The second night of the SCOPE Championships was warm and breezy, ruffling the palm trees overhead. The city was lit up by a myriad of neon colours as autocars whirred by, and Eniola heard the pulsing of music from districts they passed through. The holographic boards and life-sized advertisements were even brighter now that they had all the contrast towards the starry sky. Eniola, Lucia, and Jay all walked downtown in identical black clothes, passing a beautiful holo-model in purple hair floating atop a building demonstrating what a new model of hoverboards could do.

“We’re here,” Lucia motioned as they reached the alleyway. It wasn’t hard to miss. There was an enormous red neon sign over the entrance. Eniola chewed on the bottom of her lips grounded her teeth in anxious worry as the entrance loomed closer and closer and the walls of the alleyway surrounded her.

“We can see you,” Theo’s voice rings in her head, and Eniola almost jumps. It was still weird hearing him talk to her over the earpiece outside of SCOPE games. He and Iris are back at the dorm watching them, while Eniola, Jay, and Lucia stayed to take on the danger. Eniola didn’t know what was going through her head when she decided she would go. “But make sure no one sees you.”

“The cloaking I found should protect you,” Iris said. “Just don’t call attention to yourself, okay?”

“We won’t,” Lucia replied. Then Eniola looked through her lenses at the virtual overlay. She looked for the external view menu before choosing the encrypted file Iris found holding into her inventory. A blue ring of light shone over her body in the virtual view, and when she looked down at two unfamiliar white hands, she smiled in satisfaction. She looked over at Lucia and Jay, who had all done the same thing, choosing the same general avatar so that they wouldn’t be suspicious, but to Eniola they were Lucia and Jay. Eniola knew the avatar was in all black clothing, and only its steel-gray eyes were visible. The last thing they needed was to be seen here uncloaked in an unfamiliar shady place.

“I feel nervous,” Lucia suddenly said after walking through the streets silently.

“Me too,” Eniola responded, shaking. “Like really, what if it’s dangerous?”

“Just look at me,” Jay reassured.

I already have been, she thought.

Or so she thought.

“I knew it,” Jay responded, and Eniola gasped while Lucia snickered. Eniola realized that she had been thinking out loud. Maybe the soft mutter wasn’t so hard. She had just admitted to staring at Jay. She hung her head and bit at her lip.

“It’s fine,” Jay said. “I mean, who could resist me.” Heat surged through her cheeks.

“I’m sure there are girls immune to the charms of Jay Yoon,” Lucia said. “Me and the rest of the female population, for example.”

“Good one!” Eniola sent her a high five.

“But the question is, are you one of them?” he asked, looking over to Eniola.

Her eyes went wide. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Eniola?” Jay said seriously.

“Yeah,” she replied, avoiding his gaze.

“Why don’t your parents know you play SCOPE?”

“Why should I tell you?” Eniola asked.

“I’m curious,” he admitted. “You guys are my teammates and we haven’t exactly gotten to know each other. Doesn’t having chemistry with the team make it better or something?”

“They think SCOPE is a criminal street game,” Eniola said, instantly. “And they’re not too keen on me gaming regularly either. There you know.”

“So you sneak around?” he asked, eyes trained on her. “That must be tiring.”

“Tell me about it,” she replied with a sigh. “I had to lie and say that me and Lucia were visiting colleges. That’s the only way they’d let me go.”

“Why don’t you just tell them the truth?” he asked.

“Everyone says that it’s easy,” Eniola said. “When you have parents like mine, it’s the hardest thing. They want me to be a doctor because everyone else in my family was a doctor.” Not everyone. Olu was the black sheep of the family.

“I should know,” Lucia said. “I’ve met them plenty of times. They’re more on the traditional side of things.”

“I mean, it’s fine if they think that way, but what about you? Do you want to be a doctor? Is SCOPE just a side thing?” Jay asked.

“I want to do SCOPE, but I have to think of my parents,” Eniola told them.

“But think of us too,” Lucia chimed in. “We’re in the SCOPE championships!”

“That won’t do anything,” Eniola admitted. They could’ve been eliminated, and that would’ve made things worse because she didn’t win and came home a loser.

“We’re here,” Lucia reminded. “Let’s focus on this now.” Eniola didn’t object as she faced forward. Talking about her future made her stiff. She sighed as she faced the door they had been hanging around for a good 5 minutes. Eniola checked multiple times that she was cloaked and she would stay anonymous. They came to the door and waited for it to recede. Nothing happened.

“What’s wrong?” Jay began but then was cut off by a sudden dinging sound. Suddenly, a figure took its place. It was clad in shiny dark green armour and had replaced the door, standing in front of it.

An inkling inside her told her to touch them, like this might be a hologram or some AI in the form of a human.

“State your name,” they yelled in a distorted computer voice.

“We’re here to see the events tonight,” Jay said, in a shaking voice and Eniola breathed heavily again, hopefully, Jay just sounded like he was also a neutral computer voice.

“Password?”

“Password?” Theo questioned through their lenses. “They never said they had a password.”

“There was that one phrase I found,” Iris remembered.

“There is none,” Eniola stated, remembering what Iris had told them.

The figure vanished in a wave of pixels, leaving the door wide open. They walked in and the sound of clamouring immediately hit their ears. The arena looked the same, except the spectators were cloaked and wearing neutral avatars and the scoreboards were a deep ruby red instead of blue. Eniola sighed in relief because no one gave a second look at them.

In the playing pit, two teams were playing SCOPE in a world Eniola had never seen before. Eniola looked up to the boards. The title above it simply read ‘ALTSCOPE’. Was that an alternative version of SCOPE? She raised an eyebrow at the team names: THE X and The Skulls. She had never heard of them before, but the bets were outrageously higher than what regular SCOPE players normally did.

“I have a feeling this is an illegal game,” Theo observed obviously. “Focus more on the players, we want to see.”

Eniola watched closely. The game was rowdy and looser than a normal SCOPE game. It looked purely driven by violence and pride. Eniola had difficulty watching. One player shot a thick arrow at somebody in the shoulder, and that player jumped over him and took their disk. The arena screamed in excitement as the simulation ended and the player scrambled out.

Except for one.

There was one player in the middle lying there. Eniola observed closer to see a pool of crimson underneath his shoulder. It was the same place he got shot in the game.

Eniola gasped in horror. How did he get hurt? Did they play with actual weapons or something? But the arrow was gone and the guy simply lay there, shoulder injured blood gashing out.

“He’s injured!” Eniola yelled, but the crowd ignored her. Instead, they were all indulging in the ALTSCOPE games and the market down below in the same place.

“Let’s go,” Lucia said, pulling her shoulder. As soon as that happened, figures in armour identical to the door guard’s simply dragged the player out. No one seemed to care.

“How did that happen?” Iris asked through their headsets.

“I don’t know,” Eniola replied. “Something here is very wrong.”

“Maybe you should look over there,” Theo told Eniola, and she quickly slipped away to the SCOPE market. It looked like the regular ones. It was shaped like a cube, with mannequins of avatars outfits they heavily promoted and wanted people to buy. The walls were also the same, with smooth red shelves holding models of power-ups floating above their titles, descriptions and their price. Eniola peered closer and scanned the shelves. There were power-ups and items from regular SCOPE, but also new power-ups she hadn’t seen: “Play God?” “Anonymity?” “Out of body?”

As she browsed, her feet froze in front of a cube she might’ve almost missed if she was going too fast. It was a blue and red cube, with a shiny label below. She quickly turned off the link for a second so that Iris and Theo couldn’t read the info on the disk.

Anonymity- Shield yourself and your team from hacks and external intervention. 100,000 yeons.

A holographic blue message asking her if she wanted to buy it. materialized in her SCOPElenses. She turned her head back and her eyes swept the room and a stab of anxiety hit her in the gut. Before she could think, Eniola turned back and hit the holographic buy button in her vision, buying not one but two. The number on her yeon count went down by a staggering amount until it was next to nothing. It was tons of money, but if someone was going after Rogue, she needed all the help she could get.

It was ironic how much Eniola wanted to correct her parents on this not being a game for criminals, and yet she was now taking part in its illegal side.

She turned the link back on. “Eni, are you there?” Iris asked.

“I’m fine. It was just a technical difficulty,” Eniola said. “I’m fine.”

Someone grabbed her arm and spun her around, and she almost screamed, but it was Jay and Lucia, looking concerned for her.

“It’s us,” Jay said. “We thought we’d lost you. We need to stay together.” She sighed in relief as they navigated through the crowd, trying to find things different in this weird arena.

However, a wave of interest seemed to wash over the crowd as they began migrating away. The three of them joined back into the crowd like a current before they emerged again.

Suddenly the main hover like the one Howie used rose from the ground, with someone in an anonymous green armoured avatar. Eniola raised an eyebrow, finding it was the same one at the door. The crowd yelled deeply in excitement. The only distinguishing feature Eniola could pick was the symbol on his avatar armour. It looked like the shape of an X over three lines. Eniola’s head rose in excitement.

“What is that symbol?” Iris asked. “Is this some cult or something?”

“I don’t know,” Eniola said. “Take note of it. It could be useful later.”

“Welcome, ALTSCOPERS!” a distorted voice announced similarly to Howie. Was this person the ‘Howie’ of ALTSCOPE? “And I am Paradox!” The arena cheered and screamed his name. So did they know him?

“We live in SCOPE. It is our way of life,” they announced, while yells of agreement came at them. “And yet every time we take off our SCOPElenses, we have to leave this reality.

“But we’ve figured out a way to make it real, to immerse ourselves in the game’s reality,” they said.

“What are they talking about?” Iris asked.

“It works like this,” he said before black took over the arena. Eniola almost jumped, breaths labouring like this was earlier today before the beginning of the side challenges. The crowd also gasped, as the only person visible was Paradox. “Atoms make up the known fabric of our reality. Of our universe.” A holographic model of an atom materialized in the air right beside them in pixels, before it spun around in demonstration. Eniola leaned forward to see.

“They make up the three-dimensional reality we live in,” they explained, sailing towards it on their hover as the image rotated further. “This reality is the only one believed to be real. But simply, our brains cannot comprehend the thought of another timeline outside of our own. It was all considered impossible. Until now.”

The arena gasped, and Eniola, Jay, and Lucia were no exception. The curiosity was eating at her now, nipping at her stomach in anticipation. Another red sphere took up shape next to the atom design. “Atoms were believed to be impossible to create or destroy until now. However, we discovered something called synthetic atoms. They hold little parts of the fabric of a new reality created by a special computer that can convert dark matter into visible matter that contains the new reality. The reality of SCOPE.”

Lucia grumbled. “I didn’t go on summer break just to be educated again.”

“What does this have to do with us?” Jay said. “I’m so confused about all this science stuff.”

“Wait a minute,” Eniola hissed, shushing them. “This sounds interesting.”

Suddenly, they snapped their fingers, and the two atoms moved to overlap in the air. “When the synthetic atoms sit within the ones that make up our reality, they merge and create a new reality. And that new reality will bring SCOPE to real life.” Another model of the same atom materializes beside it, before more keep popping up before they spread out into an entanglement of webs.

Eniola leaned forward and squinted. “What?”

“This sounds too good to be true,” Theo says. “This person’s talking out of their ass.”

The Paradox person dug into their pocket before pulling something out. At first glance, it looked like a smooth black large egg, but it was sleek with glowing green from lines in its surface. Everyone oohed and awed at the revelation and Eniola peered forward.

“This is the future!” Paradox yelled louder. “With this device, SCOPE can be real. We don’t need SCOPElenses to connect with our world. We can change the world.”

Jay whispered down to her. “What is he talking about?”

“I don’t know!” Eniola hissed. “Why don’t you just listen?”

She focused back to Paradox, huffing. It was so weird and complicated. Eniola felt like she was looking at an illusionist conjuring up fake images to fool the public.

“Please remove your SCOPElenses,” he instructed, and the spectators did so. The three of them didn’t because that shielded them. Paradox then squeezed onto the thing and then it popped open into a clear, compact holo-screen hovering over the egg thing.

He did some toggling before the world suddenly fizzed and glitched like it was one big computer. In one flash, the arena turned into the mystical world of the Land of Illusion as lush gardens and fantasy creatures began replacing the arena. Then it disappeared as quickly as it came, and the place turned back into the arena.

“You don’t need SCOPElenses when this exists,” they said. “After the last round, this could be reality. It is the ultra alternative.”