Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

It felt great to revisit the Matrix Online-verse and peek in on Sieges, the Merovingian Paladin and her brother Merrill and their "family dog" Morraeon, and it was even more fun to imagine Christmas in the Mega-City...

On the Sixth Day of Christmas, the Matrix Refugee fanficced for ye:

Redpills stealing a Christmas tree,
Harry Dresden for the holidays,
Frank Sweitz adopting a David unit,
One Chateau Christmas party,
One American Gods fic,
and An A.I. fic with David decorating his first Christmas tree.

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"Stealing Christmas"

by "Matrix Refugee"

Disclaimer: I don't own the "Matrix" series, its characters, concepts or other indicia, which belong to the Wachowski Brothers, Paul Chadwick, Warner Brothers, Village Roadshow Pictures, Joel Silver Productions, Burlyman Entertainment, Monolith, Sony Online Entertainment, etc.

Author's Note: This was a Christmas fic I'd wanted to write for some time, but there was never any place, even in my MxO storylines, to fit it in.

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( An ordinary morning in Sieges's construct office on board the Quinotaur... )

I haven't quite reached my goals, but it isn't phasing me too badly: I'd rather tie off some loose RP ends and spend time with my faction mates. I wish I had been able to find more play time this spring, but the kitchen renovation among other things made it very hard to jack in.

I'm not sad, but I am feeling somber: something that brought me a lot of joy and laughs and which allowed me to muck around in a universe I care deeply about is coming to an end. Not to say that I won't still write bits and pieces about my characters, but I'll miss the game itself; I'll miss the Mega-City. Granted, there are other worlds I am looking forward to exploring, but that won't be for a few days or a week: I think I need a bit of a break after the servers go offline, time to write, time to grieve, time to plan and look ahead...

The news is in: The Matrix Online is being shuttered on July 31st.

I'm shell-shocked from the news, but I'm not letting it get to me. I'll be spending the last two months trying to finish up everything I haven't done (Neighborhood contact missions, archive missions, etc.). And the gang of folks I'm hanging with are planning on what game we're going to migrate to.

It's still sad to see something I've enjoyed for four years coming to an end.

You've probably seen the running "Peanuts" gag featuring Charlie Brown and the kite-eating tree. We've had the odd phenomena of the light-eating tree. A couple years back, about three or four sets of lights went out on our big Christmas tree, so we had to buy some new ones after Christmas, take all the ornaments off on one side, take off the blown-out sets and put on the new sets.

The same thing happened last night with my little tree in my room. I came into my room late last night after a long session on MxO (the winter holidays hijinks are in full swing, and I've been leveling Sieges's brother by running the winter holiday missions, aka killing winter weather programs which look something like the abominable snowman; and since he's a hacker, ie. the MxO version of a mage/wizard, he's been melting them with code hacks, which look a lot like fire, so I was joking IC about using "code-fire" to melt the "yetis") and noticed the tree looked really dark. I went to take a look and found two out of the three sets had blown out. I just finished replacing them with working sets, and frankly, the second time around, the tree looks better.

And oh yes, ye draggies:

|| || ||

And that would be NaNoWriMo. I'm doing something I've been meaning to write for a long time, and that would be a novel based on the adventures of my main MxO character, Sieges. I've written quite a bit about her later adventures, but I haven't told much about her Awakening and her early days as a young Redpill, so this is going to be quite exciting. It's six parts original work, four part walk-through of some of the early missions and quests in the game itself. I'm just hoping Sony Online will recognize this and offer to make it a legit media tie-in. It would be great publicity for this under-rated MMO...

I only just got started, so there's not a whole lot of words just yet:

471 / 50,000 (0.9%)

Filmed and edited by my good friend Demedrian, and featuring cameos of two of my girls, Sieges and Morraeon (Sieges is the girl in the dark green blouse in one group shot, and Morrae is the Bettie Page-ish looking gal in the revealing black gown):

One of the reasons I was absent from here and from the Internet in general for much of last week had to do with some in-house bickering among the group I hang with in MxO. I won't go into detail about what went down, other than it had to do with ownership of a faction website. Unfortunately, I got caught in the cross-fire of the bickering and ended up having a huge panic attack. I ended up moving my crew and helping two friends move theirs once the smoke settled and the faction reorganized itself. However, there's this one guy who was in another faction I had been in, who was starting his own, which I'd toyed with the idea of joining. Now he's hounding me after I made my decision and finalized it. I'm trying to find a charitable way to tell this guy that he doesn't own me or my characters, and that I need to make the decisions *I* need to make in order to maximize my enjoyment of the game.

I swear, the psychologists who think you have to have scores of friends need to rethink their theories. The more friends you make, the more likely you are to have a crazy or two ...or ten in there, and since each of us has their own stuff to deal with, do we really need to expose ourselves to more?

I'm trying not to dwell on this. I'm trying to focus on good things like my current obsession with Su Doku puzzles (despite having number dyslexia and wierd logic, I'm impressed at how good I am at these things) or the new idea I have for an urban fantasy short-story, inspired by -- of all things -- a co-worker whose husband died in his sleep very suddenly of a heart attack seven months ago, but she's since worn out my sympathy for her because that's *ALL* she's talked about ever since. Up to and including, "I wish I could get him back", which lead me to think, 'Does she really want him back seven months after they buried him? What does she want? A zombie?'

Looks like my comp is in the clear. We (as in me, with WGAnubis coaching me over Xfire) ran a scan on the boot files; something odd did turn up, but it turned out that it just meant some optional component hadn't been installed. No big deal, but I'll admit, this is putting me off EvE for a while. But, there again, I got a lot to do in MxO, between farming for a snazzy new coat, preparing for a player event of my own, and gearing up for the Christmas/December holidays event, aka snow coming down,  snowball fights and yetis popping up randomly (usually in Westview). They're coming out with some lovely new formal clothes this year, including a warm-looking overcoat for the guys and -- finally! -- a knee-length skirt for the gals; Sieges, like her player, is a conservative dresser and she's been hoping for something like these.

Working steadily on my Christmas shopping: I just have to order a couple-few more things from Amazon.com now.

After yesterday's angst, I had a good night in the Matrix Online: I jacked in to hang out with my pal LinksLife, and a crew-member heard on the wire that Morpheus (or at least a sim that seems to mimic him) had turned up Downtown, so the three of us -- which soon became four when "Dragon-Guy" jacked in to see what was going on after I jumped him on Xfire and told him Morpheus had shown up -- rushed to see what was up...

And promptly got socked with a code bomb that triggered free-for-all fighting. Despite all the Zionites in the area, us Mervs didn't get shot/kung-fu chopped much (unless you count the EPN that jumped me from behind as I was leaving to help Dragon-Guy scout around; I was going anyway, but it just took longer to leave the scene).

So we wind up in another part of Downtown, and we're still flagged FFA when this exchange takes place:

Dragon-Guy: "Why am I still flagged hostile?"

Me: "Further proof of how damn mean you are?"

D-G: :: Smirks:: "Besides that."

I'm still chuckling over that exchange.