Don't Hate the Player: Part IV

There was also a gold star chart pinned up with everyone’s names to reward good ideas, which had quickly devolved into a black star chart marking down anyone who cussed and now functioned as an analog LanguageBot.

Out of all the things Jake helped Bob drag to the green room that morning, half out of punishment for getting caught with Emilia and half out of necessity because the sheer volume of swag he’d packed in his trunk would take one man two trips, he liked the blankets best.

Jake watched Emilia’s Pharaoh perch up among the obelisks in the crumbling architecture of the Memphis III map before the camera snapped to an opposing player’s POV.

Jake had a sudden, vivid mental image of Emilia decked out in Pharaoh’s gold robes, standing atop a mountain with an army behind her and a swirling ball of necromagic fomenting between her capable hands.

Fury’s colors flashed along the arena’s LED screens, red and black in a shooting loop around the mezzanine.

“Baby Jake’s been colluding with KNOX all week,” Muddy said, directing his accusation to Bob.

The ensuing silence quite frankly sucked.

He was going to have to figure out how to parse that in the finals, but it was his problem to work out, not something that should be decided by committee.

He’d been holding his captain’s behavior against him all day but had hoped that their victory might assuage him; now he saw that every step that brought Team Unity closer to a showdown with Fury looked to Bob like a move on Byunki’s chessboard.

It’s only taken Mr. Grimes two weeks to turn his fish tank of an office into what I’m sure he imagines is a den of Zen but is doing way more to stress me out than calm me down. The last time I was here, the most egregious things were his wooden-beaded bracelets and my mom.

“I remember your mother very well,” Grimes replies with a little too much wistfulness in his voice.

“Miss Romero, I’m all about the youth of today finding what gives them purpose. Your generation has inherited a broken world. If you’ve found something that might drive you to do your part to fix it, I respect and admire your spirit,” he intones.

Penny waived her God-given right to say “I told you so” and expressed regret that she didn’t take Matt up on his bet...

If anything, bringing Penny and Matt together as future supervillain and willing stooge has been the highlight of this entire experience.

“I have to tell you something,” I try to start again. That seems like a marginally better way to begin than “we need to talk,” which gives even emotionally well-adjusted people palpitations.

Between the furtive texting, the last-minute backstabbing, and everything I know about Audra and Connor, this isn’t just politics.

If he’s upset, he’s hiding it behind a facade of not caring about anything, which is exactly what I deserve.

I’m supposed to be awash in catharsis by now, but knowing that Connor noticed how poorly I treated him makes me feel, ugh.

I feel like...I’ve been tweaking the sliders on a character creator trying to get everything right—the face, the body, the base skills and strengths—and when I finally thought I was done and hit confirm, the character rendered way uglier than I expected and can’t pass a skill check to save her life.

I’m trying to figure out how I can smush everything that just happened into a few pithy sentences when I get to the library door.

By the time Mom brought me home on Monday, my dad had gleaned the full story from forum posts on the website where my info turned up.

...he’d given me the external hard drives to bring files back and forth from school, but the misappropriation of storage to house dozens of 20-gigabyte games ticked him off as much as the (sort of) stealing did.

This is the isolation and hopelessness wrapping their nasty little tendrils around my brain and squeezing until all the logic squirts out like juice.

My vision darkens as the blood rushes up to reach my head, then bubbles back in a grayish tide that ebbs to the beat of my lazy heart trying to remember what it takes to keep me upright.

From her deadpan tone, I’m guessing that explanation isn’t going to fly.

I didn’t catch all their names; they’re a real motley crew.

I haven’t talked to him since he left me a message on GLO right after Round 3 saying Unity asked him to steer clear of me until the tournament was over. That seemed fair then. It’s clearly a moot point now.

He glances over at my parents, who didn’t seem to notice anything amiss.

No one’s ever diverted an esports coup to my doorstep before, but if that’s a love language, I’m pretty sure I speak fluent Jake.

Once I said yes to joining their team and got the full, unabridged story of Muddy’s deception (Unity graciously withheld from my parents that me kissing Jake is what sparked his whole tantrum, for which I am eternally grateful), all I had to do was e-sign some documents.

“I have a bad feeling Byunki wants to checkmate me instead of fighting for the payload. I want the swap in case I need to change my tank to ward him off,” Bob explains.

She and Bob start speaking over each other but fall in unison to deliver the new imperative: “Don’t do anything stupid.”

I’m more than happy to engage Ivan one-on-one as Unity launches into a dense, defensive battle—a sortie, if I remember Byunki’s military terms correctly—centered on the payload.

Ki, Bob, and Jake are there staving off double attacks from Ivan and Muddy.

It’s a side effect of each game inevitably splitting off into a series of mini-battles that winnow players out until a final few are left standing for the checkmate.

Byunki and Erik lumber toward the three of us, maintaining their shield like a two-man Spartan phalanx.

I oblige, slamming Erik’s defense with normal bolts that do nothing but incrementally increase a Special I won’t be able to use without Jenkins taking me out anyway.

Back when we talked about the ice cream incident, Jake told me to use my fire to goad that pesky player into attacking me.

Ki and Penelope rush around their chairs to glom me, Jake, and Bob as the final three, and whoa—Jake has confetti in his hair.

Like, yeah, he aided and abetted her daughter breaking a billion rules, but he also staged a parental coup solely to make Em happy.