I ended up at The Black Sheep Cafe around 7:15. I was in a rushed panic. I was mortified I might have wasted Jess’s time and made a terrible impression, but to my relief, she texted me back to say she’d be running 25 minutes late herself.

I had some time to pour myself the ultra dark roast and bought an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie to pick away at while I waited.

I looked out onto the snowy street. We were deep in the bowels of winter now. From 3 PM on the sky was pitch black and choked by clouds. These were the times when our ancestors would hole up and pray with bated breath for the sun god to triumph over the demons seeking to smother him.

A few minutes later I saw Jess when she came up to the counter to order and waved at her. She waved back. I sipped my coffee and took a moment to look her over. She had long, curly, unnaturally brilliant red hair. She wore these cute black square-rim glasses and a deep purple jacket. And she was thicc. I was into it.

She came over with a cup of mocha to plop down into the chair in front of me and collapse into a heavy sigh.

“Busy day?” I asked.

“Yeah dude. I’ve just been running around with work stuff since 7 AM.“ she explained.

“Oh, yikes. You must be really tired.”

Jess laughed. “Yeah kinda, but I have the next four days off. It’s a pretty good gig that way. What about you, what have you been doing today?”

Crying. Masturbating. Playing videogames. Eating cereal. “Oh, you know... It was a pretty slow day on my end.”

“Yeah, so what are you up to usually?” She asked.

I hesitated. “Eh, well, I’m kind of in a weird limbo place at the moment. I don’t really have a job, I just moved back here in the middle of November since I finished my undergrad fieldwork and was late on figuring out where to go next, so I just sent out a bunch of PhD program applications and soon I’ll be finding out... like, where in the world I’m even going for the next few-ish years.”

“Oh, so you’re like, trying to be a professor?” Jess asked.

“Yeah, I study archaeology and anthropology. Like, ancient civilizations and hieroglyphs and stuff. I was training to be an assyriologist, like, someone who studies ancient Mesopotamia and reads Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform.” I said.

“Oh hell yeah dude, that sounds awesome!”

I shrugged. “It’s pretty cool I guess, but it’s like anything else in the academic these days. I love the subject, but It’s all really cutthroat within the actual academic departments, and I’m just trying to gear myself up for that kind of professional conflict entering my life again.”

"Oh yeah. Well, most professors are full of shit! You deserve to make it there because you actually seem to care about it!" She said.

I smiled. "What about you? What's been going on in your life?"

“Well, right now I work shifts as a cook at the dining halls at the university. Like it’s kind of crappy dealing with the students, but I really like the team that I work with and I like cooking. I like having some structure to my life. I’m planning to train to be a chef. Other that that I make a lot of art is my thing. I do paintings.”

“Oh, that rules! What’s your art like?”

“Well like... I paint... mostly I was just trying to like, draw this pattern that I saw one time when I was doing shrooms, this... it looked like a grid of rainbows. It was like, all these colors that don’t really work together, but if they don’t match with each other in just the right way, they make something even more harmonious and brilliant. I don’’t know if that makes any sense.”

“I can kinda see it.”

“Right, so I tried to draw that and I ended up, just, totally finding myself, and getting really into like, fractal paintings and psychedelic art stuff. I do stuff with markers that show up under blacklights. One of my friends actually just commissioned me for a hundred bucks to do a piece for her!”

“Oh rad... so are you like... into psychedelics?" I asked with feigned timidity. "I was really into Terence McKenna and the ethnography of shamanism and stuff when I was in school. I've only had shrooms once though. I spent an hour thinking I was an alien insect creature riding around in a mammal's body."

“Haha, yeeeah. Stuff like that happens sometimes... I spent last weekend just plowing through Cannibal Hymn while dropping acid and listening to drum and bass. There were just just colors everywhere, I felt like I was in a different world!”

“Oh you’re playing it too? Is it really that much fun to play while high? I think it’s actually pretty hard, and from what I’ve done so far it just seemed really dreary...”

“Oh, dude, I’m obsessed! Where are you right now?”

“Uhhh, I just beat the first boss. Like, this albino tiger thing.”

“Wow! Okay, so you’re still like waaaaaaay at the beginning.”

“I guess. Does my character ever look like he’s not the centerfold in an anatomy textbook?”

“Oh yeah. God. You’re really early in the game, huh?”

“Yeah. I got it on sale. Just started it up for the first time this afternoon. "

"Okay, well, yeah, your skin got stolen, and you've got to go kick the ass of the guy who stole it and take it back."

"Is that when you do character creation? I still haven't really picked a class..."

“Oh. Yeah, there aren’t really classes, per se. There are builds you can make with the stats, but basically you can put points in any stat and do any skill if it's high enough.”

“Guess I need to be figuring out what I'm good at."

"You can, like, you do need to specialize eventually because you can't be good at everything, but you can always reallocate the stat points later. You should just be experimenting right now and seeing what works for you. Plus you'll probably end up changing your strategy once you're in the PVP areas anyways."

"Is there a build in particular you reccomend?"

"Eh, I play a DEX build who does melee with like, staves and spears and stuff. Really any strategy or weapon is viable as long as you're smart about it. The game is like, hella balanced."

"So like, what makes the game so good? Why do you keep playing?"

"There's just so much imagination in it. It's really immersive! Like I've never played something so alien but also so detailed in terms of the lore and the graphics and stuff."

"Yeah, I already knew I'd dig it just by the name! The Cannibal Hymn is a passage from the Egyptian Old Kingdom funerary spells where the soul of the pharaoh in the netherworld is eating all the gods to become one of the gods. Pretty cool premise for an RPG to be honest!"

"Oh yeah, I read about that! There's lots of Egyptian stuff in the game."

"Ehh, well, having played it myself, I see a lot less Egyptian stuff and a lot more Mayan and Aztec stuff. Which is cool, since I've never seen anybody really do anything with those settings."

"Like, you know the story of the guys who made it right?"

"Nope."

"So Hajime Miura, the director, like, Cannibal Hymn was going to be his magnum opus. He'd been working on the whole game world since he was a kid, and he'd been working his way up in the company so that he and his team would have complete creative control and he'd get to make exactly the game he'd always imagined.

Anyways, they'd finished the whole series and all the DLC, and they were going to spend a weekend crunching to do final tweaks before release. Apparently somebody showed up at the office on Monday and found all the lead designers with bullets in their heads and the conference room on fire."

"Holy shit. That's hardcore."

"Yeah, there are all these rumors that he was killed by the government or the yakuza or something, but nobody knows."

"And after that the publisher just... released it and started selling it?"

"Hey, that's capitalism!"

"Fuck me!"

Jess laughed.

I smiled.

"Hey, do you wanna hang out and play games at my place?"

"Hell yeah! Let's go!"