The Ribbon Was Tied Too Pretty
When you really thought about it, tea-bagging was one of the most ordinary things in games.
It had reached the point where you could almost call it part of the culture. Doing it to me, though — that was the problem.
And it wasn't even like they'd taken me down on their own skill. What possible qualification, what possible confidence, gave them the right to tea-bag? I found myself genuinely curious about the architecture of that person's brain.
The second round, played on defense, wrapped up faster than I'd expected.
Four of the enemy team were already dead. Players that mediocre were never going to flip a situation like that. The rappel down toward the elevator had been a reasonably fresh idea, I'll give them that — and that was as far as it went. Every entrance was sealed behind barricades, and the grenades they tossed in hoping to flush out whoever was hiding inside all died against the preemptive defense system I'd already set up.
In the end it was nothing but a string of pointless standoffs, until a stray bullet finished the last enemy player and closed the round.
Even on a second look, they were truly, spectacularly bad.
Bad enough that the anger still crowding my head a moment ago simply drained away. Provocation only deserves an answer if the other side is worth answering. No adult is going to clap back at an elementary schooler waving a perfect math test and announcing, see, you're worse at math than I am. I had no idea what kind of concrete reaction I was even supposed to give someone whose skill sat on the floor.
The unexpected tea-bag had made me angry, sure. Right now, though, all I felt was disbelief.
Fine. Tea-bagging, at least, was cute enough to let slide.
"Thanks for the donation. Was it really that bad? I thought I was holding back a reasonable amount."
Fifteen kills, four assists, and one death.
The truth was, this kind of pubstomp was only possible right now. Once the control scheme had moved from keyboard and mouse into a virtual reality that actually moved your body, the gap between players had narrowed dramatically — except for a vanishingly small handful. Even people who worked out were a world apart from people who moved tactically; pumping iron to build muscle and fighting with purpose were not the same sky.
Which meant that the higher you climbed, the less the ladder cared about any one person's Physical, and the more ruthlessly it sorted teams by how well they synced and how cleanly each person did their job.
Of course the world had its exceptions. I just wasn't prepared to swear I belonged in that category.
"Alright. We'll leave it here for now."
A best-of-five. We'd taken it 3–1.
It had been fun, honestly. I'd only played the one match, and part of me wouldn't have minded queuing a few more — but right now I wanted to see what other PvP modes were even on offer.
What? Why was chat like this?
Had I said something weird? The viewers were rioting like a pack of rabid dogs. I'd only run one match, sure, but I was pretty sure I'd given them plenty of footage worth watching.
"What's with all of you. I just meant I was going to run a different mission."
...Had I really phrased it in a way you could misunderstand that badly?
Next time I'd have to say it properly, so the viewers didn't get the wrong idea. With that decided, I carefully switched my attention off the wreckage that was chat.
Telling them I was heading into a different mission seemed to settle the frenzy, at least a little. There were probably people who'd been sitting on the matchmaking button the whole time, waiting for a collab slot. So what. I was the one running this stream.
That was when another donation slid up over the screen.
"...The cold."
Maybe it was because I didn't answer on the usual beat. Or maybe it was because my eyes had quietly slid away from the camera that was broadcasting my face. Either way, chat went up in flames.
Right.
I'd trained for the cold during my mercenary years. Not just the cold — I remembered a whole spread of courses on surviving extreme environments. How to stay alive in a desert with no water. How to stay alive in killing frost.
Learning it, though, was not the same as enduring it. Knowing how to survive a desert did not mean you would walk out of one. It just meant the knowledge made survival a little easier. And the cold was a different conversation entirely. Easy or hard didn't enter into it. I simply hated being cold. A wind sharp as a blade, a pain like needles driven into the skin, a body that would not stop shaking — keeping all of that under control was not a small ask.
Training against the cold did not mean you stopped feeling it.
Besides, I had no reason to run survival mode right now. Climbing the ladder was the more urgent job.
"I get cold really easily, so..."
"Doesn't survival mode not even give rank points? I want to climb a bit right now, so..."
"Wow. Two hundred thirty dollars. Thank you so much, really. Thanks to all of you I can cover rent, groceries, the AC bill, and even my editor's paycheck. I'm genuinely grateful."
The answer came out halfhearted.
A donation was something to be grateful for, obviously. Even if stream donations carried more of a conversational weight than ordinary charity, money was still money. The real reason it sat wrong was that I knew exactly what this one was for. Plenty of donations were a thank-you for a good bit of content, or a show of support so the stream could keep going. They got used as a ticket into the broadcast, too — text, voice, video, missions.
The purpose of the one that had just landed was coercion. Hold out the cash and ask, you're still not going to do it?
A phrase surfaced in my head uninvited: it was too much money to refuse.
The snide little implication that I played indifferent about money until a large enough pile showed up, at which point I'd fold my principles and bow my head.
I wasn't the kind of person who did whatever you wanted just because you paid me.
And honestly, two hundred thirty dollars to go shiver through a mission did not add up. I had actually run an operation in a cold country once. Breath fogging even indoors, that kind of insane weather. A brutal snowstorm tearing around outside, the kind of cold you could feel stealing the obedience from your extremities first.
Even now, thinking about it, it had been a goddamn miserable job.
Hands shaking so hard that shooting was a struggle. No — the blizzard was so thick that if you drifted even a little you couldn't tell where you were.
That was not a mission I was going to cheerfully accept for a couple hundred bucks.
And Last of Quantum was a pervert of a game that insisted on realism in all the worst places. If the mission was going to be anything, it was going to be hard. Easy never even crossed my mind.
"I want to climb rank a bit for now. If I get a chance later, I'll do it."
I was doing my best to ignore the inferno in chat and queue a match when another one came in.
A woman's voice, filtered through the machine, and the entire mood of chat snapped around. A lot of people wanted to know if I was actually going to enter. Had I even brought up the LOT tournament?
"The LOT tournament... I haven't really thought about it that hard."
"When did I say anything, you guys? I just put the firewood in. You're the ones who lit it."
No. If I was being honest, I hadn't even put the firewood in.
I'd only untied the string around the kindling. The ribbon had just been tied too pretty.