Teenaged Elven Romance and Lemony Snicket

Sometimes life, or your own pigheaded stupidity, throws you a curve ball and you land on your rump. At times like these, you can pick yourself up and carry on, or navel gaze and flee into reminiscence and dodgy mixed metaphors. And, gentle readers, must you even ask which I choose?

Readers of a certain, um... social strata shall we say... who grew up in the Internet age will know what the term Play-by-Post RPG is. If you do, congratulations. You are a nerd, and your IQ probably approximates the age you will be when you lose your virginity. For those who (ostensibly) don't know namely those who sat at the cool table in the cosmic lunchhall that is life, or readers of a more mature vintage, Play-by-Post RPG refers to the practice of carrying out a role playing game on a forum, usually one which has nothing particularly to do with RPGS of any sort. It's a sort of collaborative story, and one in which strict rules must be observed- one cannot simply dictate what another person's character does. The players tend to be early teens nerds, and older varieties of saddo, who are probably harmless. Probably. Your typical introductory post goes like this

Name: Arwaearianarein (lots of vowels make it elf like)
Species: Elf (Lord of the Rings, not Santa-esque. Everyone takes this as read.)
Age: 293- 17 in human years (because your online persona is ALWAYS older until age 35) Background: Parents killed in a troll raid, suckled by a caring hyppogriff/centaur couple. Has abandonment issues and hates trolls with a fiery passion only mirrored by the flames which issue from his uber cool weapon, The Blade of Leet, and the magic fireballs he can throw because clearly he's a master elf magician who also knows ninjitsu.
Appearance: Flawlessly handsome except for that scar on his face which makes him tragically attractive and gets points for backstory synopticity. Eyes are sapphire blue/emerald green/amethyst purple etc etc or alternatively, change according to his mood. Hair is silver/ ebony.

Arwae-whatever walks through a forest. His wise eyes look left and right, seeing the magic in everything, and contemplating the mysteries of the universe as he simultaneously hunts his prey despite being a totally peaceful guy who would never hurt anything. He knows this because he is tortured daily by the faces of his dear parents who died when he was a baby, yet he still remembers them. Suddenly a figure steps out from behind the bushes. Arwae-something calls up a handful of terrible fire, draws his hand back to throw it.

RPG etiquette dictates that you don't decide what happens to someone else. So our elf person can throw a fireball, but must wait for the other person to respond in order to see whether he hit his mark, and if so, what damage was sustained. You can't make someone else do, feel, write or say anything. To do otherwise is the cardinal RPG sin- Godmodding. Bear this in mind when I say that, in my extreme youth, on the forums dedicated to Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, I had an RPG play by post romance.

Yeah. I know right?

And of course I knew it wasn't real. I am not a six foot seven half elf with the power to control water, and I have never met a silver haired orphan elf princess called Merenwen who gets captured on a regular basis. And yet, something about our choice of characters led me, and whomever was behind Merenwen, to a weird sort of romance-by-proxy. Despite my best efforts, I remain a romantic at heart, and Merenwen and I dominated the thread. What started out as an interaction between six or seven RPGers rapidly declined into an embarrassingly public and prosaic outpouring of adolescent swooning, and others slowly stopped posting to let us lead our story to the conclusion.

Our characters were confused about their feelings for each other, pulled in different directions. They swapped amulets, defeated enemies in sync. Real life hands sweating, I had my character proclaim his love (incidentally, the only time I've ever said this first in any sort of relationship) by the light of a waterfall, as she sipped a drink he had just conjured for her and thought about her slain parents. Her post took a whole twelve hours, and when it came, it was filled with hesitant reciprocation, outcry at the futility of life, and finally acceptance of the epic love between our two creations.

The bitch godmodded our whole first kiss actually, but I let it slide.

Saddly, inevitably, she was kidnapped. My character tried to find her (I was still a good year shy of my first girlfriend and eager for vicarious smoochies), but she blocked all his magical enquiries. I understood- she wanted to be pursued. The one remaining RPGer and I set out to find her, while she indulged herself in spirited repartee with her jailer (the guy who killed her parents donchaknow?). He killed himself off in disgust halfway through the quest, and I carried on solo.

The details get hazy, and the forum is gone now anyway, I've looked. We won of course, there was even a wedding. I distinctly remember that she described her wedding dress as featuring "A spectacular ruby suspended by a golden thread in the well of her breasts".

Of course, you're thinking, Merenwen was probably a 60 year old man anyway. Well, she wrote like a girl. But then, so did I.

We, of course, swapped MSNs, chatted a little, but the magic just wasn't there without Merenwen and whatever my avatar was. Still, I wonder. If she was who she said she was (minus 2 years, the standard addition online) she'd be around 18 right now. We both wanted to be writers. Someday, perhaps, I shall read a book, and the style will remind me of the girl behind Merenwen. Someday there will be a ruby suspended in someone else's bosom, and I will know that it's her.
Or not. She'd never recognise the way I write now

. Still, there's always the chance she remembers me every now and again, when things get complicated in her life. She wrote about me in a diary, I seem to recall. There's a chance I take up a little of her brainspace every now and again. After all, she was a romantic, angsty, loser-nerd. And as I know well, that's not something anyone ever really walks away from.

I really don't know what brings on these contemplative, embarrassing moods. Perhaps I should drink more.