Level Up (On a Role #1)

Chapter 1

one

his stupid, weird mouth

Every young woman remembers her first time.

I was unsupervised and ready to get into some trouble with my childhood best friend, Cameron.

Later, I would tell my mom that nothing happened, that it wasn’t a big deal, that there was nothing to worry about. What I wouldn’t tell her, though, is how my life changed forever that day.

All because my at-the-time best friend introduced me to a little game called The Stones of Ayor 3.

It was my first time playing an action/adventure RPG. I was hooked. So much so that I barely left my computer desk for the next six weeks; I’m pretty sure Christmas still happened, but I couldn’t give you any details. I’m just going on precedent for that one.

Nearly a decade later, The Stones of Ayor 3 is still my favourite video game of all time, and the fourth game in the series is coming out in—holy shit: five days.

Five more days and I get to experience my first time all over again. And I won’t let anything stop me from enjoying that. Certainly not stupid fucking Scones.

God, I hate Scones.

“These are muffins,” Victory says around a mouthful of one such muffin after I express my discontent to her at Green Bean Coffee—our favourite little café in Toronto, near Kensington Market—on a Saturday afternoon.

It’s our usual thing, getting together for coffee once a week to catch up when life gets too busy for more than that. And while my life is blissfully dull as ever—aside from my blossoming, all-consuming hatred for a certain Stones of Ayor streamer—my BFF has been quite busy.

Victory has barely been able to take a break for weeks now, with all the commissions she’s been getting for murals and window art for local businesses and events. I’m incredibly proud of her but also incredibly sad that I can’t hog her all to myself anymore.

“I mean the dude,” I tell her, unable to quell the rage boiling in my veins every time I think about him. “SconesOfAyor, the guy who streams Stones 3 all the time.”

“Right.” Victory nods like she only vaguely knows what I’m talking about. “The guy with no face.”

I take a bite out of my own muffin but I don’t finish chewing before I reply. “He has a face. But it’s never fully on camera.” I finally swallow. “You only ever see his chin, or sometimes his mouth. It’s really weird.”

“His mouth is weird?”

“No, his mouth is—” Okay, I’m not going to admit that I’ve given thought to what his mouth is like. “The hiding thing. It’s weird.”

“Maybe he likes his privacy.” Victory sweeps her waist-length, bubblegum pink twists over her shoulder.

I don’t think she means to look glamorous as she does it—she has sensory issues, and her hair was probably touching her leg—but she always manages to look glamorous anyway.

“Didn’t you say he has, like, a hundred thousand subscribers? ”

Two-hundred-and-fifty-seven thousand, actually. But she doesn’t need to know that.

My expression flattens as I take a long sip of my cold brew through a soggy paper straw. (Victory would say it’s too late in the year to still be drinking iced beverages, but hot coffee is disgusting. And no coffee is even worse.) “I showed you what people were saying about me, right?”

“Yeah, they think you faked your, uh…speedquest?"

“Speedrun. And yes.” I take another grumpy sip. “Some people even said that I must have paid someone else to speedrun the game for me and then used the footage to pretend that I was playing it myself. Which sounds like way more effort than just playing it myself!”

“Because your time was better than his?”

“Barely! And neither of us is ranking on any lists, by the way.” I slurp the rest of my coffee loudly, but I continue speaking before Victory has a chance to reply.

“Okay, yeah, so maybe I’ve never really played this sort of game on my channel before.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t put thousands of hours into it.

I don’t just play Cloud Quest and Laundromate all the time. ”

Her eyes light up. “Oh, I love Cloud Quest!”

“I know, it’s awesome, but not the point.”

“Right, sorry.” Her expression turns pensive and she taps the sides of her coffee mug with short, brightly painted fingernails. “Wait, so this Scones guy, he accused you of cheating?”

“Well… No. But he basically says he agrees,” I tell her as I squish the straw between my fingers to vent my frustration. “Not, like, with his words, but with his silence.”

“Spooky.”

“Eight hundred and seventy-two people tagged me in comments on his archives and on his streams in the past few days,” I add, and Victory nods even though she knows that I tend to make up numbers out of thin air—which I did.

“Trying to goad him into agreeing that I’m just some wannabe-gamer who should stay in her lane and keep playing kiddie games. ”

“I’m pretty sure children shouldn’t play Laundromate—”

“And he said nothing.” I slam both of my palms on the table, nearly causing Victory’s latte to spill.

“Which is…bad?”

“Exactly!”

“Audrey,” she says slowly, folding her hands together in front of her lips. “You know I love you, but—”

“Ugh, I hate love-buts—”

“—you realize you are being ridiculous, right?” She raises her eyebrows at me and I nod sheepishly. “You’re annoyed that this guy you like just Mad Men’ed you.”

“First of all, I don’t like him,” I sputter, though I can feel my face heating up like it’s trying to contradict me, “and also I have no idea what that means.”

“‘I don’t think about you at all,’” Victory says, sounding nothing like Jon Hamm.

“Oh, come on. I don’t care about that.”

“Look, obviously I know you don’t, y’know, like him like him,” she adds, and I stare at my empty glass as I will this topic of conversation to die. “I know that’s not your thing. But you like his streams and respect his opinion on this stuff, so it hurts when he doesn’t seem to have one about you.”

With a laborious sigh, I slouch back in my seat, reclining like a Skyrim jarl in this too-soft armchair that Green Bean keeps by the window. “You make me sound pathetic.”

“It’s not pathetic to want people to think well of you.” She takes a sip of her (disgustingly hot) coffee and I roll my eyes.

It’s easy for her to say such a thing because everyone likes her. She’s friendly and smart and talented, and everything she wears looks like candy. She is the epitome of awesome—the exact opposite of me.

I feel like a slob, sitting here with her in my too-warm, oversized grandpa cardigan—in a shade of brown that looks like it wishes it were mustard yellow but didn’t quite make the cut—and high-waisted plaid pants that dig into my waist because they are technically a size too small now but I hate going shopping.

Maybe I do look like candy—a Werther’s Original.

“Assuming this hating Scones thing isn’t going to take all day…

” Victory says, setting her cup down gingerly, having one of those occasional moments where she actually seems awkward and relatable instead of her usual: unflappably confident.

(I love her so much.) “Do you think we could stop at Reggie’s Records after we’re done here? ”

My grin unfurls at her like a caffeine-addled Cheshire Cat. “Looking for something in particular?”

She shrugs, a limp attempt at trying to act casual. Sweet child. I can read her all too well. “I just want to check out what’s new in the second-hand bin.”

“You sure you don’t want to check out a certain blue-haired employee?” I waggle my eyebrows at her despite lacking the coordination to do so effectively.

“Uh, no, I hope Pal isn’t there, actually,” she says, convincing exactly zero people as she does. “They’re always really rude to me and I don’t need that energy in my life.”

“I think they tease you because they like you, Vic.”

Her face scrunches up, but she can’t fully hide the flicker of hope there. “They make fun of my clothes all the time.”

“Maybe they just want to see you out of them,” I say, and her mouth drops open.

“Look who’s suddenly making sex jokes,” she says with a laugh. She reaches over and squeezes one of my hands. “My sweet little ace baby.”

“I’m not—a baby.” I have to hold back my immediate reaction. Because I don’t know how to have that conversation.

I came out to my friends as asexual after I broke up with my first—and only—boyfriend, Shawn, over five years ago, when we were still in university, because it was the best word I had at the time.

But lately I feel like I don’t even know if it’s right.

I thought I knew what the label meant, what it said about me, but much like the Cozy Gamer label—and my plaid pants—it’s starting to chafe, like it doesn’t quite fit anymore, and I don’t know what to do about that.

And yeah, okay, maybe some of that has to do with Scones’s stupid, weird mouth, and how his streams always make me laugh, and how he plays The Stones of Ayor 3 more thoughtfully than anyone I’ve ever seen.

But whatever confusing, misguided, pathetic thoughts I’ve been having about this literal stranger over the last couple of years are gone now, replaced with unadulterated fury aimed in his specific direction.

I hate Scones. And that’s that.

Summer is still clinging to the ass-end of September like a wad of rumpled toilet paper, but because it is technically fall, according to the equinox, I’m decked out head to toe in fuzzy earth tones.

As a result, my hair is plastered to the back of my neck with sweat by the time we reach the record store two blocks away from the café, but I refuse to admit that it’s not actually sweater weather yet.

Reggie’s Records is a remnant of the past that has been teetering on the very cusp of obscurity for years, never giving up hope that one day—one day—vinyl records would be widely popular again. And huzzah, that time has come.