The rest of the game had gone about how Emma had expected. Irrespective of Doug’s constant tirade against her specifically, she’d been able to successfully keep Greg ahead in midlane, help Jonah get a lead over his opponent, and provide the extra bit of damage that Derek needed to actually get kills on the enemy north laner, rather than constantly sending the man back to base.

All of which meant that while Doug and Jakob were a bit behind their own lane opposition, all four other players were significantly ahead in credit value, meaning that when teamfights came around, Doug had had complete freedom to fire into the enemy while their own ability carry was spending so much time trying to stay out of reach of Emma and Jonah that her credit lead was completely neutralized by her inability to hit spells on vulnerable targets.

Not that he’d acknowledged that, of course. Most of the supposed “postgame recap” was just Doug bragging about how he managed to completely turn around his early-to-mid-game disadvantage with pure personal skill… and maybe a little bit of help from Jakob.

Jonah and Greg kept looking at her, as though expecting her to correct him, but she just couldn’t muster up the effort. It was possible, after all, that Doug’s skill had been what made the recovery happen. She didn’t see him all the time when they were on the ground.

“And now I’ve gotten us into finals!” Doug ranted. “So you should all be grateful to me for–”

He was cut off by Derek. “Okay, so, I know I agreed to sub in for your team,” he started, then glanced at Emma. She noticed his eyes harden as he did, then he looked back at Doug. “But I’m out if every fucking game is like this… and from what I see from your teammates, it is. Don’t message me.”

Derek disappeared from the meeting room without even a flash of light– the sign that he hadn’t even bothered with going though the usual exit process, instead triggering the emergency signout on his pod.

Emma was impressed, really. It was making quite a statement when leaving a conversation; it meant you wanted out of there so badly that you’d trade thirty seconds no longer in that room for a two-hour recalibration procedure next time you wanted to use the VR pod.

She did wish that that ire wasn’t directed at her, though. It did hurt a little bit, even. She knew she hadn’t been particularly communicative, but she didn’t think that she’d done anything that was worth quitting the team over. Without a north-laner, they wouldn’t be able to play on a reasonable level, let alone be competitive in finals.

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Doug must have caught that, too. As soon as he stopped staring, slightly open-mouthed, at the place where his friend had disappeared, he rounded on her. She tried not to cringe, instead staring a hole in the virtualized metal table.

“Now look what you’ve fucking done!” he yelled, and she started the normal logout procedure, which would take about a minute, without saying anything, “Now I have to go find him in real life and try to apologize to him for whatever it is you did. That’s just not fair. You’re an alright player, if not as good as Jess…”

He paused momentarily, and Emma celebrated somewhat, internally. With the logout already going, she’d more quickly get out of Doug’s sight so he could do what it was he needed to. The silence wasn’t as long as she’d like, though.

“But that doesn’t excuse you ruining my team constantly! Jess was fine until you came along, then all of a sudden she decided that–”

This time, he was cut off by the flash of light from a normal logout.

Emma knew she should have stayed and heard him out. It wasn’t like he was saying anything that wasn’t true, so it really was childish for her to have left…

Still, she had to blink back a few tears from where she was, lying in her pod.

Doug didn’t yell at her this much before Jess had left, about a month ago, and had forced him to poll his group of friends for people willing and able to play with, and on the same level as, his team. Emma was a high level six and none of the others were that much lower than her, either. Doug’s calculation score was slightly higher than hers, along with all of his physical scores, so it made sense that he was the leader. A good caster-carry with physical stats often had a much higher ability to get out of tough situations than one with only a high calculation score.

That said, it was probably cruel to leave him to deal with the enemy team without helping him directly… She did kind of deserve him yelling at her.

He was probably right that she could have helped him out.

I’m just glad that I never told him where I was going to school, Emma thought to herself, before shaking that thought out of her head. That kind of thinking was just asking for trouble. She couldn’t even remember why she originally hadn’t wanted to tell him, anymore. She just remembered that Jess had been really strongly in agreement with the decision, so even after the other girl had left, Emma had stuck with it.

Thinking about Jess had been a mistake, she realized, as she felt tears start running down her face.

Emma already hadn’t had a lot of friends going into college, but the fact that one of those friends had been a high school girl who…

She cut that thought before she could get too far into it and end up unable to finish the work she needed to get done today.

Sitting down to do the work took her the better part of an hour, wherein she left her phone off, trying to put off responding to Doug on the messaging app until she could be fairly sure he would be offline, so that her responses wouldn’t interrupt him in the middle of saying something.

She didn’t get the chance though, because before she could turn her phone back on, her roommate burst in, grabbing her hand to take her out somewhere.

Emma wasn’t a huge fan of going out, but it also provided an excuse to “forget” her phone…