by Natalie Grey
"Hide for a second," a new voice said, and Gracie shrank into the shadows.
Another flag carrier ran out of their headquarters and toward the enemy base. Gracie waited until they were past, then snuck into the library and went to a dead sprint to get to their empty flag stand.
VICTORY, the screen announced in huge letters, and there was a cheer from her teammates.
"Look at that," Ushanas said privately. "You were right.”
"Sorry I was an ass," Gracie said. She heaved a sigh.
"You don't have much patience for losing, do you?" Ushanas was clearly smiling. "It's been a strength before. You can make it one again if you choose."
Chapter Eighteen
Alex was out with Sydney for dinner, so Gracie wolfed down a tuna sandwich and a beer and logged back into the game. By the time she arrived, Caspian was there, chatting seriously with Chowder, Kevin, Lakhesis, and Freon.
"Ushanas says she'll be back soon," Lakhesis told them.
"Ushanas is a she?" Chowder asked in surprise.
"Pretty sure," Lakhesis said.
"Huh." Chowder seemed very preoccupied with the idea.
"And Alan will be here soon as well," Kevin said. "He came over to my place for dinner to meet Jamie, here, and he's driving home to log on now. I have to say, it just feels weird not to call you Caspian.”
Caspian laughed. "You could call me Caspian. I don't mind, you know. I haven't been offended when you slipped up, just like you weren't offended when I totally botched the pancakes.”
"You botched pancakes?" Chowder asked skeptically. "Even I can make pancakes.”
"I got cocky," Caspian said. "I've never been able to make them properly, but I was on a roll, and...they just turned out horribly.”
"Which is why we have McDonald's," Kevin said. "Although, I'm beginning to remember why I stopped eating that stuff. I'm not twenty anymore, and my stomach isn't made of iron.”
"Where are you all?" Gracie asked curiously. She had walked into their usual tavern, only to find it empty.
"Oh, sorry." Kevin sent her a party invite. "We're up at the temple. You know, where things first went south?”
“Yeah?"
"Yeah. Come join us." He didn't give any other details.
Gracie frowned curiously as she headed their way. They were bantering back and forth, throwing around lazy insults about each other's play style, into which were mixed some genuinely good pieces of advice. That seemed to be how they'd taken to helping each other out these days, and she didn't mind as long as the information got across and everyone was in on the joke.
She started up the hill during a particularly spirited round of “yo mama” jokes, including jokes about intellect buffs, equipment slots, and whether or not Chowder's mother was large enough that they needed an AoE spell to do damage to her. Gracie snorted at that last joke. She was high enough level now that she didn't need to pay attention to the patrolling ghosts in this zone. Instead, they were trying very hard not to notice her.
Gracie could still remember their initial climb up this hill. It was one of the first times they'd had Ushanas on board, and they'd been carefully planning out their strategy.
For a different boss than the one they got.
Instead of the ice boss, they had wound up with the first boss in Harry's quest line, and Gracie smiled to remember the way they had thrown desperate suggestions at one another and banded together to defeat it. It was something she had loved about those bosses, despite the stress of them: you never knew what was coming. You had to think on your feet and go by instinct.
Like PvP.
She slowed to a stop at the entrance to the temple, her mind whirling.
It was true. She loved pitting her wits against game bosses who forced her to think outside the box and react cleverly. And what boss required more outside-the-box thinking than a human opponent, someone who adapted to your play style and acted illogically sometimes? She had a very low tolerance for failure, and she'd allowed those experiences to scare her away instead of forcing her to adapt...which was the best-case scenario for Harry.
She was damned if she was going to let him win because she couldn't learn something new.
"Gracie?" She whirled with a muffled exclamation and saw Jay standing there. He waved, then blew a kiss.
She sighed. "You know, I wish we could actually kiss. That would be much nicer.”
"Guys?" Kevin said. "Public channel.”
"OH SHIT!" Gracie clapped her hands over her mouth. "Don't mind me. I'm just going to go sink through the floor. It's fine. Everything's fine.”
"Oh, don't do that." Caspian was laughing. "You two are cute.”
"They're together?" Chowder asked. "Did everyone else know that? How do I not know anything about this guild?”
"They've kept it on the DL," Lakhesis said. "But they're super adorably awkward around each other.”
Gracie sank her face into her hands.
"Ignore them," Jay said on a private channel. He held out his hand, and she put hers near it. There was a pause while they stared at each other's hands, and then, in unison, both of them made a fist and did an airy fist-bump. Jay emoted a laugh. "Who says romance is dead?”
"Not me." Gracie grinned at him. "A ruined temple filled with ghosts and zombies? You really know how to treat a girl.”
"I don't want to brag," Jay said, "but it looks like there's a considerable amount of mold as well.”
Gracie laughed. They were strolling toward the main group, and they came around the corner to find that the team had laid out a feast by the view out over Kithara. Gracie looked at it all in interest as she walked over.
"Holy crap, that’s a lot of food.”
"Remember how Alan and I were learning to cook?" Caspian asked. He swept his hands over the array of dishes. "Well, here you go!”
"If you knew how good his cooking was in real life, you'd be as hungry as I am right now," Kevin commented. "I bet you could make a roast pig.”
"In your apartment?” Caspian asked skeptically.
"I have a balcony.”
Gracie laughed. “So, a pixelated picnic. I love you guys.”
"And we love you," Kevin said, giving her an elaborate bow. "And we figured, what better place to hang out and strategize? We've heard you had a few successes in Saladin's Keep today.”
"We did indeed." Gracie settled her character down on a chunk of stone. "It's not my forte, I'll tell you that, but Ushanas whipped my butt into shape, and I'm definitely not about to let Harry win this confrontation.”
"Speaking of which," Jay said bluntly, "I've been tasked by Dan and Dhruv with finding out what he's planning, so if any of you have any ideas, let me know. I don't know that I'll pass everything on to them, of course, but it'll be nice to know what we're going to be facing.”
Gracie smiled at him. "They might have really changed their tune," she pointed out.
"They might." He sounded troubled. "I don't think they trust you as a queen.”
"Well, to be fair to them, I haven't had any official training." She noticed his hesitation before he laughed and reminded herself to ask him about it later. "In the meantime, unless anyone else has a different gut feeling, I'm definitely going to be preparing for us to face Harry in a PvP match of some sort, and—what was that?”
"What was what?" Jay looked over his shoulder. Gracie slid off the stone and headed for the edge of the temple, her heart pounding all of a sudden. They had teammates coming to join them here, but the person she'd seen was trying to hide, not join them. Which meant—
She came around a tumbled-down wall and gave a grim nod. "Yaro. What a surprise."
Chapter Nineteen
Yaro smiled at Gracie, a sharp-toothed smile on the pale, sickly-looking face. He was still dressed in the Level 1 robes, so she couldn't imagine how he'd made it up here without being killed by a bunch of ghosts, but she wasn't going to waste time on logistics right now.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Gra
cie asked him bluntly.
"I came to see you," Yaro said, his tone dripping with insincere warmth. "I wanted to watch the queen hold court.”
"Would you stop it with the queen bullshit?" Gracie's temper was spiking. Everything was coming home to her now: the PvP, the constant uncertainty of what was coming next, the fact that people were trying to sabotage her, and they didn't have the first idea of who she was or what she was even trying to do.
The fact that she didn't really have the first idea of what she was even trying to do.
Fuck my life.
Yaro smiled again. "You don't like being called a queen? I thought you earned the title. That's what you told me last time, isn't it?”
Gracie's hands clenched, and when Yaro laughed, she remembered too late that he could see her gestures.
"Why did you come?" she asked again. "Because it wasn't to observe me with my friends, that's for damned sure.”
"You're wrong," Yaro said simply. "You don't know the first thing about me.”
"And you don't know the first thing about me!" Gracie shot back. "You're acting like you know some deep, dark secret of mine, but you don't. I didn't cheat my way to this. I didn't take anything from you—unless you're Harry, of course, in which case, you deserved it.”
"You see, you're inconsistent," Yaro said. "You did take something. That is where it begins and ends. You took something that was not yours, and you've used it to rise above those who should be your equals.”
Gracie had nothing to say. There was nothing to say to that.
Yaro was right, after all. It was no use saying she hadn't stolen anything or cheated. She might have fallen ass-backward into the quest, but she had known how to give it back—and she hadn't done so. She had known that the quest wasn't something Dan and Dhruv intended, and while the two of them could easily claim that their vision of the game was just as important as Harry’s...
She definitely couldn’t.
"You thought you deserved this?" Yaro asked. "Or did you just want to be the queen and have a pretty crown and listen to your teammates fawning over you and telling you how smart and wonderful you were? Did you actually want loyalty or just sycophants?”
"That's enough." Jay's voice was hard. He had come to stand by Gracie's shoulder. "I don't know who the hell you are, but you need to stop stalking her. This isn't anything to do with you.”
"It's not anything to do with you either," Yaro said. He crossed his arms over his chest and tilted his head slightly. "You just wanted to be close to power, didn't you?”
Jay started to respond, but Gracie cut him off with a swipe of her hand. Caspian and Kevin were at her other shoulder, and she felt more embarrassed than anything to have her team standing up for her. After all, wasn't Yaro right? Didn't Gracie like being in charge? Didn't she like winning?
"No answer to that?" Yaro asked. "Typical. You thought you could come in here and all the men would fall all over themselves to—“
"Shut up." Gracie's temper blazed to life. "Shut. Up.”
Yaro fell silent, but Gracie could sense his smirk through the internet.
"You want to know why I held off coming here for so long?" Gracie snapped at him. "Because every other group I played with treated me like shit for being a woman. They expected me to be available to them; they told me how they wanted me to dress, how they wanted me to do my hair and my makeup like I fucking owed it to them to be their personal idea of a fuckable gamer girl.”
No one said anything. Yaro's posture had changed slightly, although Gracie didn't know what to make of that, and her team had stepped back.
"You know why I love these people?" Gracie demanded, sweeping her hands out to indicate the guild. "It's because when they found out I was a chick, they didn't give a damn. They didn't take me any less seriously, and they didn't stop thinking I was a good tank. They didn't treat every interaction like it was some sort of power struggle someone had to win. They suggested things to me and took my suggestions." She was heaving for breath. She wanted to scream and scream and never stop. "I walked into this world, and it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and you know what? You were right the other day, okay? You were right about my family. They do think I'm a piece of shit. I'm a disappointment, okay? I had a shit job. I didn't have a boyfriend. I never got my Ph.D. And here, in this insane world with magic and faeries and swords the size of my whole body…“ she was shaking, tears leaking out the bottom of her headset, “this was the one place I felt like I could make a difference.”
Yaro said nothing to that.
"She did make a difference," Caspian said. "I found friends in her guild. They helped me become a better healer without worrying about their own ranks.”
"I was going through a really bad time," Lakhesis said. "My sister died, and my parents...haven't coped well. They didn't want to see me anymore since it just reminded them about Kara being gone. I came here because I needed a place to get away. I don't know what I would have done without this world, and I don't know what I would have done without these people telling me jokes and just giving me an escape.”
Gracie looked at her, her heart twisting. She had never guessed that behind Lakhesis' bright, cheery persona was something like this, but now that the other woman mentioned it, she could remember the slightly brittle edge to her voice sometimes, and the way she was just a bit too cheerful.
"I hadn't been worried about whether I stood up and did the right thing," Jay said. "It hadn't even been on my radar. Gracie showed me what it looked like to care, even when the people you cared about weren't part of the real world.”
Yaro had paused, but now he stirred to life again. "Very touching stories," he said, and his voice was far too sweet, "but none of it changes the fact that you cheated your way here. You didn't play as hard as others did to win your ranking. You found your title by accident. How are we supposed to trust that you should have this power?”
Gracie looked down at the ground, her vision blurring. None of this mattered to Yaro. Why should it? He hated her, and no matter that she refuted each point he threw at her, the goalposts would only keep moving.
She'd learned long ago that those fights were unwinnable. Her parents hadn't ever let her accomplishments get in the way of favoring her sister, the guys at her college were sure as hell not going to believe she was there on merit, and the men she played D&D with weren't willing to see her as a person instead of a bundle of physical features.
There would be no winning this. To her surprise, her anger began to drain away. She should hate this man, she thought. Part of her was still raging at the absolute unfairness of it all. He was being an asshole, and she shouldn't have to deal with that.
But she would. It was just part of life. She was angry because of everything she had been through, and the same must be true of him. And maybe, just maybe, Dhruv had been right—that this world could be the place they worked all that out so they didn't hurt their friends and family outside Metamorphosis.
"You shouldn't trust me," Gracie told Yaro. "You shouldn't trust anyone with power. Anyone who can control people is untrustworthy.”
Her entire team was silent. Alan and Ushanas, who had just arrived up the road from Kithara, had stopped a few yards away, unsure what was going on.
Yaro said nothing.
"Who you should trust is these people," Gracie said, jerking her head at the ones around her. "Because they're the ones who call me on my shit. That's what you should trust; that's the team I've surrounded myself with.”
There was a long pause.
"And when they disagree, and you get rid of them?" Yaro asked. "What then? You'll be a dictator with no one to stop you.”
Gracie shrugged helplessly. "It's a chance I'm willing to take because I think I'd rather lose all of this than lose these friends. And if everything goes wrong, if it all goes to hell...well, at least I'll know I tried.”
"Tried what?" Yaro pressed. "Why do you even need this?”
"Because there's an a
sshole who wants to be the thought police, and another asshole who hates him and keeps taking money over being ethical," Gracie said, "and both of them are fucking around in the servers. I'd like to be able to do my damned job as a tank and keep that aggro off all the rest of you.”
"Nice spin to put on it," Yaro said, "when really, you're just a power-hungry bitch who wants all the men to be drooling over her.”
Gracie laughed. She couldn't help herself. "You really think you can find an insult I haven't heard before?" she asked him. "You believe you can come up with something that'll devastate me? Look, I don't know why you hate me. You won't say. But if you need to hate me, fine. I'll still be your tank.”
She turned to walk away, and she heard Yaro's voice again—but he wasn't speaking to her, he was speaking to Jay.
"I guess she is the woman you thought.”
"Dhruv?" Jay sounded halfway between shocked and furious. "What the hell?”
"You think I'm going to be the worst she encounters?" Dhruv asked. "She was tempted to ban me at the start. She tried to explain herself to me, and she won't be able to explain herself to everyone. But in the end, she's focusing on what matters.”
Gracie turned back, shaking her head. "You could have just asked.”
"No," Dhruv said. He shrugged. "I couldn't just ask this. Power changes people, and this power was what Harry created for himself.”
"I know that," Gracie said. "I knew that the first day you got on my case and I wanted to ban you. This is how Harry saw people: ants in an ant farm, rats in a maze. He wanted to pick and choose people until he ended up with some fucked-up utopia where all the people thought exactly what he did and did exactly what he wanted and never called him on his bullshit. That's where his powers lead; I know that.”
Dhruv said nothing.
Gracie walked closer. "That's why I'm saving them for him."
"He'll find a way to take them away from you," Dhruv warned her.
