carl@fire

Roberta Weathers usually preferred to go by Bobby. It was the name her parents had called her ever since she could remember. It was the name that they liked. The things her parents liked made them happy. Bobby liked it when her parents were happy.

When it came to being a good daughter, Bobby Weathers was the best.

Obviously she had her big sister, Samantha—who went by Sammy, which ended in 'y' just like Bobby, and that was awesome because not only did their full names both end with the same letter but so did their nicknames—who was pretty cool as far as big sisters went—though it wasn't like she had a ton of experience in having other big sisters besides Sammy at this point, since her friends only had younger siblings, but she was sort of learning—but tended to get into trouble a lot because she was impetuous, which was a word that Mom had been suitably impressed by a few weeks ago.

Did Bobby study extra vocab just to impress her mom?

Obviously.

It wasn't like it was gonna be a ton of work to learn an extra word every week and then say it in a conversation, but it was going to impress her mom, and Bobby liked to impress her parents.

Plus, this was sorta related to Social Engineering, which Dad had tried to explain to her but was still hard to understand. She was thirteen, after all—though she'd be fourteen this month, as she was sure to point out anytime someone mistakenly thought she was just thirteen, which could maybe mean they thought she'd just turned thirteen, and she absolutely hadn't. Being only thirteen was practically a baby. She could barely even remember being only thirteen now.

"Fucking heal me, noobs!" Bobby shouted as she blocked another of the Sword Shatterer's massive kicks with her epic shield, significantly reducing the damage she'd take. Her health bar had been hovering around a third of the way full for way too long, and she was getting the feeling that this was gonna be another wipe.

"I'm trying!" Jen called.

"Out of mana," Shiny announced.

Shiny was the freaking worst. He was friends with their guild master, and while there was supposed to be a zero-sum, point-based loot system for everyone, it always seemed like his points went up between raids, which wasn't something that was supposed to happen.

She'd done the math there, she'd double checked it, and the numbers didn't make sense.

She always double checked the important stuff, just like Dad said to.

"Shiny, you suck!" Bobby yelled.

The reason Shiny was the worst was actually two reasons.

First, he kept taking all the good healer gear, which meant Jen—who was way better at everything than him—was still using garbage rares in some slots. He always justified it by saying that he was an adult and was benefiting the guild more, but he was just some idiot in college. Probably didn't even know what altruism meant.

Second, he sucked. He was supposed to be the guild's top healer with all the gear he'd taken, but he always ran out of mana first, never brought his own consumables, and sometimes he'd just log out and go AFK randomly after wipes.

"Clear comms," said Capeman in his usual bored voice.

Capeman was the guild master. At a minimum, he didn't suck, and he was mostly pretty good at managing the guild so all the raids went off on schedule and succeeded to some degree, which was why Bobby and her friends had joined. He did have friends like Shiny though, and he was pretty bossy, so it wasn't like he was the best at being a guild master.

Bobby's health finally reached its maximum, and she activated her taunt skill again, barely grabbing the undead boss's attention when Zane pulled aggro. "Hey, NoobClaw, I'm tryin' to tank here," she called over their private group voice channel.

Jen's boyfriend, who went by DarkClaw, kept pummeling away at the boss's back with his mismatched sword and mace—not even using a freaking claw weapon to match his name. "Sorry," he said, even though he was obviously more focused on topping the damage meter than staying alive.

Dad had warned Bobby about boys like Zane. Not directly, of course, because, according to her Daughter Sense, there would be no direct discussions about any of that stuff since she'd continually maintained her high-level Good Judgment buff, which, at its current level, had an eighty percent chance to deflect the Parental Suspicion status ailment—unlike Sammy, who was permanently afflicted by said ailment and was mostly just high level in Breaking House Rules, which, for example, she'd used once to go see an R-rated movie and come back super late without calling and made her sister worry that she'd run away—as well as granting immunity to the deadly We Need To Have A Talk skill that Mom sometimes used.

No, Dad didn't ever need to say something so obvious. Instead, she inferred it from an afternoon when he'd explained how she'd need to be careful while PvPing for long periods of time if she wanted to avoid getting camped when she'd rustled all the jimmies there were to rustle. The key for her, he'd said, was to know her limits and leave once all the noobs grouped up together for defense.

In short, it was a lesson on knowing when enough was enough.

Zane never knew when enough was enough, as evidenced by the boss turning around and splatting him when he pulled aggro again while her taunt skills were on cooldown.

Bobby sighed noisily. It wasn't the first time today he'd done this, and she knew he was noob enough to do it again.

"You can still triumph, Bobby!" called a different voice in an awesome accent on the private channel that brought a smile to her face despite the fact that they absolutely weren't going to triumph.

Mina was really, really cool.

"I'm trying!" Bobby said, activating more defensive cooldowns as her health dipped again.

She didn't know exactly where the older girl was from, and she didn't know that much about her other than that Mom and Dad were trying to help her, but she was already sort of maybe hoping that Mina would stay around for a while. The older girl was really good at games, she had a cool accent, and she was really, really nice, even if she was kinda weird.

Weird in a weird way too. It was like she didn't know stuff. There was like, stuff that everyone knew. Everyone knew what movies were, for example.

Mina didn't know what movies were.

Everyone knew what TV was.

Mina didn't know what TV was.

Everyone knew about music.

Mina had never heard of any music groups.

They'd messaged back and forth during the day, Bobby on her phone and Mina on a tablet she was borrowing from Mom, and it was really fun talking to her, but there was so much stuff she didn't know!

How could anyone not know so much stuff?

Also…it seemed like maybe she couldn't read?

It was weird to think about, but Bobby had picked up the tablet to show her a cool video when she'd gotten home, and it was open to an app that was for learning how to read.

Whatever though. Mina was still cool, even if she couldn't read. She'd even wanted to watch their raid!

Sammy never did that. She was always too busy. That was fine, and Sammy was still awesome—most of the time—but it was still cool having a big sister-y girl who wanted to hang out like this.

As with the attempts before, Bobby's health reached zero after a few more seconds, and she died. Being that she was the guild's best tank, and being that their second-best tank, iLikeChickn, had already said he was giving up on the raid in the private tank comms channel after their twelfth wipe to this boss, it didn't take long for the other twelve people to get killed off as the boss darted around the palace courtyard, throwing punches and kicks that did enough damage to one-shot most people.

"So stupid," Bobby grumbled. No matter how good she was at the game, she couldn't carry the whole guild. The game was stupid like that.

She wished she'd had time to ask Dad's maybe-a-superhero friend Vol what guild she was in. Dad had said she was good at the game, and if he said it, she must be in a top guild. Being in a top guild like that—one without Shiny, mainly—was probably pretty awesome.

Vol was a weird lady. Dad had agreed that she was a superhero, but he'd also said that he went to college with Santa, and that was sorta not that accurate, meaning that maybe this wasn't something to immediately believe either. Double checking the facts though, she was so good at games that it made no sense—like how she'd almost broken a world record in Castle Knight last night without having ever even played it before—but then she was also really good at other stuff too. She'd chucked a basketball over her shoulder one-handed, without looking, and had gotten it in without touching the rim.

From past half court.

When Sammy had rushed down to try it a couple times after—and even a couple other girls from the team had tried it—she hadn't even been close. The angle was wrong, the throw was too short, and Bobby couldn't imagine the ball ever going in.

But Vol had done it on purpose. The ball had gone up at just the right angle, and it had traveled just the right distance. There was no way that could just randomly happen, and she hadn't even looked back to see if she'd made it in.

Plus, it was really hard to throw a basketball that far like that!

And that wasn't even the weirdest thing she'd done.

"Shit, I thought we had it that time," said BlamBlam, one of the guild's ranged DPS who used a pair of pistols and was not a noob.

"Am I doing okay?" Monica asked on the private channel while they ran back from the spirit graveyard. She was an archer, though she had a pet tiger who did most of the damage for her.

"Fuzzyfuzzy's doing great," Jen said in reply.

"We'll get it next time for sure," Capeman said, just like he said every time.

"Yeah, you've got a great pussy," Zane added.

"Ugh." Jen sighed in annoyance. It wasn't all the time that Zane made innuendos, but when he did, they were usually dumb like this one.

"Don't talk about my Fuzzyfuzzy like that," Monica said, also sounding annoyed.

"What? He just said she's a great cat," said Zane's friend Chris, who was a jerk but was kind of okay at playing his mage. Sometimes.

Also, his character name was IHeartBewbs.

"She's beating you on DPS, IHeartNoobs," Bobby said after checking the graph in her addon.

"Shut up, Bobby."

"Don't make me camp you again, Chris."

"Tch. You just got lucky the first time."

"Noob."

"I've been playing longer than you have!"

"Nooooob," Bobby said again, drawing the word out. According to Dad, any time there was an in-game argument, one of the most powerful attacks was to just keep saying the word noob. As always, he was right about this too.

"You're such a kid," Chris retorted. "No wonder you don't have a boyfriend."

"Hey, chill," Zane cut in.

It was true that Bobby didn't have a boyfriend. She'd thought about it, mainly after Jen and Zane had started going out, but then she'd realized she didn't know any boys who weren't noobs, so she'd set up a reminder on her calendar next year to think about it again and see if anything had changed.

"This runback is so looong," Monica said after a few seconds of private channel silence.

"Yeah, it's the fucking worst," Jen agreed.

"This scenery is quite fascinating," Mina said as they ran through a long, columned hallway. "It's reminded me in no small way of a place I'd studied. Perhaps… Oh, it seems we've a visitor to the house? Someone's knocked upon the front door."

"Probably just a delivery drone or something," Bobby said.

"Hey, Mina, you sound hot," Chris said. "You wanna send us a pic so—"

"Ugh," Jen groaned.

"Boys," Monica said.

"I'm sorry, Chris," Mina said, "but I was unable to hear you over the sound of an animal slobbering. Perhaps you'd care to—"

"Buuuurrrrn!" Jen said as she started to laugh.

"Mina, I think I love you," said Monica.

Bobby grinned.

Mina was pretty awesome.