#to the one person that rb'd my teaser: ily this is for both you and me

[domesticmail]

Loading In - The Finals Fic

(better pics coming soon, i'm not a graphic designer by trade so bear with me lol)

Note: I've been working on this fic for a while :) To gauge interest I went ahead and posted a teaser a little while ago. While there obv isn't a huge fandom for the game on tumblr, I've always shared my writing here, regardless of who is or isn't interested. Badger, Ducky, and Lefty have been bouncing around my mind non-stop, so I had to at least experiment a little with their characters. This isn't very long, it was meant to be an exercise for myself to see if I liked what I had in mind, and it turns out I do! Figured I'd share to give an idea of the characters I'm going to expand on first. I hope you like them as much as I do!! (Most of the fic will be under the cut to avoid clogging up the dash)

Word Count: 2.7k

Summary: A team of three players, randomly selected to play together from a small pool of the best of the best, meet each other before their first tournament in The Finals.

“Look bud, if you made it this far and you’re still asking other contestants for advice…” The fabric of his mask contorts into what could probably be called a grimace, and I had the sudden realization Badger’s face was still very expressive, even under a mask. His attention went immediately to his gun, hands grasping it like a lifeline. “But since I’d never shy away from giving my two cents…” Looking back to me, he continued, “Know your weapon like the back of your hand.”

I scoffed with a playful grin. “Is that it, old man? I know that much.”

“What? Oh, come on. Fuck you, kid.” Delighted indignance rose in his voice. Badger made a movement that I could only assume was meant to be an exaggerated eye roll, throwing his head back in a quick circle. I laughed, to his dismay. “Don’t laugh, asshole. You’re the one that asked me for advice!”

“Well, duh,” I responded. “You’ve been in the game for a while, I thought you’d have some sage advice to offer.”

He stared at me.

“You know,” I continued. “Like…elderly wisdom.”

Laughter erupted from my mouth before I could stop it. Badger started chuckling, then asked, “How old do you think I am?”

“Ancient.”

He shook his head. “No, come on, give it a real go.”

I stopped and studied his visible features, looking for anything uncovered to reveal the signs of age. Nothing. My brain froze for a moment; wait, why does he feel old to me, then? His voice? “You’re…in your forties.”

If I wasn’t a comedian previously, I definitely was now. Badger nearly crumbled over with laughter, arms gripping opposing sides as he bent over himself. “I - HA! - I am not that old.”

“How old are you, then?”

“How old are you? You know that’s a weird question, right?”

I shrugged. “Nobody ever told me.”

“Well, it is, so - ” He was quickly cut off by the door to our left swinging open with enough force to slam the wall. In strolled a tall, broad man with a proud smile. He walked like he believed he was a hundred feet tall, and you had no chance of convincing him otherwise. I had done some training with a Heavy in the prelims, and had definitely played against my fair share, but I didn’t really know how to work around one yet. Best guess? Go with my instinct, in the moment.

He stopped a few feet from Badger, then stuck out his hand. “Lefty.”

Badger watched him for a second, then introduced himself. The untouched hand dropped immediately.

Lefty then turned to me. On instinct I stuck my hand out, on second thought almost retracted it, but he had grabbed and began shaking by then. “Ducky.”

The stare I was expecting materialized on his face, the customary look everyone gave when they first heard my name. I resisted the urge to cringe, remembering my former teammates’ joy at my reaction. Instead, I smiled. “Not my choice,” I added.

He nodded. “Teammates in the qualifiers?”

“Yeah. You know how it is.”

“You’ll have to tell me the story!”

I would’ve gone on to explain, but a loud noise interrupted my train of thought. A high-pitched beeeep, followed by a woman’s voice carrying through the speakers mounted in the corners of the room. My mouth froze, half-open, as I recognized her: June. One of the announcers of the Finals.

In the prelims, the announcers were various influential personalities from the virtual world, common enough to be recognizable to their fans, but not so famous that everyone knew who they were. I suppose it was a method of engagement; your favorite influencer, announcing your every move in the arena as you fight for the chance to prove your mettle! 

But the real tournament - at least, the most popular part of the gameshow - was announced by two people, well-known and on the top of the world: June and Scotty. Their voices were immediately identifiable, whether it was a recording spilling from the nearby vending machine urging you to drink Ospuze, or blasting into your ears while your virtual body sat in the airborne stadium, watching the players below. And there I was, standing in a white room, waiting for my turn to fight for fame, listening to June’s voice address the three of us.

Reality hit me like a ton of bricks. This was it; the real fucking thing. In a few minutes, I would be one of the people running amongst crashing buildings, hauling for a vault like my life depended on it. My chest tightened slightly; anxiety seeped into my bloodstream for a horrifying second, reminding me of the terror of the chase. 

I did well in the prelims. I had fought amongst hundreds of people in training, solidified my skills. Nobody had a better understanding of their class, their limitations, than I did; and yet, in that one second, right after hearing her voice, the panic I felt as a rookie reintroduced itself to me. 

Badger must’ve noticed the look on my face, because he shook his head at me. I didn’t know how to take that. Stop worrying? Stop staring off into the void? Shut the voice in your head up and listen to June?

Attempting to re-center myself, I focused on June’s voice.

“- and we’re so excited to have you all here with us today. You made it through the first gauntlet: the qualifiers! Today, as you already know, you’ll be fighting to impress the sponsors. Please feel free to help yourself to the equipment shelves at the back of your loading room. In just a few minutes, you’ll be out in the arena! Good luck, contestants!”

An electronic noise hissed behind us. Lefty laughed as Badger and I turned to look behind us. The wall had been replaced by racks of weapons and gadgets; I’d seen something similar in the qualifiers, but never to this degree. Nearly every weapon I had ever seen on the field was hanging there, pristine and perfectly rendered. 

Lefty walked up to the racks and began surveying the weapons, not carefully, but more like an excited child examining his toys to find exactly the right one to play with. Evidently, the shiny Lewis gun caught his eye, as he reached up and pulled it off the hooks holding it up. “They have all sorts of guns here,” he remarked offhandedly, still taking in every detail of the weapon in his hand.

“No shit,” I breathed. I’d been attached to my M11 since the training days. Sure, it wasn’t always exactly the same gun, considering we’re in virtual reality, and the rules of materials worked differently here than in the meatspace, but I’d never laid my hands on another gun. I thought about what Badger said: Know your weapon like the back of your hand.

He didn’t mean anything close to sentimentalism. It was more practical than it seemed. There’s a lot that goes into shooting a weapon, more than simply your finger on the trigger and your sights on a target; knowing the fire rate, the recoil pattern, how many shots it takes to kill each class. Humans are amazing at pattern recognition, and our weapons, our tools, follow patterns. As we use them, our subconscious is familiarizing itself with the routine, and if you’re smart, you’re actively studying the way it functions. At a certain point it becomes an extension of yourself, another part of your body you know inherently how and when to use. 

As you practice, your gun becomes a piece of you, integrating itself into your playstyle. To swap it out for an unfamiliar weapon means changing the entire way you play. Sure, objectively, a burst-fire AR might function just as well as a full-auto, but I’ve seen them go up against each other; a burst-fire will take slightly longer to kill an opponent than the full-auto. Those few seconds can be the difference between winning the engagement and waiting for a revive, or anxiously counting down the seconds before you can respawn. Someone familiar with the burst-fire should know that and account for it; someone unfamiliar will rush into the conflict the same as they would with any other, paying no attention to the weapon their opponent might be carrying or what cover their environment provides.

If you want to reach the Finals, you have to play well. Playing well requires at least ten different skills, all working in unison to help you survive and devastate. You can’t do that if you’re still trying to figure out the recoil pattern, because you decided to play with a different weapon this time.

“You guys aren’t going to load up?” Lefty’s voice broke the whirlwind of thoughts in my mind. He was looking back and forth between Badger and I, waiting for one of us to respond. I looked at Badger, still holding his FCAR close.

“No,” he said. We waited for an explanation, but none came.

Lefty glanced at me, then back at the wall. “You too, Ducky?”

I grimaced. “No. I’m good with what I’ve got.” 

“You don’t have anything on you,” he pointed out.

On cue, I summoned my M11. It appeared in my right hand, the weight comfortable, familiar. I waved it around a bit to show him. 

“Right,” he mumbled. “I’m never going to get used to that.”

Even if we spent most of our lives in virtuality, there was nothing that could prepare you for the shock of being able to call a weapon into your hands with only a thought. I remembered practicing in a gray-walled, dingy training room, the instructor reminding me to simply tell the simulation I wanted a specific gun in my hand. “Just focus on how it looks while you hold it,” he’d said. “Tell the sim what you want, and it’ll give it to you.”

Simple as that. You ask, the sim gives. Of course it’s more complicated in practice, an innumerable amount of lines of code reading and interpreting your brainwaves faster than you could consciously think, telling microscopic components which flows of current to accept and block off, all amounting in a virtual gun in my virtual hand. But in practice? It really was that simple. I asked for the gun I wanted, and it gave it to me. 

“Nobody gets used to it,” Badger said. “Maybe it becomes muscle memory, yeah, but every time you go back to the meatspace - you’ll remember how insane it is.”

Lefty nodded. The Lewis gun, resting in his hands, began to dematerialize into the air. Bright white squares of data, like a flurry of snowflakes, lifted into the air as the gun deconstructed itself and was stored as ones and zeroes somewhere far away. That’s how it worked: you found a gun that worked for you, and told the sim to save it as your primary. It would dissolve into data, stored safely in the binary space between virtuality and computer hardware, so you could call on it again whenever you needed. The previous primary would be deleted and the new primary would take its place. So on and so forth, as many times as you wanted; but never more than one weapon at a time.

As the Lewis disappeared into the ether, so too did the entire selection of Heavy-class weapons, replaced by a number of gadgets. These were your utilities, or utils. Your loadout, no matter the class, could hold three; the decision of which three was always left up to the contestant. Of course, just like the weapons, they were different for each class.

I watched Lefty waltz up to the gadgets wall with a pensive look. How can he not have at least one default pick?

By this point, I knew exactly what I liked, and didn’t need to change it. My trusty M11, a stun gun, and two different grenades: gas and frag. In the beginning I did a lot of screwing around with other gadgets, mixing and matching different utils until I found the loadout I liked the most. I spent my time in training familiarizing myself with how they functioned in battle, how to use them to their maximum efficiency. I wouldn’t have the time in the qualifiers, where everyone was focusing on strategy and kills, vying for enough fan support to be sent to the tournaments.

And yet there was Lefty, just grabbing grenades off the wall and pulling the pin to see if they worked in our loading room. Anxiety began to rise in my gut. If Lefty was so comfortable screwing around with dangerous weapons, did he actually know what he was doing? I mean, he made it to this point, at least, so he can’t be bad, but the ease with which he swapped gadgets out in virtuality was making me nervous. It was near impossible for him to be comfortable with each gadget individually, let alone to have an understanding of how they worked in conjunction with one another.

I took a deep breath. Best to let his performance speak for itself. Worry about him when you’re in the arena, I chided myself. No use suffering now.

Badger piped up, finally, filling the silence. “Do you actually know how to use any of that?”

“Of course I do!” Lefty replied indignantly. “I’m just figuring out what I want to use. It’s a big decision.”

The expression of fabric on Badger’s face betrayed no emotion, but I could’ve sworn I felt a hint of annoyance radiating off of him. 

They began to bicker in an almost-familiar manner, and I felt a sense of camaraderie. It was just for a moment, though, as June’s voice cut through the argument. 

“Okay, contestants! It’s time to load into the arena. Welcome to The Finals!”

I looked over to Badger as he moved to face me. “It’s time, rookies,” he said, a hint of excitement in his voice.

Rookies. How long has he been trying to get into the arena? How many times did he fail in the prelims? Has he been here before? A million questions ran through my mind, but the moment for curiosity had passed. 

Badger and Lefty began to disappear into data as my vision turned to static. Loading in was almost more nerve-wracking than the experience itself, watching the virtual environment shift and flow into a new image, a new environment, creating a whole world from mere numbers. Watching the sim adjust your surroundings, it was impossible not to recognize the moment where you yourself became nothing but data. The first time it happened, I felt a surge of panic: what if I get lost?

Of course, that couldn’t happen.The sim knew what and where you should be, and had never lost track of someone in virtuality. 

My vision stretched and skewed until I rematerialized into what is best described as a red tunnel, expanding forwards roughly 30 feet before dissolving into a white light. I’d seen this before, but not in prelims or training; this is where the audience was introduced to the contestants. While they saw a stream of video displaying all the teams in succession as June and Scotty explained what each team was named. We never got to choose - each was randomly picked from a pre-generated list.

I could hear the announcer’s voices as Lefty and Badger materialized on either side of me. Lefty, to his credit, looked less like he was going to barf than I thought he would’ve. Badger seemed unphased. He stared straight ahead at the end of the tunnel; I wondered what face he was making under the mask, what thoughts were running through his head.

My anxiety began to mix with adrenaline as another high-pitched beeeep sounded off behind us, the go-ahead to run through the red and into the light. Our feet began to pound the floor underneath as we each broke into a full-speed run towards the end of the tunnel, a cacophony of thunder filling my ears. I pushed myself into the white, feeling the edges of my body break apart and fit themselves back together. 

Out of the training stage, into the tournament.