“Was that true? You had the misfortune to duel Septic Rose, Sister of The Eastern Tyrant?”
Ruru frowned grumpily at her grandkid's Bloodmancer friend. "The Eastern Tyrant?"
As a noob, she was familiar with neither that person nor this 'Septic Rose'. Earlier, The Tyrant Tyrant had popped into the local chat and requested that they not blow matters further out of proportion by hawking footage of Alpha - if they were the same person. He'd told them to respond to any reporters that the forfeit was due to the clever witch strategising around one of his hardest counters, a fear of accessible ‘literature’. He'd praised the ingenuity to scrounge for weaknesses from other hobbies but threatened copycats with disqualification.
Grandma Ru continued to frown, 2050's online memes incomprehensible to her. “I have duelled Alpha—” she self-corrected. “Alphamutt. Not officially. We've sparred a few times in the past."
She told a white lie out of respect for the girl's privacy. She'd actually been training with the Cutthroat throughout the day. After the forfeit, she'd even contemplated probing for whatever real counters might've scared The Tyrant off but'd resisted because Alpha wasn't the type to divulge tactics. Ruru's opposition research into both had revealed nothing in the girl's favour. Alpha's main strength, her stealth—the best amongst the rookies—would be negated by The Tyrant's anti-stealth tactics. Moreover, although he rarely used it for whatever reason, his own stealth was monstrously superior.
She tried to change the topic. "An official match would be improbable since I’ve already taken two Ls.”
The tone with which she admitted her day’s second defeat mixed together many incongruent feelings. There was a splash of mock bitterness due to her current standing still being in the top 0.2% of entrants. Another splash, of pride, invited the kid to inquire who she’d lost to, the identity of her last opponent dispelling any cause for shame since almost no one could’ve been expected to win that fight. And a third contained her genuine bitterness at losing because she had kind of been expecting to win anyway.
“You’ve only lost two rounds?!” The Bloodmancer replied. “Out of how many?”
The preliminary categories followed different schedules. The boy, in the 6v6, was hovering at 4-4, and his team were practically eliminated. The rookie 1v1 would’ve crammed in extra matches due to the larger participant pool.
Grandma Ru smirked. “Out of 12. Yep. I’ve taken two hammerings. But,” about to segue into boasting, she caught a stabby-stabby glare across the table from her daughter, Cass, clenching a fork and steak-knife, “but it’s an amateur 1v1. Bunch of infants – no offence. Us three were pro gamers in the PC era, so this level’s expected.”
Picking up a smoked zebra haunch, she gestured at Pete and Jorge, offloading onto them this ticking bomb of a topic. The two were debating what Roboboomer haircuts to get after lunch - the El Classico rainbow mullet versus 2044’s bleached Vegeta revival.
Most of her companions, not monitoring her duelling run besides the updates from herself, had paid no heed to the reporters. Her granddaughter resumed showing her set of cute outfits purchased at the markets. Millie's father, Ruru’s German son-in-law, was delighting in the game’s magical cuisine effects, and he kept expressing his astonishment that more people didn’t buy VR units to indulge. Cass alone clung to her irritation, continuing to menace in Ruru's direction as if the failed interview’d been planned.
Grandma Ru, mindful of this watch, shrugged and evaded the follow-up pestering from her grandkid's friend. A fellow arena junkie, he understood that the ‘recruitment tournament’ had evolved into one of the weekend’s most competitive events.
Now, if the kid were surprised by her score or acquaintance with Alpha, he would’ve been really shocked to learn who’d administered her second spanking.
It’d been dealt by The Tyrant’s other teammate, Whitefrog. Although her death by Justinian had deprived her original chance to spar this prodigy, fate had arranged their re-meeting in the eleventh round after a whooping by his teacher.
Despite the abysmal string of luck behind this pairing, despite the outcome, Ruru had left the duel happy and relatively hopeful, comforted by the knowledge that she’d almost beaten him.
Coinflipping her desired Hamlet map, she'd had the opportunity to test the upper limits of her anti-weapon-juggling strategy. This tactic centred around subtle pockets of the arena that she’d documented nullifying the technique, to which she could lure a chasing enemy.
At the start, her plan had worked perfectly. Again and again, the Qi Master had screwed up as his swords were blocked from summoning by random objects occupying the intended location, as lengthy spears snagged in the corners of buildings. These failures, even the tiny ones, then rippled through his juggle. The technique's main vulnerability was its interconnectivity - weapons at one coordinate of its sequential summoning matrices facilitated the deployment of those at other coordinates, and by Jenga-pulling one or two items, you could collapse the entire art.
Whitefrog, not versed after a mere week in adaptations to these disruptions, was forced to repeatedly cancel his engagements seconds before contact and to retreat into emergency reset manoeuvres. After three botched skirmishes of this, his Class lacking any heals to recover, the match had seemed secured for an under-grandma upset.
But then his coach, shouting from the sidelines, had ordered him to stop being stubborn. The Qi Master, abandoning the juggle with a sneer, switched equipment to a standard shield and spear, and he reverted to the simpler fundamentals utilised in Saana League. The subsequent beatdown had a one-sided speed and brutality familiar to many gaming households. Whitefrog punished her like an older brother does a sibling whose ego has ballooned after being boosted by an unnoticed handicap. Grandma Ru, receiving a finishing prick from a sidesabre, was hauled off by the medics, the hot air seeping from her punctured lungs.
Still, it was more than most could expect against the tourney's second favourite, and forcing the regression of his technique gave her a partial sense of victory. It forecasted well against the rest of her competitors, who, amateurs like herself, wouldn’t have the advice of coaches or the fallback of martial arts acquired in a pro career. Whitefrog's youthful stubbornness also offered something to try experiment with in any future rematches.
Unable to restrain her excitement, Grandma Ru showed the Bloodmancer friend a replay. On the backside of a pot between them and her daughter Cass, a stealthy projection channelled from her fingers. She narrated this telepathically in a chat group, highlighting the various map niches where she’d outsmarted the fumbling Indian genius. A casual might expect an immunity to her kiting tricks due to them being the preferred method of his mentor. Such a simplistic take, however, failed to ransack the specifics of their sparring record, the vast majority of which had been melee-v-melee - The Tyrant, while coaching Whitefrog, used him to polish up his own weapon handling.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The Bloodmancer—gobsmacked by the first-person view against the pro, by this random grandma actually giving him trouble—pointed at her parkour. “How are you moving that...that gracefully?”
It was graceful.
Her granddaughter Millie, huddled with them over the footage, gave a nod, understanding at least that part.
Ruru beamed. “Pathing’s easy. The Tyrant’s workshop laid the mobile foundations, and the rest follows if you imagine playing Quake with your whole body.”
“What’s Quake?”
“What’s Quake, Ruru?”
The grandma groaned. Her millennial heart sank from where it’d risen, all that once had shimmered gold in videogaming decayed to rust by time’s relentless corrosions.
A groan also came from her daughter, catching the grandma flapping gums.
Ruru winced apologetically and shut the footage off.
She'd promised to curtail any duelling gossip while they ate. Her daughter, like her father, wasn’t thrilled about the tournament.
To tl;dr their family drama, Cass had outstanding childhood grievances about Ruru being a rubbish mother, doing too much gaming and not enough parenting, and Cass considered her participation in this event a re-enactment of that past trauma. Grandma Ru, who admitted to her historical misplays, could see some similarities but disagreed they were identical. For one, all of them were adults now in regular contact and this was a single frivolous weekend in a videogame. Two, having signed up well before Cass decided to tag along last minute, having anticipated this self-inflicted drama, Ruru had informed her of the probable absence from the start. Daughter and father had simply decided to ignore that warning, organising group-outings with the expectation that Grandma Ru would buckle on account of some guilt complex and then acting astonished when she hadn’t.
The whole thing was stupid. Nevertheless, Ru accepted her own contribution to this stupidity, and thus she'd promised to entertain them for one duelling-free meal.
So, stowing the arena aside, she returned the floor to her family and their festival. Her grandkid showed off a recording from a ballerina troupe, and she fantasised as kids her age do about becoming one herself. Grandma Ru offered pros and cons from her experience in a field with a similar cutthroatness and dearth of long-term prospects. When she added risks of injury and unhealthy beauty standards, she didn’t recommend it. Plus, the creeps.
None of this talk bothered the grandkid, the two yarning in the hypothetical, purposeless way old and young gals do when bored. The daughter's mother, however, had turned beet red while listening. This agitation, boiling up from a vein-deep sensitivity, soon erupted.
Cass slammed a cup against the table, causing several dishes to jostle and spoons in bowls to chime.
“You’ll be a brilliant ballerina!” she shouted. “Don’t EVER follow her advice. If I’d listened to her criticisms, you wouldn’t even exist.”
The final sentence was thrown out as a challenge, left to hang awkwardly over the dining table. The others looked at the woman with confusion. Pete, her father, grinned.
Grandma Ru stared back at Cass, wondering what was warranting this outburst. If her daughter had seen a commonality between herself and the ballerina stuff, that still didn’t justify escalating to this hysterical comment about her grandkid’s potential non-existence.
To tl;dr the family skeletons behind that remark, thirteen years ago, when her daughter had been studying in Europe, she’d gotten into a toxic relationship with a fellow American on a grant for veterans of the revolution. Grandma Ru had recommended breaking up, but her child had always excused his instability as post-traumatic stress disorder. The dude later got deported and jailed for sending Cass to hospital. Shortly after followed a surprise pregnancy. Ruru begged her not to carry it to term. She didn't want her child to bind her life permanently to a piece of shit or get kicked from her university and deported herself - post-revolution Europe practised soft eugenics that forbade active prisoners from siring children. The response to this advice was about as sensible as you’d expect. Her daughter accused her of lecturing from her own regrets and suggesting what she wished she’d done herself (false – Cass had been planned after their retirement), her daughter doubled down, and Grandma Ru became Grandma Ru. The deportation finisher was prevented by their son-in-law, a local, who’d swooped in and agreed to an in-utero adoption. Cass had since claimed a special foresight on her part, the irrational one being her mother, conniving very specifically to kill the grandkid she’d been chatting with.
Ruru once again thought this whole reasoning moronic. A salvageable ending didn’t retcon the misplays preceding it. Those who bought into this and other fallacies were failing to imagine the alternatives, e.g. the other grandkids cherished without the drama. Cass in turn thought her cold reasoning originated from her defective maternal instinct. Was that true? Maybe.
Now, as Ru stared across the table and studied her daughter’s spiteful glare, she realised the deeper intention of this out-of-nowhere comment. Her relationship with her grandchild wasn’t anywhere as poisonousness; Cass, hearing too much amicability in their earlier conversation, wished to sabotage it, to reduce it to their level.
Before lashing out against that realisation, she first paused to mull it over. It could be an uncharitable projection, a misinterpretation spawning from her own combative tendencies and prior bickering. Her daughter did have a nasty side, but, as a mother, it wasn't pleasant to acknowledge that.
Her grandkid Millie, much hastier, rolled her eyes. “Mom, you can’t—”
Ruru winced and placed a soft hand of objection on her shoulder. "Abort. Ab—" she winced again. "Stop. Your mother has reasons to be angry.”
She sent a private message to continue feigning ignorance and promising to explain later. Ruru’d already hashed this history out with her grandchild after she'd called her following previous snark. Between them, everything was cool. With Cass, though, if one had grasped her emotional immaturity from this drama, the outcome should have been obvious to her discovering her rage hadn't been inherited. The ugliness of that tantrum belonged to a different weekend.
The sour atmosphere soon dissipated, Cass’s temper vented by her mother's misplay and forfeiting of this round. The rest of lunch was lovely. Ruru adventured into a Sweet Crab sorbet for dessert – disgusting. Both Millie and her schoolfriend lost their marbles when another sparring partner stopped by to say hello, the guy apparently a child actor or something. Afterwards, Ruru waved her family off, restated that she’d reconnect if eliminated, and scooted back over to the stadium in whose massive shadow they’d been dining.
As she waited in an inspection queue, repeating this vague, virtual facsimile of negligences past, she pondered the matter a little further.
Six decades limping around the earth hadn’t granted any tidy resolution.
On the one hand, life had humbled her to some of the wisdom in her daughter’s irrationality. Children, family – these had much more lasting substance than a career. Grandma Ru had won her share of gaming accolades. Decades later, though, what did those offer her beyond nostalgic memories? The cliché of the real treasure being the friends picked up along the way had proven unironically correct, Jorge and Pete the only tangible products of those days remaining. The career didn’t share coffee with her on Friday afternoons. Whenever she would lay gasping in a hospice bed, the career wouldn’t warm her hand against the intruding chill. Ultimately, only people mattered; retaining sight of their importance, we should cling fast to every one of them regardless of the sacrifices to the self.
At the same time, part of Ru, the more significant part that’d compelled her back into the ring, dismissed the above as a coping strategy. Careers and aspirations might be brief but they weren't trivial, and giving up your dreams was giving up some portion of your fundamental humanity, which family life was rarely challenging enough to exercise. That didn't mean never sacrifice. But, in the full awareness of what was being stripped from her, a woman should deliberate before her commitments. Is this latest demand fair? she might ask. Will it ever be reciprocated?
In terms of deliberations around the tournament, the answer seemed clear enough to Grandma Ru. This was a fake problem echoing a real one. She continued to reject her daughter and ex’s conflation of a weekend event with history. Instead of engaging on these terms, a wiser woman stepped back from the whole argument and reminded herself of the issue’s deeper cause, identified after many cycles through this tired drama. Daughter, like father, just kind of sucked. And, recognising this, the solution was easy, the same history regurgitating one up: she should send her child divorce papers.
Grandma Ru snickered.
"What's crackin', ol' momma?" asked a neighbour in the queue.
"Life."
As for the answer to the rest, the grandma forgot even the question as she was re-admitted through the stadium gates.