In the VIM Control Room, the screens were still glowing, bathing the room in a cool, electric blue.
Vincenzo stood with his arms crossed, watching the replay of Amelia flustering over the Nappa dialogue.
“Look at that spike,” Vincenzo said, pointing at the graph. “The exact moment she realized she had the wrong file.”
Grey didn’t look away from the footage. “Confusion is relatable.”
“Relatable sells,” Vincenzo added. “Panic sells better.”
Grey Elwin sat at the console, his face illuminated by the monitor. He wasn’t looking at the numbers, instead was watching the footage of Chase’s rant, playing it frame-by-frame.
Saul Goodman giving a closing argument, Grey thought. But without the jury.
“Chase’s retention is solid,” Grey said aloud, his voice flat. “He captures the angry intellectual demographic. He thinks he’s leading the conversation. Just like he thought he was leading the Team.”
Grey blinked, and for a second, the high-tech control room dissolved.
[Memory Index: OrangeSide Esports Arena. Many years ago.]
The smell of stale energy drinks and desperation flooding into his mind.
Dean Starmer had entered the “OrangeSide Fannys” into the regional Overwatch tournament in a manic bid to secure funding (and pay off a questionable mascot costume debt). The prize was $10,000. The Dean had promised to split what was left evenly.
Elvis Santiago sat in the Captain’s chair. He had analyzed every frame of the meta. He had a perfect flowchart for victory.
However, that flowchart didn’t account for the “Chase and Amelia Show.”
“Chase, pull back,” Elvis barked into the comms. “They’re baiting out your flashbang. Regroup behind Tyrone’s shield.”
“I got this, Elvis,” Chase’s voice came through, cocky and loud. He was playing Cassidy, of course. The cowboy. The solo hero. “It’s High Noon somewhere.”
“It is literally 2:00 PM and you are out of position,” Elvis countered.
But Chase rolled forward anyway.
Amelia, playing Mercy, didn’t stay with the team and flew right after him, her healing beam attached to Chase, ignoring Wilson’s critical health bar entirely.
To Chase and Amelia, the memory of that tournament was a rom-com montage. They remembered the thrill, the saved lives, the “flirting-but-not-flirting” adrenaline of being a duo against the world.
Elvis remembered the math.
He remembered the final push on King’s Row. Overtime burning down. Chase went for a highlight reel play and got sniped immediately. Amelia tried to resurrect him in the open and died instantly.
A total strategic collapse born of ego and unspoken sexual tension.
It was down to Elvis (Torbjörn) and Tyrone (Reinhardt). Two against five.
“Tyrone,” Elvis had said, voice dead calm amidst the screaming crowd. “Turret placement Delta. Sit on it.”
“Elvis,” Tyrone muttered over comms, “Are Cassidy and Mercy joining us in the win?”
“We are winning *around* them,” Elvis said. “Which is the hardest kind of winning.”
They won by a millisecond. Not because of Chase’s heroics. Because Elvis used a glitched geometry spot for a turret that the devs hadn’t patched yet.
Later, in the chaotic celebration while Dean Starmer tried to crowd-surf, Elvis had found Chase and Amelia celebrating their “teamwork.”
“We won,” Elvis had told them, refusing to high-five. “My optimal strategy, adjusted for your sub-optimal interpersonal variables, created a viable, if inefficient, path to victory. Your method had a 12% success probability. We got lucky.”
They had just laughed and hugged him. They didn’t understand. They thought they were the main characters.
The Dean did end up splitting the money, but evenly throughout the school and faculty. Everyone got $16.32.
[End Memory]
***The Control Room***
Grey blinked, the memory receding.
He looked at the screen now. Chase was ranting about “broken systems.” Amelia was apologizing to a chat room for being clumsy.
They were doing it again. Chase was going rogue for glory. Amelia was pocketing him with her vulnerability.
“She’s the breakout,” Grey said, pulling up the footage of Amelia frantically shuffling papers. “The clumsiness? It reads as vulnerability. The audience wants to protect her. They want to buy her things… Help her.”
Vincenzo nodded. “It’s good. But we can optimize it.” He chuckled to himself, “‘That’s gotta sting.’” Vincenzo smiled. “That’s meme-able.”
“We have to optimize it,” Grey murmured. “Or the unmanaged resources will try to co-opt it.”
He tapped his chin. He remembered Amelia in college.
How she used to dress in bright colors to hide her anxiety.
How she used to hide behind the “cute” persona when things got real.
“We lean into the Bee theme,” Grey said, his voice clinical. “Yellow and black aesthetic. It’s disarming.”
He opened a digital sketchpad and started drawing over Amelia’s frozen image.
“We get her a set that looks like a hive. Cozy. Warm. And the glasses…”
He sketched a pair of oversized, thick-rimmed glasses.
“We get her glasses that are slightly too big,” Grey explained. “So they slide down her nose. She has to push them up. It’s a physical tic. ‘Adorkable’. It creates a recurring engagement loop. Every time she pushes them up, the chat types ‘GLASSES.’ It builds community ritual.”
Vincenzo smiled, a shark sensing blood in the water. “You’re designing a character.”
“I’m adding accessibility features.” He looked at the screen, at the friends who had once ignored his orders to play their own game.
Not this time, Grey thought. This time, I control the cooldowns.
“Elvis Santiago would have told her she looked pretty good,” Grey murmured.
“What was that?” Vincenzo asked.
“Nothing,” Grey said, finalizing the sketch. “Just… production notes. Order the glasses. We will run a wider test-stream next week.”