Talking with Jade over text had made her confusing-ness more pronounced, if anything. About half the time she was usefully direct, but the other half the time? It felt less like she was talking to him directly, and more like she was gesturing at a bunch of information he just had to think of for himself.

Nice, because she was trusting him to keep up with her and not treating him like an idiot. Irritating, because he did sometimes need more help than she gave him.

Like today, for example. He was… fairly sure that what Jade had been gesturing at was having him play a game with the team members that they had so far, trying to figure out how well they worked together.

Not that she’d come out and say as much.

No, instead she’d talked about the importance of team synergy and the ability to build it between players who wouldn’t usually be working so closely together.

Subtext: “Even though we won’t see you as much because you’ll typically be more closely connected with the midlaner and diver, we should figure out how we’re supposed to work together.”

Probably. He wasn’t entirely sure that she wasn’t just putting her thoughts in the messages without a filter.

Still, that had been fairly useful to him when it came to a purely practical level. While she hadn’t offered any specific advice regarding items beyond yesterday’s suggestion of Jupiter’s Authority, she had, over the course of a couple of hours, managed to convinced him to take another look at his pre-built filters.

Mostly, the game was fairly good at suggesting items that would fit any player’s build, but as he was digging in deeper to her suggestions, he noticed a few problems.

The primary culprit was that any usability issues that resulted due to other players, not the basic parts of the game that everyone always had to deal with, were largely not covered by the default settings.

Items that changed how the build played were also largely unknowns, as were mid- and late-game consumables, if you weren’t running a support build.

That was for a good reason, if he thought about it, but the reason itself made him feel a bit like he’d just picked up the game and autopiloted his way to being relatively good at it.

Specifically, because those consumables were difficult for new players to understand when and how to use them, making them almost entirely wastes if you couldn’t farm well enough to make that cost less of an issue when compared to the opponent spending the same credits on more permanent power scaling.

It was a lot like the abilities screen had been at first, really; Before he knew what he was really looking at, the game had very kindly taken him by the hand and narrowed down his plain-English explanation of what he wanted into five very neat choices between four abilities each.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Everyone knew that it was usually– though not universally– more effective to build something that wasn’t suggested like that, but not really by enough for most people to bother. Still, he probably should have. Even if he hadn’t jumped directly into the full complexity of the game, he wish he’d made an attempt, at least.

At this point, it felt a little bit like taking a ceiling off that he hadn’t even been really aware he’d been running into. It wasn’t easy, but having the additional options was much better than the alternative.

He tried not to think about that too much, actually. It was uncomfortable to think about.

Still, for now it was at least worth paying attention to.

To a point, at least, and he noticed that he was past that point at the same time as an invite had been hanging in front of his face for almost a minute, according to the timer in the corner.

Not that he’d be admitting to that distraction.

He accepted the invite, landing him fairly quickly in what appeared to be a very cozy cabin.

“Hey, I’m here. Anything you wanted to go over before we got in?”

Jade looked up from the wall she was looking at, moving some of the pins on a barely-readable menu in a strange way that seemed to pull new text to her.

“Hmm? Not really, I guess. You’re here before the other two, so there is that.”

He blinked at that. He hadn’t exactly accepted quickly. “Any idea why that is?”

She looked put-upon for a second before pulling her face back to a neutral expression. So she was planning to mislead him, based on what he’d seen so far. Though he didn’t know how much of that lie would be true. “Some. They get really wrapped up in talking about things. They haven’t exactly known each other for all that long but they seem to be having fun looking at the items and games they’ve played so far.”

Assuming that what she wasn’t saying was as much as she was, they were probably doing something she didn’t really want to be talking about. Simple enough, at least. “You said something about items, so we could go into that in the meantime? I don’t really know what you meant when you said you’d be looking into it…”

She visibly perked up at that, at least. “Oh! I’ve only done a little bit, but I do have a start. You said that you used the nanobots? I assume you meant the ‘Improvement’ set?”

Close. Very close, especially given that she didn’t have any direct information about him. “I usually go with ‘Reinforcement’ followed by ‘Strengthening’ after I get a weapon. It’s obviously a bit unbalanced, but it’s more effective at surviving the early game.”

She nodded at that, then reached out her hand to him. “Grab on.”

Strange enough, but he assumed it had something to do with her menu and did.

He was right. Once he’d taken a hold of her hand she fully grabbed on to one of the lines and the two of them passed through the ceiling, coming to what looked like a meeting room just under the cabin’s roof. “Strange desktop.”

“Easier for me than the normal menus. If you were uncomfortable with it I could have just moved us here with a different room, but this way’s faster.” Jade explained, pulling on the table from the side. A strange thing to do to a wooden table, at least until the surface of it started glowing slightly. “It’s writable now, and there’s a few gestures for more detail, but I just wanted to do the basics with you right now.”

She wrote down the nanite type derivation, seemingly from memory. Or at least, there were twelve labels, and he knew four of them were correct.

“What do you have planned, exactly?”

“Well, your plan works just fine for an average session, especially given that you can’t remove nanite effects once in place except by dying. But given the role that you’re likely to be taking in a team, I think it might be worth delaying your improvement curve to pick up a secondary power spike…”