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GC: WHY WON’T YOU 3V3R PL4Y M3.
GC: 4FR4ID YOU’LL LOS3?
TT: That’s an incredibly amateurish taunt.
GC: NO, 1 TH1NK 1TS MOR3 TH4N TH4T.
GC: 1 TH1NK TH3R3S SOM3TH1NG 3LS3. SOM3TH1NG YOU DONT W4NT M3 TO F1ND OUT 4BOUT.
TT: I have nothing to hide.
GC: SUR3
TT: Maybe I just don’t think it’s fair to trounce you in front of adoring friends, my brother, your ethically dubious girlfriend, et al.
TT: Maybe I’m just trying to afford you a little dignity.
GC: OK WH4T 4BOUT JUST 4 NORM4L G4M3 OF SM4SH TH3N.
GC: JUST TWO G4LS P4L1N 4ROUND PL4YING 4 V1D3O G4M3 L1K3 4 BUNCH OF C4SU4LS.
TT: What are the hypothetical parameters? Standard tournament rules?
GC: W3’LL M4K3 TH1S 4N 34SY G4M3!
GC: FOUR STOCK. ONLY 1T3M 1S TH3 SM4SH B4LL.
TT: Final destination?
GC: YOUR3 ON.
TG: are you earning your way through college via esports
TG: thats some sort of weird level of
TG: idk somethin thats some impressive fuckin irony there
TG: thought youd try and do it via winning the oolong shoggoth award for most tentacles in a sestina
TT: Please, Dave. I can hardly pay for college with this money. This is spending money. How is a young lady to attempt to support her sestina tentacle writing habits without some spare cash with which to acquire rare and forbidden Tomes?
TG: of course
TG: the tomes
TG: i forgot about the tomes
TG: ok so who do you smash as
TG: whos your super brother or whatever
TT: My main.
TG: yeah your main punchman
TG: sir hitsalot
TT: I cannot even come close to having this conversation with you.
The tiny room the Smash tournament got shoved into feels cloyingly hot. You'd come here, ostensibly, to scope out the competition, but you're self aware enough to admit it's partially to get out of the apartment (also hot as hell, but also containing two nearly overdue papers and a copious amount of dishes). It's been a little too crowded and dull so far. You've been forcing yourself to keep your eyes on the game, but you're fairly confident you could beat most of these guys easily. At least you can always depend on Dave to listen to your running color commentary.
TG: whatre you doing now
TT: Watching this one girl play. She’s quite good, actually.
TG: woah dont sound too surprised there you might sprain somethin
TG: you didnt invent kicking peoples asses with the smash thing you know
TT: I perfected the craft.
TG: worked out the smoothest arc for that ass to fly when you kick it
TT: Let’s face it. I redefined the game.
A noise from the crowd startles you out of your conversation. You look up from your phone, almost guilty for a second that you allowed your attention to wander when you’re attempting to suss out the competition. In the three seconds you weren't watching, the girl you'd been silently rooting for absolutely trounced her opponent -- she'd been doing good before, but the game's over now, when realistically it should've taken much longer.
"Who's that?" you say to one of the cheering onlookers.
"Oh, that's Terezi Pyrope," says the girl. "She does this every time."
You don’t ever play Terezi directly. You just see her, at first -- in the final match for almost every tournament, jeering the other player along sometimes, perfectly quiet others. It depends, you quickly discern, on what sort of player they are: if her opponent is easily angered, she’s quick to jab. If they’re more tolerant of the normal sort of friendly heckling players at the tournaments you go to seem to favor, she’s eerily professional instead.
Her girlfriend never is. You assume the loud shambling girl always cheering her on is her girlfriend. You formally meet her before you meet Terezi too, actually. She just walks up to you while you’re attempting to subtly and cooly sulk around the edges of the little crowd of spectators and shoves a hand in your face (to shake? presumably to shake) and announces herself: “I’m Vriska Serket, I’m hot shit in League of Legends.”
“League of Legends in general is a steaming pile of shit,” you say, shaking her hand. “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. Rose Lalonde.”
“I’m hot shit in Call of Duty too!”
“You’re not making a great case for yourself,” you say, trying to look past her to see what Terezi’s doing.
“Wait, Lalonde --” her eye gets wide. “Holy shit, are you Roxy Lalonde’s kid sister?”
Here’s the real reason you picked SSBB as your eSport of choice: it’s one of the few games Roxy hasn’t bothered to try and play professionally. It’s also one of the few games (besides Scrabble, and occasionally Grandmaster Tetris) that you’re able to beat her in. Not that that’s the biggest accomplishment, as Roxy’s insistence on always playing Snake (”he has fifty dogs, rose, he just wants to pet their lil faces”) leaves quite a few weaknesses to exploit.
So you think: maybe this one thing, you can have. You think: this is fun, maybe I’ll try it. You think: this is fun, maybe I can be perfect at it.
You think later that Terezi might have some of the same reasons for picking the game she's picked. Not that she'd ever say anything like that, but nevertheless. It's the dogged determination she defends the game with, the presumption that her mastery of it means a great deal more than any sort of skill at something like Call of Duty or Starcraft could mean.
“Vriska mocks me for playing something as minor league as Smash instead of something that actually rakes in a good deal of money. She misunderstands the appeal. I like Smash. I like the one on one aspect. It can be as much about knowing your opponent as it is about knowing the game.”
“So you like to get up close with the competition?” you ask.
She smiles. “I like to get very up close with the competition.”
That’s promising.
TG: so is using your freaky mind reading powers really tourney legal
TT: I’m not using any powers, freaky or otherwise.
TT: And I told you, I can’t read people’s minds. Just. . . forsee fortuitous outcomes.
TG: so is using your freaky luck powers really tourney legal
TT: Well, there’s no rules against them.
TG: the air bud clause
TG: classic
Here’s the thing that gets you to actually talk to her: you think she might have something up her sleeve too.
Said secret not being the fact that she’s legally blind. A lot of people don’t figure that out, but you did. Something different altogether. You think she might have the ability to do something like what you can do. It's in the way she tilts her head sometimes, like she's hearing something far away. Or else in her ramrod straight posture, the certainty with which she makes her decisions, her slightly too fast reactions to her opponents.
“Terezi Pyrope,” says Terezi, thwacking her cane against Dave’s extended hand.
“Dave Strider,” says Dave.
“So how come you never got into the eSports?” asks Terezi. “It seems to run in the family.”
“Oh no, no no no,” says Dave. “I studiously attempt to be only the highest tier of shit with anything even tangentially related to sports of the e kind. I attend the church of button mashing. I played Team Fortress 2 once and it made me cry.”
“Tears of defeat? Delicious tears of pain?”
“Tears of joy when I realized I was free of the family curse. Never would I have to competitively play video games to earn my living.”
“What do you do?” says Terezi, leaning into the “do.”
“Studyin to be a paleontologist,” he says. “Also I am of course hellishly famous in the world of shitty digital entertainment.”
“Oh no,” you say, realization dawning. “You two are going to be friends .”
“Tell me more about this digital entertainment,” says Terezi. “Precisely how shitty?”
You and Terezi end up at the same cons, the same tournaments, face off against the same opponents. You start meeting up with her after games to chat, sometimes Vriska's there too. But you never actually play her.
You know you're going to have to eventually.
TT: So I’m going to need you to fuck off for about five hours tomorrow, if that’s alright.
TG: wow watch the language lalonde
TG: why is your girlfriend coming over
TT: I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m just going to play a friendly bout of SSBB with a friend, in a friendly manner, and I need there to be no witnesses.
TG: haha holy shit thats definitely the sort of thing someone says right before they murder someone
TG: wait
TG: rose youre not seriously planning to murder terezi are you shes the shit
TG: we’re workin on a collab project now if you kill her itll ruin the whole effect
TT: Just, go on a date with your boyfriend or something.
TT: Far away from here.
TG: i dont have a boyfriend just about as much as you dont have a girlfriend
TG: which. wait. i think i owned both of us there.
TG: anyway just bring her to your place instead
TT: You know I don't have the setup for that.
TG: remind me why im the one with the fancy tv when youre the one who uses it for gaming or whatever
TT: Irony? Irony seems a likely culprit. Also, it doesn’t fit anywhere in my apartment.
TG: fuck
TG: its always the irony that gets you in the end
TT: Remind me why you’re the only member of our semi-coherent “family” to not acquire some sort of skill in video games, when you’re the one with the technology to do it.
TG: sports
TG: literally the second you attach the suffix ‘sport’ to something
TG: i lose all skill with and knowledge of it
TG: it just happens
TT: Okay well I’m breaking into your apartment tomorrow night. Whether you’re there or not is your own business.
Dave, wisely, chooses not to be there. The apartment's dark when you let Terezi in, and as she pours over the contents of Dave's apartment the secondary advantage of not playing at your apartment occurs to you: she doesn't get to know what you keep in your room.
"Enough of this silly business!" she says, once she's done knocking around Dave's jars full of dead things. "Let's get to the real business."
You settle onto the couch. She digs around under the tv, you give her the courtesy of letting her choose which controller she'd like.
"One last stipulation," you say, taking the controller she discards.
"Want to play blindfolded?"
"Not likely," you say. "No -- we can each forbid each other from selecting one character."
Her eyebrows furrow. You know she's going to say yes, and you know she knows you know that, and she already knows the gambit she's playing, and that's the thrill to it -- mind games chess via Smash.
"Alright," she says. "I forbid you from --"
The power goes out.
"Really?" you say.
"What?" she asks. "You didn't see this coming?"