1

Hannah

I’ve wanted to be a professional gamer ever since I first picked up a controller. Getting paid to play video games? Yes, please. Getting the latest gaming gear for free, just so I can show it off? Amazing. Having my gaming skills actually recognized and admired--sounds good, right?

Somehow, I managed to completely overlook the fact that it is so much work.

“Hey, thanks for the sub, Breaker!” Larkin chirps, smoothly chatting with our live viewers even as she heals our teammate through a wicked attack.

She’s so good at that kind of stuff. She always makes sure to thank people when they subscribe to us on Clutch, or donate money when we do something awesome. She talks to our viewers, responds to the things they say in chat, and is always in a good mood for them. I get tired after being on camera for a while, but Larkin is a natural.

The tiny box with her live video feed shows her sitting in the glow of her computer monitor, spiky hair streaked with blue, and grinning with pure joy as she skips away from the fallen avatar of her enemy. My live video feed shows me as I always am: pale skin washed even paler from the camera light, hair pulled back in a messy braid, ball cap with the Affinity logo firmly in place, expression serious. Always serious . . . unless I’m utterly destroying someone, of course. Larkin is an amazing performer. I mostly just try to not embarrass myself by saying the wrong thing. I’m just here to do what I’m good at.

And what I’m good at is wrecking faces in the online battle royale game Affinity.

Maybe that makes me sound full of myself, but I have actual outside confirmation of my skill. I played in the first ever Affinity Invitational Tournament, where only the top sixty-four players in each role were invited to participate. And I didn’t just play--I won. My whole team won, really--me, Larkin, Josh, and Wheatley, playing under the team name The Weird Ones. But since the final round was a free-for-all with only one winner, instead of a whole team, we had to choose just one person that all the others would defend and support. That person was me. We all took down the other players together, but in the end it came down to just me and the other team’s top DPS.

The moment I landed that final blow was pretty much the best moment of my life. I was crowned the top Affinity player in the country. I was also given the opportunity to form my own professional gaming team, so of course I picked Larkin, Josh, and Wheatley. The Weird Ones have gone pro, and our first match is coming up super fast.

Except there’s one small problem.

Wheatley is still missing.

“Starzzle, that Nano Rogue is coming up behind you,” I call out, bringing my focus back to the game. She’s on high ground, too far over my head for me to intervene in time. “Rex, can you get there?”

Rex is the name we’ve started calling Josh, a.k.a. TankasaurusRex, whenever he’s playing with us while we stream. He listens in on voice chat but doesn’t talk, which I don’t get. He had to deal with people watching him play during the tournament. He’s going to have to deal with even more people watching once we have our first professional match in just a few days. Neither of those involve people hearing his voice, though, so that must be the thing.

I’d much rather people only hear my voice instead of seeing my face, but I guess everyone is different. If I’m gonna make it as a streamer, I don’t have much of a choice anyway.

On my screen, I see Larkin’s health bar drop sharply, then stabilize as she throws heals on herself. Her avatar bounces around, kiting the Rogue around the battlefield in a desperate attempt to survive. A bright red glow bursts over the horizon--Josh’s stun move, I bet--and Larkin has both of them healed to full in no time. They’re both so good.

“Whew, thanks for the backup, Rex!” Larkin says brightly. “You’re the best!”

I smile to myself as I line up a big finishing move to take out the Song Titan I’m currently destroying. Larkin thinks it’s weird when we talk to Josh and he doesn’t respond, so she always follows up to let people know what Josh did.

It makes sense. I know she wants me to do more talking to our viewers, more narrating what we’re doing, more joking and having fun, all that. It’s not as easy for me as it is for her, though. We both have our roles: she’s the one who’s good at all the social stuff, and I provide the more technical commentary during our matches. Sometimes I give advice for new players, or talk about strategy . . . but not too much, because our pro league competition could be watching.

“Great job, both,” I say, trying to make my voice sound more upbeat, the way I know Larkin would want it. “For the new players out there, on a free-for-all map like this, sometimes it’s more important to keep the other team from eliminating you than to focus on taking them out to boost your own score. We’re ahead by two right now, so Rex made the right call there to abandon his fight with the other tank and keep Starzzle from getting eliminated instead.”

The chat floods with text after that, and I catch a few comments here and there. Things like, “Good point!” and “But defense is boringggggg.” There are probably some people having a great time telling me how wrong I am and how bad we are, too, but I don’t pay any attention. I gotta focus on finding my next target to eliminate. It’s too hard to keep up with the chat during a match anyway.

Despite how weird it is to be watched and listened to all the time, I really like this part of livestreaming. It’s like getting to talk about my favorite thing in the world (gaming, of course) with thousands of friends every night. There are downsides, though. The people in our stream’s chat aren’t always nice.

And they can be really nosy.

Breaker221: Where is Wheaties??? Is he not on the team anymore?

Nameless1: Yea bring back Wheat

Nameless1: Nano Ranger is a sick class combo

Breaker221: No one cares about all the randos you been playing with lately

Breaker221: No offense rando

Nameless1: So?? Where is Wheat???

The question makes a little pit of dread open up in my stomach. Truth is, we haven’t heard from Wheatley since our final match against Phantom Gryphon Party during the tournament. Once Wheatley was eliminated, that was it. He was just . . . gone.

Honestly, I’m afraid he might be gone forever. He was an artificial intelligence, after all. Hurricane Games, the company that created Affinity, also created Wheatley. He was stored on their computers. All they had to do was hit Delete.

I shake my head to get rid of the thought. He can’t be gone. He’s not. We’re going to find him before our first match. We have to, not just because I really don’t want to replace him on our pro team . . . but because he’s our friend, and we all miss him.

I thought he might have been back in a stealthy kind of way, at first. A Nano Ranger named MsLadyCortana grouped with us once not too long after the tournament, and she said some stuff that sounded exactly like Wheatley. She never responded to our questions, though, and never spoke to us after that one match. We ended up deciding she must have been a copycat, someone who thought Wheatley’s class combo was cool and his weird jokes were funny.

We’ve been dealing with that a lot since the tournament, actually. Demon Punchers, my preferred class combo, used to be so rare I had never actually grouped up with one before. Same with Starzzle’s healer combo, the Star Mender, and Josh’s tank combo, the Rune Knight. And Wheatley’s Nano Ranger, too, of course. Now, you see all four of those combos everywhere. People decided that if we could win a tournament with our weird class combos (hence our team name, The Weird Ones), we must have uncovered some sort of superpowerful secret class combos that are so good they’re broken. It couldn’t just be because we’re, you know, good at the game.

It only got worse after we started our streaming channel. Now, our following is even bigger, and even more people are trying out our class combos. Luckily, they’re difficult to play, so most people give up and go back to what they know. Still, though, it makes me feel like a dog getting her hackles up when someone invades her territory.

I’m feeling it right now, actually. The team we’re playing against has a Nano Ranger named Squaddie2A93 that we’ve run into a few times before, and he’s always a jerk. He’ll pick one person on our team, almost always me or Larkin, and do nothing but follow us around. Harass us, try to take us out over and over, jump all over us when we get eliminated--the usual annoying stuff. Now that I think about it, we’ve ended up fighting this guy a lot. It’s like Affinity’s random team matching is trying to torture us with memories of Wheatley wrapped in the most obnoxious package possible.

Larkin’s voice startles me out of my Wheatley worries.

“I see a lot of people worrying about Wheatley in chat! He just doesn’t want to livestream with us, but he’s around,” Larkin says, lying through her teeth. “Don’t worry, you’ll see him at our first pro match.”

Hopefully my reaction to the lie isn’t right there on my face. It makes my stomach turn, thinking about our first pro match, and the fact that, as of right now, we don’t have a fourth teammate. We’re going to have to deal with that eventually. Larkin just flat out will not talk about it, though. She refuses to acknowledge that Wheatley might really be gone. Josh isn’t much better, honestly.

I wish I could be confident like them. But as much as it hurts to think about, I’m pretty sure that once our first professional match comes around . . . Wheatley still won’t be here.

The ten-second end-of-match countdown begins, and my eyes flick up to the score. We’re still up by two, but a last-second elimination wouldn’t be a bad idea.

And it would be dramatic for our viewers, of course.

I set my sights on the other team’s Green Mender and charge in, my fists glowing with purple demonic energy. I hit my Shadowblendability so he won’t see me coming, then dash in for a quick demon strike that drops ten percent of his health in one blow. The healer dances out of my reach, but a quick speed boost gets me back in range for another flurry of blows. The countdown ticks away: five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .

Then Squaddie2A93 comes out of nowhere and stuns me right before I can land the final hit.

We win the game.

But the Green Mender lives.

“Agh, I almost had him!” I moan, slumping back in my seat. The chat floods with sympathizers and complainers.

Breaker221: nooooooo

Nameless1: SO CLOSE

Sharaa: you shoulda had that, CHAMPION FIGURE SKATER

I grin. Josh’s chat filter add-on he uses for Affinity released a version for streamers on Clutch, too, and it throws out some priceless gems. Definitely a good life choice. The funny substitutions it makes whenever someone tries to call me names or curse at me can really lighten the mood. Normally I’d get angry and feel like I have to fight back. Now, I can just laugh at them instead.

“Ah well,” I say with a shrug. “Squaddie, next time we fight, I am absolutely taking you out.”

“And we know there’ll be a next time,” Larkin adds, “since you somehow have tricked the game into matching you up with us like . . . daily.”

Zukoooh: Or there just aren’t that many players ranked as high as you

Zukoooh: So obviously you see the same ppl over and over

TwoBy2: lolol right?

“Look, let me have my conspiracy theories, okay?” Larkin says with a laugh, and the chat laughs right along with her, spamming UFO and alien emojis. I laugh, too, but in the back of my mind, I’m not so sure. Maybe there is a conspiracy?

Sharaa: Nah it’s totally like Wheaties is haunting you

Breaker221: YES, it’s secretly Wheat! He IS streaming with them!!

Sharaa: I believe the Wheat-spiracy!

“Anyway,” I say in an ungraceful attempt to keep us away from anything Wheatley-related, “we’ve gotta log out for the night. Remember, I’ll be streaming from the LA eSports Convention in a few days, taking you around the conference floor and behind the scenes as The Weird Ones prep for our first pro match.”

“See y’all tomorrow!” Larkin says with a big smile.

I click End Stream, then relax, letting all the people-are-watching-me tension fade away. Larkin can still see me, but she doesn’t count anymore. Josh unmutes himself on our team chat channel, and his voice fills my ears for the first time since we had lunch together at school earlier today.

“What did the chat filter give you for that one complainer, Hannah?” he asks, and I snort.

“I am a champion figure skater, apparently. What did it say on your end?”

“Fierce snuggle bunny.”

“Oooh, that’s better,” Larkin says, then launches straight into trying to talk Josh into streaming with us again.

“I miss talking to you during matches, Josh. Hannah gets to see you all the time at school and stuff, but I never get to talk to you anymore outside of practice!”

“Because you’re always streaming,” Josh says.

Larkin shrugs, though Josh can’t see her. “We have to. If we don’t stream a certain number of hours per week, we lose our Gold status and can’t make money off it. That’s, like, . . . our college fund.”

Her college fund, she means. I doubt I’ll be going to college. I’m not very good at school. Streaming does help pay for us to have decent internet at home so I don’t have to play at the library anymore, though I still like to go there. It also bought me the camera, microphone, and lights that make our stream look and sound professional.

The money isn’t the point for me, though, even though my mom and I never have enough of it. I’m only thirteen. If I can get popular as a streamer and professional gamer now and keep it up after I graduate high school, then maybe my mom won’t be so disappointed when I don’t get into any colleges. I love art, and I’m pretty good at it, but not good enough to make up for my grades. I don’t even want to think about college, honestly. I’m only in middle school. But all the other kids in my year are already talking about where they want to go and what they want to do. Including Josh.