When she’d sent the message to Rayne about possibly bringing Jessica into the team, Jade had been expecting a lot of questions, maybe even straight pushback by the fact that she’d chosen a particularly strange carry. She’d gone through several hours of recorded spectation from the other girl’s games, taking mental note of how she’d be arguing for how the specific type of player would fit into the team she was planning to run.

Instead, two hours later, she’d gotten a message back.

‘got it. She’s pre-approved, added to the roster. Your brother’s came through from Granduon too’

Which was strange. Jessica was pre-approved? She’d been on a team before, of course, but most of the time the approval would have been revoked, if the player had been kicked.

Well, it was another point in her favor, then.

And one that was pretty strongly against Jessica’s previous team, given how quickly she’d accepted the offer to join the not-even-a-team-yet that she was putting together here.

What exactly had gone on there?

Eh. She’d hand that off to Nathan, and he’d have an explanation for her by the end of the week.

As long as it didn’t require him to talk to a bunch of people at once, she trusted him to turn up way more information out of that whole thing than was probably reasonable. And he’d probably have cut some information out of the summary he’d give her in order to seem less like a stalker.

Even though she had access to his computer. And could check his notes.

He knew that, of course, just like he knew that she’d go through his notes if she wanted something more complete than what he gave her. He wouldn’t find everyone on the list, of course– not everyone would be willing to respond to some random person on the internet poking them about a former team– but she was hoping it would be enough information to know what was going on with that, anyway.

‘want to talk to you about a potential. 20:45?’

Potential what, exactly?

Not that it mattered.

Rayne was basically a legend in their region; somewhat for flashy plays, but mostly for her ability to come up with new sets so regularly that almost none of the enemy teams had prepped for them.

Labbing out new counters against a set was a chore to start with, and adding on Granduon’s limitations on resetting an ability set made it extremely difficult to manage a reactive set to someone who was willing to show up with two completely new ones on the day of a tournament, eschewing the ability to have two mains for the ability to regularly throw more than one wrench into planning against her.

It was a strategy she both had a great respect for and would never have been willing to use herself.

So if she was going to be recommending a player, Jade would mostly be looking for a reason to say no more than one to say yes. It could theoretically be a test to see if she was willing to say no, but it wasn’t really the style that she’d picked up over the course of their so far text-based communication.

Which didn’t make it impossible, of course, just fairly unlikely.

‘Sure.’ Jade sent back, then started digging, trying to see if there was someone in Rayne’s history who it was likely to be.

Four hours later, she’d come up empty. Which wasn’t terribly surprising, even if it was disappointing. Rayne had been playing for Z/Z/Z almost exclusively in the months leading up to her injury before very suddenly announcing her retirement from a hospital bed.

So when she logged into the pod, she still wasn’t sure what role this potential would be playing.

Still, though, she had to calm herself before accepting the invite Rayne sent her, rapidly tying down her inner fangirl as she did so.

At least it wasn’t Nathan. Rayne was his favorite player.

Jade had to stop herself from physically cringing at the sight that greeted her on the other side of that invite.

It was a default room.

Rayne’s desktop was a default room.

It wasn’t polite to comment. It wasn’t polite to comment.

“Heya, Jade. Wanted to pull up the stuff from your other teammates before we start.”

Suspicious. “How much are you trying to sell me this ‘prospect’ of yours, before we get started on that?”

Rayne’s head made a strange motion, pulling some of her almost annoyingly straight, black hair in front of her eyes. “Uh. He’s a friend. Friend of a good friend.”

So significantly, but not to the point of the team’s detriment, at least. She obviously didn’t want to elaborate, though, which meant she had some reason to think Jade would be against whoever he was. Which was intriguing in and of itself, given her team’s current composition. It wasn’t going to be a test, at least.

“Okay, so what is it you wanted to go over?”

From there, the meeting just became a fairly thorough but fifteen-minute review of how exactly she was building her team. The… “interesting” part was when she explained her idea for having the mid, north, and diver be able to rotate out with one another.

Rayne’s eyes had lit up like a madwoman, and she’d started talking so fast that she’d been able to catch only about half of the words she was using.

That wasn’t a huge issue, given that a lot of it was Rayne figuring out the tricks that that would provide in the same way that she had, herself, when she’d been talking about it with Nathaniel.

Notably, the way that it would be using two ability sets to essentially make four team compositions.

The more interesting issue was that she found it hot, and she was torn between trying not to stare and wondering what that said about her.

Probably nothing good, at least.

Finally, there was a small tinkling sound from the window that they’d been using to work on, and Rayne pulled her next sentence up short.

“So… if you’re willing to talk to him, I can pull him in.”

“Go ahead,” Jade said, keeping herself from smiling. “Pull him in. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

She didn’t have to wait long before a beam of light appeared in the room and a guy walked out of it.

He looked a bit like someone had taken the man off a romance novel cover, then de-aged him until he was seventeen, same as her.

At least she had recent practice not staring. But still.

Really, Rayne?

He’d probably be fine, but she was absolutely going to have a bit of fun, first.