‘I’m sorry’

‘You’re not blocked anymore, but I can’t friend you because then Doug would know.’

‘I’ve been thinking about some of what you said.’

And Emma had left it there.

It was driving her crazy.

Not that Emma had really done anything particularly wrong. Jessica had let the situation with Doug fester well past the point where she should have stepped in, putting up with the abuse because he was the lynchpin in an opportunity to play on a larger stage.

It had drawn both her and Emma in, though luckily neither of them had given in to his annoyingly consistent attempts to get either of them to date him.

Though “luckily” might have been the wrong word.

She just wasn’t much interested in the braggart type, but with Emma…

Well, the older girl’s, in retrospect, incredibly obvious crush on her hadn’t helped Doug’s case one bit, and Emma’s complete lack of interest in men had finished that one off completely.

Never mind the fact that he’d picked that up first, using it to drive a wedge between them when Jessica had finally spoken up about leaving the team.

Actually, definitely mind that. That was probably the worst part about the whole thing.

‘Okay! Just send me a message with the limits you want on what I can say, because otherwise I might go past them.’

‘It’s… not in the way you might prefer it, but I still love you lots’

Jessica had sent better messages, but she was neither prepared to be suddenly unblocked like that nor willing to let it sit on read without responding. She wasn’t expecting Emma to suddenly come to some profound personal realization about how awfully Doug was treating her, but the fact remained that if she could provide any modicum of comfort to the best friend who’d managed to pull her out of her own funk, she’d go to the ends of the earth to do it.

Which probably wasn’t healthy. But that was neither here nor there.

She pulled her focus away from that continuing catastrophe, though, instead trying to focus on the whole thing with “Nathaniel M.” from the other day.

It probably would have been better to just let things play out how they would when they decided to play together again, but when she’d woken up at one a.m. with a burning need to see what the hell his deal was, she didn’t fight that feeling much.

And boy, had it turned up some weird shit.

Nearly eighty percent of his games were played with “Jade M.”, who she had to assume was the sister who he’d been talking about. Which, for someone on the level they were playing at, was basically ridiculous for covering the roles that they did.

And as if that wasn’t enough, checking the sportsmanship part of his profile was a trip.

Fully public, zero substantiated reports against him, ninety-five percent outgoing report-to-punishment ratio.

Frankly, she suspected that that was just as high as the profile would show, given that it wouldn’t allow checking and that was the highest number she’d ever seen.

Even her own report ratio was only fifty-five, and that was considered fairly high. And she’d been handed a single voice-mute as well, though playing in those lobbies had calmed her enough to never end up in that hellish matchmaking subset again. Privately, she considered whether Granduon was still bothering to have the human checkers on his reports.

And yet, his sister’s profile, findable from his game history, had the same numbers. So probably they did– to determine the duration and severity of the punishments.

Honestly, when she’d seen that, she’d instead jumped over to the forums to check if he was a fake person the Granduon AI had slipped into matchmaking, as it had been known to do from time to time.

But no, he’d made a few posts on the forums, particularly in regard to the build he was playing and the logic behind it with a degree of patience that made her brain hurt.

And Jade’s interaction was essentially the same. They were both using custom-anonymized faces and a replacement last initial, like basically everyone did, but were otherwise weirdly transparent.

To the point that she spent multiple hours digging for incriminating evidence that just didn’t seem to be there.

When Lex had dragged her away from the computer at four a.m. and pushed her towards the bed, she hadn’t even had arguments for them.

So she’d been tired, today, when Nathaniel messaged her about queuing up for a game.

It had been a little bit of a humbling experience, honestly, because she may have let a little bit more of her skepticism for the twins’ playing together out than she’d meant to, and the two of them had shared some kind of look before they joined the game.

Never in her life had she been so monumentally embarrassed to go thirty and zero.

It had started off fine enough, but about ten minutes in they’d started just stripping shields from random enemies the two would point her at in the mists then just… standing there until she shot them.

With shit-eating grins every time.

Even the enemy had started catching on, hurling insults their way each time they were left alive just long enough for her to swoop in and get the killing blow instead of even bothering to run.

So when they left the postgame lobby into Jade’s desktop, she was fully expecting the two of them to make fun of her for it, preparing to take anything they said as well as she could.

“Nice game! You played well, you know?”

“Yeah, you did your job to a T.”

Jessica stared between the two of them, genuinely confused.

“Okay, what the hell is up with you two? You handed me that game and are saying I played well?”

“You did get a hexakill.” Jade pointed out, one eyebrow raised.

“And I was twenty-four and zero when I did it! Because you two kept feeding me kills!”

Nathaniel spoke next. “Well, you are the carry, so the credits were most efficient on you.”

“Still doesn’t make any sense! The marginal value was in at least Jade’s favor by the end of that, but she didn’t take anything. I just want to know how and why.”

They shared another completely incomprehensible look, then a nod.

“Well… how is honestly just that you listen to us. At that point, it’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. We both have builds with major burst potential; all we need to do to set up a kill is hit them real fast.” Nathaniel explained.

“As for why,” Jade said, “We actually wanted to see how you’d play with both of us there. And, well. We haven’t actually played with you much, but I did check your history so… Well, I have something to offer you.”