I Don't Have a Character

 Getting straight onto the computer after school wasn’t entirely feasible for Kelly. The return trip by bus was already a long one that put her back home at around 4:00 p.m. Kelly’s mom would then surely want to hear about how the school day went and ask if any homework had been assigned yet. Little household chores here and there were also expected to be done well before she got the chance to have any free time for herself. Usually, that was an order to clean her room. Kelly never really understood what her mom wanted from her. It felt like she cleaned and cleaned and cleaned every day, but her mom was just never satisfied with the way things were done. It was the source of a lot of fights and even more stress, and it always caused delays in her free time.

Eventually when all was said and done, Kelly found herself free to do whatever else she wanted. And today, she had told her friends that she’d be meeting them online.

The family computer was located in a small utility room which shared the same space as the washer and dryer. It was hot, cramped, and uncomfortable in there, and was pretty much the only room in the whole house that didn’t have vents for air conditioning, so sometimes she had to either open the small sliding window or turn on a fan.

Her parents had established quite a lot of rules for Internet usage. There weren’t too many limitations set on time spent online unless it meant it was going to get in the way of some other work she needed to do, or if someone else needed to use the computer or the telephone. But communicating with other people online was something that terrified Kelly’s mom and dad. Once when she was just a little younger, Kelly had used her dad’s E-mail address to sign up for an E-mail exchange where you pretended to adopt a digital pet alien, and that alien would interact with other people’s digital pets and make friends and have little alien babies. When her dad saw the E-mails, he lost his mind, thinking that he had been signed up for some horrific adult E-mail service, and so he scolded Kelly and then E-mailed the web site operator to demand to be removed from the E-mail listing.

He probably would not be thrilled, then, to hear that Kelly had signed up for her own free E-mail account, separate from her dad’s. She didn’t see herself needing to write a lot of E-mails, but there were parts of the Internet she couldn’t participate in if she didn’t have an E-mail address connected. That included the ability to use the messenger service that she logged onto in order to contact her friends.

Kelly shut the door to the utility room and scootched the computer chair as close as she could. There wasn’t much room to roll the chair forward or backwards in that little room. After powering on the large computer tower and the even larger CRT monitor, she navigated to the icon on the desktop to log herself onto the Internet. A window popped up showing the transfer of data from one computer to another, while at the same time the computer tower beeped and squealed as the built-in modem used the landline phone to connect her to the Internet. The process of waiting always felt like torture. Was the dialing process getting longer every time she did it? Surely she was just imagining things. Eventually, however, the beeping and squealing stopped, and she received a notification that she was now online.

Now that she was connected, Kelly went straight to the icon for Internet USA Messaging, a free service that allowed her to directly chat with another person in real time. Her parents were only okay with this chat service because Kelly always told them who it was she was chatting with, and most of the time it was just Aurora or Clara.

A tall, narrow window popped open on her monitor that showed Kelly a list of contacts she had previously connected with. This included Clara as well as Aurora, although Aurora had changed her username to something else ridiculous. “Cupidia”? What was that supposed to mean, anyway?

Actually, neither one of them was online at the moment. Both of their names were greyed out and appearing offline. Clicking on each one of them, they had set their own unique away messages. Clara’s was set as some kind of emo-sounding song lyrics.

***~~~ how was I gonna know you’d leave forever ~~~***

Kelly had no idea what this song was, and frankly she was too uncomfortable to ask.

Aurora (or was it Cupidia?) had an away message with a totally different tone.

YAY i r0x0rz! Leave me messages, OK???????? =^_^=v

Wow. This was barely legible. The away message included a word in all caps, a word that should have been capitalized but wasn’t, an overuse of punctuation, an anime emoticon, and l33t speak. L33t speak was something Kelly was slowly learning to understand over time, as it was associated with a very popular manga-like web comic the three girls had been reading together. It involved replacing letters of the alphabet with similar-looking numbers and symbols, and in some ways made writing between the three of them feel like they were speaking in code.

Suddenly, through the computer speakers came a loud creaking noise, like the sound of a door opening. An alert window popped up in the bottom right-hand corner of her screen. “Cupidia is online.” Oh, good, Kelly thought. She hadn’t missed her. She clicked her name, now labeled as “online” and illuminated in red, and a small chat window between the two of them opened up.

Kelly: Yo! You’re here!

The computer speakers chimed happily when Kelly hit the Enter key to send her message, notifying her it had sent successfully.

Several seconds passed. It was always uncomfortable waiting to see a message get sent back in return. Finally, Kelly could read at the bottom of the window a notification telling her that Aurora was typing her response. Several more seconds passed. It sure took her a while to write anything.

Cupidia: w00t! mom got off the phone. i waited so long T_T

It sure seemed like Aurora’s mom talked on the phone a lot.

Kelly: You heard from Clara yet?

Cupidia: nah but i’m sure shes comin since she’s the one who wanted us here

Sheesh, Aurora’s spelling and grammar was really inconsistent.

Well, this was gonna get boring really fast if they didn’t know when exactly to expect Clara to come online. Kelly had to come up with something to fill the dead air.

That’s when she remembered the web comic they were all reading. Kelly clicked on the desktop icon to open a browser window and navigated to the comic’s homepage. “Giga de Kyoto.” The comic featured the wacky hijinks of two Americans who’d traveled to Kyoto on a sightseeing trip but found themselves wrapped up in goofy events that wouldn’t let them leave. One of the characters hadn’t bothered to learn any Japanese at all before he got there, and on top of that he was also a huge tech geek, which made him feel extremely out of his comfort zone in such a largely traditional city. The author had decided to show off his tech speak by using this l33t speak (believed to have been around for a decade or two on the Internet already), which Aurora was now using in her chat with Kelly in abundance. And whenever something stuck with Kelly, it stuck hard.

To Kelly’s surprise, a new page had actually just been published today! Kelly watched as the image slowly loaded downward within the browser window and read along as it popped in.

Not a lot had changed. The characters were still stuck in Kyoto. Now, the goofy side character, Corto, was struggling to figure out how to buy food, how to communicate to people that he wanted food, and even how to locate food that he even recognized. The character tried yelling at people and making big goofy gestures, none of which communicated what he wanted, and even started scaring other people away.

Kelly got a good chuckle out of the comic and decided to share it with Aurora. She knew Corto was her favorite character.

Kelly: Check it out! Giga de Kyoto updated! Your favorite guy is back to his old stuff. XD

She copied and pasted the link to the comic in the chat window and hit send. This time, Aurora responded immediately.

Cupidia: oooohhh i’mma go seeeee o_o

Several minutes passed. Finally, Kelly could see Aurora was typing, and the message followed shortly afterward.

Cupidia: hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!~~

Well, Kelly thought, I guess that means she liked it.

It seems like just enough time had passed that Clara finally made her online appearance. The door creaking noise played, and her online notification popped up in the corner of the screen, just like Aurora’s had. Kelly quickly navigated around her chat window with Aurora and found the appropriate commands to invite Clara into the same group chat. It took a few seconds for Clara to accept the invitation on her own end, but now the three of them were online talking to each other in the same chat window.

Cupidia: Claraaaaaaaaaaa! Did you see the new giga de kyotoooooo??? O_O;

Clara: They updated? Sweeeeeet. I’ll read it when we’re done talking here.

Cupidia: OK!!!!!!! ^_^d

Ugh, what was that, an emoticon with a thumbs up or something? It barely looked like anything recognizable.

Kelly: Glad you got on Clara. I thought maybe I’d already missed you.

Clara: Nah, my little bro was throwing a tantrum and mom wanted me to be the one to do something about it. ~eyeroll~

Kelly had no frame of reference, but sometimes from the stories Clara told them, maybe she was glad she didn’t have younger siblings of her own.

Clara: ANYWAYS
Clara: So I’m already working on a drawing for you Aurora
Clara: YOU’RE WELCOME

Cupidia: YAY! i cant wait

Clara: so that means we gotta start talking about what we’re gonna do with your character next, Kelly.

Kelly paused for a minute. A character? All this time she thought this was just gonna be some drawing of her. You know, the way she usually looks and dresses. When did this become a character?

Kelly: Oh, I dunno about making a character or anything. I guess it’s ok if you just draw me like whatever.

Clara: Nuh uh, not good enough. We gotta make you something that looks like the both of us, too.

Kelly: Wait, Aurora, do you have one of these character things?

Cupidia: yeppers! I already gave clara a description of everything i wanted. I’m gonna have wingsss!
Cupidia: oh, but not like Clara’s wings. Mine are like a fairy. hee, hee, FAIRY!

What in God’s name were they even talking about? When did these characters come into existence? Do they even have a backstory or anything? None of this was making any sense to Kelly.

Kelly: Okay, well this is really sudden. I don’t have a clue what I want to do.

Clara: Hmm.
Clara: OK
Clara: I have an idea.
Clara: Aurora, give her the link to the chat.

The chat? What chat? Weren’t they already chatting here? Was this something different?

Cupidia: i was waiting for you to ask!
Cupidia: ~poof~

The next message Kelly received was a link to a web site she was unfamiliar with. Under most circumstances, she usually followed the advice of her parents to never click links to places she didn’t already know. But since she trusted her friends, she clicked the link anyway.

What loaded in a new browser window was a rough fan-built page, titled “AxeClaw.” What was this for exactly? There were some images loading in that she recognized. It looked like a bunch of kids she had seen before. Where had she seen them?

“Mutamals?”

“Mutamals” was a book series that had grown in popularity over the last couple of years. Kelly had read only a handful of them, but she knew that both Clara and Aurora were extremely interested in the series. The franchise featured a bunch of kids who were about their age who had to save the world from intruders from another dimension, and the only way to stop them was by transforming into animals. So, somehow these kids had to disguise themselves as dogs and monkeys and cows or whatever, and then go find the portal to the other universe, shut it down, and protect the planet from invasion. It was crazy, and Kelly found it a little difficult to keep up. But for the most part, she was able to hold a conversation with her two friends about it.

Anyway, the web page looked like somebody’s fan site dedicated to “Mutamals.” And in the middle of the screen was a small green window where a chatroom was embedded. “Enter Username.”

Cupidia: this is where I spend my free time! I talk to a bunch of other mutamals fans and then we all make up new characters and role play with each other!

Oh, no. Role playing? Was this some kind of a game? Did it have rules? Kelly was worried she was about to get in way over her head.

Clara: Anyways I think you’ll start to flesh out something I can draw for you if you start hanging out with us in here. You don’t have to come up with anything to wild just yet. Just hang out in the chat tonight, and we’ll slowly figure out what your character is.
Clara: ok, see you there, friendo! ^_^

What? Were they both gonna stop talking to her here?

A minute or so passed. Nobody sent a new message. Did they really expect her to just join a bunch of strangers? This was another thing Kelly’s parents had warned her about. She was expressly instructed not to enter any chat rooms. Talking to strangers on the Internet was the thing they were worried about above all else.

At the same time, though, Kelly was now extremely curious, and she wanted to be in on whatever it was her friends were doing. As it stood, she sometimes felt like she was barely hanging on to being part of this group.

Kelly stuck her head out the utility room door to look around. It looked like her mom had just laid down for a nap, as she often did when she came home from work. And knowing how far away her dad worked, she knew he probably wouldn’t be home for at least another two hours. The conditions were just right for taking risks.

She clicked the box in the browser window to enter her username. It’s not like she had anything creative to type in. She still didn’t have a character or whatever. So it would just have to be “Kelly” for now. With only a brief moment of hesitation, she hovered her mouse over the Enter button on the screen, and finally clicked.

The chatroom popped open.