Art by Meddygon

“Deadly Virus Man” was the screen name created by a wannabe hacker twelve-year-old that played the MMO “Otherworld” created by “Ettin Industries,” which was a company run by characters within a roleplaying universe known as the “Corkie Commune.” DVM is a triple troll.

DVM is a character in a character I used to role play. The group usually stuck to one universe that visited other universes. The Commune was sort of a limboish place that existed slightly left of reality and could only be first reached by necessity. One RP member decided that he wanted to play a different universe, but rather than start a story up in that universe, he had some convoluted idea. Instead of a new universe with new characters, he introduced an MMO that the characters played, and we were going to play our characters playing their characters. It was pretty obvious to me that he wanted to do a new universe, and I’m still not quite certain why he didn’t just say it. He still has some characters he made up for it in his D&D playing. All characters I made for this universe were silly and lighthearted.

For this MMO, my main character in the Commune universe played a GM that sold hints and help for in game money or items. He played a super-sexy self-reliant assassin that dressed slutty but wasn’t a slut, managed to be able to speak every language in the world better than even native speakers, and was completely unstoppable. He was very keen on making sure that this character had NO flaws whatsoever. He’d retcon decisions that made her look bad or pretend things didn’t happen at all some times. Rather annoying to role play with. His character also, in one adventure, cured a permanently scarred tragic hero of her disfigurement with a regular healing potion. I say his character did it because this was free-form RP; there were no real rules or skill checks or anything. He had started recently RPing with godmoders, which made me thing it was time to introduce some %chance stuff.

Instead, I made a character that was a troll. This is prior to WC3 / WoW, so it was a d&d half-troll-ish thing (1). Remember, he’d declared the setting to be an MMO, so I decided to play a character that would play an MMO: an annoying pre-teen (2). I also had this character annoyingly follow around and one-up his undefeatable main character (3). Deadly Virus Man, the triple troll, or quadruple troll if you want to include the layer of me trolling this guy. (This guy later on invited me to d&d games after a period of silence. He trolled all his own players, constantly. The others enjoyed the attention over the game, whereas I would have rather enjoyed the game. He also had a habit of running an IRC game while playing World of Warcraft. His players would lie and cheat on their character sheets constantly. Not interested in playing with him or the majority of his friends anymore, I haven’t spoked to him since.)

Looking at just DVM and not the characters behind him, he’s a half-breed in a world of racists. The equipment in the game was designed for medium humanoids, and he was large. He would need to get everything special fitted, and neither of his races would serve a half-breed (which meant he did a lot of streaking). He never really got past this short personality bio, since I only brought him on when he was to troll the other player. This wasn’t some sort of secret trolling; I wasn’t pretending to be someone else that was pretending to troll him. He knew it was me, and I enjoyed annoying him back when he got too godmodish.