A bright light, a moment of darkness, and then my constant companion, the end of match screen. My chosen end match music, a cover of an old song called Revolution X*1, fills my ears as my vision is overtaken with scrolling bars and numbers, detailing my performance.

“Eat the rich, it’s”

The music cuts as I make a throwing motion, pull a trigger that's no longer there, and tense muscles in my butt, the programmed motion for jumping. I can look at my stats LATER, I need to see how this ends.

The view swaps to a chase cam hovering above and behind Monarch. I could see two of the three firing on her, all three streams of bright yellow balls of static splashing across a ruined charging station that she was crouched behind. They were holed up in excellent cover themselves, a fallen tower of some kind completely enclosing them except for a thin gap they were firing through.

The weapons fire stopped, and she moved. From the chase cam vantage, I watched as the two in my view stood there, watching through their firing slit as their weapons recharged, expecting their sniper to keep her pinned. Monarch vaulted over the cover, both hands suddenly aglow with grenades. Both flew from her grip off camera, and the shotgun strapped to her back was suddenly in her hands, booming as she darted at an angle towards the pair.

The one on the right lit up in a small blue flash, the spread of the shot gun managing to put a pellet or two through the slit. She kept charging, and the next boom caused them both to light up with shield impacts. In any other scenario, this would have been suicide on Monarch’s part, there being no way a shotgun would do enough damage through the small space until she was right on top of them, and by that point they would be free to return fire. The duo, realizing this, stood there, not even swapping weapons, waiting for their guns to finish recharging. I could hear the high pitched whine of the weapons lower in tone, almost charged and ready to fire again. It was at that moment that the wall behind them lit up a moment in pink, a moving glow passing them and stopping just past their cover, a bare couple of feet away from Monarch. From experience, I knew the warning pop ups that would be showing in their HUDs, the klaxon warning in their ears, and the sensation of trying to move through syrup they were now experiencing as the narrowing field caused them to be outside of The Signal*2.

The duo finally reacted, panicking in a predictable way. Monarch fired again, this time close enough that most of the shotgun blast entered the firing slit, but neither of them were hit, as she aimed right between the pair. They broke in opposite directions, moving for the open ends of the tube they were in, several yards away in either direction. Monarch broke to her right, in the opposite direction from which she had flung the grenades. I grinned to myself, guessing at where the third player had been standing, and what was about to occur.

My grin snapped to a frown as the charging whine in the background stopped, and the third player, clearly just inside The Signal, opened fire again. I watched from behind her as she juked left and right, several burning balls of lightning barely missing her. From behind my view as the camera, I heard a pair of dull thumps, and the gunfire stopped. The counter in the upper right corner of the screen dropped from four to two. The upper right corner opened up a picture in picture, showing a slo mo replay, two grenades on the ground a few feet from a player firing into the distance. The runner came out of the tunnel and ran past the shooter, regaining connection to The Signal, just the grenades went off, killing them both.

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In the main view, I watched Monarch’s shotgun drop to the ground, and she threw an object towards the exit to the fallen tower the other runner was making for. I couldn’t tell what it was, other than that it was not a grenade. It hit the ground and activated just as the player started to run out, expanding into a wall. The Instant Cover grenade was a new item this season, and largely ignored by most players due to the small size and low stability, easily broken down by a few shots from any ballistic weapon. It WAS stronger against electro rounds, however, and just large enough to prevent the player from escaping. I watched the edge of the wall shudder a few times, the player having switched to their melee tool to try and break through in time.

Time was not on their side, and just as the wall collapsed, the screen froze, the counter dropped to one, and the message blazoned across my view: ButterflyGrl2020 Brings Home the Bacon!

My vision faded to black, and I could feel my actual hands again. A quite twist unlocked the wrist restraints, and I worked the buckles on my helmet, pulling it off to see the rest of my squad doing the same, Julie looking away from us all, blushing a bit at the attention as the rest of us started chanting, “MONARCH! MONARCH! MONARCH!”

1 - The music available in Furlong has a strange history and pedigree, due to several older legal challenges, notably Alfonso Ribeiro Vs Take-Two, and the lack of lawsuit in the instance of Jonathan Coulton Vs Glee, as well as more recent precedent such as Sony vs Vanilla Millenia Audio AI. A mix of different decisions, concessions, and legislation have led to a licensing bedlam where the use songs that are covers of songs that were previously licensed in other media, often stripped of their original title and instead named after the media they were taken from, is largely impossible to prevent as long as the use is inside of similar media. One of the most egregious examples of this is the use of a cover of Aerosmith’s ‘Eat the Rich’, from the 1993 album ‘Get a Grip’, due to its use in the stand up arcade game, Revolution X. - The Dissolution of the RIAA, Zelda Medica, CNN.Com , originally published September 26th, 2037

2 - One feature held by every successful battle royale game was that of a slowly decreasing play area, forcing the players to eventually come in contact with each other, ensuring a set time limit to each match, and creating a sense of danger and excitement even when other players are not currently present in any specific player’s play area. The earliest representations, the blue zone and the storm, were slowly closing boundaries that simply did constant damage to anyone inside them, and closed into random circles. Later games became more creative, such as Archipelago Survival, in which the sea itself slowly rose, cutting off peaks into islands situated apart from each other, leading to several distinct combat areas in the end game of each match. The cult hit COD, Fish at War went the opposite tact, with the underwater arena slowly freezing from the outer edge, with the added danger of brinicles that could bring the ice down randomly at any point in the map. Furlong is largely unique in completely reversing the narrative approach to the shrinking battlefield. Instead of an outside hazard slowly taking more and more of the map, the Loaders of Furlong are, in the game lore, connected to the robotic bodies they fight in through The Signal. The decreasing play area represents a loss of Signal to the playscape, similar to losing radio or satellite signal in a vehicle when going through tunnels or under large structures. Instead of damage that can be healed, loss of signal causes an actual degradation of control over the player’s avatar, and a hard timer requiring the player to reenter The Signal or simply lose. The psychological difference between an outside hazard squeezing you in and an inner safety to be sought out may seem minimal, but in the next section we will go over three very important player behaviors unique to Furlong that derive from that difference. - Excerpt from FMS 342 - Narrative choices in interactive media , Taught by Dr. Flint Alexander , First offered at ASU, spring of 2040