Local Area

From Candypedia
Local Area
Chapter82 of 127 (list of chapters)
PublishedApril 9, 2014 (2014-04-09)
Page count15
Major charactersStacy, Mike, Sue
Minor charactersAmaya, Katie, Paulo, Haley
LocationsRoseville High School, Mike’s house, SwordsVale
Collected inVolume Five
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A group project lands Mike at Stacy’s house, where a bumped computer mouse reveals that she is secretly a dedicated online roleplayer. Soon Mike has a flower mage of his own, and a hard lesson about public servers headed his way.

Synopsis

The study partner Stacy has been dreading turns out to be Mike. Katie has already breezed past the bus stop in a convertible, calling Stacy a loser for staying behind.[1] On the bus ride home, Mike goes straight for their oldest unfinished business with the worst icebreaker available, admitting he kept her anonymous love letters.[2] Stacy is mortified and won’t admit to writing them, but Mike insists the mockery back then was all Lucy’s doing: “Lucy was just being jealous back then. I thought they were great.”[3] Stacy allows that whoever wrote them would appreciate hearing it, and Mike takes the hint with a grin.

At Stacy’s house, Mike accidentally discovers her bigger secret. While Stacy fetches strawberry lemonade, Mike bumps her computer mouse and wakes the screen to an online roleplaying game, starring a cat adventurer who is plainly Stacy.[4] She walks in, screams, and throws the drink in his face. Once the mess is cleaned up she admits she overreacted, though she insists that “Only LOSERS like that stuff!!”[5] Mike rolls a character on her computer anyway, and is stunned to learn that Sue, Amaya and Abbey all play on the same server. Saying hello is strictly forbidden, though, because this is a serious server where everyone remains in character.[6]

Stacy’s dad drops Mike home with the project nearly finished, and Mike promises to install the game that night. Stacy waves goodbye sweetly, then lunges at the car window with a terrifying grin: “Just remember: NOBODY NEEDS TO KNOW.”[7] Mike builds his character, decides the girls have better designs, and joins the private server as a female flower mage.[8][9] He breaks character with his very first line, much to the private delight of Sue at her own computer. When the others log off for bed, Mike joins a public server alone.[10]

Joining the public server alone is a mistake. Strangers crowd around his flower mage, and their friendliness soon slides into something much creepier. Mike logs off flushed and thoroughly put off.[11] The next morning Sue can hardly believe what he did, and a pointed phone-to-the-ear gesture about him and Sandy scandalizes him even more. Paulo walks in just in time to hear Mike yelp that he didn’t choose to be a girl “just so strangers could make out with me”, and laughs himself to tears.[12] In the hallway, Mike passes Katie swearing Stacy to secrecy over some boy whose band she has to pretend to care about. He walks by without a word, trades a knowing peek for Stacy’s grateful smile, and the ditz mask goes right back on.[13]

Character dynamics

Stacy grips the car window with a wide, intense grin and says "Just remember: NOBODY NEEDS TO KNOW".
Stacy sees Mike off with one very firm condition.
  • Mike and Stacy: Before this chapter they were near-strangers with one piece of buried history between them. Stacy once wrote Mike anonymous love letters, and he never found out who they came from.[14][2] During that one afternoon, the letters and the game both come into the open. Mike meets each secret with warmth instead of the ridicule she expects. By the last page they are allies in secrecy. He passes her in the hallway without blowing her cover, and her grateful smile says the arrangement suits her just fine.[13]
  • Mike and Sue: Sue shows Mike how the game works, and no one enjoys his mistakes more than she does. She corrects his etiquette without ever breaking character, savors his obliviousness from behind her own screen (“This is too perfect.”), and is the one who spells out for him the next morning just how badly the public server went.[9][11]
  • Katie and Stacy: Nothing changes between these two, but the final page shows what the friendship runs on. Katie is genuinely affectionate with Stacy, and she keeps up the very performance Stacy lives by, pretending to care about a boy’s band and swearing Stacy to secrecy over it.[13] The girl who mocked Stacy for having a study partner turns out to have her own version of “nobody needs to know”.[1]

Trivia & observations

Mike's avatar, a white female flower mage in a green dress with pink flowers in her hair, beams at the other players' unimpressed avatars.
Mike’s flower mage reports for duty.
  • The whole chapter fulfills a Volume 3 Kickstarter reward that let one backer direct a chapter of the comic. Veronica’s commentary calls the result “fully canonical” and adds that she’d always wanted to do a story about Stacy.[13] Per Oliver’s Tumblr, the backer’s brief was “Mike gets addicted to an MMORPG”, which “evolved into the short story with Stacy and her crew”.[15]
  • The chapter’s original art was never sold in the store. The authors have explained on Tumblr that the Kickstarter pledger received all of the pages.[16]
  • Veronica’s commentary christens Mike’s avatar “magical girl maishul-chan”.[9]
  • The public-server disaster is told almost entirely through Mike’s face, and the chat itself is never shown.[11] Veronica’s commentary under the Paulo scene acknowledges he’s “making light of a terrible creepy thing that’s happened”, though she also counts that page’s last two panels among her favorites.[12]
  • The game is never named in this chapter.[9] The name SwordsVale first turns up in Guest of Honor, when the group cosplays their characters at a convention.[17]
  • This is Stacy’s first lead role, though she has been on panel since The Burden of Parenthood.[18] Her dad makes his series debut too, chauffeuring Mike home with a single line to his name.[7]

Related chapters

  • Puppy Love: The letters Mike mentions are the ones that spilled out of his locker there, where Lucy read one aloud and ridiculed the writer while Stacy listened around the corner in tears. Mike defended the letters even then, so his kind words on the bus finally reach the person who needed to hear them.
  • Guest of Honor: The players from the private server form a proper guild, and the whole group turns up at a convention cosplaying their SwordsVale characters. Paulo remembers exactly which game Mike plays: “The one where you’re a girl?”
  • Popularity Contest: Stacy keeps hiding the game, but this time it means snubbing the guild to protect her image. She insists she still loves SwordsVale, but that she has “a life outside of it” now.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 1
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 3
  3. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 4
  4. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 6
  5. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 7
  6. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 8
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 9
  8. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 10
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 11
  10. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 12
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 13
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 14
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 15
  14. ↑ Chapter 13: Puppy Love, page 1
  15. ↑ “Ask response on the 2013 Kickstarter’s “direct a chapter” reward”. 2018-04-11.
  16. ↑ “Ask response on the Local Area original art”. 2018-09-15.
  17. ↑ Chapter 89: Guest of Honor, page 30
  18. ↑ Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 3
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