“Why don’t we have a cool team name?” Sirena complained.

“Like what?” Fey retorted. “‘Three weirdos and a Blade?’” She slung an arm around Mimi’s shoulders and added, “I mean ‘weirdo’ as the highest compliment, of course.”

(While Blade was trying to decide whether he should be offended or not,) Sirena sighed. “Yeah, he does throw a wrench into the theme of things. Not like the other team has to be creative with four rogues.”

In preparation for their first match, Blade’s team was reviewing the basic information provided about the members of the opposing team. It was a fairly homogeneous group based on the basic profiles: four rogues, all male, all human, and all level 49.

“One thing’s for sure, they’re not particularly good at math on top of the lack of creativity,” Fey pointed out. “Three of them could have gone up to level 50 without going into the next level bracket.” Fey’s own team had an average level of 49.75 after added the +2’s from her and Mimi’s dual classes. “Plan A?” she proposed.

Mimi nodded.

“Against four rogues?” Blade asked. “What if it doesn’t work?”

“Plan D,” Mimi answered.

“What if Mimi gets hit?” Blade pressed on.

Three pairs of eyes stared (blankly, mockingly, and expressionlessly) at Blade, who was momentarily paralyzed until his much-trained Fighting Spirit kicked in. “Never mind,” he muttered somewhat grouchily. After all, no matter how skilled Mimi was, there was still a remote chance of her being knocked out during the match.

Fey slung a companionable arm around the warrior’s shoulders. “If Mimi gets hit,” she answered, “we lose.” She patted him on the arm and went to confer over the opponent information with Mimi.

Before the actual start of the match, opposing teams were given a few minutes to meet, shake hands, exchange trash talk, and otherwise display shows of good and bad sportsmanship.

The Shadowstalkers decided to spend the time glaring at Blade.

Blade looked aggrieved. “Now what?” He was starting to believe that the game world was conspiring to make his life miserable. (Ah, but ‘tis the author-goddess, not the world, poor chap.)

Sirena was the first to figure it out. A look of pure deviltry crossed her face before she flirtatiously hung on to Blade’s arm and exclaimed, “Oh Blade! You’ll protect me, right?” in a voice straight out of a harem anime.

“Uh, yes?” Blade answered. After all, his role was to keep Sirena out of danger for most of the plans the team had come up with (except Plans E and G).

Cued by Sirena’s theatrics, Fey joined in and latched on to his other arm. “What about me?” she asked with a pout.

“Uh, what—”

“Stupid Blade!” Fey flounced off, making sure her face was turned away from the opposing team before she started laughing.

When it came to the laser tag tournament, the most common gender composition was four male, followed by three male, one female; four female; and two male, two female. Rarest of all was one male, three female. Given this and the appearance of Blade’s team, the word ‘harem’ quickly came to mind.

First there was Blade, a generically good-looking and rather dense guy. Fey filled the role of the tall, slender beauty (‘beauty’ in quotation marks) with waist-length hair and a haughty attitude. Sirena played ‘small, perky, and clingy’, while Mimi looked like the archetype of a female athlete.

In Blade’s mind, his position on the team was sometimes fun, but often quite unenviable, so it took him a while to understand why the glares intensified after the confusing exchanges. “Wait, they think— Hey, guys, it’s not like—”

Sirena pulled on Blade’s arm and drowned him out by loudly saying, “Blaaade, you’ll protect me no matter what, right?”

Sirena and Fey were exacerbating the misunderstanding purely for entertainment purposes, but Mimi saw an opportunity. The sniper went over and made a show of trying to pull Sirena off of Blade while murmuring, “Plan G,” so that the other team did not hear.

Fey and Sirena’s eyes lit up while Blade wore a long-suffering expression. The party spent the rest of the time until the match enacting a surprisingly convincing scene of playing tug-of-war with Blade’s arms.

“Man, that worked way too well,” Fey remarked. “Those guys need to stop watching so much anime.”

‘Plan G’ in its basic form involved Blade purposely drawing attention and sacrificing some of his 10 lives in order to allow the other team members (i.e. Mimi) to locate and shoot their opponents. Truly drawn in by the charades, the Shadowstalkers had all converged upon Blade and begun shooting, not even looking around for the other members when the warrior’s vest flashed red to indicate he would be invulnerable to further fire for 30 seconds. Mimi had picked all four of them off before Blade even lost his second life, and the entire match had lasted less than ten minutes.

Blade was just relieved that they did not have to meet with the opposing team after the match as well. More than being shot at by lasers, being the target of so much focused ill-will was quite exhausting. “That’s it until tomorrow, right?”

“For official matches, yes. We can still play extra for the prizes,” said Fey. “Speaking of which…”

A small, plain box materialized on a pedestal, the team’s prize for winning the match. The four players gathered around it curiously. Fey reached out and lifted the lid to reveal a single, olive-green stud earring.

Fey automatically pushed the box towards Blade, with not a trace of disagreement from Sirena or Mimi.

“But my ears aren’t pierced,” said Blade.

Fey rolled her eyes. “Who cares?” She plucked up the stud and said, “Come here.”

“Hey, wait,” Blade protested, backing up.

Fey sighed. One could almost see her mind teetering between violent and non-violent solutions. Since they had already used him in a scheme and incited ill-will towards him today, she decided to take pity on him.

She stuck the stud onto her own ear. “See? My ears aren’t pierced either.” There was demonstrably no blood around her (pointy) ear. She plucked it back off to demonstrate that her earlobe did not have a new hole in it. “It just sticks.”

“Oh.” Blade hesitantly took the earring and stuck it on. He shook his head experimentally. “How does it stay on?”

Sirena rolled her eyes. “Magic.”

◊◊◊

***

“Hey, Leander, your girlfriend is doing really well in the tournament,” said Kevin, sliding onto the cafeteria seat across from Leander.

“One, I do not have a girlfriend, and two, please stop snooping into people’s information outside of your job requirements,” said Leander.

“It’s not private or anything,” said Kevin. “Anybody can look up any player’s name and get their match footage. Look.” Kevin put his cellphone, a screen model, on the table, and began playing the match, starting from the pre-match meeting of teams.

“Ooh, is that your girlfriend, Leander? She’s pretty. Which one is she?” Lacey asked, joining the table and leaning in to see the video. Today, her hair was jet-black with fiery red streaks.

“The tall one,” Kevin answered, pointing.

“I should have guessed – wait, why is she hanging all over that guy?”

Leander abandoned his attempts to appear aloof and leaned in as the Fey in the screen flounced off haughtily.

The trio watched, dumbfounded, for another minute.

“…This is game footage, right? Not a live-action version of an anime?” Lacey asked.

“Yes…” Kevin answered.

“And that’s Leander’s girlfriend, right? Not some random bimbo whose IQ is lower than her bust size?” (In centimetres. In Fey’s case, that would be quite low indeed.)

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Kevin muttered. “This team is ranked number 197 in aggregate skill score in their level bracket.”

That caught Leander’s attention. “197? Out of how many teams?”

“21,739,” Kevin answered. “Second biggest level bracket. They’re tied for first in hit accuracy and time before knockout, but one of them lost a life before the end of the match.”

The video moved on to the actual match, and the trio watched the brief moments before the entire opposing team was eliminated.

Lacey reached over and slapped Leander on the shoulder. “Leander, I approve. Your girlfriend is a sneaky, underhanded trickster.”

“What?” Leander asked.

“That harem scene. All to make the girls seem stupid and incite the other team to attack the guy.”

“It’s that sniper girl who’s really good,” said Kevin in an admiring tone. “Tied for first in the individual player skill rankings. 100% hit rate, four kills, no lives lost.”

Now reassured that Fey’s motives for flirting with Blade were completely ulterior, Leander’s brain began working properly. “Will their high ranking make them a target?” he asked Kevin.

“Well, the skill score calculations aren’t available to the public, so they’re only one among ten thousand teams that won their first match. There’s a small chance that an unaffiliated game commentator will feature them if they happen across this match, but it’s unlikely. If they keep winning, though, they’re bound to get at least some attention.”

“They will keep winning,” said Leander. “Mimi is really quite skilled.”

“Well, sure, she shot all four guys this time, but they were being easy targets,” said Lacey.

“I had a practice match against her in my level 60 avatar and she shot me nine times,” said Leander. “I couldn’t hit her at all, and had to time out the match to win.”

Kevin looked impressed, while Lacey’s expression had a much more focused type of interest. “Oh? A practice match, you say? As a favour to a certain tall, pale, and sneaky person?”

Leander frowned and said, “That’s a rather uncomplimentary way to describe someone.”

Lacey rolled her eyes. “No it’s not. Fine.” She cleared her throat and began speaking as if reciting poetry. “She who is as tall and slender as the willow tree, with skin as fair as moonlight upon fresh-fallen snow, mind as keen as a blade adamantine.” Her voice returned to normal. “Happy? Oh my god, look at his face, Kevin.”

Leander, whose eyes had softened at the description, blinked and resumed eating his lunch.

“Why don’t you just admit she’s your girlfriend already?” Lacey pressed.

“Because she isn’t,” Leander answered.

“Well, it’s certainly not due to a lack of interest on your part,” said Lacey. “What, is she not interested?”

“You would have to ask her,” Leander muttered.

“As in, you haven’t asked her out?”

Leander remained silent.

“Oh my god. He hasn’t asked her out.” Lacey dug her nails into Kevin’s arm, making him wince. “What is wrong with you?”

Leander gave an aggravated sigh. “One does not just—”

“Yes, ‘one just’. How do you think couples get together? A blood ritual during the full moon?”

“I…” Leander petered out without any real argument.

Lacey reached out and grasped one of Leander’s hands in both of her own. “Please, do me a favour and ask this girl out before you explode in a rain of sad poetry and depressed sighs.”

Leander’s resolution firmed. “I will,” he promised. He extracted his hand and resumed eating.

“…Like, now, maybe?” Lacey suggested.

“She will not be online for another eight and a half hours, and I have no way of contacting her otherwise,” Leander answered.

Lacey sighed at the logical argument. “You’re such an improbable person.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Leander asked.

Lacey turned to Kevin. “What are the statistical chances of a Leander existing in this world?”

“Hmm, depends on how far from the population mean you’d consider him,” answered Kevin.

“Six standard deviations,” Lacey answered firmly.

“Mm, that’s about one in a billion, so there would be about ten of him in the world population.”

Lacey’s eyes went exaggeratedly wide. “That’s too many. Seven, then.”

“That’s about one in a trillion, so one in a hundred that he’d exist.”

Lacey nodded to herself. “That sounds about right.”

“Am I allowed to exist, then?” Leander asked dryly. (The meta-ness of this is unmatched.)

“Yeah, yeah. Just ask her out already.” Lacey dug into her own lunch.