Sweet Romance13 min read
Broken Avatars, Real Consequences
ButterPicks13 views
I scrubbed at my wrists until the soreness throbbed away and rolled my neck, then went back to the canvas. I had been in the studio all afternoon and into the night—no break, no dinner—until my back announced itself in aching pops. When I finally padded back to our dorm, the hallway was quiet and the little balcony at the end smelled faintly of rain and instant noodles.
“Ugh,” Hazley said, flopping onto her bed when she came in. “I can’t take the mood in here lately.”
“I noticed,” I said. I balanced a steaming bowl of noodles on the railing and watched the steam scatter into the chill. Hazley rubbed her eyes. Across the room, Hazley and I had been the easy laughs: gossip about classes, swapping sketches, sharing deadlines. Now every time Hazley’s roommate returned she would pull the curtain closed and—“sob quietly,” as Kiara had put it.
“Is Wu—” Hazley stopped herself.
“I don’t know the details,” I said. “Give her a few days. She’ll come out.”
“She’s gone off to teach for two months, you know,” Kiara said, half to us, half to herself. “Left this morning.”
We all breathed the same sigh.
My phone buzzed. It was Flynn again. He always sent messages like fireworks.
“V—” the chat began, full of exclamation marks. “You HAVE to try Jian Xiao Jianghu. Look at my endgame set! I’ll bring you in.”
“I’m busy,” I typed, and closed the phone when it buzzed again. I had been busy thinking and avoiding certain old stings. Half asleep, I scrolled through a folder of screenshots from a time I never wanted to revisit.
They were crude. The gang’s screenshots of my avatar—my white robes turned crimson, my good trinkets scattered like crumbs across a battlefield map. I remembered the way Juliana had typed that last taunt and how Lillian had laughed on voice chat. They had called me names—cheap things, worse things—and then they had plundered everything I had. There was one line that had a sting I still felt: “You think you’re getting him? Please. He was only playing with you.”
“No,” I had wanted to say. “He promised me. He said he’d always—” But the chat log proved otherwise. When I logged back in that night, someone in the world channel wrote: “泡阮 was my woman,” and then the account vanished. My hands shook for days.
“Forget it,” I told myself. I had erased that account and sworn it off, focused on class and commissions. I painted until the world narrowed to color and line. But yesterday Flynn’s name flickered in my inbox again, inviting me back. I ignored him. I thought of Hazley’s roommate and of Kiara and Emmaline who had decided to log in tonight just so we could be a small army for a friend.
“You’re coming, right?” Kiara told me, holding her laptop open and squinting at character faces. “We’re doing it for Hazley. For Wu. We’re going to be her backup.”
“I’ll help you set up accounts,” Emmaline said, grinning. She always seemed to know the exact shade to set off anyone’s features.
“Just make sure it’s a new ID,” Kiara said. “Flynn told me, ‘Change your name—nobody will know you.’”
I let the idea in like a cautious animal. If the world had a new map, could I not move across it unseen? I drew new lines on paper, then deleted them. I said, “Okay, I’ll create an account. I’ll watch.”
That night we gathered around a thin screen for the cinematic introduction to Jian Xiao Jianghu. The animation was cinematic—swords gleaming, deserts and moonlight, the white-clad heroine whose robes split into a thousand whips of light. We all laughed like kids.
“Which class will you pick?” Kiara asked. “Do you want the whip, like her?”
“I’ll be the whip,” I said before I could overthink it. “How about—‘Where Red Stains Belong’?”
“Perfectly melodramatic,” Emmaline said.
“Don’t be melodramatic about names,” Kiara warned. “I’m Ringing Bells—so cute.”
We split across the classes. I chose a silver-whip path and called my avatar the name and turned it into a desktop image for practice sketches. Painting saved me. While I worked in the studio, the others argued about skill trees and cosmetic drops.
“You guys are obsessed,” I muttered, but I added them, accepted invites, and let a small, new world creep into my life.
Our first night in the game was gentle. We learned mechanics together, joked in the party chat, and found ourselves pulled into a random public event. Some low-level boss went crazy with a buff, and the nearby map filled with whoever was logged in. A few players laughed at my clumsy spacing. One player—Blade-Blood in his id—typed, “Noobs get eaten.” I snarked back. We died. A stranger with a clean name called out coordinates and invited me into his party. I accepted; he escorted me to safety and then left without a fuss. His name was Nash Mori. He added me: “Call me if you ever need a hand.”
“Good guy,” Kiara said.
A few nights later, things changed. I was logged in late, idly doing a fetch quest when I found an NPC—an elegant silver-vested woman—who offered me a hidden mission. “Choose,” she said: a plain bead, a task to hunt a name I’d never heard: Summer Yarrow. The bead said nothing. The reward was a mystery.
“Why would you hand someone a quest like that?” I whispered as my cursor trembled.
Curiosity is a greedy animal. I accepted.
The next message in the world channel exploded. “Who triggered the hidden event?” players spammed. People wanted the secret revealed. “Which genius found it? Tell us.”
I opened the box and found a meaningless bead and a prompt: “Slay Summer Yarrow; return to me.”
I frowned. I mapped the name to nothing obvious. I ground through the next level of missions and ran into a pack of elite enemies. I died more times than I wanted to count. Then someone—three strangers—banded together and rushed past me. They fought cleanly, took the boss down, and we all shared loot. My drop was...a useless charming ring, purely decorative. The others got actual gear. I laughed aloud in — I couldn’t help it; the game was playing the same private jokes on me.
But then a real world boss announcement popped: a named brigand had spawned near our small region. Players flooded maps. I hung on the world message like a moth. I chased coordinates and, by chance, took a wrong quest turn into a grove where a little child NPC complained about his stolen candy. The fight turned out to be not-played-as-designed. When the NPC’s thief revealed herself it was the brigand. She’d been placed there by game design and developer whim; her title flashed above her head: Van Wyck—“the brigand.” We duked it out, clumsy. I thought I’d be merciful and keep it kind, but the fight snowballed into a public event. The brigand, strangely, gave me a pouch of something when the fight ended—candy, a token, and three hundred thousand experience points—and the system announced I’d defeated the boss.
The world erupted. “Who is that? One player did it?” people typed. Some called me greedy; others were jealous. “Selfish!” posted a user named Yellow-Mayonnaise. “Wouldn’t tell coordinates!” I did what felt natural: I ignored the hot gossip. I handed the little NPC the candy and he thanked me. The candy turned out to be a pendant that would wait in my storage until I was ready to use it.
“System error or fate?” Kiara typed on party. “Either way, nice.”
“Don’t post it on the forum,” Emmaline urged. “People will eat you alive.”
Because of those small gifts, I began to feel the peculiar sway of fate and code. The bead, the ring, the pendant—that thread ran through the game like a soft, useless string in a seam I could tug. I tried to be small and anonymous, but the world noticed. I collected keepsakes like a child collects stones.
Outside the game, campus life bent on its axis. I finished a five-day commission and offered to buy the girls dinner: “It’s on me,” I said, pocketing the stipend. We went to the Korean barbecue near the west gate everyone loved. The server’s glance followed four roommates walking in: Hazley, Kiara, Emmaline, and me. We slid into a booth and laughed until the cook opened the grill.
Across the room, a group of boys were pretending not to look. One of their faces—clean haircut, sculpted cheekbones—caught my attention. He looked up from his magazine, met my gaze, and smiled as if he recognized something gentle. Then he turned back to his notes. A second later Kiara waved. “Zac!” she said, like an old high school connection. He stood and mingled like someone comfortable in his skin. I felt oddly flushed and not at all myself.
A week later I found his name on the company handout for a downtown game promo: Garth Burke. He was one of the professionals organizing an on-campus event for Jian Xiao Jianghu. Later I would meet him again under lights and noisy booths, watching cosplayers and giveaways. For a few hours he was just a bright face in a crowd.
Our in-game group became close. We learned each other’s rhythms: Seiji—uh, Nash Mori—was dependable on defense, Flynn Vega was an evangelist for the game and kept inviting friends, and Kiara would make the most ridiculous, perfectly timed heals. Emmaline drew concept art for our avatars. I was the quiet damage, the one who preferred not to speak up unless I had to. We joked and we bickered and for the first time in a long time I forgot the old sour taste that came from being betrayed online.
Everything was warm until world whispers started to grow sour again.
Hazley told me one night: “They posted Wu’s screenshots on the forum. People are rewriting the truth.” She handed me the tablet. The thread on the unofficial gossip board, known as “818,” was a mess. Screenshots had been stitched together and printed as proof. “They paint her as the seductress,” Hazley said. “They claim she ruined someone’s life.”
“They used her avatar’s name and linked it to a real account,” Kiara said. “They even named the guy she was supposed to be with.”
I read the thread. The man’s in-game handle—‘SupportLin’—was now our villain. The forum had named him and posted his school. The accusation was cruel: the man had too many words, too many promises; the women who wanted him were staging a campaign.
“He’s named,” Emmaline whispered. “Who is he?”
On the campus thread someone posted his real-world identity: Kendrick Chandler. He was a face in a photo—a slick smile that made me feel like I chewed glass. I had seen him around, maybe once in the cafeteria or on the boulevard. I didn’t know him, but the way his image flashed through the thread made my ears pop with the absurdity of the whole thing. Kendrick—if that was his name—had sided with the other woman and had... how do you say it gently... kicked someone into the gutter.
“We’ll help Wu,” Kiara said. “We’ll fight back on the forum. We’ll show the truth.”
“I don’t want a fight,” Hazley said. “I want her—Wu—safe. I want her to stop crying in our room.”
We planned carefully. We gathered screenshots and chat logs, the timestamps, the screenshots of his messages and voice-chat prompts that proved he had promised differently. Proof, we decided, would be truth’s weapon.
The day of the punishment—an exposure we didn’t expect to be so explosive—happened because of a simple, terrible decision. A group of students convened in the student union for what they thought was an anti-gossip panel. The student body president had arranged a conversation about online civility. We thought we’d show the moderators the evidence. We thought the voice of reason would win.
Instead, when I stood up, I held a laptop with every thread open. I said, “I’m Veronika Bridges. I’m an art student. I used to play Jian Xiao Jianghu. My friend Hazley—” I could not say Wu’s full name in the open; she had left to teach—“my friend was hurt by lies.”
“Where is the evidence?” someone challenged from the back. The man who spoke sounded like someone who wanted to be right.
“Here,” I said. I clicked the first image and the projector showed a private chat. I read lines aloud, slow, making sure each word hit the air cleanly: “I will always protect you,” it said. “When you grow up, marry me.” I clicked the next image. The world chat—other player posts, screenshots—spoke of betrayals. On the screen the account name Kendrick Chandler flashed.
“You promised,” Hazley said from the front row, voice small but like glass. “You told my friend she was safe.”
There was a heavy pause. Kendrick—who had been invited by a friend to the panel and sat in the second row—rose, face the kind of careful flush that only someone with something to hide knows. He did not leave. He stood. He was not even asked to speak.
“Those are taken out of context,” he said at first, because that is always the defense. Then his voice climbed into anger. “You’re making stories.”
“Context?” I asked. I showed a screenshot of Kendrick’s messages where he, in world chat, spoke in contempt about the supposed affair, where he shrugged and sided with Juliana. I showed, with grinding patience, the private message where he had said exactly the things he had to someone else and then ignored when she needed him. “You told her one thing and acted another,” I said. “You let someone be eaten alive to save your pride.”
The auditorium hummed. Students whispered. A girl near Kendrick pulled out her phone to film. Within seconds, someone had the video live-streaming to a student channel. We did not intend for that; it happened because the world is hungry for spectacle.
Kendrick’s face went through changes: surprise, then irritation, then an attempt at poise, then denial. He blustered, “You’re twisting it. I didn’t—”
“You told her to wait,” Hazley said, stepping forward like she had swallowed a blade. She unrolled a chat log and read Kendrick’s private line: “Wait for me. I will protect you. Trust me.” His attempt to interrupt puddled into silence when Emmaline pulled up the public log—the world channel where he posted about not caring and laughed it off.
The first shift in the room came as a ripple. People murmured. One of Kendrick’s old friends stood up and said, “I knew he had a lot of promises, but—” and then he sat down, suddenly small. A cluster of onlookers began to chant in a low, incredulous way: “Why? Why?”
“Is that the type of man we want to champion?” a student asked, voice sharp. “A man who tells private promises and public scorn?”
Kendrick’s denial curdled into anger. “You’re making this up,” he hissed. “Who put you up to this? Who paid you?”
“We’re only showing what he did,” I said. “Look at the pattern.”
“You’re hurting him!” someone cried from the back—some ally, perhaps. “Public humiliation—”
“We waited,” Emmaline said, cutting clean across the soft gasp. “We waited for him to explain. He had the platform. He chose silence while she cried in our rooms.”
It is impossible to describe crowd dynamics. Some people who had scrolled those very same forum posts now stood with their arms folded in a new sort of shame. Others reached for phones. A little knot of them applauded. The live stream skyrocketed. Within an hour the student group’s channel had thousands of viewers. The studio’s video was reposted on campus feeds.
Kendrick’s face unmade itself in public. He flailed between fury and humiliation. He called out, “You can’t do this to me. Defamation—” Then he tried to laugh, to make it small. “Come on, V—this is petty.”
“You promised,” I repeated. “You made a person feel safe. You let people tear her down publicly while you stayed silent. You posted to world chat and helped spread the narrative. You used the power of a visible account and a visible identity to make her smaller.”
He dropped his head when the moderator suggested we deescalate. He wanted to fight the narrative with procedural fairness, but fairness looks small when accusation, evidence, and witness combine into shape. Someone in the front row—one of the students who had seen him at a party—shouted precisely the thing that toppled him: “He said the same things to me too!” Two others echoed. The tide turned.
Kendrick’s reaction was a catalogue of stages. At first he was outraged. “This is false!” he said. He tried to laugh; the laughter came out wrong. He tried to deny the photographic proof, but the chat logs were stamped with date and server and digital fingerprints. Then he tried to charm the crowd: “We were kids.” That failed. Then anger—he shouted. The moderator asked him to calm down. When the moderator suggested he might behave better and openly apologize, he refused. He stormed out.
Outside, the live stream had already caught him exiting and one of his students shouted, “There’s the coward!”
The rest of the story unfurled like paper in wind. His alliances within certain circles condensed into distance. The various groups on campus that had once smiled when he entered now clicked their tongues. A group chat that had named him as “awesome” fell silent. The gossip channels that had once amplified his teasing now turned their spotlights on the evidence we provided and his refusal to respond with honor. He called for private messages asking to speak and was advised to step back. Some of his friends unfollowed him on socials, not publicly but quietly.
The worst part for him—because we were not bloodthirsty—was the slow, exquisite turn of public opinion. People who had once laughed at my friend’s pain began to apologize to us in private, saying they had been wrong. Kendrick saw that the man he’d been online had become the person people avoided in the hallway. He watched, in real time, as an image he had cultivated through flattery and casual charm contracted into something narrower: the man who had let someone cry alone.
He came back a week later to ask for forgiveness. He sent messages and an essay-style apology posted on the campus feed. He was careful, but the language felt canned. “I regret my part,” he wrote. He asked to meet. We accepted—publicly—and then, when he arrived, the room did not contain long embraces. It contained questions. He tried to explain the pressure of stay-and-be-cool. He tried to say he had been immature. He asked what could be done to repair what he had harmed.
I told him, “Repair takes more than words. Repair takes making it right in public. Go apologize to Hazley and the others in the forum thread you helped spread.” He blinked. “Make it visible. Make it honest. Don’t ask for forgiveness. Show it.”
That Tuesday, outside the student union, he posted a detailed apology and offered to speak at a forum on online ethics. He was required by the student council to participate in community service—teaching a session on empathy in digital life. He sat with the shame of being noticed and of having to be quiet. Peers who had once called him a charmer now treated him with a face like a glass that had been dropped and mended—functional but cracked.
The public punishment satisfied a part of what we wanted. It didn’t heal everything. Wu left for teaching for a while longer. Juliana and Lillian—her followers—would taste social cold: other players stopped following them on the forum, their guild politely told them to explain themselves; one of them lost a guild title after an internal vote. Their shrugs grew thinner. For the very first time, being cruel had a real price beyond the ephemeral thrill of clicks. People who used public channels to create nightmares felt the warmth of attention flip to cold.
“Do you feel better?” Hazley asked me the night after the exposure. She was asleep on the futon with her tablet face to the wall, but her fingers twitched in the small mew of comedic texts.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Vindication is a complicated thing. I paint for the small hours between sunrise and coffee. That’s still where I want to live. But I am glad she won’t be gaslit into silence anymore.”
Emmaline smiled. “You did good,” she said, and I believed her. Flynn added, “And now the guild’s name we’ll start—’Flower at the Other Shore’—let’s make it a place where people are actually kind.”
We laughed, and the server crashed mid-laughter—which, in an oddly perfect way, felt like a good omen. There would be other fights; there would be other moments where code and hearts intersected. For now, I slept with my desktop image of a red-whip girl beside me and a tiny bead waiting in the storage for when I was ready to learn what it really did.
And the last thing I did before sleep was check the inventory one more time: the Avoid-Water Bead, a phoenix feather, an ice-silk spool, and a ring that had once meant nothing but later meant enough to remember. The next morning I would go back to the studio, lay out the next commission, and maybe, if the world let me, sketch the face of a woman who knew she deserved better.
The End
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