass table. This was one of the scariest feelings i've ever felt in my life, when I had woken up on the floor my mom was right next to me trying to wake me up. When I saw the look on her face I knew something bad happened, she looked so scared it made me even more scared. After I woke up from on the floor after the first seizure, I got moved to the couch and when I sat down I suddenly went into another seizure. During the first seizure my mother had called for an ambulance, so that was on the way. This second seizure lasted for about 2 minutes from what I was told from my mother. Once I woke up from this seizure I knew something was really wrong, seizures really run in my family a lot. Once I got to the hospital they told me that they had to run. In conclusion they said the seizures were most likely caused from dehydration, ever since that day I haven't had another seizure, which I am really happy for.
After all of that happened, I had stopped playing Darkorbit and was focusing on school, and work. This was my first full year in college besides the few classes I took while I was in highschool. College full time was not the easiest thing to do, I struggled with the math class alot, I still to this day could not pass that class even after I took it 3 times. I was in college for computer technology however it was not what I expected it to be, I had to end up taking these programming classes that really didn't fit into what I wanted to do as my career. All of the other classes I had to take were easy enough for me, but it was mainly the math classes that I had to take in order to graduate that really killed my whole vibe on college. During the summer break I was really thinking a lot on if I wanted to try the math class again, and I ended up deciding to not go back and just focus on my job. I tried so hard in that math class the 3 semesters before and even tried tutoring and it just was not working. Also since I was taking programming classes instead of the things I wanted my career in it finally made me choose to not go back. This was a hard time for me because I really wanted to finish college, however it was just so hard that I couldn't do it. Thankfully I was accepted into a program in my 8th grade school year that paid every cent for college, so I really didn't lose anything moneywise, but I still feel bad to this day that I could not finish it. When I finally told the program instructor that I didn't want to go back the following semester, I broke down really bad. I would say I got really depressed for a while, at least a few weeks. I had just felt I failed in life at this point, and it was not an easy time trying to overcome that, I still to this day feel like I was a failure at that point in my life, however we all move on, and I have since moved on. Life is all about the ups and down whether you like it or not.