We stayed up way too late last night, even for a night owl like me. First everyone started by talking about themselves, trying to make friends, before getting into the actual relevant information. I appreciate the effort, enough that I wasn't going to tell them to their faces how much it didn't work, but it didn't work. If knowing all about a person and their public struggles was enough to make me care about them than I would have no choice but to help my opponents win after watching a documentary about the new upcoming names in my e-sport. For me friendship only starts when a person makes a choice that is at least mildly inconvenient for them and not just the type of thing that the person would do for absolutely anyone. By that measure, while most of us are friendly with each other, we only have two sets of friends with two people each: Me and Donnie, Veronica and Clark.

I know that isn't really fair to the budding couple because their attitude makes it harder to become friends, but there it is. Veronica doesn't seem to have a ruthless bone in her body and Clark is the kind of person to give the shirt off his back to a stranger if they needed it, so the bar of doing something 'inconvenient' that wasn't just a normal thing for them is a lot higher. It isn't impossible, though. Clark exhausted himself keeping Veronica in The Game even when there were others that could have protected him better. Likewise Veronica went out of her way to protect and extract Clark when he was caught before. Sure, there may have been ulterior romantic motives on the part of both of them, but that doesn't negate the fact that they were there for each other in a way that they wouldn't have been for some other pretty face.

The backstories on everyone were pretty much exactly what I expected, rich kids and sponsored prodigies. Veronica was actually the most unusual of the bunch. Sure, she was a rich kid who went to all the rich kid schools and had lots of pampered rich kid friends, but her family wasn't rich enough to get her access to The Game. Instead she was friends with a clique of other girls who used 'best friends forever' as the justification to beg their parents for the extra she needed to get in. That isn't to say her family was poor, they were still part of the 'upper crust' of society, they just didn't have the funds to send her in on their own without trouble.

Reading between the lines, and taking some from context clues, I think it really bothered her to be the poor one of the group. The others had unique designer dresses made for each specific occasion and then never to be worn again and she had to deal with non-unique clothing that was tailored to her, and then she had to wear the same clothes more than once. Ok, she wasn't quite that pithy about it, but the point still stands: she was a rich girl. Her struggles were few and typical of any normal person, beloved grandparents dying and a single romantic disappointment, yet her sheltered existence received these difficulties as though there were character defining tragedies. I guess to her they were.

She had gotten several different class options, better than what I had been given, but had chosen the Super track purely on the promise of being able to make herself prettier. She saw it not as an improvement to her looks but as a way to reinvent herself as someone better than the tagalong who never quite measured up. I could admire her desire for self improvement even if I was less sure about her resolve. Still, there had apparently been some in our nerd group who went into shock and just shut down in the middle of the chaos of simulated war, so she had proven herself in that she fought on despite the overwhelming fear. I could respect that.

After her for weird backstories was Dimitri. Apparently in Russia getting into The Game was a new fad among youngsters rich enough to get in. The downside of being logged in for weeks or months at a time was balanced out by the way it kept them out of trouble and the possibility of bringing back some extra abilities. That was a bit weird, since in the US the rich and powerful avoided going in personally because it meant leaving their financial empire behind. The thought where I was from was that you could just pay someone to do whatever you needed and, so long as you kept some Enhanced for protection and kept up good publicity, actually going in yourself was not worth the trouble. The alien overseer in Russia had been pushing for it, though, so the practice was likely around to stay.

Dimitri himself came from a government family who had their roots stretching back to the times of the Tzar and so his family had drilled into him the practicality of power and how to use it. As a third son, however, leadership was never an option unless more aggressive strategies failed. While his older brothers had been trained in leadership and administration, he had been trained in survival and finance. The thought behind it was that the family would survive and remain strong even if the worst was to happen. He had been brought up with stories of how others in his place had been the only ones to survive to rebuild the dynasty and how it was now his burden to remain safe for the good of everyone. According to him this type of upbringing wasn't universal among the super rich, but it also wasn't uncommon either.

This strange confluence of events is what brought him into The Game with the specific goal of getting upgrades that would increase his survivability while also remaining useful in other circumstances. To him Earth Molding was the perfect fit. His choice to join with the 'entertainment lovers' was due to some research he had done where the most useful speculation he had found was from self described 'geeks' and 'gamers'. Short of the military, they seemed to know the most about what might be going on once you got inside. Unlike the military they were not known for being ruthless to outsiders in order to ensure their own survival. Most people online thought that avoiding the nerdy types was a good idea because they would either be right about their speculations, and outcompete you, or be wrong and bring everyone else down; the convictions of the internet speculators were too rigid for a lot of compromise.

And yet Dimitri had chosen to join the nerds regardless. As a survivor he trusted himself to either keep up if their speculations were right or survive when they went down for their bad ideas. Unfortunately he didn't know enough to recognize the different flavors of 'nerd' and so ended up with our little group. In his mind, however, it could have been worse. Afterall, none of us were trying to sabotage or kill each other. That one statement alone told me more than anything else about his background and upbringing. It also became clear that he routinely played up the gruff act to hide his calculating intelligence. His description of himself as 'just a support' was just one example of this.

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From there I was likely the next most unusual person in the group. I'm not sure how to take being the average level of weird in the group. I wasn't exactly sponsored, with strict rules forcing me into a in-game workplace, but my old teammate's help did come with the unspoken understanding that I would help him out with some sort of cloak and dagger stuff that hadn't seemed to be a big deal at the time. I didn't mention the depths of the drama that I had likely gotten myself into, though I did let them know that I had gotten in through connections with a friend and that I would be helping him out to pay him back. That was kind of like a sponsorship, even if it wasn't corporate in nature.

Beyond that my background wasn't that unusual. I was a late bloomer with 'little man syndrome', always needing to prove myself but not being big enough to do so physically, and so I turned to other sorts of competitions. While growing up I had been uncomfortably close to several newsworthy events, through random chance rather than involvement, and that had pushed me away from the public spotlight as much as possible. But I never had a chance of avoiding the spotlight completely. As the saying goes: 'get good enough at something and someone will pay you for it, get even better and someone will celebrate it'. My time as a professional gamer never saw me enter the ranks of superstardom but I was a recognizable name in every championship.

As for my choice to enter The Game, I was honest. My age wasn't exactly a secret but most people don't understand just how important quick twitch reflexes are to a gamer when the competition is for a top spot in one of the world's biggest games. Most interactions, after a point, become formulaic. You know what the enemy can do and you know all the openings and counters so the only question is which of you is fast enough to get their plan off first. The rest of what you do, where real creativity appears, won't always be enough to carry you back up that slope. So here I am, playing a new Game to see how far I can go.

Sure, there is more I could have said about my journey, but there really wasn't much reason to do so in my mind. This much would get the point across of who I was and what I aimed for. I never really was one to talk about myself too much.

Compared with that Clark's introduction was almost straightforward. He liked organic chemistry and biology growing up and was incredibly talented at it. Being a doctor wasn't in the cards, due to the tedium of general practice, but research was something he loved. His background before that was one of a precocious super-nerd up until puberty hit him like a truck. Suddenly there were these girls around that he couldn't ignore and none of them wanted to talk about mitoendometriosis, or some other six plus syllable long word that I can't remember, so he had to learn to talk to people. Thankfully, as the baby brother in the family, he had lots of help learning to take care of his appearance while not talking too much. Unfortunately his first love was still science and he was still a nerd at heart.

It was for this reason that fantasy media became his new side obsession as there were plenty of stories where the nerdy nerd gets all the power, respect, and female attention he could ever want. It was pure escapism, he admitted, and continued even as the aliens landed and then people showed up on earth with superhuman abilities. The stories he had watched were a quietly unrealistic dream that never quite went away as he grew up and went to college. It was the sort of thing that did not completely die when reality proved that the superheroes on TV are just normal folk with more power and a grudge. The tipping point for his dream, however, was a news interview with some vigilante who had jokingly quoted an anime character when asked why they deserved the power they had: "Power isn't important, who I am with that power is". From there he strove to be the type of person who could someday be worthy of that power.

And so, when he was approached by a biotech company to bring back superhuman medical technologies and cures, he jumped at it. Because, in his mind at least, the unrealistic part of his dream wasn't being a good person or the power of the Enhanced; the unrealistic part was in trying to be a either a good person or powerful without being both. As much as he would try to tell himself differently, some part still believed that a 'good' person without the power to do good was less 'good' than someone with that power. Similarly some part of him still held the childlike belief that 'good' triumphs over 'evil' and so the most powerful people must also be good.

He admitted multiple times that it was a childish belief, but it was one he wanted to believe. I wasn't sure if I should applaud his optimism or worry about his naivete, but at least I could understand where he was coming from.

Donnie, however, was the most normal person out of the entire group. He had managed to get in through a sponsored robotics competition. His description of the process, however, gave me new insight into what these 'sponsorship programs' consisted of. They were loans. They would dress the whole thing up and give the person 'exciting opportunities both within The Game and outside', opportunities to work off the debt, but the reality of it was little more than indentured servitude. How could it be anything less when he cheapest pod was in the millions of dollars and had no way to communicate with the outside world. His acceptance into the program had come with a preparatory school that would help him be ready for what would come, but lacked any information about alternate ways to make money in The Game or alternatives beyond taking advantage of the company's 'exciting opportunities'.

It was worrisome.

Even worse was when I learned about the qualifications that Donnie had before winning his 'sponsorship'. Sure, he got good grades and was talented at mechanical engineering, but he wasn't the world level genius savant that I had been led to believe were being picked up by these companies. He was essentially a smart but otherwise normal guy. His financial prospects were below average, mostly due to a large family, but not so bad that he truly suffered. Early in childhood he had been drawn to technology thanks to watching reruns of MacGyver, a show that was apparently about an itinerant engineer with a mullet who got out of death traps using a pocket knife, a paperclip, and whatever he could disassemble? Somehow? Engineering had been adventurous profession in his eyes and even the harshness of reality hadn't swayed his opinion.

And that was the entirety of his relevant backstory. Stuff happened with his family and friends, but nothing too unusual. Even now, after he himself had explained what the sponsorship program was and how it worked, he still viewed it like winning the lottery. He was also the youngest of our group so perhaps he just didn't understand what he had gotten himself into.

But then, after those long conversations about who people were and why they did what they did, they finally got to talking about the good stuff that was actually important for our survival. Next we transitioned toward talking about what each of us could do.