Of course, things went differently once the team fights started. They always did. There I was watching my guys head up to the enemy, standing at the gates of Mordor. They stealthily moved back through the jungle, utilizing the games fog of war.
Now this part was key.
We knew that the enemy had not been heading through the jungle. I had them walk single file to leave no idea of their numbers.
By this time, Esther had sacrificed her tower and was luring them to her second one. She was making it look easy. Then Racquel began the five versus two fights by charging in.
It wasn't even a contest, like kicking a soccer ball through a toddler’s legs. Sure, it looked cool when they didn't pause to celebrate. It was like a good guy walking away from an explosion.
Job done, they methodically moved to dragon, and I saw two of the Passaic players throw their hands up. My team was pure professionals.
"What exactly was the tea?" I asked Rachel.
"Something about a girlfriend. I didn't want to hear it because it seemed like whoever it was had been playing both of them."
"Ouch."
I checked Murph’s stats, and his offense and his redacted skill had both gone up by one. I couldn't chalk it up to him though, Rachel was here, and he had been training with her at odd hours as well. I tried to think of what he had been doing this whole match and it seemed like he was doing more of the same.
Esther’s mechanics had gone up by a point as well. That seemed like a foregone conclusion, the way that she steamrolled two other guys. Now they didn't even have a chance to catch up. A minute after they killed the two top players, they headed to dragon, and took it down.
You might be thinking to yourself that this was a foregone conclusion, but I still saw this as an absolute toss-up.
Our mid laner had given up three kills so far and had a match rating of six now. Only their mid laner had a match of five or over.
They kept pushing and we pushed back. That was when the snowball began and ten minutes later, we had it in the bag. The ref gave us five minutes to have a drink and eat and then come back.
"All right. So, what are you thinking Rachel do the same thing? Change it up a little bit?"
It felt good to finally speak to somebody about this. I wasn't going to tell it by the patch, but I was going to tell her my feelings. That was a very good round and I wanted more of it. I thought that my guys were going to be out of the challenge and that was ready to face that head on. The road from here to finals was paved in sweat. My guys were sweating, and they were making the other team sweat. Some of that was tears as well.
The kids stepped up to stretch.
"You don't need to change anything," Rachel said. "Esther is particularly good at this. Can she play a different lane?"
"She can play any role but if they're doing two on top, then I need her there. She is my rock."
"She's amazing yes. She's your standout star. She's in for this game’s MVP. We'll see about the series though. Best of three games is an odd choice."
"It's either that or the Swiss system and they wanted a max game time of ninety minutes. This is close."
Esther was back and joined the circle.
"Have you ever heard of them shutting the third game down at the ninety-minute mark?" Esther said. "Or is that way too rules lawyer-ish."
The rest of the team returned, and I nodded to the ref. He made a countdown clock appear above us.
"Never heard of it. Alright, across the way the Passaic manager is rethink his career choice. But we're here to play the win. Let's leave nothing on the table. Now, no big changes in this game. Esther, I need you to ask for help earlier."
"Spread the love," Rachel said.
Esther smiled. "Assists count as love, right?"
"Whatever got you talking more often. I don't care if you and Raquel are having the worst lesbian fight right now, but I need you to talk to her and to the rest of the team and be proactive. They know that you can throw them back. What they don't know is how well you are. It just about every character they can keep out of the ban pool."
"Got it boss."
"Everyone else?"
I surveyed my warriors. Every one of them would take down the dragon for me. Even Rachel was buying into it. I can tell she wanted to be paid for this, but she was hard to get paid by her company. I was going to pay her later, but I didn't want to start that conversation right now. With her help? I was hoping Mark would advance to his capacity and the rest of the team would also do better as well. I had absolute faith in her now. When I wasn't behind somebody, I can see her speaking her truth to them and getting them better.
Heck had you asked me last week if Esther could have approved in her offense? I would have said no. But there was something about having a coach there. In professional sports, there are tons of different coaches of offense or defense. or specifically for some positions that just train that position. Usually, it's a professional that had that position for years and then moved on.
This game had only been out for about 12 years now so there was nobody with a 20-year career in it that I could lean upon. All I had were kids like her that grew up on it and played it for the last eight years of their lives.
There's difference between somebody that plays a game and somebody that has a job. When you go to a job, you check in and you do your work while you're there. When you're playing? That's your leisure time. You're focused. You are one with the game.
When you get good? You get absorbed into it.
You get into that flow state.
I could see it in her eyes that Esther was already in the Flow State.
Even in the beginning of that next round, she was farming like it was going to save her life.
Our jungle showed up just at the right time to make sure that the pressure stayed up. There's a little period before the minions spawn where the jungler usually requests help. Sometimes a combination of two. There's nothing going on in lanes until the avatars arrive. With the help of a laner, the jungle can pick out some of the spawn camps before that. If they can help the jungle with one small camp, that'll get them to level two.
Then they can Still all their progress from there if they know what they're doing. Usually, a jungle knows what they're doing by this time in their career. Anyone that picks jungle has seen it several times before settling on it. Good ones watched it being played on a YouTube channel or something like that. There were good, set definite strategies that they could use. Especially if they worked with their team to get as many camps as possible.
Our guys were efficient. If the camps spawned at the thirty second mark, they had bought their initial load out and already were on their way. When the first clutch of minions headed out, they were with them. It wasn't strictly necessary for that to happen, but it looked cool AF.
I loved it when I was cool AF. This was all the time because I loved myself unconditionally.
It was like they were showboating just for a small audience of me and Rachel.
I checked the match ratings at the beginning of the game and all but one of theirs was set to three.
Unsurprisingly, we dominated them in the second round and my points finally began to take up after being so low for so long. I needed those points. I wanted to unlock the shop and see what else is going to be unlocked. When I started opening my new abilities. Round two was tempting me.
As Oscar Wilde once said, the only way to get rid of temptation was to give into it.
I was whirly in a camp of getting into temptation by getting it out of my face. Even now, I knew that the interface was there. If I focus on it, it will come my back up. I did need that right now though. I knew where we were.
Is that anything that I need to drain up some backups as well. If we were going to be this far ahead and match, then it made sense for me to have some people trained for next semester. In community college, you only have them for about 2 years. Not everyone finished their degree, but a good bunch do their two years and then go onto bigger and better things.
If I needed to attract the talents, I needed to win this game then I was going to have to do all with this team and bring up some new talent for next year. Or at least for next semester. Next spring? I couldn't even think about that. Fall 2025 felt like it was ten years away.
There was only one way for me to win this. And that was by somehow getting a place to manage a regular team where I could hire and fire these guys.
Not that I would hire a fire my guys. I love these kids. But for a professional League on a professional team? Things will be very different indeed. I just need someone to think about giving me a chance. That would be all it took for me.
---
Once the snowball happened, it was all over for those kids. Passaic folded like a crunchy taco shell. We were minutes away from our first regular season victory when the taco trucks arrived, and I was overjoyed to see it.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Rachel, would you like to have a taco with me?” I said.
“After we’re done, I need to start wrapping up stuff and then I have to put it back into the van,” she said sheepishly. “I can’t even use the bathroom if I’m the last one here. I’m supposed to have a partner.”
She didn’t need to say much more for me to be on her side. The game was over. The snowball was turning into an avalanche.
“Oh, your boss didn’t forecast enough help for his off-site event?”
“That’s about the normal. I don’t expect much from him, but at least I get paid on time.”
“Getting paid on time is like… the bar is on the floor,” I said. “You need to value yourself higher.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s just a lot of work.”
“Speaking of which, the tacos are on me. Esther can watch the computers when the game is over.”
She twirled a bit of her hair. I was thinking that she wanted to eat. I wanted to speak to her alone and offer to pay her for coaching. She was already paying dividends. If she knew some techniques to take my guys to the next level, I was all for it. To be frank, I knew what I wanted them to do but I wasn’t sure that just having them run these team fight drills would do it. So much of what was happening was situational.
The situation was that there were so many game states that you could work through. If you had only seen a game state once, then it was hard to think about what to do. The game was dynamic. You had to break it down into small things.
At first you needed to farm and defend your lane. Then you needed to pick your targets. Then you needed to push a lane or go to dragon. At each point, there were branching paths based on your current state. Then the enemy made choices.
Right now, she had a choice to make.
“Can you get me a chicken taco?” she said.
“I got you,” I said.
She smirked I would get her a taco. Then we would talk about it.
It was a very easy or shall I say simple affair to get Rachel's equipment loaded back into her company van. It was only a bit of a drive. Dan for her to return everything. Joe, I asked the team to help a little bit and of course he did.
They were good guys. They might be hilarious to me, but they were all good guys and I thought that after that when? They deserved to not have to do anything. What they thought didn't matter to me. I wanted to celebrate and in true Passaic style, the taco truck was right there.
“Professor Thomas, you getting everyone tacos?” Raquel said
I took a moment to check my bank account. Although I had been putting stuff Hey, this kind of expenditure was well within my guilty spending budget.
I guess I can. But nothing alcoholic.
There were little roots and wall haulers as most of the team went over to order tacos from the truck. When the little Latina working behind the window looked at me. I gave her the thumbs up. I also showed her a credit card. I had already paid for Rachel's Taco so I might as well pay for theirs.
If it only took me buying you a taco to get you on our side, I would have done his way sooner, I told Rachel.
You just met me. She chuckled. They weren't out a lot of African American women in esports so us being together was kind of an oddly. Noah was seeing it more and more with casual games. Hearthstone will always be a casual game to me. But maybe I needed to play more of it.
Other black girls my age like to play cozy games like Stardew Valley. I like Stardew Valley. But it didn't quench the thirst I had inside of me to decimate somebody's so badly that they had to wonder what just happened.
See all my gaming was an equalizer. It didn't really matter if you could run fast or if you were strong. It was all about your brain and understanding of the situation in front of you. Just like those game States, you had to make the best decision based off of what you saw in front of you. And even the best players still lost because of what other players did on their team or on the opposite teams. This meant that when a team gelled together. It felt almost as good as a Tres leche cake.
You know those cakes with a little bit of milk in the bottom. Oh, those are my jam.
I miss my mom used to make those things.
Mom has asked me to take her to dialysis. She was feeling a little bit low and needed a ride there and back. So, I obliged and told her I would. I just wish he wouldn't ask me last minute.
“Rachel, now that you've seen the team, what are you thinking and understanding that we play Union next week? Are you available Tuesday night.”
“I'm available Tuesday night,” she said. “I'm off but for you?”
“You can start up a little side business, we can see where it goes?”
As much as I hated the way that Living in America made everyone have to have a side business or a side hustle everywhere, I could see that she had a keen sense for business. If I was going to look at managing a franchise, I would need a coach like her.
Her own ability was off the charts. Want to look at her again? It was still calculating her scores. Or maybe that was just the system trying to figure the fuck out what she was. I was hoping that she might be one of those mythical messy like people who just was amazing at the game and would be able to do that for years at a time. And then we might have a way in.
“Are you going to college?” I asked. “I've never really asked you these kind of questions before, but I feel like I should probably figure it out what you're doing. You know you're right next to Bergen, right?”
She sighed. “I'm trying to save up the money to go. I was taking one class at a time.”
Unspoken was the idea that she was living at home. I was guessing that her mom didn't want to move out, but I didn't really want to impose the values of the Caribbean upon her. She just could have been from a first-generation immigrant family, and they had no idea how things went here in America. But she spoke fluently so she at least had been here since she was little.
“Yeah, I'm sorry if I didn't ask you this but I'm really trying to figure out a way to get the college to pay for their scholarships and Murph and I and Raquel have talked about doing these invitational tournaments where you get like $1,000.”
Her jaw dropped.
“If you had a team I could take to these tournaments, yeah that might be a way for us to win some money. But what's tuition for a semester now?”
“It's about $3,000 for a full course load? Mind you, I can help you get through some of the things that you need to get through, but it's not that difficult. Basically, anybody who's attended high school here can get in for free or at least I can start taking classes. You don't seem like you're going to need any remedial classes.”
She smiled. “I might need some classes in math to get a degree but… I can dig it.”
“But we can work around that if we have to. Right now, you have a skill I need, and I would like to see about making this more official starting with our first practice session on Tuesday. If you can lead us to win some of these tournaments, then some of that money will be yours. Especially if it's us having used one of the members of the team.”
Her face brightened up. It was good that she played a game a lot. It was also clear played. She'd probably coach a lot of kids after that. I was thinking that she was ranked well. I would have to check her profile later, but chances were that she played this game non-stop when she wasn't working. I knew she wasn't in high school. I was 90% sure that she didn't have any children and wasn't married now that was any of my business but share a lot of free time.
“If you keep giving me all these tacos then I'm going to be forced to apply to your college and attend as a student.”
“Well you're just in luck,” I said. “The fall 2 semester is starting in about next week and you could sign up and start taking classes then. And if you need an academic advisor, I'm right here. You do live in Bergen?”
“Of course I live in Bergen County.”
“Excellent. “
“I suppose you have some big plan to win the league this year or something?”
“We wanted to go in this group, but I don't know where the team is going to be able to go. We've got about eight regular games and then we'll see how the finals shake out.”
The thing about finals… It was a bit dicey. The point of college was to educate people in a specific domain. It was not to get them better at sports. Though many schools looked like they were athletic apparatuses attached to an education of power learning, that simply wasn't the case where I was standing.
My college was a commuter college. It didn't have big football games where people flew in to see some of the highlights. We didn't play against Army or navy. We played against our fellow County colleges. Sometimes we play against a four-year College. If they were invitationals? We would attend those. The referee came up to talk to me and I blinked several times.
“Hey, you guys did a great job today. I just want you guys to know about the invitationals that we're sponsoring,” he said.
“I haven't heard about that,” I said. Rachel turned to look at the referee. She was still in her customer service mode and not into him.
“I'm sorry sir. Are there any other pieces out there did you see? Or are we all done getting unloaded.”
It was leading question and we both knew it.
“Everything that came in to be set up from you is done. If it was me? The referee said. I would go back and check once more myself, but you can do yourself.”
I gave Esther the little motion with my head, and she sprang into action.
Murph and Raquel had driven in together which gave more Credence to my idea that perhaps they were not dating to the whole world, it looked like they were dating. Esther returned from the interior of the conference center and gave us a thumbs up.
“Professor Thomas, thanks for bringing your team out. As for the invitational I will send you the information on email, I hope to see your team there.”
He smiled. I slipped him a business card.
A relic of the 1990s and 2000s, the card, the business card was a way to let people know that you wanted them to contact you later. It's not really a thing anymore. You could use a QR code on your phone to direct someone to a web page to show your services or you could just give them your phone number and then have their phone do all the work.
You could even share your contact to someone else's phone from your phone making the idea of wasting paper on business cards. A useless expense. But if you are dealing with a boomer, the first thing they would say is to make a business card for you to do business. Even if you weren't going to be handing them out. And they'd be like do it anyway. And he'd be like you got a job at a factory when you were 16 and you work there until you died or retired.
Times have changed and we need to change it with them. The only constant in the universe is change. Well, change and my own excellence. That would never change. It would only get better.
Rachel had her phone out and was scrolling.
She was scrolling through something. I can see her on the Bergen homepage. Fall 2 was an idea for her and I didn't think she was going to follow through with it. Would it be great? Yes, would it be perfect for her? I didn't know. I didn't know it was pretty good schedule and her personal life was not for me to ask. If she wanted me to be her advisor or if she wanted me to be some sort of Mentor? I would take that. I would take that in a heartbeat.
Is a certain kind of way an expert works that you can see when they are doing their job. She knew exactly which one to sit behind and Coach who that two-gain session. I hadn't really appreciated what you've done so far, but several of my guys had already improved their stats a little bit. That meant that something about her coaching could upgrade my guys. Was it the system working through her to do that? I didn't know. All I knew was that I wanted her in my corner.
“So, all I have to do is register for a course?” She said.
“You can take a general education course and we could have you on the team next week. You don't have to. Again. I'm offering you the coaching position because I need someone to get these guys in shape.”
“They already seem like they're in shape, she said. Is there something you're not telling me?”
They were just the things that I wasn't telling her. I wasn't telling her about the patch. I wasn't telling her about how she had an AP of 100. I wasn't telling her about how she was probably one of the best candidates I'd seen so far for an actual pro, but chances were, she's come to one of the problems that so many women I knew fell to.
She probably had terminal imposter syndrome.
I couldn't directly say that to her because then she would shrug it off and say that she wasn't that great. But so long as the passion lie, she was great. I was willing to push back on that.
She could be me. I saw her as a little mini me. So of course I wanted to pit myself against her. I didn't really have a gauge of my own potential right now and it will be a good matchup for me to see how well she did.
I was guessing that if I could do a matchup between people of differing abilities say one side was an offense higher than the opposite defense, then the offensive win. But what would happen if a match of two players of equal ability on the opposite side? Say one that had a defensive 10 and the other one had an offensive 10 but both had the same mechanics.
Well now I could test that out. I could use her to test more of my theories because I could get my guys better. Than the A-Team and the B team could advance slightly faster.
The referee waited a line for some tacos and made some small talk. Rachel went to talk to Esther and the two of them exchange numbers and I was pretty sure that they were either going to suck face later or become a power duo, the likes of which DOTA had never seen before. Either way I would be impressed.
They could go open the best gay bakery ever so long as they played my game to its fullest.