Read The Mall of Cthulhu for Free Online Page B

as which avatar?" the screen asked, then presented him with only one name: "Randolph Carter." This sounded familiar too. Ted clicked on the checkbox, and the screen changed again. "Welcome back to Virtuality! Proceed to Miskatonic U. expansion area?"
    "Sure," Ted said.
    Soon Randolph Carter was strolling, in his jumpy, not entirely naturalistic stride, through the leafy campus of Miskatonic U. He knew that name. Where did he know it from? Was it even important?
    Ted looked in Randolph Carter's inventory and found a dorm room key with "Innsmouth 212" stamped on the side . . . He proceeded to a green quad with knots of students sitting at the foot of trees and four guys tossing a Frisbee. He imagined what Laura would think of guys sitting immobile in dark rooms pretending to play Frisbee out in the sunshine. The red brick walls of the buildings were covered with some kind of climbing plant that looked like a strangely sinister version of ivy. He wondered if it was supposed to look like that or if the Virtuality programmers had just blown off making believable ivy. He walked up to five buildings before he finally found Innsmouth Hall. His key opened the front door, and he walked down a long hallway. A staircase led down, and a sign with a downward-pointing arrow said "Subterranean Passage to Howard Phillips Hall." He suddenly realized where he knew all these names from.
    "Yog-Sothoth on a bike," he opined to the garbage bag next to him. "This guy's a friggin' Cthulhu geek." Like most of his friends, Ted had spent a great deal of time in the eighth grade reading the horror fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and every name in Half-caf's virtual world referred to a Lovecraft story. Ted remembered what it was like to be a fourteen-year-old who played role-playing games, read comic books, and obsessed about Lovecraft. Only later had he realized that all the energy he spent on these things was fueled by a desperate, all-consuming horniness. He had often wondered what would have become of him if Kate DeAngeli hadn't decided in the twelfth grade that Ted's interest in horror and fantasy was a close enough match to her own interest in goth culture that she was willing to date and, more importantly, blow him. Perhaps if his horniness had never found a proper outlet, he would have turned into the kind of guy who shoots up coffee shops.
    He found another stairway going up and went up to the second floor. The door opposite the staircase read "222," and he watched as his blocky, robotic avatar, Randolph Carter, walked down the hall to his dorm room. As Randolph Carter turned the key and entered room 212, Ted felt his heart pounding just as it might have if he'd been pretending to be someone else and sneaking into their room in real life. He had to remind himself that he was crouched in a Queequeg's dumpster, and that there was no Miskatonic U. Even still, he was reluctant to switch to the first-person view so that he could see what was on Randolph Carter's desk. It was just comforting to look at Randolph Carter's back in that over-the-shoulder, third-person view. That way he'd see if somebody was sneaking up behind him to clock him over the head.
    Which, of course, would not have any effect on Ted's real self here in the dumpster.
    He looked around the room. The walls were plain white with only one decoration—a maroon pennant with "Miskatonic U." in white letters. The pennant hung over a cheap metal bedframe with a thin mattress and white sheets. There was a desk that looked too cheap even for IKEA, where Ted always bought his own barebones furnishings, in front of a gothic-arched window. Ted marveled that Half-caf had actually managed to create a virtual dorm room even more cheap and dull than most real dorm rooms. What the hell was the point?
    Finally, confident that he wouldn't be caught, Ted clicked on the point-of-view toggle and moved his cursor over the stuff on Randolph Carter's desk: a notebook, a pen, a photo of Anna Paquin