Page 14 of Don't Hate the Player
I know that seems very dramatic, but I really do have my reasons. Aside from my parents is the issue of being, you know, a girl competing in an esports tournament. I’m well aware of what just showing up here could do to Fury and my online life, which is why I need Byunki to protect me.
If the greaterGLOcommunity doesn’t know who I really am, the worst of them won’t be able to find me. When I first started playingGLO, I loved everything about this game. The characters, the strategy, and the players themselves too. For a while it was enough to be good. I got invited to waiting rooms with people I watched all the time on Twitch, played some matches with absolute legends, and made friends all over the server on Discord. It wasn’t until I bought my first headset and got on voice that everything changed for the worse.
It was stupid.Iwas stupid. I thought they wouldn’t care that I was a girl, but the second those same players heard me speak, my inbox transformed into the online equivalent of Dante’s second, fifth, and seventh circles of hell. I was fourteen, man; I didn’t need to know what that many different dudes’ dicks looked like. My dad’s entire business is internet privacy, so my IP address was safe, but that didn’t stop hundreds of men, boys, whoever, really, threatening to hurt me when I beat them in a round, rape me if I got ahead of them on the leaderboard, and track me down if I dared report or block them. I don’t even know what they would have done if I still had an accent like my mom or if they knew I wasn’t white.
It was light-years beyond anything else I’d experienced, which is saying something considering the residents of Hillford aren’t the most enlightened Philly-adjacent suburbanites in America. When I created a new account and started over, I stayed off voice entirely and didn’t say anything that hinted I was a girl. Some of the same guys who harassed me even tried to play with me again, not knowing the person whupping their butts was the girl they tried to drown in hardcore porn GIFs a month earlier. Nobody suspected anything, I kept having fun, and one day Byunki DMed me with an offer to try out for Team Fury’s new DPS slot.
Showing my face at the tournament is dangerous, but Byunki promised he’d never leak my real gamertag or name to anyone, not even press who wanted to cover Fury. He made everyone else promise too. The rest of the team uses some form of their real name in their competition titles—JOON, YUNG, VANE, RIKK—but I came up with something that had nothing to do with Emilia Romero. KNOX. Like Fort Knox, where no one gets inside and everything important is under guard.
I need my guards here now. Why aren’t they here yet? Is it really hot in here, or is it just me? Why don’t they put these green rooms on the ground level so we can have a window to open? I bet this is a fire hazard. Oh my god, I’m sitting on a polyester couch in a fire hazard.
No you’re not, I think.You’re panicking. It’s different. This is something you can control.
Under normal circumstances, meeting the most impressiveGLOplayer in the game who also is giving you the chance of a lifetime at the expense of his own reputation would not be a thing that calms me down, but the sudden sound of Byunki’s voice outside the door snaps me out of my budding panic spiral.
“Are you sure this is right?” He sounds different without the distortion of voice chat, but I’d recognize his tone anywhere. Even when Byunki asks a question, it’s phrased like a military order. “This room is too far from the stage. Do you know who I am? Who this team is?”
I can’t hear what the arena aide tells him next, but it doesn’t make him sound any happier.
“It’s fine, man,” says another voice I recognize. Ivan, the other Fury DPS. I stepped in as his new partner on damage after Byunki kicked a guy he’d been playing with for years off the team. I thought he might be salty about it, but honestly Ivan’s been nicer to me than anyone else on the team. It totally tracks that he’d be trying to smooth this situation over. He’s known Byunki the longest out of all of us.
I instinctively stand up when Byunki and Ivan finally enter. Byunki gives me a quick up-and-down look and nods. Ivan, sweet Ivan, is generous enough to smile.
“Emilia!” Ivan says, and walks over to give me a hug.
“KNOX,” Byunki corrects. “She’s our little secret, remember?”
“Right. Duh!” Ivan peels off a leather jacket and tosses it over the back of the couch. He strikes me as the kind of person who could be comfortable anywhere. He looks good in our Fury jersey (competition name: VANE), like one of the quidditch world cup players fromHarry Potter. Dark hair, massive eyebrows. Yeah, Ivan’s our Krum. “I forgot you’re, like, super paranoid.”
“I’m not—” I try to defend myself even though I know he’s just teasing me. Byunki cuts me off before I can.
“She’s got reasons,” he says brusquely. He’s out of his jacket now too and looks authoritative in Fury red as well. Byunki’s smaller than I thought he would be. His usually black hair is blond on top, a change from his streaming look that I’m sure he intends to debut onstage today, and the new look suits him well. He looks severe, deadly even. And short. Napoleon by way of South Korea.
“I do,” I answer in agreement with Byunki. “I’m down for this as long as no one knows anything about me.”
“No, I like it,” Ivan answers. “It’s mysterious. It’ll play well, right, B?”
Byunki doesn’t answer.
The door to the green room swings open again to reveal the last two members of Team Fury. Han-Jun and Erik are our healers. They’re a dream team that came up inGLOtogether and can team heal like actual combat medics.
“Your lifelines have arrived,” Han-Jun announces before falling in to hug Ivan and salute Byunki.
“Hey, it’s the new Arjun!” Erik points to me. I don’t know much about Fury’s old DPS. Ivan told me Byunki waited less than a week to replace him with me this summer. Am I the new Arjun? I’d rather be the first Emilia. “Can I call you Knoxy?”
Knoxy? Thanks, I hate it.
“Maybe!” I answer with a smile anyway. These guys are legends, and I’m starting at the bottom. I have to earn my way up to having an opinion on my nickname.
“Everyone’s here. That’s good. Shut up,” Byunki barks. Han-Jun and Erik haven’t even taken off their jackets yet, but he gestures for them to sit down. I glance over at Ivan to see if that’s a normal way to start our first team meeting. He rolls his eyes and moves over to give me a place on the couch next to him. Okay, so this is normal. That’s cool. Just wanted to know. Byunki takes his place at the whiteboard and rips open the marker box to start scribbling on the board.
“We’re up against a low seed in round one. Team Vulcan. They’re morons. That means Wizzard expects us to win. If this competition was online, I’d tell us to sandbag to keep some of our big moves under wraps for Round Two, but we’re not doing that. We are going big. There’s no point in keeping our profile low anymore. This is going online. Could mean sponsorships, could mean global attention.”
I mean, yes, but also please keepmyprofile low. I’m here to win, not to plot a sponcon pivot.
Byunki writes a series ofGLOcharacter names on the board and draws a question mark next to the list. “The meta jacked a lot of rosters up, so we can’t count on knowing which characters Vulcan will play.” I genuinely can’t tell if this is a motivational speech or marching orders. Thrilled to find out, though. The panic I was feeling before is transmuting into excitement. I’m really here! In a green room with the rest of Team Fury! Ivan just passed me a little plastic beanbag, and I don’t know what that’s about, but I’m excited about that too!
“They won’t have a Pharaoh,” Ivan says. He seems to be the only one with enough authority to interrupt Byunki. “Their whole team is a bunch of PVE streamers who play popular characters. They didn’t make time to get good on him.”
