The Internet is… a place.

I’ve had relatively uncensored Internet access since I was about eight years old. I’ve gotten caught by my parents with pretty much anything legal and barely legal a couple of times.

When I was 13 years old I stumbled onto a forum for an MMO game the name of which I forgot. I think it was space themed. I was on the site for a couple hours. I don’t know how I ended up there but I had nothing to do. I was probably just clicking on random links until I found something interesting.

The exact MMO doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t be telling a story about something I forgot. This story is about a specific user of the forum who was, for lack of a better descriptor, terminally online.

As I scrolled through the listing of posts that made little to no sense to me, I noticed a specific username repeated way more often than any others. I did a brief tally and counted on average about six posts per day.

I clicked to open his profile, and got a better look at its picture. It was set to a very masculine character that was clearly from the MMO. He was muscular, probably tall, and very powerful looking. I wondered what the person behind the photo looked like; it was probably nothing like the character.

I browsed through his posts. There were about eight per day, some must have not gotten to the home page. There were hundreds of pages of replies. I was instantly demotivated to look through all those, so I skimmed them. The user carried on long conversations about random things with random users. Talking about extremely specific sections of the game.

I looked through the user’s posts. A lot of them were about nudity mods, because of course they were. It was like he was documenting every step in the game.

I clicked the double greater than to go to the last page. The user had posts ranging back a bit over a year.

For some reason I wanted to meet them. I created an account with the forum. I populated my new account with a feminine user name and profile picture. I pretended to interact with some posts on the site for about twenty minutes to make my account look realistic. I imitated some information that I picked up from reading some posts, but mostly asked questions. Eventually, I interacted with the user in question.

They responded to me five minutes later.

We had a bit of back and forth before they decided to direct message me. Apparently this was to not pollute the threads with excessive comments.

User: Let’s do this here so we don’t pollute the thread.

Me: okay

User: so how’d you get into <the game>?

Me: I’m into this sort of thing and I stumbled upon this game online.

User: Into this sort of thing?

Me: MMORPGs

User: what have you played?

I listed some random similar games I hastily found.

User: I’ve only played <one of the games> but I never got into it. That’s why I switched to <the game>.

Me: <The game> seems interesting to me too! I’ve played for just a few hours. It’s just so confusing!

User: Well I can help you.

Me: That’s what I’m here for.

User: So what’s your story? AGL?

Me: 27, female, Portland

User: 35, male, Jacksonville.

That made sense

User: so what do you need help with?

We chatted for about ten minutes. I can’t remember why, probably because I’ve blocked it from my memory, I got him to send a dick pic to me. It was surprisingly easy. I didn’t even have to dive into my “non reverse image searchable attractive pictures of women” collection. He had to upload it to Imgur and give me the link to that.

It was a picture of his erect penis. It was actually about average sized. He was a bit chubby.

I stared at it for a few moments. It was confusing. I don’t think I was attracted to the photo; just confused.

I closed the browser I was using. I felt immediate shame and anxiety. I opened up a terminal emulator. I deleted the browser’s data. I then ran a command that would remove any temporary files on my computer, and overwrite any empty space on my boot drive.