Chapter 16
sixteen
And I spend most of this time talking to Damien, although we’ve been keeping our personal strategies secret from each other. Not that I think it matters—neither of us is extremely competitive—but it is sort of fun.
We’ve planned to do our joint stream on Friday; it will start around the time of his usual daily stream and end around the time of my usual Friday night stream, so we’ll hopefully catch some of our regular viewers. And hopefully none of them will give me too much shit. (Hah.)
I’m a bundle of nerves all day on Friday, though. I’m worried I’m going to make a fool of myself and die (in-game) doing something really stupid and easy, or that I’ll take twice as long as Damien and everyone will have left the stream by the time I’m finished.
“It’ll be fine, don’t worry,” he assures me over a last-minute video call as we get set up. He’s already got the camera angled so that most of his face is hidden and it feels strange now, but still very familiar to me.
“What if people start saying awful stuff in the chat?” I ask, skimming over my notes one last time. “I can’t pay attention to the chat if I’m trying to focus on the game.”
“I’m setting Malcolm up as a moderator, he’ll make sure any assholes are dealt with.”
“Cold-blooded murder?”
“Exactly.” The corner of his mouth ticks up. “Also, are you finally going to tell me what build you went with?”
I sigh dramatically. He’s been trying to find out what type of character I’m going to use for my speedrun all week, but I’ve been keeping it secret.
Not that I was afraid he would steal my idea, but because I thought he might think it’s ridiculous.
At this point, though, it’s not like I have time to change it, since we’re starting the run right after the character creation screen.
“I went for a Glass Elf because they’re the tallest and can run fastest,” I tell him. “And my primary class is Assassin because they have the stealth roll for getting past enemies quickly without engaging them.”
“Solid move,” he says with a nod, but then the lower half of his face splits into a grin. “Wanna guess what I chose?”
“Rock Troll Brute?” I say condescendingly, and he snaps his mouth shut. He’s incredibly predictable sometimes.
“You can be so judgmental,” he says, pretending to be offended. “But yes, that is absolutely what I went for.”
“Trolls are so slow, though.”
“Yeah, but I’m gonna do what that one girl did and recruit Treagan as soon as possible, and he can use spells to boost me.”
“She also knows how to take out three doomstalkers with one hammer toss,” I point out. “She might be a bit more advanced than you.”
“I’ve been practicing,” he boasts, but then sinks back in his chair a little. “Not successfully, but still.”
We talk for a few more minutes before Damien ends the call so he can make sure everything is working properly for the stream. I agreed to let him sort out how to run the joint stream, since I’ve never done that sort of thing before, but I double check that everything is working on my end as well.
I try to push down my nerves as the clock ticks down. I haven’t been this nervous about a stream since I first started out, back when I was still new at this and hardly anyone even watched me then, anyway.
But this is going to be a much larger audience—larger than any I’ve had so far. And I expect it will mostly be Damien’s subscribers watching at first, although I did announce on my community board that I’d be doing a special stream today that starts earlier than usual.
Apparently Helmi saw the notice, because she is the first person to say anything in the chat as soon as we go live.
HeySMR: Audrey, you absolute angel, I am so excited for this speedrun!!
HeySMR: Scones, you are cool too, but I only fangirl for Audrey
“That’s understandable,” Damien says as he fusses with something off-camera.
“Behave yourself, Helmi,” I tell her, looking directly at my webcam for a moment to get my point across. She is absolutely going to say something embarrassing about me during this stream, and I won’t be paying enough attention to the chat to stop her.
HeySMR:
HeySMR: That was for Audrey
LinkFarts: gayyyyyyyyy
HeySMR: I am gay, thank you for noticing
“Link, your comments are always as eloquent as your username,” Damien deadpans as he sits back in his chair.
LinkFarts: i came here to watch you crush this bitch
Damien looks over at the chat again, since we still have a couple minutes before we are officially scheduled to begin, and he frowns. He glances over his shoulder to say something, and I realize Malcolm must be sitting on their couch. “Mal? Will you do the honours?”
SconesIsRad: It would be my pleasure, sir
I laugh as soon as I see the username. “Did Malcolm make an account just for moderating your streams?” I ask, my attention still on Damien, small in the corner of my second screen.
SconesIsRad: No, I already had this one ;)
Damien ignores him, though he’s still reading the chat window for a minute. “Wow, there are a lot of you,” he says. “I guess we’ll get started. Ready, Oddly?”
There’s something stilted about the way he’s speaking, and it occurs to me that he might be nervous about this as well. But he streams this sort of game every day, I figured he’d be used to it. Then again, the time pressure of a speedrun adds an extra level of nerves to the whole thing.
I take another moment to check that everything seems to be in order. My game is loaded at the point where we agreed to start, and my LiveSplit timer in the corner is ready to go. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Which, perhaps, is not very ready at all.
Two hours in, I’ve nearly forgotten about the fact that we’re streaming this. Damien and I have just been chatting, the way we always do when we play—although I have enough awareness not to share anything too personal; we keep it mostly to the game.
I glance over at his stream on my other monitor every once in a while, but it’s usually discouraging because he managed to get a decent head start early in the game.
He didn’t stop to recruit Cartwright, but I need him for my strategy, since he’ll draw enemies away while I slip through to get quest items. (But I didn’t bother looking for Cartwright’s trousers, since that part is tedious, so he’s been running around in some sort of weird boxers this whole time.)
Still, I thought I’d be able to catch up fairly easily, since I didn’t stop to hunt down Treagan. I already know where the secret pass up the mountain is, and I don’t need his magic right now. But Damien was right about Treagan’s spells helping with his Rock Troll’s speed—he is zipping.
He finishes the fourth quest in the main story before I’ve finished the third, and I figure there’s no way I’ll catch up now. But it’s not really about that. It’s just supposed to be fun, and it is. And if I don’t look at the chat at all—which I don’t—then I can pretend we’re just hanging out.
Damien swears, which I know means his character has just died, but when he lets out a whiny “Nooooooo!” I realize he’s had to reload really far back. When I look over quickly, I can see that he’s lost a decent chunk of his lead on me.
“This is why I am a fan of save-scumming,” I say haughtily, quicksaving my progress yet again. “F5 saves lives, my friend.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles, but I can hear there’s no actual resentment in his tone. We pick on each other like this a lot while we play, most of the time.
By the three-hour mark, we’re pretty much neck and neck. One of us will get ahead by a small margin, and then the other will surpass it quickly, back and forth like that.
And then I make a fatal mistake.
I forgot one of the crucial steps to unlock an ancient tomb, and I end up having to backtrack to pick up the artifact I need, losing a good ten minutes of progress. This late in the game, it makes all the difference.
Damien reaches the end of his battle with Nurendoth in just under four hours; I reach it in just over. A ten minute difference, all because of my carelessness.
Despite all that, I am elated when I finish. I’m proud of myself for completing it—and it was still faster than any of my practice runs.
He’s not at all gloaty about it, either. As soon as he was done, he turned his attention to cheering me on through the last ten minutes; it didn’t feel like a competition at all.
Not until I see the comments coming in.
I have to assume there were more of them, because they disappear almost as soon as they pop up—Malcolm has been busy, it seems.
One person tells me that I should have stuck to Cloud Quest.
Someone else says this is proof that I suck at these games.
A few people accuse me of cheating—even though I lost—while another person says that Damien probably let me (almost) win to get in my pants.
Damien’s expression is stoic, at least what’s visible of it, and I expect him to just ignore all of this, as usual. Malcolm’s done a decent job of scrubbing away and blocking the worst offenders, so all of this could just get swept under the rug.
“Look, you guys know how I play Three,” he says, his voice light despite a bitter edge to it. “If I died for stupid reasons a bunch of times,”—which he did, to be fair—“it’s because that’s what I do. I’m not actually good at these games. I just like them.
“And Aud—ly likes these games as much as I do,” he continues, although he trips up a little; I think he was about to say my real name. “She’s technically better at them because she puts more thought into strategies.”
“It’s fine,” I say with a laugh, which comes out a little forced. I’m surprised by his statement; I wonder if he actually believes that. “If people want to think that I cheated so I could do worse than you by ten minutes, then so be it.”
HeySMR: Ignore all these fools, my sweet angel
I laugh in earnest at my friend’s message. “Helmi, you should be asleep.”
HeySMR: Hush you
HeySMR: The two of you should do more collabs, this was so fun
ToastOnBeans: I don’t usually like speedruns but I loved this
HadTrash93: Definitely do more collabs! Oddly, you have a new sub. :)
SconesIsRad: I ship it
Damien holds up a middle finger, aimed somewhere behind him—probably directed at Malcolm, then. “Maybe we’ll have to do the second half next time, then,” he says towards the chat, towards me.
“Maybe we will.”