Somewhat for crushingly, the opponent lost the first of three. I did not expect them to win the second one, but there was always the chance that they might come back ahead.

They made two substitutions during the break time. The support and the jungle swapped out. But otherwise, all the lane players were the same.

Of course, they were all white men. I was bringing concentrated girl power to bear.

Concentrated belt fed girl power.

The one thing that the Skylanders hadn’t thought to do was to have a food truck on retainer. They didn’t even have much besides a little table with snacks on it.

True, the snacks were free, but you get what you paid for when the snacks are free. I wasn’t even mad because again it was a community college and they were holding this event where all the esports games and apparently some of the other games they were in were doing really well. It was just that this one was criminally under funded.

My stomach grumbled. I made the trek over and found out that they had hot chocolate. That was good news. I made a cup, grabbed something with more sugar than sense, and surveyed the rest of the room.

As I returned from the snack table, I realized why they had made the change.

They were switching games! The jungle and support from our previous game were playing something else. My jaw slowly unclenched as this was just normal. Of course the kids that What part of one group? What part of the other one? I didn’t know that there was a lot of overlap, but gamers are gamers and they play lots of games. Why wouldn’t they play more than one game at a time? Why wouldn’t they play more than one game for their college? It made perfect sense. What didn’t make sense was for these two kids to be stuck playing a game? They were bad at when we could have people that were better and had them rostered first. Maybe they made a deal?

If I was there manager I would have put them in the second or third game. But then again maybe the other manager. The one for whatever deck building game they were playing had needed them to play second. And this facilitated that the people that were playing jungle and support now were definitely coming off of some other activity.

“Hey Professor, what’s up?” Rachel said as I returned.

“I think the two of the Skylanders left this game to go play Wyrm Haven over there,” I said.

“The support and the jungle?” She said, sneering. “Some people just have all the talent.”

“Those guys weren’t too talented. They were good, but they weren’t anywhere near you or Esther.”

“Of course you would say that. You need to butter me up so that I can stick around for as many semesters as possible,” she said, flipping her hair.

“Honestly, yes. Stay as long as you can. But graduate as fast as you can. Or we’re going to be going pro soon.”

“Both are good,” she said, turning. “Esther! We’re going pro!”

“That’s a great move, Professor! I’m so glad that you’re finally letting us follow our dreams. Maybe we can get that uhaul ready and move into a mobile home by the library,” Esther said.

I wasn’t sure if either of them was serious. They might be serious. I didn’t know.

“If you guys are done kidding around, then Rachel, I want you to see if you can manage this one,” I said. “Set the stage. Talk to the troops.”

Murphy, Bob and Racquel circled around, as if some unseen ping had gone to all three of their brains at the same time. I hadn’t done it.

“Circle up, squib,” Rachel said. “This is my time. Rachel’s crew is now in effect.”

I swear to you I have never heard so many near swears in two minutes that had absolutely nothing to do with the point that she was trying to make.

“...in closing, we may not win, but we will have our freedom!”

“Thank you Rachel, for that unhinged take on American history,” I said. “I’m surprised that you were able to work both Robert Moses and Martin Luther King into the same talk. Surprised and very much not disappointed.”

She stood tall, defiantly letting my tiny note drop into the dustbin of history. As if that one speech would solve all the world’s problems. Then she curtseyed, like a true lady. The girl wasn’t even wearing a skirt, and she made it look formal, practiced and easy.

“I used to be a theater kid. You’ve got to leave them wanting more. Otherwise, they’re going to forget who you are.” Her voice dropped. “They’re never going to forget me. Not if I eat the Mona Lisa.”

She narrowed her eyes as if to forestall any of my inclination to drop her from eating prices of priceless artwork. As if I could care.

“Yes, and the Mona Lisa isn’t even in this country last I checked, so good luck on that part of the plan. Okay Bulldogs, our time is up. Let them have it.”

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

The team hi fived and made their way back out. Spirits were high. Unfortunately, there was no beer.

Esther skipped back to her computer. I saw a little pep in everyone’s step, but she was about to straight up murder someone, or feed the Mona Lisa to Rachel. I shuddered, thinking of the potential headlines.

I wanted to see if they were even good at Wyrm Haven. I had only played the game a few times. I probably needed to brush up on it. It gave me the idea of recruiting some of our Wyrmhaven players.

Sadly, the other games were not being played against any of my esports teams. If we got one early, then I’d be able to check them out a little better. That was the dream, wasn’t it?

When I was younger, I felt more like a player character, like I was there to go to the fair to do the thing. As older, more mature lady, I was definitely an NPC. And I definitely beveled in that. I wasn’t out there to check out everything and try to be a popular kid.

I was here to do one thing and one thing only.

Crush students’ dreams.

So of course, that began with working through our second ban round.

Nothing changed there but by the end, the jungle and support that have been swapped in had it match rating of eight. It was the biggest change over off the team. Rather than the other three having a match rating of three, they had all been pulled up to a four. This showed the value of adding two good players to a bad team. Overall, it helped.

I would have liked to try some other variables like putting Ester on their team and seeing if that raised them to a five or six. In the end, it was a good sign that they were doing the right thing for their organization, but unfortunately, they were about to run into us.

And we hit hard.

---

Here’s what happens when you bring in two ringers in the wrong game. Let me paint you a picture. You got a wonderful shop selling burgers. You have an assembly line that would make Ray Kroc the founder of McDonald’s. Proud. You have a fine-tuned machine. So what do you do? You optimize the ones that are there.

But oh no. Two of them quit because you’re not paying them all enough. So sad, too bad. What happens instead?

You optimize the position. But the problem is that you’re trying to optimize for someone who has a management role or a supervisory role. When your burgers just need to be tended to. Maybe I should make this a tortured farming metaphor instead. So you’re a bachelor in a town that’s far away from the mainland and a brand new farmer has just shown up and they’re independently wealthy and you and the other seven bachelors, both male and female, are all vying for his affection. Does that sound like a place where you would want to optimize? It’s where I would want to optimize. I want that farmer to notice me.

What the jungle was doing was getting noticed. Every time that he popped out of the lanes, one of my guys would harass him. He hadn’t been there for the last round. In fact, I was pretty sure they had not been watching, otherwise he would not have taken Esther so unseriously. He was almost dead before the six-minute mark twice because he barged into our lanes.

Both times, Esther had kind of found him by accident. She had gotten that. They were going for a pincer maneuver and decided that this was about the time that she make a suicide charge. He had one of those teleportation abilities on top of his regular abilities.

He used that to pluck his avatar out of danger. Both times. In fact, he had to exhaust that. Unfortunately, it was on a two-minute cooldown which was great because he couldn’t use it. But also probably he would head all the way back to the base because of how low his health had dipped.

Freya, the avatar, had an insidious power that let her do poison damage. Every time she hit, it would do a certain amount of poison damage based on how you scaled her with her weapons and since her main weapon, her auto attack was not so strong, you wouldn’t feel the effects all at the same time. Sometimes led to kill that were late. Because the poison effect would resolve over four seconds, each time doing another twenty to eighty damage to the person.

The poison counters that Esther’s Avatar did stacked, meaning that over time, you might be doing 400 damage a second to an enemy for a few seconds and you can see how that might not work out so well for somebody. I hated being on the receiving end of that, but it was a good way to make players scale specifically with their equipment.

It wasn’t like I had set the tactic to attack. She just found this guy because he stumbled into her at the wrong place at the wrong time. They had warded two of the entrances to our jungle after that and he continued to probe as if he was going to get all the mobs on our side of the Jungle.

That was not happening.

He was going to have to fight for every single inch. Just like the girls in my new favorite novel liked to say, size mattered. They were talking about the size of people’s estates and duchies, but really you know what they meant.

When we got to minute eight, it was still just the two close calls so far and nothing else had changed. They were approaching the point at which they could take Dragon or begin team fights, but you know what I did? I had them sit on the farm for longer than usual. I wanted to see what they were going to do in response to us. Their support, though good, could only do so much.

I stressed it over to check out the bottom lane. Murph looked like he was juggling the bottom laner now as a support head cycled out to do what had to be their second buy. Raquel had also cycled out, leaving my support laner and their bot laner. Something in the back of my head told me that they were to come back in strong. I checked the map, and the jungle wasn’t there. I slid our tactic to defense.

“Move a little back,” I said. “I think there’s going to be an attack.”

Murph took a swig from his bottle that had been dangling awkwardly off the side, attached by a bag hook. Of course, he did what I asked without question. By now, the whole team knew that I was looking at the trends I was seeing and preparing for it. Sure enough, it almost became a three-on-one as both the mid laner and the jungle paraded into the bottom lane. They were closely followed by someone who was definitely keeping up their support.

“Of course they’re going for the four-on-one,” Murph said. “What else would they do?”

Murph took himself behind the tower, keeping it safe. We had taken none of their towers yet, but only just. Each one of the first towers had taken heavy losses. I didn’t have time to check and I wouldn’t right now if I was a player, but our towers were definitely either at full strength or very close. And it looked like what they were trying to do was tear down the bottom lane with four people and tried to end this game quickly.

Meanwhile, they’re top later seem to not even attention to the rest of the game. If this was a serious move, then they should have had him read in. Again, I was thinking about that one fry cook in my metaphorical McDonald’s who just decided to not play the game correctly. This would be a great time for that person to be ganked and have them realize they were doing their team a disservice.

No, I wasn’t so callous as to attribute this to malice. This was clearly him not paying attention to the game state and that hurting the rest of his team. If anything, he should have thought about this more. It would make sense for him to be distracted, though. He was right next to the Necroprancer game. It was a horse themed dance game which I had never expected to hit big. I can’t account for taste.

The customer is always right in matters of taste.