Chapter Two
EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT a battle royale is; they just don’t know that they know.
It’s a fight where the only rules are survival of the fittest, everyone for themselves, eat or be eaten.
They gave it a special name because Battle Royale is the English title of a Japanese book about a bunch of high schoolers trapped on a remote island and forced to hunt each other until one student remains.
And, uh. Yeah. That pretty much sums up the genre.
Metaphors for capitalism’s for-profit transmutation of youth into trauma aside, the concept of a battle royale is basically made to inspire video games, so it does, and it whips.
Wizzard’s Guardians League Royale is my favorite, and while there are many battle royale titles that are like GLR, none of them can touch it when it comes to player base and sheer originality.
Some come close, but Wizzard Games is the industry’s uncontested number one.
This is the part where I toss my curls over my shoulder and say something arrogant like “Being number one? I can totally relate,” so I will. Internally.
But seriously, I am so fricking good at Guardians League Royale.
That is my mantra and I know for a fact it’s all I need to survive this summer.
As far as mantras go it’s a little specific, but I’ve always had a hard time applying vague, universal language to myself.
Like “I am a strong and powerful woman.” Cool.
That imparts zero information. Or “love and light.” Anyone can say two nouns.
My favorite unrelatable mantra is “I have the same number of hours in my day as Beyoncé,” which, no.
No, I do not. Beyoncé bends time, and anyone who doesn’t believe that is delusional.
Focus, Zora. Get hype. Is it possible to do both?
I need to calculate the precise emotional equilibrium between focus and hype that results in a positive outcome.
In this case, a positive outcome means I roll up to today’s orientation and unleash a can of digital whoop-ass on forty-nine other players who all want to do the exact same thing to me.
As established, that’s going to be the easy part.
The hard part is everything else about today.
New Year’s Day was one thing, when the Wizzcon crowd made it easy to slip in and out of the theater without attracting attention.
Well, almost. There was that one … nope. Not thinking about him. That boy does not exist. I knocked him out of the running; I did it on purpose, and that means I never have to see or think about him again. Nothing—he, whatever. Never mind.
I reflexively yank my phone out of my jean shorts pocket and check my texts to see if anything has changed.
Nothing new, just the last three messages from “Your Nemesis,” aka Cassius Sharpe, the other winner of the January battle that day at Wizzcon.
In the parlance of the summer academy, we were both considered “top two winners,” so I don’t like to admit that Cassius beat me, not the other way around.
I’ll only agree to admit it because Cass is kind of the best thing ever.
I’m not the most gracious loser, in fact I would rather lick the sidewalk and die, so my second-place finish must have activated my Resting Murder Face.
I didn’t have high hopes when the winner that day, a tall, skinny boy wearing the classic T-shirt and cargo shorts fit in January approached me after the match.
I thought he was going to say something condescending at best or embrace the toxic gamer stereotype and be a legit Nazi at worst (both options are subtle variations on the ways people communicate the extent to which girls, especially Black girls, don’t belong in games).
I was loading several ways to say “kick rocks” into the chamber and getting ready to shoot, but Cassius stayed my trigger finger by offering me a rematch.
Not onstage, obviously, but later and online, just for fun.
So we kept in touch. We got in the habit of voice chatting while we kicked everyone’s butts, and those hours added up. Cass is an apex predator of the East Coast server and the best friend to have if you’re really frickin’ good at Guardians League Royale and have trouble reading social cues.
From: Your Nemesis
running late
Attached is a GIF of a guy running away from a dragon. Cute.
From: Your Nemesis
theres big red stairs here im gonna wait here
From: Your Nemesis
just saw a naked guy with a cowboy hat n a guitar is that normal for summer camp?
I resist the urge to correct him on the use of the term “camp.” Band geeks go to camp.
Hot people telling ghost stories around a bonfire unaware that they’re about to get murdered by a lake-dwelling maniac go to camp.
Wizzard’s top players go to an academy. The Wizzard Games Summer Academy Royale, to be specific.
A two-month summit where, starting today, we’ll sleep in dorms but basically live at the Wizzard Theater—fifty of the best GLR players in the country duking it out in battle royales (battles royale?) for the top two spots on the end-of-summer leaderboard. And those top two players?
They only get to face off in a live, streaming debut of the new GLR mode everyone’s been begging Wizzard to add to the game since it launched: Guardians League Royale: 1v1.
And while I will say I’m not as enthused about playing a game mode where you only get to hunt down and snipe one player, I am enthused about the part where we get to try new maps and modes before they launch.
When Wizzard announced the competition, they said it was an opportunity for the studio to get top players’ feedback on new content and the upcoming season of GLR.
That means talking to studio heads, developers, artists, and writers—and that access is priceless.
Especially if working for Wizzard Games has been your dream since you were eight years old, when your cousin sat you in front of an Xbox to shut you up while she babysat and you took her brother’s high score on Guardians League III by the time someone came to pick you up. Good times.
I’ve come so far, I think, even though it feels like one of those cliché mantras. I really have. This homeschooled, touch-averse nerd from New Jersey is heading to the big city to basically make a video game with her favorite studio!
And by “heading to the big city,” I mean I’m already here.
The moment I emerge from Penn Station, New York City announces its presence with a moist blast of hot street air slapping me in the face.
It takes me a moment to tap around my hairline until I find my sunglasses and yank them down over my eyes like protective goggles.
A group of neck muscles I swear I didn’t know existed unclenches in relief.
I love wearing sunglasses. There’s something about hiding my eyes that makes existing in public so much easier.
I don’t have to worry about giving strangers an involuntary stink eye (my face just looks like this, honest), no one can tell when I’m staring at them in a totally normal, academic, people-watching way, and I think the glasses make me look like a big weird bug, which I love for some reason and refuse to interrogate why.
Now I am armored and on time. You’d think a Wizzard diehard like me would jump at the chance to be the academy’s most obvious teacher’s pet and show up early with a batch of cookies for the program leads and a big ole “love me” smile, but that’s not in my strategy.
I need to be smart about this summer, and that means not wasting time making small talk with my competition. I did not come here to play.
Okay, technically, literally I came here to play, but what I mean is I didn’t come here to make new friends.
That’s what Cass is for, and that is why instead of heading straight through the double doors at the Wizzard Theater, I will meet him on the big red stairs next to the naked guy with a guitar and a cowboy hat.
How to make a good first impression on the cofounder of a game studio, I tap deliberately into the search engine on my phone as I turn north toward Times Square.
The top results are unhelpful. Have a firm handshake, some corporate-pilled lunatic with a blog suggests.
Use people’s first names and make lots of eye contact!
Yeesh, pass. How about searching talking to people in real life vs.
online, return with a handful of judgy articles about online friendships that, if I read between the lines here, add up to “touch grass, dork”?
Let me try a new tack: What does Brian Juno look for in a mentee—I hover my thumbs over the screen while I think this one through—and is it a 17-year-old Black girl—I add to the query—low-key on the spectrum—seems relevant—who’s followed his work forever and wants to basically be him when she grows up. Hit Search.
No results. Not like I expected any. It only takes a few more minutes for me to make it to the part of Times Square that leads up to the Wizzard Theater, where costumed characters from the Guardians League series post up alongside the legion of Captains America and Elmos who winkle tips out of tourists for a picture.
The multiversal effect is jarring. Some studios rely on famous character cameos and franchise partnerships to get people interested in their games, but because of Brian Juno, Wizzard has always been about generating their hype in-house.
The result is a game series where the players are the true stars of every match.
We create our characters, embody them, dress them up in limited edition avatar fashion drops and hard-earned 3D bling to indicate our win count and tier status. No Deadpools required.