This is the second part of a two part tale beginning Valentine’s week. It is about a love formed in the early days of online gaming between two souls only known by their names in a full-text world. Read part one here.
After that first meeting and painful goodbye, Solaron and Kitrana’s mornings together took on a different tone.
“We had, like, this shared acknowledgment,” he recalls. “We both knew. I mean, it was there. Out. In a way it made it that much harder. We started talking on the phone and AIM. Exchanging pictures. It really made it worse, honestly, because we both knew what we wanted.”
Within a few months, Solaron made the trip to Memphis to see her.
“It was at that point, that first trip, when I officially asked her on a date. It was funny because I hadn’t planned for it at all. I mean, I knew nothing about Memphis and here I am asking her to go on a date with no idea where to go.”
“He was cute,” Kitrana adds. “He went out for coffee and came back with a rose. Like I would have said no.” She laughs.
After that first trip, he came back as often as he was able. They talked on the phone almost every day and for everything they lacked in physical time together, they made up for in virtual time. They each rolled a new character and went out on daily adventures. He was a warrior, she was a cleric. He was her strength, she was his support. As their main characters languished, their characters together began to flourish.
Their immortals were unhappy. It’s best to let them tell the story.
“I was part of a pretty hardcore following,” Kitrana recalls. “We were a powerhouse with heavy RP roots. Our leader was the Arch Lich and he demanded a lot of his followers. I mean, this was a guy who asked for phone numbers from all his members so he could call you to log on at any time. I was his soldier. When I stopped logging on, and wouldn’t answer his calls (that sounds crazy now), he tracked me by my IP address and found out what was going on. The next time I logged on, he moved my character to a no-exit room. In no short words, he told me that the next time he saw my main I’d be killed and removed from the following unless I gave up this alternate character; he’d invested too much in me to see me disappear and twiddle about with his enemies.”
“I was furious,” Solaron said. “I mean, where are the rules? You’re not allowed to just pull people like that, especially when the character isn’t even in your following. And who was he to say what she could or couldn’t do with her time. I never liked that guy and after that, I’d had enough.”
“He wanted to tell him off, which was a sure way to get a ban. I wouldn’t let him. I mean, the answer was really pretty simple. I logged in the next day and took what was mine. Lich was good on his word and killed me, alright. Except he knew that I wanted to be released. In those days, you couldn’t just quit a following. The FLI had to release you or you were stuck. Of course, he refused to release me. Instead, he moved me to his cellar, which was really a prison. You couldn’t get out unless an immortal took you out.”
“I filed a petition,” Solaron continues. “She didn’t want to do it but I insisted. What he did was wrong. He spied on her, threatened her, and then kept her prisoner in that crappy following. She could have just said ‘screw it’, but he silenced her so she couldn’t even speak. Nothing. Not tells, or global, or anything. I filed a petition with the game’s creator. It took a week but this was the response I got:
WE UNDERSTAND YOUR CONCERN BUT THIS IS A FOLLOWING LEVEL ISSUE. AS SUCH, WE CANNOT INTERVENE WITH THE IMMORTAL’S DECISION.
Something like that. It was crap. The FLI had been in the game for some stupid amount of hours and they didn’t want to step on his toes. Total favoritism. I went to the forums and told everyone what had happened.”
“He tried to, anyways” Kitrana adds with a headshake.
“They banned my account. Like, permanently. Deleted the thread. My character, who I’d had for two years, posted with hundreds of times, was done on the forums. So I made another. And another. And another. Every single one was banned and the threads deleted. The implementer himself even sent me an email. Kitrana got the same one, even though she’d never said a word on it. Not one and they sent it to her too because they knew we were together.”
“It pretty much said ‘stop this or you’ll have a consequence.’”
“Well, no. It wasn’t going to happen, so I kept on. The next day my IP was banned for 14 days. They gave her the same thing. Again, banned and she’d never so much as complained.”
But people noticed when they went missing. Solaron and Kitrana were regular players. They logged on every day, had friends; they had people who took note that they were missing – and special note of the one-post forum threads claiming to be from them… threads that could never be found after first being read. The community came out in support, taking to the forums themselves and the in-game bulletin board system. No less than ten forum posts were made, accusing the staff of a cover up. It became a fire the staff could no longer deny.
“They couldn’t cover it up without making themselves look bad,” Solaron said. “There was no way.”
After three days ban, Kitrana and Solaron were allowed back into the game with a public notice reading:
Re: Solaron and Kitrana Reinstated. Investigation Pending.
The IP addresses associated with characters [Kitrana, Solaron] have been re-allowed. The matter is open while staff investigates the events preceding banishment. It is our policy not to discuss such investigations publically. Players should not expect an update on this matter. Thank you for your patience.
“You know,” says Kitrana. “I should have left the game right there. But – this might sound weird to people who have never been there – being able to log in and play was so important. By then Mark and I were talking all the time out of game, but playing together, even when we were supposed to be enemies, was as close as we could get to actually spending time together. No one else got it, but just having his name next to mine on the screen was like having him by my side. When I came back from the ban, I’d been kicked from the following. At one point that would have made me sad, but I was only relieved. Now Mark and I could be together whenever we wanted. We even roleplayed it out.” She laughs.
An in-game wedding wasn’t long to come.
“I proposed right on global chat,” Solaron recalls. “There had to be 30 people on. Over that next week, I went on a quest. I grabbed all of the things I needed. There was a witch who carried an ancient engagement ring and a Gollum homage who carried a silver wedding band. I grabbed a tux and a bouquet and about a hundred bottles of champagne. Flower petals from the ghastly wights. Everything it was possible to do, I did. We even had a full wedding party, scripted dialogue, emotes, the works. The twenty or so people there all played right into it.”
“I had an RP father who gave me away,” Kitrana tells me, a look of pleasant memory dancing across her eyes. “You know the funny part? We were close enough in-game to roleplay family and I haven’t talked to him in at least five years.”
“It was really great,” says Solaron. “What she didn’t expect was for me to show up at her house two days later. I’d booked the flight right before we did the ceremony in-game.”
“I opened the door and there he is, down on one knee, holding out a ring. It was the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
Solaron left his job in San Dimas and moved to Memphis to be with her. With his particular skills, he was able to get a job at a local accounting firm, and within a year, they were married for real.
Today they’ve just celebrated their 10th anniversary. They have two daughters, a Golden Retriever named Samwise, and house Solaron is perpetually attempting to renovate.
“It’s funny,” Solaron says with finality. “If I had listened to my dad and ‘done something worthwhile with my life’ I don’t think I’d have a life. My wife and girls are everything to me. And I really owe it all to a MUD. A video game, of all things.”
“Without gaming,” Kitrana adds. “It’s hard to think of where we might have wound up. Some people might say that it’s weird or sad or something else negative for us to have met the way we did. You know what, though? I wouldn’t trade that time for anything. We have everything we’ve ever wanted. I’ll never look back on all that time in-game with regret. Even though I never saw his face, all that time before we started talking off-game, I still felt like I knew him. And I did. I can’t say the same thing for games today.”
Today Solaron and Kitrana are both raiders in Everquest 2. Solaron leads a guild of over 100 players, while holding down a successful job at the same firm he entered in 2000. Kitrana attained her teaching degree but now stays home to raise her children. Now and again, they still log into TFC. Both feel they’ve lost the edge and have drifted away progressively more with each passing year. Even still, when the question of the game closing is raised, they donate and speak out to keep the game going.
“I couldn’t see it,” she says. “The game closing. It’s a chapter of our lives I never want to close. Time might pass it up, but the players that were there never will. A part of us will always be there on that MUD. I can only imagine others feel the same.”
And, as someone who shared their time on TFC, I can agree. Theirs is a love story often untold in favor of Internet horror stories and poorly drawn what-ifs. But there it is, the tale of Solaron and Kitrana, true loves bound through innumerable lines of white text, and their story closed with a happy ending.
