Dagmar decided she might as well go find batteries.

A woman in a hotel room, Dagmar thought a few hours later. That would be a good place to start a story.

You would have plenty of issues to deal with right away. Who was the woman, and why was she in the hotel room? Where was the hotel? What was going on outside? Was she in transit, in hiding, on the phone, in denial?

Probably all four, Dagmar thought, and felt an uneasy pang of self-knowledge.

The sad fact was that every sad fact in the world was the raw material for a story. Fiction thrived on desperation, on dejection, on violence. Every time you stepped outside the door, you could find a new subject. Every book and newspaper became research. Every act, no matter how sordid, and every tragedy, no matter how pointless, was matter for fiction-and in fiction, all tragedy has meaning and no action is random.

So you start with the woman in the hotel room, Dagmar thought. And the reason she is there is that she has no place else to go.

The screen was full of chaotic movement, explosions, the clash of weapons. BJ’s fingers danced over the controller. The ice-cold Entropy Beast that hovered over the chamber exploded in a blast of flame, scattering chunks of frozen flesh-shrapnel and knocking down half a dozen Goblin Warriors and one Lawful Paladin.

“No,” BJ said, “you can’t download all of ‘Fly Like an Eagle’ as a ring tone.”

The Paladin sprang back to his feet and cut a Goblin Warrior in half with his Fire Sword.

“No,” BJ said, “it doesn’t matter if your friend says he did it. You still can’t. If you have the right software, you can convert a sound file into a ring tone and download it from your own computer, but we don’t provide that service.”

Explosions rocked the stone castle walls. BJ’s Elven Mage-who had the advantage of being invisible, at least as far as the other players were concerned-scuttled up the staircase and toward the glowing chest on the Altar of the Black Goddess.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said BJ. “Sorry I wasn’t able to help.”

BJ worked in the darkest, most depressing dungeon of information technology, that of customer service. He spent his hours aiding the inept, the insane, and a very large population of compulsive liars. It was that last category that drove him into a fury-couldn’t any of these people tell the simple truth? They chanted their mantra-“I didn’t do anything”-when it was clear that they had been ravaging their own software with one deranged decision after another.

Fortunately, Spud LLC-“Your source for user-friendly IT solutions”-didn’t much care that BJ ran his own little gold-farming projects on the side.

“Let’s try this,” BJ said. “Try restarting your computer. If you still have a problem, call me back.”

His Elven Mage was the first of the party to the casket on the Black Goddess’s altar. BJ knew that once he magicked open the casket, he had approximately thirty-four seconds before the Goddess Herself materialized in the chamber to lay waste to any intruders, whether they were invisible or not. BJ planned to be out of the room by then.

“Your email program won’t respond to the password? Indulge me for a moment-have you checked to see if the Caps Lock key is on?”

The Elven Mage touched the glowing casket. A balloon appeared in a corner of the screen. BJ moused to the balloon and typed in the Pre-Adamite spell that would open the casket. With the sound of flourishing trumpets-a sound that BJ hoped would be obscured from other players by the general sound of combat going on below-the glowing casket opened.

The countdown had started.

BJ clicked the Grab button, and the Elven Mage glommed the two items in the casket, a scroll of spells and the Orb of Healing. The spells on the scroll were low-level crap, but BJ could maybe trade the item for something more useful. The Orb of Healing, however, was the big prize on this level, and BJ wasn’t about to give it up.

The Elven Mage scurried down the stairs and snaked through the battling warriors. The Paladin was still cleaving Goblins in twain. The Dwarf Twins were fighting to protect the Enchanter, who in turn was casting spells, fireballs exploding with little mushroom clouds like atomic bombs, and the Halfling was hanging around in the background and throwing flaming bottles of oil at the Goblins.

If they were still in the room when the Dark Goddess showed up, they were all going to become extinct.

BJ didn’t much care-he’d gotten what he came for, and if none of his party survived, there wouldn’t be any argument over how to split the loot.

Besides, the Orb of Healing was unsplittable.

“Let’s try restarting your computer,” BJ said. “If you still have a problem, call me back.”

The Elven Mage ducked through the Gothic arch at the far end of the room and ran past the splintered bodies of two Guardian Gargoyles. Behind him, he heard the chiming chords that accompanied the appearance of the Dark Goddess, followed by the sounds of a lot of dying.

Stupid noobs, BJ thought. And when the Dark Goddess disapparated, he could reenter the room and pick up the gold and possessions of his deceased companions.

That Fire Sword would come in handy… for somebody.

BJ had just made anywhere between six hundred and a thousand dollars-real dollars, not the virtual gold pieces used in the game. More if he could pick up the Fire Sword.

BJ had played the Adventure of the Orb so many times that he could practically do it with his eyes closed. He could do it with perfect competence even when performing his customer service job. But though the adventure was by now tedious in the extreme, the tedium was worth it in terms of income.

The fact was that there were a lot of players who didn’t want to play the lower levels of online games like World of Cinnabar. They wanted to start powerful characters right away and were willing to pay-pay real money-for those characters and for powerful magic items like the Orb of Healing. It was against the rules of the World of Cinnabar for money to be exchanged for these virtual items, but there was no practical way for game administrators-or those of any other MMORPG-to police eBay or the many other auction sites.

The Orb alone, when auctioned online, would net BJ at least three hundred dollars. His Level Twelve Elven Mage, with all its loot and gear, would net him another three hundred. If he was lucky, the auction could go higher.

Not bad for the thirty online hours it had taken to raise the Mage to his present level-even if competition from a thousand Chinese boiler-room gold farms had depressed prices.

And besides, BJ’s old Chevy needed a new set of tires. And a paint job, but the tires came first.

BJ’s job with Spud paid him enough to cover his nine-year-old car and an apartment that smelled both of mildew and of his ursoid roommate, a UCLA dropout and fellow Spud employee named Jacen-whose parents had named him, incidentally, after a character in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

When he reflected on his apartment and his car and his job with Spud and compared it with what Charlie had, it made him want to sneak over to Santa Monica and slash Charlie’s tires.

If he could actually come up with a Spell of Invisibility, he would do exactly that.

But until then, it looked as if he was stuck with having to toil at the gold farm in order to make ends meet.