“The new tenants crammed the insides full of Unified Desires workstations and littered the back with cable crimpers, pitted track balls, carcasses of old CRT monitors, liberated ‘esc’ keys, twisty-tied clumps of twisty ties, pink puffy packs nested inside of manila puffy packs, unlabeled male-to-male flow-through enhancers, outdated small capacity RAM chips, ditto hard drives, capless Sharpies, and plastic belt clips. They ripped up part of the parking lot for the installation of their honkin’ fiber network pipe ideal for wireless Castle Wolfenstein play, forcing every cordless phone within a miles radius to echo everything spoken into it with digital clarity. Hello? Hello. With its “closed door” policy towards COOMB and authentic Castle Wolfenstein barracks feel, twenty-somethings no one from Timberline recognized started parking their cars and entering and as the weeks went by they just kept on coming. The building gave off a vibe similar to a slaughterhouse where all the attention is focused towards going inside and it’s painfully obvious no one’s coming out.

Black paint and heavy mesh covered the two windows. The faded, battleship grey trim arched and swelled like overstretched rubber bands. Brown smoke churned out of the crevices each time the front door swung open. Before going on their dawn rides, the Timberline kids peeked through the crack underneath the back door. Inside there was no way to tell what time of day it was, and though the place was rife with gamers the entire room felt static. Individual movement was limited to keystrokes. Eye to the mat, they were able to see several pairs of turned-out feet anchoring oversized torsos. Enormous hands fondled keyboards that were balanced on their laps, or sometimes on one meaty thigh. The keyboards heaved and roiled like rowboats at sea, as the medics reached out to aid the lieutenants, the lieutenants called fire, and the engineers blew shit up. The wireless kept the cable management at bay, but used matches and pizza crusts littered the floor. The smell inside was glandular. Everyone had headphones on, so when they did speak to each other they yelled, and when they yelled, they called each other by their online names. Narsil. Don Donger. Glamdring. Nin. Celdan. Gondor. Efar. Argoyle. Matagon. Grond. Charr, Oy. ”

[from the novel A Drink With Clarity More]