Chapter Three #2
It’s a huge deal when a game company decides to launch their own esports division.
It’s a huger deal when they launch the league with a championship tournament that ends with an underdog win.
The deal assumes another level of hugeness when that team has not one, not two, but three girls on their roster, which gives Wizzard an incentive to build a diverse (if moderately feral) fandom that has no time for gatekeepers in esports.
The Big Three members of Team Unity playfully jog onstage to join Brian at the center, looking clean-cut and dominant in brand-new blue jerseys emblazoned with the Guardians League crest.
“We have Bob Quince, team captain! Kiki Kim, damage-dealer extraordinaire. Penelope Howard on heals!”
Even the most sleep-deprived student in the theater is wide awake now. We know what comes after the Big Three.
“And of course, the ones you’ve been waiting for, the healer and the dealer, it’s Emilia. And. Jake!”
Team Unity’s deal goes beyond huge when you throw in the Emilia and Jake factor. It blows up; it cannot be contained. The deal has its own gravity and a moon and potable water in underground springs. They have something Wizzard couldn’t manufacture if they tried: crossover appeal.
Onstage, at just the right moment, Emilia and Jake emerge from the wings holding hands.
Emilia’s big, Disney-princess eyes brighten her tan face and her long brown curls almost reach her waist, which is nuts because I don’t think she’s wearing extensions.
Hot girl magic, I guess. Jake has the wisdom to look primarily at Emilia as they cross the stage with laser focus; his thick glasses and sweet face scream both “sex nerd” and “babygirl.”
They’re gorgeous, they’re dating, and their timing is unimpeachable.
Emilia and Jake revealed their relationship live onstage right after Unity won the championship, and with one kiss they gave everyone something even more fun to root for than checkmates and team kills: true love.
Now Brian has them at every single Wizzard event like photogenic human mascots, and they basically keep WiTch afloat with the popularity of their co-streams. You can’t even say one of their names without the other; it would be like saying Salt without Pepa or calling Chappell Roan “Kayleigh.” It’s Emilia and Jake, Jake and Emilia, and—oh. OH. There’s one more thing I forgot.
This is more delicious than I thought. It’s extraordinary. Better than I could have imagined to the point where I almost want to laugh out loud. Ask me why. Okay, fine, I’ll say it. Only because it’s funny.
Emilia is the girl Ivan’s team tried to bury.
She was Ivan’s playing partner before his team, Team Fury, kicked her out!
Emilia came back for the finale as a member of their rival Team Unity, and they beat every one of those boys, Ivan included, with the digital, barbed-wire baseball bat of karma.
He must be miserable right now. Kind of hard to swing for a second chance when the reason you screwed up your first one is basically Queen Wizzard.
Talk about rubbing his failure in his face.
I happened, very accidentally and not because I was looking, to see where Ivan sat down before the lights went out, so I glance down to see if he’s there. Nope, he’s gone from his seat. Great time for a bathroom break, I think. Coward.
“Hey, every—Hold on.” Emilia tries to speak through the same microphone Brian was using but isn’t anywhere near tall enough to use it.
She looks over her shoulder and doesn’t have to say anything for her own personal Jake to step forward with a shy smile and start adjusting the height of the stand.
Someone in the first few rows of the audience whistles at him.
The blush crawling up his cheeks is so red I can spot it from all the way up here, and he promptly drops the microphone with an earsplitting squeal of feedback.
“Ouch!” I can’t help but scream when the speaker next to my seat starts to screech.
Now I know what a million dollars feels like when it’s trying to drill a hole in my eardrum.
Someone in the small crowd below has the audacity to laugh at my very real pain.
Good, another jerk in the building. Ivan will have a friend.
“Sorry!” Jake yells from the stage. “Sorry about that, person in the back. Sorry.”
I am begging the gods of whichever crossover pantheon governs both video games and live theater to end this moment before people start looking at me again.
Luckily, Emilia isn’t the type to miss a beat.
She picks up the microphone and holds it like a normal person, without the mic stand getting in her way.
“Kiss!” someone shouts from the crowd. Emilia rolls her eyes and looks over at Jake, who allows the briefest flicker of annoyance to cross his face.
“Yeah, no, we’re not doing that,” she says dryly before readjusting her smile.
“But we do want to tell you guys that we know how it feels to be where you are right now. It’s okay to be nervous.
You’re gonna do fine. You are here because you’re amazing players, and all you have to do this summer is remember that and be yourselves.
Except for you.” She points in the direction of the heckler.
“You might want to consider being someone else if that’s how you beha—”
Jake coughs loudly behind her. Somewhere in the rough noise it almost sounds like he’s saying, “Em!” She hears him, glances very quickly at Brian, and skillfully backtracks to continue her spiel about how being ourselves is very important this summer.
Which is fine; I just can’t figure out why she’s telling us this. I don’t understand why a battle royale competition needs me to “be myself” to succeed.
By the time I start paying attention again, Team Unity is leaving the stage. Talk about a quick appearance; that was barely a drive-by.
“Are you guys ready to find out the rules for the Summer Academy Royale?” Brian sets the microphone back in the stand, yoinks it back up to his full height, and resumes his part of the program. “Are you ready to find out what you’re up against?”
Behind Brian, the huge LED screen at the back of the stage turns on with a sudden flash of light that illuminates the whole theater. At the top, Wizzard Games Summer Academy Royale. The rest of the space on the screen is taken up by some kind of list.
I lean forward to get a better look at the list and spot my name somewhere in the middle. I also see Cassius and Ivan on there too. It doesn’t take a genius to assume that the other forty-seven names on there are our fellow competitors.
“This summer you will be competing in weekly Guardians League Royale matches with your fellow players, but the real field of play is right up here on this screen,” Brian says. “You begin your journey here, unranked.” He gestures up to the screen. “But that’s not how the summer will end.”
It’s not a list, I realize. It’s a leaderboard. But how is Wizzard going to rank fifty players from a handful of GLR matches? That math doesn’t math.
“Your score will be determined by”—he pauses dramatically—“the Wizz-Algorithm!”
The Wizz-Algorithm? Sounds like a chatbot that tells people when to use the bathroom. This is why I need to work for Wizzard. I could fall asleep on a keyboard and my forehead would come up with a better name than that.
“Part of it is determined by your in-game performance. Personal kills count toward the score, as will average match longevity and wins.”
That makes more sense. Only one of us can win each match, so we’ll have to score based on the thousands of other mini victories we can achieve in the battle royale format.
“The other part,” Brian says, in a tone that makes me think he says “other” when he means “greater,” “will be determined not by in-game statistics and numbers, but by a group of people all of you know very, very well.” He leaves us quietly guessing for another long moment.
I wonder if anyone here has any idea what he’s talking about, or if it’s just me who’s out of the loop. “Your fans.”
Whose fans? I don’t have fans. Were we supposed to come here with fans? I’m not the only person confused. There’s a low murmur spreading around the theater as people whisper to one another.
“And by your fans, I mean the ones you’ll earn this summer while you go through the program.
To make things fair, all of you will get a new WiTch account to stream, post, and interact with viewers.
From there, the Wizz-Algorithm is designed to track your successes, generate an audience score, and factor it into your end-of-week ranking. ”
I genuinely cannot tell if I’m hearing this right, so I ask Cassius.
“Yo, am I hearing this right?”
“You are.”
That conversation was shorter than I expected, but okay. I’m not losing my grip on reality. Brian Juno did just say that being really frickin’ good at Guardians League Royale is barely half of what it’s going to take to win.
“New positions will be calculated after each match, and the top two players at the end of the summer will play for the GLR: 1v1 reveal event.”
I think back to what I said to Cassius earlier. About how this academy is about skill and merit and nerds, so people like Ivan don’t belong. That was uncharacteristically na?ve of me. Peacocks like Ivan will always belong, and I’m the one who might not have what it takes to win.