by Alexis Nedd
The Vulcan DPS loses control of his character and slides into Han-Jun’s wall, earning himself a nice hot cup of murder. One down, four to go. Or one, if we get their Lucafont in a tank kill. That’s an instant checkmate in GLO, which is why all of their tank characters are crazy overpowered in the health department.
Lucafont’s a ghost character, which means he’s weak to Pharaoh’s necromagic. He’s going to do everything he can to take me out first, and I have zero intention of letting him. He spots me through the wall and pauses for a second, probably timing the cooldown from Han-Jun’s deployment, and nails his lunge perfectly. He’d have taken me out if Erik didn’t Shadow Step my Pharaoh away like a dad shoving a stroller out from in front of a speeding car; he takes a huge hit in the process. Han-Jun is busy keeping Byunki alive closer to the payload, and Erik’s self-heal isn’t ready yet. He’ll go down if I don’t strip Luca.
Without waiting for Byunki’s signal, I start hammering at the tank’s armor with Pharaoh’s relatively weak dagger attack. My special isn’t charged yet, but Ivan gets a kill on one of the Vulcan healers and bumps up all of our bars. Ivan, I love you. Thanks for the hand warmers.
“KNOX, stop. Let Erik get his timer back,” Byunki grunts through the exertion of manning Klio.
I can’t do that. A quick glance up at my team health shows Han-Jun has used too many heals in the last minute and has depleted his mana. Byunki is babysitting the payload, which is transferring ownership to Fury way too slowly. One of Vulcan’s DPSes is trying to take him down, but Byunki has his shields up every fraction of a second, parrying his attacks. We’re going to lose Han-Jun, and a red flash on the side of my screen tells me Erik is next in line for a drop. Without healers, we’re toast.
I fog one more time and slide over to Byunki’s attacker, spiking him with a death magic spell that paralyzes him for just enough time to fog back and face Lucafont. Erik dies, but the length of my spell charges me one more tick toward my Special.
Han-Jun throws his last heal at Byunki and drops. With no more heals available, Ivan goes nuts around the perimeter of the payload, hitting his Bend Time Special and cutting down both a Vulcan DPS and a healer—an incredible play, but Lucafont turns from the payload and takes him out with his Special, Ectoplasmic Chains.
I really, really hate ghost characters, and we’re running out of time. With me and Byunki up against the two remaining Vulcans, it’s not looking great. Fury isn’t going to lose this match. I won’t let Fury lose in the first round.
Time for a Hail Mary. I ping a ranged shot at Lucafont, which doesn’t do much damage but certainly gets his attention; he whirls on me like a cat that just felt a toddler yank his tail. Oh, did you think I meant to hurt you with that? Look again, a-hole. My Shatter is charged.
So I hit it. Purple magic explodes from my crossbow, and the charged bolt turns Luca’s silvery armor to glitter. Byunki swings for the final blow but misses by a millimeter, so I take the kill shot. Lucafont goes down.
In the absence of their tank, Vulcan auto-surrenders the payload to Fury and we win the match. Ivan leaps up next to me and yanks his headphones off to strike a victory pose. I can’t hear a word he’s saying, but he’s grabbing my arm and pulling me up to a standing position. Han-Jun and Erik are up too, making gestures around their ears and looking at me expectantly. Noise cancellation! I don’t need that anymore.
When I lift my headset off, the noise from the arena almost knocks me back into my seat. Every one of the dozens of gigantic screens is alternating between showing Fury’s logo and the three coolest words I’ve ever read in my life. TANK KILL: KNOX.
That’s what the crowd is still shouting when Fury heads backstage, “Tank Kill: KNOX.” We basically clamor all over each other as we follow Byunki through the arena’s staging area, just an absolute conga line of arm rubs, high fives, and shaking each other by the shoulders while jumping around (I thought that only happened in sports movies, but nope; it’s happening IRL). This feels like love. It’s teamwork! We are Fury, and I’m a part of this. I could either vomit or fly, whichever one feels more plausible.
Han-Jun, Erik, Ivan, and I have not calmed down by the time we get back to the green room, which makes sense because we just showed everyone why Fury belongs on top.
“Ivan, you got two with one Special!” Han exclaims.
“Not gonna lie; I thought we were going down.” Ivan’s looking at me like I’m made of solid gold.
“A checkmate on her first match! KNOX got a checkmate on her first match.” I could do without Erik’s disbelieving tone, but I’ll take the accolades where I can get them. “How did you even know to pull the Shatter right then?”
“I didn’t even think before I did it! I was just like ‘he gotta go’ and then WHAM.” That’s me, talking somehow even though my mouth feels like it belongs to someone else. My usual level of articulation has been substantially reduced by the sheer volume of adrenaline swishing through my bloodstream.
“Well, you killed it,” Ivan admits. “KNOX for the win.”
“KNOX didn’t listen to instructions.”
Byunki’s voice slices through the chatter as he marches his tiny, imposing body up to me in the room. He has his finger pointed at my chest, like he’s actually Klio jabbing me in the heart with his segmented sword.
“I told you not to Shatter until my signal. You didn’t listen. And you took the last shot before I could hit my Special. You stole my tank kill.”
I, um. Don’t do great when I’m being yelled at. Chalk it up to my parents having forceful personalities and my need for everyone who isn’t Audra Hastings to like me. There’s just this feeling I get when people sound mad, even if they’re not mad at me, that makes my whole midsection seize up like I’m expecting a punch. When someone actually is mad at me, it’s worse because my problem-solving brain bisects into the half that wants to throw down a handful of smoke powder and disappear and the half that wants to burst into tears.
It just doesn’t make any sense. I won the match for Fury, but Byunki still hates me. All that time I spent drilling Pharaoh’s Shatter and every possible move to help Fury win this match and he still doesn’t like me. At all. The other guys in Fury are staring at me now. Not even Ivan, who I thought was my boy, has anything to say in my defense.
I really don’t want to cry in front of these guys. Please don’t let me cry in front of Fury.
“Byunki, I’m sorry. I saw Ivan go down, and I had my Special ready. I didn’t see another way.”
“It’s not your job to see another way; it’s your job to take directions! Next time, don’t think. You’re not good at it. Just do whatever I tell you to do. This isn’t the KNOX show. It’s Fury, forever.”
Yup, there will be tears. Real tears. I need to get out of this green room now. There’s nothing left for me to say, and everyone is still quiet, so I run out and take whichever lefts and rights will get me farthest away from Fury and from him. Byunki hates me. I just got here, and I love it so much, and he’s going to take it away forever. Is this what completely fucked feels like?
I’m so deep in the backstage of the Wizzard-Claricom Arena I’m not sure I can find my way back without help. This far back there’s catering staff and event people passing by every so often, but if any player was looking for a place to be alone, this would be an ideal spot. As I turn another corner, I see a competitor sitting on a folding chair in an empty hallway. I should have guessed I’m not the only one who wants to be alone.
I try to backtrack before he notices, but my sad girl stompy feet give me away. He looks up, sees me . . . and reacts like I just pulled a gun on him. Seriously, he kind of puts his hands up and looks shocked. Relax, nerd, I’m—
“Emilia? Wh-what are you doing back here?”
Wait, what? There’s no way a random player should know my name, but something clicks for me when I hear the way he says it. I take a second look at his face and notice his big eyes refracted behind thick glasses, half-remembering his d
ark hair and imagining it spiked up like a fourth grader instead of falling in shaggy waves. He’s taller now, and I haven’t seen him in years, but I’d bet my ass that’s—
“I’m Jake,” he says through what still sounds like panic to me. Now that he sees I’m not going to shoot him with my invisible nothing gun, he repositions one of his raised arms to mess with his hair. That was definitely his plan the whole time, to do that with his hands. It’s very convincing.
“Jake Hooper from . . . Todd? Or Emmett’s birthday, if you remember.” He looks over his shoulder, like he’s worried someone else is going to find him talking to me. “I go to Hillford West now. I didn’t know you played GLO, though.”
He goes where? It takes a second look for me to put the final pieces of the puzzle together, something I missed in my surprise at finding Jake backstage. His tournament shirt has a blue cross and a black shield. It’s the shirt I saw on the guy on the bleachers before I wiped out in practice a couple of days ago. He goes to my high school. Which means he knows me. He knows both of me.
I was wrong. This is what completely fucked feels like.
PART II
Jake again, Saturday
SORRY, JAKE NEEDED a minute.
Pretty much the only good thing about being Jake Hooper was that his brain could do this thing where one second stretched out way longer than it was supposed to. Part of it was his thoughts speeding up so he went over a million things at once, and the other part was this super terrible slow-motion perception that reminded him of making a choice at the end of a Telltale game chapter, one of the big choices that changed the ending or forced him to kill off a main character he’d really have preferred to keep alive. Those choices always stressed him out, but Jake refused to cheat by pausing the game and looking up what happened in either case.
That turned out to be a good habit to get into. Slow as these moments stretched, he hadn’t figured out how to pause real life yet. Also, there were no helpful Reddit spoiler threads for making story choices like the one he was presented with right now.
On one side of the Telltale decision matrix was Emilia Romero, the exact person whose two-story image he’d fled the players’ box to avoid. His surprise at seeing her had made words tumble out of him before he even had a chance to think, and now that he had a moment to recoup, the idea of saying anything else to her seemed ill-advised and entirely terrifying. Jake’s vision snagged on Emilia as one possible focus, which seemed indulgent and made him feel as if his rib cage had swapped functions with a beehive. Jake had tried so hard not to look at her when he found out he’d transferred to her school. Just looking made him feel like he was bothering her somehow. Here in the back hallways of the Wizzard Claricom Arena, he couldn’t stop himself.
Unless! There was always the other choice. Shut down, tune out, run. There were so many things in the universe that were not Emilia Romero—there were doorways and hiding places, people, ducks, mushrooms, boats maybe—all he had to do was think about literally anything else, and he could postpone this conversation for never, completely sidestepping the part where he tripped over his own dangling heartstrings and whiffed the GLO match he had coming up in thirty minutes.
What made it worse was that up until he saw Emilia walk out onstage with Team Fury, of all the evil GLO teams in Pennsylvania, Jake had been having a nice day. He’d gotten up early, stopped at Dunkin’, took that nasty bus into the city, and finally met his best friends in the world. Team Unity was more of a family than his actual family was, and seeing Bob with his bald head and silly hat, Ki and Penelope completing each other’s sentences IRL, and even Matty (who was kind of a jerk but, like, their jerk) had Jake absolutely floating with joy.
Jake hoped that by the end of the day, he’d be able to write a list in his head of the most important things that happened to him at the competition, and the thing that was happening to him right now wouldn’t even crack the top ten. Best case scenario, Unity won the match and moved on to compete next week, and that would be number one on his list. Worst case scenario, they crashed and burned, and the one thing he took away from this day was running into the girl he baby-duck imprinted on in the fourth grade, the one who didn’t even remember his name and made him feel physically and emotionally microwaved.
It was pathetic. Nobody else had to tell Jake this was pathetic. He was incredible at producing that assessment from both himself and apparently everyone he’d ever met in his entire life. It was not very cool to have met someone once and been like “yup, we should be best friends,” and then hit puberty and have that morph into “help, I want kiss” and proceed to go absolutely nowhere with that. If his dad knew he was flipping out over a girl at school, he’d give Jake some awful Boomer lecture about how Hoopers don’t think, they just do, and no son of his was going to stand by while the girl of his dreams ignored him, blah-blah-blah . . .
Jake’s dad had clearly never met Emilia Romero. Just “doing” wouldn’t work on someone as smart as her. Also Jake’s parents’ marriage exploded when his mom cheated on his dad and left his entire family in this dust, so Jake assumed he’d learned more about talking to women from Mass Effect.
No, sorry. That was a lie. Jake played fem Shepard. He learned more about talking to gay aliens from Mass Effect. To be fair, Emilia may as well have been from another planet.
What was she even doing here? Jake had assumed Emilia didn’t even game anymore. She’d become something else in the years since he last saw her, something Jake couldn’t touch: a cool person. She played field hockey, made the honors list every quarter, and hung out with people who’d never give Jake a second glance. Just last week four girls in his grade showed up wearing the exact same outfit Emilia wore on the first day of school and hashtagged their group photo #RomeroStyle. The Romero in RomeroStyle couldn’t possibly care about regional esports.
“Jake Hooper from the birthdays, right? And the arcade.” Jake’s minute was up, and Emilia was talking to him. “You’re tall now.”
The Telltale engine of life had made Jake’s choice. That always happened when he stalled. With nowhere to go and a heart full of bees, he accepted his fate.
Sort of. He was still gearing up to actually talking.
“Yo. Buddy. You okay?” Emilia was looking at him the same way she had when they were kids, like she wasn’t sure if a puppy she found on the sidewalk was dead or just sleeping.
Not enough time. Default mode activated. “Sorry.” Jake’s brain-moment collapsed around him. “Sorry!” He already said that! Help, he thought.
“You really have to stop saying sorry.”
Jake wondered if that was the first time a girl had said that to a boy in the history of civilization, then realized he was still obligated to reply. If this were Mass Effect, fem Shepard would use the conversation choice that pointed out the obvious, so that’s what he decided to do.
“So—Okay. Hi. You remember me?” Now that he’d said something, every function in Jake’s body switched to manual control. His breathing took effort, and he had to remind himself to blink. He became aware of how weird tongues were and the weight of his own against his teeth.
“I remember you. It’s been, what, five years? I didn’t know you went to Hillford or played GLO. I didn’t think I’d run into anyone I know here.” She checked over her shoulder, as if she was worried someone would come up behind her and see them talking. As far as Jake knew, there weren’t any rules against players mingling between matches, but it would make sense if Fury held themselves to a higher standard. They were the old testament, fire-and-brimstone gods of the Philly server.
“That works out then. Because you don’t really know me!” Jake intended for that to sound reassuring and was certain he did not achieve his goal.
“You know me,” Emilia pointed out. “That kind of counts.” Ow? Yikes. How was he supposed to take that? Guided by his experience with alien conversation trees, Jake changed the subject.
“I just know your team because Fury’s amazing. Ma
kes total sense that you’re playing with them; if you were going to be on any team, of course it would be Fury. Like, legends only, you know? Not that I think you’re a legend. Well I mean if I would have guessed anyone I kind of know was a legend, it would probably be you, but not in a bad way? Just, like, given the context of how I know you. Which I really don’t. I just see you at school sometimes.”
From the way Emilia’s face fell, Jake guessed that he had once again managed to say the wrong thing entirely. Even though every neuron in his brain zoomed toward whichever hemisphere controlled his shut-the-hell-up valve, he felt badly enough to at least try to fix whatever he just did. Once he figured out what it was.
“I mean you’ve always been good. You’ve been kicking my butt since we were in the fourth grade, and Byunki—wow, it just hit me that you’re actually playing with the YUNG, wow—would only bring the best to this tournament. He’s not going to call in the sandbag squad, you know? I’m not even going to ask if you just won, because I know you did.”
Finally, a smile. All it took was a monologue.
“We did win. I got a checkmate.”
“Of course you did! Jesus, on your first match? You are . . .” Oof, Jake struggled for a word. “. . . terrifying.” It was true, in more ways than one. Emilia seemed to take it as a compliment.
“That’s the vibe. And what about you? You’re Team Unity?”
Jake looked down at his own jersey. Right, he was also here to compete. Very soon.
“Yeah, we’re kind of up next.”
“Right! Don’t let me keep you. You were probably getting in the zone down here, sorry.”
That was a liberal interpretation of what Jake was doing before Emilia showed up, but he was more than happy to let Emilia keep thinking that. On the whole, he’d give this whole incident a B minus, with points subtracted for awkward silences and the fact that he still had not managed to regulate his breathing despite earning one (1) smile and had blinked maybe four (4) times since Emilia started talking. And he’d stopped thinking about his tongue. Well, he had stopped thinking about it until he just thought about thinking about it. Tongues. So freaky.