by Natalie Grey
Inspiration hit Gracie like a bolt of lightning. “That was you?”
“Yeah.” Jay looked halfway between proud and terrified. “Look, it was just so that we could get an idea about what sort of questions players would have. It wasn't supposed to be creepy or anything—”
“I didn't think it was creepy," Gracie interrupted. “I mean, it makes sense. Wow.” She frowned. “Wait, what was it about our conversation that interested you?”
“You cared about the world," Jay said simply. “You enjoyed it the way I had hoped people would enjoy it. I poured my heart and soul into making that game. I had also stood on that hill and talked to a lot of players, and none of them really cared the way you did. I guess I just wanted to watch you discover all of it, and after we talked when I was Anders, I really liked hanging out with you.”
Gracie felt her cheeks go hot. The truth was, she had come to look forward to speaking to Jay every day. When she saw that he had signed onto the game, she always smiled.
When she had been on her date with Kyle, she had wished that she was sitting there talking to Jay instead, because they would've been laughing and having a great time instead of her getting insulted for what she wanted to do with her life.
“Gracie?”
She realized he had kept talking while she’d been thinking about—
Her cheeks flamed. “Sorry.” She cleared her throat hastily. She couldn’t tell him what she’d been thinking about. “I really liked hanging out with you, too. I'm glad that you—” She broke off, mentally berating herself for being glad. “You lost your job because of me,” she said quietly. “That’s not okay.”
“It’s not,” Jay said after a moment. “But it wasn't because of you. It was because they didn't want to lose corporate sponsorships, so they were willing to just throw your account under the bus to make a quick fix for a problem they didn't understand.”
“Maybe it made sense to—” Gracie started, but Jay interrupted her.
“It’s sloppy,” he said. “It’s sloppy in a way that hurts random bystanders, and they knew that, and they still did it. That would already have been bad, but it was worse because I could see you going above and beyond for people who weren't even real. You would do more for pixels than they would for actual people, and the whole reason I had worked for them was to help build a place for people. I couldn't stay, Gracie.”
That, she understood. She nodded at him. It was a commonality in their group, she realized now. On the day she had met Alex and she had not been sure whether to move in, she had noticed how he’d picked up the paper on the front steps and brought it to his neighbor, an older man who would have had trouble navigating the stairs. Those little instinctive acts were something she had seen from every member of the group.
And those acts meant a lot to her. This was what she had never been able to articulate to people like Vince and Kyle: that how you treated someone should not depend on the superficial qualities that had been assigned to you by the world. That you should be kind when it was possible, not to get ahead because the person you were being kind to was important, but because being kind was important.
Jay shook his head. “And this…the gear? They’re doing it specifically to screw us over. Your ranking is an embarrassment to them. If you were to get a month-first, you'd climb even higher in the rankings. They changed the rules to make sure the other guilds would have the advantage.” He gave a snort of laughter. “You know, just in case I thought I had made the wrong decision and they were actually reasonable, moral people, they have confirmed they aren’t.”
Gracie laughed as well, but she sobered quickly. “God, I feel so stupid. I told myself that ranking wasn't real, but part of me still saw that number on the bank statement and thought maybe I could make a living at this. Maybe I could get out of my shitty job and not have to get another one just like it.”
Jay sat back, his eyes narrowed in thought. “I don't think it was stupid,” he said. “In fact, I think it might still work.”
“They’re never going to let me...” Gracie protested, but he shook his head.
“They can't stop you,” he said flatly. “They tried to ban your account, Gracie. They tried to delete your account, but it didn't work. The game decided you're meant to be there, and you know what? Even if it weren't for all the things you've done—the things that made us all want to be in your group—the fact would still be that you're a fucking good player. You get the combat in a way I’ve never seen before.”
Gracie flushed with pleasure. “I love it,” she admitted. “I love learning all the mechanics and just flowing on instinct.”
“It’s not instinct with you,” Jay said. “It’s calculations. I can hear you mutter while you're learning the dynamics of different enemies. You’re calculating the odds.”
“Never tell me the odds," Gracie quipped.
Jay laughed. “You know what, then? Let's do it. Fuck the odds.”
Gracie started to smile. “Fuck the odds,” she mused. “Now there’s a battle cry. I like it.”
“Guys?” Alex stuck his head around the door. “Everyone is logging in.”
“Cool,” Gracie said. “Let me just order some food and—”
Alex interrupted her. “No time.” He shook his head.
Gracie realized what had happened at the same time that Jay did. He swore, and she uttered one word: “Who?”
“Demon Syndicate,” Alex said. “Someone must have given them a heads-up because they're wearing a very weird assortment of gear and they have a strange group, and they went in about five minutes after the content dropped.”
Gracie launched into motion. “Jay—”
“On it,” he said at once. “See you in-game.”
He signed off, and Gracie began putting on her VR outfit. She looked up to see Alex watching her.
“So you've decided to give it a shot." He looked pleased.
“Fuck the odds,” Gracie told him. “These people want to screw me over? They want to change the rules? That just means they're going to look even more stupid when we win anyway.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Thad bounced on the balls of his feet and gave a last experimental full-body shrug to see how the VR suit was situated. Everything seemed good, and he grinned.
Outside his VR world, he and the rest of the team stood in a series of taped-off squares in a little gymnasium. As a sponsored team, they had a training space rented for them, with high-speed internet, snacks, and exercise equipment, as well as top-of-the-line VR suits. In addition, each of them was sporting the black pants and top that served as their uniform, emblazoned with the Brightstar logo.
When this was over, and they’d gotten the month-first badge, Brightstar would put images of their fight up on the Demon Syndicate website. The gymnasium was lit along the edges by blue neon lights, the tape and the Brightstar logo glowing under blacklights, all structured to look appealing to a generation on the cutting edge of VR, raised with the memory of TRON.
They had people beating down the door to get into Demon Syndicate these days.
Not Callista, of course. For a moment, Thad’s smile slipped into a frown. Brightstar had been insistent that he try to recruit her, wanting to have as many players in the top ten as possible. Gr8p Drink was edging them out these days.
Thad hadn’t wanted to do that, but he did want the sponsorship—and he wanted the rankings their sponsorship helped him achieve. It was all over the forums that the sponsors had persuaded Dragon Soul to allow people to bring their own gear into the dungeon run this month, and Thad wasn’t surprised. Brightstar gave a lot of money to Dragon Soul. They could pull some serious strings if they wanted to, and he’d rather have them doing that for him than someone else.
So if they wanted this Callista person, he’d recruit her.
Or, that was how it was supposed to work. In reality, he’d made the offer to Callista, and she’d turned him down flat. He didn’t get the sense that she was any happier about it than
he was.
Now Brightstar was pissed, and Thad had something to prove: namely, that he could beat Callista’s little group into the dust when it came to this month’s dungeon run. That shouldn’t be hard, after all. It wasn’t like she would even try. She had nothing in terms of a team, just some newbies she’d picked up somewhere.
And even if she did try, how far would she get in a dungeon that had been built for top-level gear?
He heard whoops from his team as the opening cinematic began, and his mood dissolved. Thad had always had the ability to dial in when he needed to, and he wasn’t going to let some weird recruitment issue get to him now.
He barely paid attention as the cinematic played. His mind was already running ahead to the money hitting his bank account and the flood of congratulations that were going to come in online. People on the forums had been saying for months now that the Scions of Shinra were the real top dogs and Demon Syndicate’s rise was just a fluke, nothing more.
Thad was going to prove them wrong.
The cinematic cleared, and his second-in-command Envi, the guild’s top healer, sidled up to him. In reality, Envi was a thirty-five-year-old man named Jamie, tall and lanky, with dirty-blond hair. In-game, however, he was an Aosi woman, pale hair and skin carrying just a hint of blue. Only his eyes were dark, so deep a blue that they looked black until the light hit them.
“You’re sure about this?” Jamie asked Thad. He looked around nervously at the party they’d brought with them, composed almost entirely of fire mages. “This is a lot of squishies to be healing if everything goes south.”
“I’m sure,” Thad said.
Envi stared at him, expressionless. Even though Jamie knew Thad wasn’t really the person standing in front of him, even though he knew that he was looking at an avatar whose face didn’t show emotion unless Thad told it to, Jamie was looking for clues.
Thad sighed and took the time to open a private channel. “The information is good, okay?”
Jamie sighed too, the sound coming out less frustrated and more like the epic dying gasp of a Tolkien elf. “What if they’re setting us up to look bad?”
“They’re not,” Thad promised. When Jamie sighed again, Thad moved a little closer. It was a private channel so no one could hear them talking, but he still had the urge to whisper. “It came directly from Dragon Soul to Brightstar.”
Jamie sucked in his breath. There was a pause, and Thad was just about to say that time was ticking away and they needed to go, when Jamie said quietly, “I’m not sure I like that.”
Thad stared at him. His character, an Ocru male named Goolax, did his idle animation, straightening up and loosening up his shoulders. “What?” he said finally.
“Look, when we were scraping to try to find out information Dragon Soul didn’t want us to know, it felt different. If they help us, it won’t feel like we’re actually winning,” Jamie said. “It feels like pay to play.”
“It’s not different at all.” Thad fought a wave of annoyance. He was a hundred percent over people who wanted to get moralistic about tiny situations. “We’re not getting people killed or something here, Jamie, chill. We’re just winning at a game.” When Jamie said nothing, Thad almost snapped, “Who doesn’t take an advantage when it’s handed to them? That’s just good tactics.”
“I guess,” Jamie said doubtfully.
“And we worked for the armor we’ve got,” Thad pointed out. “Every other victory we’ve had has been because we worked hard to get good at the game. So what if we have an assist in this one, right?” He grinned. “Plus, I know you’ve had your eye on that new keyboard, which you can get with the cash from this run.”
He’d won, and he knew it. Jamie nodded. “Yeah,” the other man said. His character’s pale hair rippled in the moonlight. “Let’s go smash this shit up.”
“Hey, all.” Gracie shrugged her shoulders and bounced on the balls of her feet, trying to burn off nervous energy. Her character was hanging in a void that looked something like a nebula, blues and purples rippling around her.
“Hey.” “What up.” “Yo.” The team sounded engaged and excited.
“So we’re really doing this, huh?” Ushanas asked.
“We’re really doing this,” Gracie confirmed. “Why not, right?”
There was a slight pause, then she heard Alex’s voice in her ear over a private channel. “Maybe a bit more inspiring on the speech front, chief.”
“Right. Whoops.” Gracie’s cheeks flushed. She took a moment to think while she switched back to the global channel. “The way I see it, we’ve pulled off some crazy things in this game, and you know why? Because Metamorphosis Online is set up to reward skill, and it’s set up to reward people who love playing together. We have both of those things in spades.”
Now there was a murmur of agreement.
“I’ve watched every one of you fine-tune your play style,” Gracie said honestly. “You listen to feedback, and you work with your teammates so that each of you does the most you can for the group. You’ve learned to communicate with one another when things are going crazy—and things do go crazy around us, don’t they?”
The team laughed.
“We’ve gotten to see some weird-ass parts of this game,” Gracie said, talking through the laugh that was bubbling up in her chest. Her teammates started appearing in the void with her. Alex gave a wry salute, Kevin hopped and twirled as his tiny Piskie character, and Alan had Mirra whirl, admiring the way the light glinted on her robes.
“To be honest,” Gracie told them, “I have no idea if what we’re about to do is even the same dungeon everyone else will get.”
“Oh, shit.” Kevin was laughing. “She’s right, isn’t she? Strap in, guys! It’s gonna be a surprise clusterfuck.”
“And we’ll have a damned lot of fun doing it,” Gracie said. “Because guess what? We’re going to be streaming live. People are going to be able to see how freaking cool every one of you is. People are going to be making bets on us versus Demon Syndicate, and you know what they’re gonna see? That we’re better.”
The team cheered. They were nearly all here now, Freon dropping in with a wave, Lakhesis stabbing her sword into the air, and Ushanas standing quietly, clearly preparing mentally.
“All right, team huddle.” Gracie beckoned them all in. “Aaaaand, everyone kneel, or Kevin’s going to be staring at our junk.” There was a burst of laughter as everyone sat on the floor of nothingness—a dizzying feeling—and put their hands in. Gracie felt a swell of pride in her chest. “We’re good at what we do, guys. We’re really good at it. We have fun with it too, and that’s because we’re here every night for each other. Some of you I’ve known for ages, some of you I’ve only known for a few days, but every one of you has proved yourselves. I hope you feel confident with me at the helm.”
“Damn straight I do,” said Jay. He gave her a nod. “To our very own Callista, who’s not afraid to stand in front and get hit with maces, definitely not afraid to give orders, and a great friend for getting you out of your funk when you’ve gotten into one.” He gave her a grin and, below her headset, Gracie couldn’t help but grin back.
“Hear, hear.” Alex clapped Gracie on the shoulder in the real world—a maneuver that involved hitting her more than once—and gave a thumbs up in-game. “Now, we’re already behind, so I advise we go now,” he continued. “Demon Syndicate logged in as soon as the content dropped, and they logged in with a weird party configuration. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m guessing they had some inside information, huh?”
“What gave it away?” Gracie asked drily. “That, or the fact that Dragon Soul just now conveniently decided to allow players to take their gear into the dungeon runs?”
There were laughs and groans.
“She’s not wrong,” Jay said quietly, and although few others knew what he meant, he met Gracie’s eyes and gave a quiet nod.
“So, I say we teach them a lesson,” Gracie said. “You all with
me?”
The group pounded their fists on the ground, high-fived one another, and gave shouts of agreement.
“Good.” Gracie brought up the ready check. “Time to go catch up with the competition, then. Let’s wipe the floor with them.”
In the Dragon Soul offices, Sam crossed his arms over his chest and let out a deep breath. His team—Jay’s former coworkers—clustered around the monitors that showed the two raids in progress.
Demon Syndicate had just loaded into the beginning of the run. A moonscape, dead rock pitted with impact craters, flickered to show the team appearing. In the distance, across a chasm of space dotted with treacherous paths and patrols of elemental creatures, stood the ruins of a massive palace.
No one was paying attention to them, though. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the second screen, where the tiny doomed team was loading in.
There was a sound behind them, and one of the employees glanced over his shoulder to do a double-take. She nudged Sam in the ribs with her elbow, and he looked back to see Dan and Dhruv watching, their faces expressionless.
Sam met Dan’s eyes and then looked back at the screen. He didn’t know what to say, and, to his own surprise, he felt a little bit pleased that they were so clearly annoyed. He could say honestly that he hadn’t told the team to watch this run, nor had he told them that Jay was involved. Jay hadn’t mentioned it, either. Everyone knew, though, and Jay had been a good supervisor.
People were pulling for him to win.
“Demon Syndicate logged in as soon as the content dropped,” one of the players on Jay’s team said. His name tag identified him as Gary Swiftbolt. “And they logged in with a weird party configuration. Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m guessing they had some inside information, huh?”