Tuesday was another day as Professor Thomas, business professor to the rowdiest kids in the county. They were great kids, but I was always surprised at the passion during add drop week.
Of course, before I was going to start class, what I was going to do was take some time in the computer lab and review some more of those YouTube commentary things.
As I was going through the championship stuff and the league that would take place starting in mid-September to the second week of December, one of the patrons in the computer lab decided to give me a look. Now I'm not the kind of woman that's going to be mad at someone for just looking. I know that I've gotten enough strange looks because of who I am, and you know what?
I don't care anymore. If you want to stare? Then stare.
But this guy looked at me like he wanted to sell me something and let me tell you. I don't want to buy anything. I barely want to be at work.
I want to see my friends.
I want to get my shit done.
I want to not be in debt and then I'm happy.
So, I gave him the look of a concerned older woman. He had to be a man of about middle age? He looked like he was something out of a Santa catalog. Either that or he was just cosplaying at Santa.
He had a long white beard and he appeared to have been coming from a fashion show, if his clothing was any indication. I didn't know him, and I had never seen him before. It was too early to get into the Christmas spirit.
"Sir, can I help you?" I said, when he came over to the check in table.
My computer was clearly visible from the rest of the lab. I was annoyed that I had to take down my headphones for this.
I was always cordial with people that might be my students. But don't try me.
"I see that you were watching a commentary about DOTA," The man said. " Do you play?"
The man, who had once had my notice, now had my attention.
"I play a little bit," Said not wanting to overstretch what was going on here.
"How would you like to be really good at the game?"
At that moment, a shudder went through me. It felt like he had been speaking in tongues. Mister September Santa was going to have to explain himself if he wanted to make a sale.
"Pardon me but what?" I said.
"What would you trade? Be great at the game? A great leader? Perhaps a great player?"
I had to think about that for a little bit. While it was true that I would trade the naming rights for my firstborn (I was never having kids) I thought that perhaps this guy was maybe a little kooky. Perhaps a bit too kooky for me.
But it takes all kinds of people at an Institute of higher learning to get the learning to happen, so I was willing to accept him. If he was strange and on crack?
That was okay.
Based on where I was though, it was more likely weed or acid. He looked like a parent that would be giving such things to a child that they were sending off school, I didn't want to judge. It was my place to judge. I was just there for a paycheck and the potential for tenure.
"What are you offering? Some cheap training on how to get good at the game? Are you going to take me back to your esports arena? Do you have a computer cafe or something that you're using to get good competitors in? What's your angle?"
The man chuckled.
"I don't have an angle. I'm just looking for people that are willing to make a commitment to the game."
"Well, that's all you had to say. I'm already committed to the game. I play with my friends weekly. We have a game night regularly."
I swear to you that he took out a handkerchief and dabbed his face.
"Ah. So, what you're saying is you want to be good at this? Perhaps with the potential to be the best in the world?"
I thought at that point in time that perhaps he was just weird and not on drugs. That happens but you know what. I will give him a fair shake if he would give me a fair shake.
"You know what? Yes, I would like to be the best. I would like to be the best there ever was."
"Excellent," he said in a very devilish manner.
"So, what… are you going to recruit me for your team now? You haven't even seen me in action."
He smiled. Of course he did.
"I've seen you lecture. You're very passionate about your subject."
"You've seen my lectures?" I said, turning to see the man who now has my full attention. My headphones had moved from half on to fully over my shoulders.
"Might I add that there was a leak of the new patch notes today and I think that you might enjoy them," he said.
Every time a game got patched there would be some patch notes. The developer was updating the game and letting us know what the changes were. Usually, the changes were about little tweaks to balance things in the game.
As this game had developed itself over ten years with a big following, there were a lot of people that had A vested interest in their characters and usually their builds. The builds might change, and the place styles might change, Just based on the patch note.
Usually patch notes didn't change much, unless they were trying to balance a new character. The developers of the game had decided to take an approach where they would do some beta testing on a character first with some people adopted into a beta part of the game.
They didn't release that many characters, only a few a year after the first thirty came in but it was still a big change when a character came in that you didn't know how to fight against.
Players would then have to figure out how to counter or use a new character. Then someone would go on YouTube and make a video about the character and break it down. Then someone would make a whole commentary using the new avatar and what was good and what was bad, and it was a whole ecosystem.
In this ecosystem, I was a farmer. I was a hunter and gatherer looking for the little tidbits of information. When the man told me about the patch notes I smiled.
"Okay so those patch notes, what do you know about it?" I said.
"I hear it's going to be revolutionary. A big change is coming," he said.
I was very skeptical of the man who decided he wanted to show up and tell me all this stuff. I had enough of it, and I was ready to send them out the door.
"If you have patch notes, send them over," I said.
"I can put them on your USB stick," he said, grinning.
"Sure, why not?"
What was the harm? I grabbed my newest acquisition. Two minutes later, he put it on there.
I'd give him one of those with a bank logo. It looked a bit different now, as if the logo had been a bit burnt out. I hadn't remembered it like that.
You know the one that they give you when they want you to sign up for your credit card? Turns out that they don't care if you're a student or the professor. They'll give you whatever swag it takes to get you into their good graces.
Marketing 101 tells us that attracting a client that's going to be long-term is worth spending the five dollars to give them a custom USB stick that says Bank Union of South Hackensack. We call it a loss leader. The BUSH logo was a bit blacker and redder than I was used to.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
"Good luck," he said, packing up his laptop and heading out.
"Thanks," I said, staring after the strange man as he made his way to class.
I plugged the USB stick into my laptop and loaded up the file. Patchnotes.md, because of course he sent shit in markdown.
That was fine. Universal file formats worked.
I opened it up and scrolled through the notes. It looked like they were dropping a new character and that one of my mains was getting a buff. That was good for my purposes. I would be able to work with that until they nerfed it again.
In gaming terms, a nerf is when they take something and make it less powerful or good in general. A buff is the opposite, and it probably meant that Shana, my jungle main, hadn't been faring so well in high level play. The buff wasn't revolutionary, but it was something good for me.
I was going to exploit the heck out of it. I couldn't live with myself otherwise. I briefly thought about getting out of discord to talk about this, but then I remembered that I had a class in about 15 minutes. Looking up, one of the tech kids was there to take over the computer lab. I surrendered my station.
Going to pull out my USB stick. I got a little bit of a jolt. For a second, the whole world fussed, and I shook my head several times.
"Are you okay professor?" The tech student said.
It took me a minute to respond.
"I think I'm okay, but that was a bit of a zap."
And worthy. I always realigned. This was only the second day; I couldn't already take time to get a sub. I needed to hand out the schedule and syllabus for these new classes and make sure that my students do what was going on.
"I'm just going to go to class," I said looking up to her. I packed up my laptop into my bag and stood up to leave.
Above the girl, I could see what had to be the hallucination of a name tag.
*Stephanie Diaz*
I blinked several times. Maybe I needed to see the nurse. I promise that I would wait until the end of class to go and then I would finally go and see them.
I walked out of the computer lab and took a left.
"Professor Thomas!" The student said. "Your class is the other way!"
Of course she had been the one that set it up. I thanked her and turned back around. By then I'm walking to the room and let the fifteen students into marketing 101 that were waiting there.
There was no way that I was hallucinating at that moment. I needed a whole video for the rest of the day. I couldn't just quit. I needed the health insurance.
I sat down in my chair and sipped from my water bottle.
I went through my notes, bringing up last semester's materials and getting the presentation up. That was nothing. I had just pushed through this.
I began to take attendance at the five-minute mark.
It was just my luck that the thing that I thought I saw popped up when another person with a name tag popped up.
*Xavier Rienoso*
*AP 40 AC 10*
I checked his name off the list. If I was going to be cursed to see people’s names, your girl was going to take advantage of it.
"Xavier Reinoso, I take it?" I said.
"Present!"
He said down in the back. The guy was sporting a pair of khakis and a collared shirt. I took a second to really look at him. Below his name I saw AP and AC. I tried to contain myself, looking around if anyone else had anything.
I saw no one else with a name tag. Conscious that I had been looking at a student for ten seconds I turned away.
I launched into my spiel about attendance, handed out the syllabus to the class and pretended that I wasn't seeing shit.
---
"I don't see anything wrong with you," the male nurse in the student clinic said. "The closest hospital is a psych hospital, though if you just wanted to get a neurological evaluation, I would just send you to the urgent care on route seventeen. You don't have any other classes, right?"
He seemed calm, but something in his demeanor told me that he was not taking me seriously because I was a woman.
"Are you sure that I shouldn't just take a pill and sleep it off?" I said, trying to lead the witness.
"I wouldn't," he said. "If you are really having hallucinations, it's better to get that looked at quickly and it's almost noon. The dean of your department can cover down for you if you have any more classes today."
I didn't have any more classes. I had office hours, but I could leave a note. I asked him to help me out and he got my affairs in order while I went to make sure that I wasn't crazy.
---
I was just sitting in the waiting room at urgent care. There was a live DOTA match playing on the waiting room screen, showing off an exhibition match. I saw the **Secret Agents** taking on the **Rogue Lights**, both top tier franchises. They were doing a match for charity, raising money for children's hospitals. I hadn't ever seen a live stream of DOTA at my doctor’s office, so my eyes were glued to the action.
That was when I saw a bit of something in the corner of my vision. It was a small button. I focused on it, and it expanded to a full screen.
Points 32
Shop:
10 Points: Scouting Level 1
20 Points: Basic Profile
100 Points: 1-1-2
I didn't know where the points had even come from. This whole thing made me feel like not only was I going crazy, but I was also going insane. At least the bus that went to both took the same route, because I was hopping on.
---
A nurse waved me in and then the medical team put me through a battery of tests. Most of them I had never even heard of, but I played along.
Two hours later and I had an appointment with a neurologist early the next morning. The urgent care doc was a bit ambivalent as the headache had cleared up. I had never had a concussion before, but I was beginning to think about that strange DOTA fan that had given me the patch notes. When I got back to the apartment, I checked my laptop and the USB that the patch notes were on was unbeknownst to me, fried.
I wasn't even able to focus on anything. I had been too hyped up thinking that I had some kind of brain tumor or something. They told me that it was a good sign that I was up and moving around and cautioned me about driving myself around too much if it got worse.
I was a grown up. I would stop driving when I felt like it.
It didn't do me any good and I resolved to kind of let things lie. I texted for Stacey to come over if she could and by dinner time, I had told her all about what had happened with me.
"Anyway, enough about me, Stacey. How is that amicable not so amicable couple doing?" I said, trying to hydrate myself.
"Well in discovery, I found out that his wife had been with the kids eSports tutor, and she had been racking up the wins," Stacey said. She was well into the soft cushion that I loved to curl up into. It was a bitch to clean, but it was so worth it.
"She left her husband for the kids eSports tutor?"
"Yeah, I figured that might pique your interest," she said.
I scoffed. Divorce details were a general human interest. Everyone wanted to know the lurid details of what had gone down, but usually it was just a financial affair or emotional infidelity. Even where we were in Bergen County, people still left each other for ugly reasons.
"I mean is the kid any good?" I said.
"I don't know," she said. "But this Thai place was a good idea."
Your girl has a weakness for Thai iced teas and Tres Leches cakes. But it's not a fix that you can get from one place. I had to ask her to pick both up on the way. At least the Thai place had a good curry.
"Yeah, I'm sorry you had to go to two places," I said.
"Girl! You can't be sorry about that! You just got done telling me that you think you might have brain cancer or something," she said, waving her drink. "I'm going to take care of you, boo. You came over when I was down."
I smiled. It was good to have friends.
After she left, I found myself watching a live streamer play DOTA. I felt more like myself and for now, the headache was gone.
I had been watching for a few minutes and then I checked my status screen.
It showed that I now had thirty-six points. Hadn't it been thirty-two earlier? I checked how long I had been watching them stream their game and that wasn't helping. I looked at the clock, then watched the game for a minute.
My points had gone to thirty-three.
The rest of the evening I did my best to figure out the rules of the system.
I was like a junkie trying to figure out how to get more games to play or watch. If I got one game in, that gave me thirty points. It felt like I was trading my time in one minute per point and that kind of stung.
If I was part of a team, and we were all talking, I got 150 points.
There was a little bit of a leeway there if I was talking with half of the team but somewhere between one or the other. I had tested it out Monday night getting between seventy and one hundred depending on participation.
But I had shit to do. And there was only so many games I could get in during a night. So, I figured out that I would have to make a schedule.
I couldn't just wander around looking for games. It had to be a live game or a streamed game that was not over. Something about it happening in real time made the difference.
If I was watching a streamed game then I could get a sense of what was going on, easily figuring out who would be the next player to make a big move. By focusing on the avatar, I was able to see not only their stats, but the stats of the person playing as well. Or I would be able to if the boxes weren't grayed out and unusable.
It was clear that there were a few things that I could see that made a difference. There was a ability called Offensive talent then an Defensive talent and although I wasn't really sure what they were, they both had some grayed out stuff beneath them which made me think that they were subcategories. There were three other such abilities and I had to think about what those could be.
I grudgingly purchased Scouting 1 and Basic Profile.
Basic Profile showed me that there were two more greyed out boxes to the right of the profiles I was looking at, but that two of the other five abilities were mechanics and reflex.
The shop had scouting two for the frustrating cost of five hundred points.
Shop:
Scouting 2: 500
Points1-1-2: 100 points
Basic Profile 2: 1000 points
A separate sheet showed me something else. Basic Profile 2 took the cake with asking for one thousand points to unlock. My own sheet showed what I had purchased, at the very least.
----------------------------------------
Thomas
Scouting 1
Basic Profile
----------------------------------------
There was also a category for potential and current ability. That one seemed to be out of twenty, based on everything that I had seen. I was going to need to figure out what AP and AC meant in game, and it was frustrating that I couldn't see my own AP and AC.
Now I couldn’t see a real pro doing stuff, but there was a chance I might be able to see some soon.
If I got my say, then I would be heading down to see something at Comic-Con which usually hit around the second or third week of November in New York City.
There was always an esports demo there and I could make it. I checked my calendar and yeah, the tickets were expensive, but I went and got one, anyway.
I got it for all three days in case I was able to do something else with the time. I was hoping to scout more players as that was the other thing that got me points. Passing by students in a hallway let me see that about one in ten had a potential of one, with a capability of one. I would have needed to get more than a glance to get more information.
One girl had an PA of sixty, and an AC of one, which threw me a bit and I wanted to chase after her and shake her down to join the Bulldogs, but then I imagined how that would look like in the dean's office and thought better of it.
On career day though, her ass was going to get one hell of a sales pitch.