Coming into June, a couple things came up. First thing was that Arya had long accepted that she was not going to have enough time to make Diablo 3 cosplay for Penny Arcade Expo in August, and we were sad about that. On the plus side, Arya and I were still finding the time to pretty much do nothing but play Diablo 3 in our spare time. The game was still getting harder and harder, and Hell mode was definitely still crushing our souls back and forth. But it wasn't terrible; the elite mobs were still eventually dying, and I was still enjoying every time I'd troll her as we started Act 3 with the fires on the castle walls and I would start shouting "THE BEACONS OF MINAS TIRITH! THE BEACONS ARE LIT!" It was alright.
Another exciting thing was that we were starting up other characters as well. When you have a game with five character classes, it's plenty of fun to try different things. In our cases, Arya put together a wizard named "Nymeria" and I made a witch doctor named "Pabu". We rarely played with these as much since we were still on track with our demon hunter and monk, but it was nice to have them on hand; it was even nicer the night I showed Arya the witch doctor's attacks involving throwing jars of spiders or tossing out exploding frogs. She went "ewww" at those too.
Most excitingly, though, was that we were nearing level 60 with our main characters. At the level cap, we would have access to tons of very high-level gear that people would be selling in the game's Auction House. Arya was looking forward to buying a new bow that would do all kinds of ungodly damage. Myself, I hadn't been quite as good with my money, wasting it on crafting useless items and the like, so while the opportunity was exciting, the actual goal wasn't quite so much.
So again we stomp through Act 3 (probably my favourite act) and once again make it into the endgame. Again, we spend a night or two playing until we get exhausted and have to go to sleep. But three difficulties later and we were almost done with Hell-difficulty. At some point we both also hit level 60; Arya was quick to buy a brand new bow in the auction house, and I was quick to look forward to eventually having enough money to buy something in the auction house. Nothing could slow us down at this point.
Then came the night I didn't play.
Some friends had come over one Tuesday night so I didn't log into the game - I'm good enough of a host to entertain rather than just play my games while people sit at the TV. Hadn't thought too much on it at the time - over on Messenger I could see that Arya was set to "Busy" and as such was likely playing Diablo. She does have a lot of folks looking for her time, after all. So yeah, I thought nothing of it.
The next day at work, my best friend came over to my area.
"Hey, where were you?" He asked me. "(Arya) and I beat Diablo last night."
"Yeah, I had people over," I told him.
"She was waiting for you, you know," he said.
"What?" My friend elaborated a little.
"I jumped into her game and we played through Act 4. After we beat Diablo, she said 'we are gonna have to do this again with James.'."
So suddenly I felt all like hell and stuff, partly because I apparently had let down my friend and partly because we didn't get to finish the act together. Kinda sucked.
I chatted with Arya a bit after that. She denied my buddy's account of the story, saying that he was the one to say that we'd have to replay the Diablo fight with me. My buddy would later deny her denial. I'm still not completely sure what to make of that one, but whatever. Technically, it's not too important in the long run.
