Chapter Text
In the darkness of her room, a young purple-haired woman squinted at the bright screen in front of her. The contents of the monitor reflected off of her violet eyes, and an equally sinister grin pierced the dimness. An eerie cackle gradually bubbled from her throat, until it eventually grew into an unhinged squeal of glee.
The clock struck midnight.
And the woman, Uzi, refreshed the browser.
The little donut circled around until a neon green button lit up in front of her.
"Finally!"
With a few clicks, she excitedly purchased what was surely game of the year: Drones Online. It was a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG for short, that involved creating a robotic avatar who has to survive and find a way off a desolate, barren, and overall apocalyptic planet. What made it so amazing was the combat, the customizations for movesets and character designs, and the deep and enriching lore buried within the game.
As Uzi was waiting for the gigantic game to download completely, she decided to scroll through the endless amount of streamers that were also getting ready to play the game. Her attention immediately went to one of the highest-rated and most-watched streamers on the platform; his elated expression stood out in the sea of thumbnails. Shrugging her shoulders, she picked his stream and only waited a moment before it popped up on her screen.
“It’s finally here! This is so exciting, I am so excited!!” He turned to the camera, “Are you guys excited??”
She cringed at the loudness before lowering the volume to one more tolerable, which allowed her to be able to focus on the man gushing on video.
His alias was N, and it wasn’t her first time seeing him on the internet, but it was her first time catching one of his livestreams. His set-up was very typical of a popular streamer, and he seemed to be fully furnished with expensive and modern equipment. He was very boyish-looking, with fluffy, swept blond-silver hair and round golden-brown eyes. His smile was very eye-catching, and she couldn’t help but feel herself smiling back, before she slapped herself out of it.
Gross. I’ve been online for almost two decades, so don’t parasocialize now, Uzi!
Remembering that he was just a random guy on the internet, and therefore they had a less than 0.01 percent chance of meeting, any feelings of relatability or familiarity were squashed. Her focus shifted to the ongoing chat of the audience, and her eyes rolled at the predictable messages of simps.
“Ooh! It’s done downloading, guys! Let’s open!”
She glanced at her own download, and groaned that it was still taking forever to finish. Curse her only moderately-upgraded computer and her apartment’s struggling wifi!
N had already opened the game and was going through the introductory cut-scene. Uzi felt like she was spoiling herself, but she couldn’t stop herself from watching it with him. She had been waiting for this game for so long that even seeing a little bit of it enraptured her. To her surprise, the streamer didn’t talk over the introductory cut-scene, and was instead reacting appropriately yet not obnoxiously. She felt herself sharing his emotions, feeling as enthralled as he was with the wonderful immersion of the game.
There was a huge explosion on screen before it faded to black, and N raved, “Whoa! That was amazing! If I wasn’t excited before, which I definitely was, now I’m bursting at the seams!”
Uzi nodded with renewed energy surging through her, before she blinked and settled back down in her chair.
A big streamer I don’t find annoying. Huh.
“Okay, my name is gonna be N, of course… and I wanna be male-identifying… Wait, how do these robots have genders… or even sexes? And why?” He swung back in his chair to look at his audience with a deep, thoughtful look, “Is that something we wanna think about? But, oh no, I’m already thinking about it…! Are there robo-babies brought into this world by the NPCs?! Is that something we can do with other players?? Make robo-babies??”
The concept was so ludicrous and random that she didn’t even realize that a laugh escaped from her lips. It didn’t help that he seemed so serious about these thoughts as he went on and on, but she slapped a hand over her mouth and forced her laughter into a choked chuckle of some sort.
A small sound dinged in her headset, and a notification pulled up on the bottom right of her screen. Her game finished downloading!
Uzi actually hesitated to turn off the stream she opened, but fighting back the weird urge to keep it up in the background, she exited out from the browser. How could she be fully immersed in the game with him playing his own in the background? It was only logical she closed the browser.
Shaking her head from her indecision, she sat up straight and scooted up to her desk to get situated. Once she opened the game herself, she allowed herself to be pulled into the majestic, dreary world of Drones Online.
“Uzi?”
There was a snap-snap close to her ears, but she paid it no mind and tugged her beanie lower.
“Hey, Uzi! Prosnis'!”
A hand shook her shoulder, which finally dragged her out of her slumber. The piercing ceiling lights above made her head throb, and she squeezed her eyes shut in hopes of diminishing the pain behind her eyes.
“You can’t be sleeping on the job like this. Ugh, Uzi, ti takaya glupaya," the Russian woman, Doll, dragged her hand down her face and sighed, “Your break ended thirty minutes ago.”
Uzi was still in the process of waking up as her co-worker was speaking to her.
Oh, shit, that’s right. I’m working right now. Uzi yawned wide and stretched as far as her limbs would go.
“Don’t tell me that Drones Online has been keeping you up all night?”
Uzi smirked as she looked up at the other woman. “It’s hella fun. What can I say?”
Doll rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “At least I know how to control myself, radi boga.”
“Yeah, yeah, bite me. You’re better than me, Doll, I know.” Uzi groaned and stood up, feeling her neck strain from sleeping while sitting. She pointed at the door as she started leaving, “I’ll go man the registers now. Hopefully Rebecca won’t hate me for leaving her, even though she definitely already does.”
“I didn’t mention that, but you’re probably right. I am better than you, and most definitely at Drones Online.” Doll grinned, a creepy one that made Uzi shudder. She sorta believed that the other woman was just trying to be friendly, but her smiles made chills run down her spine. “You need to stop falling asleep at work before you get into serious trouble parshivka, because it’s already been a week of this nonsense.”
“Ugh, yeah, I get it. Fix sleep schedule, don’t get fired.” Uzi pushed her way out of the breakroom before Doll could continue to lecture her. “If that’s all, I’ll be working now, okay? Happy? Bye!”
She sighed as she made her way to the center of the store. The Hot Topic she worked at was just one of the various stores in the largest mall of the city, but every teen had their goth or anime or rock or whatever phase, so she found herself weaving through the crowd of teenagers. Once she made it to her station at the second register, Rebecca was glaring daggers at her.
“And where the hell have you been?! The lines have been crazy!”
“Oh, bite me. I’m sure it wasn’t anything you couldn’t handle, since you’re oh-so capable.” Uzi ignored the seething that ensued and proceeded to begrudgingly help the next guest. She glanced at the time and nearly banged her head on the register.
Just a few more hours…
After a chaotic midday surge, Uzi was ready to knock out on the spot. She dragged a stool nearby to her register and, seeing that there weren’t as many customers as earlier, pulled her phone out and browsed for streams. It wasn’t much of a surprise that N was still at the top with over fifty-thousand viewers, streaming his gameplay of Drones Online. Glancing around, she plugged in a single wireless earphone and tuned in on the livestream.
“Ugh! This boss is kinda hard…” N frowned as yet another death screen greeted him. Uzi, not that she wanted to admit it, had been catching more and more of his streams. One thing she learned was that N was actually pretty good at the game. He was getting through a lot of the main storyline much faster than she had expected, which shocked her since she was still struggling on some of the earlier chapters. His character was in the “Disassembly Drone” class, though, which was one of the strongest fighter classes in the game; high attack damage, increased agility, and increased regeneration all made for a very powerful avatar. She picked “Absolute Solver” for her class, which was apparently the hardest class in the game to master, but she was determined to learn how to use the class’s skillset.
“Maybe if I use this move instead of this one, I have a higher chance of surviving Phase 2, but then I have one less dash, which will make it hard for me to engage…” N placed his hand on his chin as he thought out loud, very engrossed in his battle strategy. His screen was stuck at the moveset customization, and he spoke to the camera while reading off of the chat. “It does that? I didn’t know! So, wait, maybe it would actually turn out okay? If it also boosts my defense, then I could just run in? That sounds like fun, let’s try it!”
Uzi watched as this silly man near-effortlessly defeated the boss he was just struggling with in a span of fifteen minutes. He grinned at the camera after looting, giving a big thumbs-up and a wide smile to his viewers. “Thank you, everyone! What would I do without you?”
The overflowing love he received from his audience did not go unnoticed by Uzi. She wondered how it felt to be so well-liked by so many people, even if he probably didn’t know any of them. She could barely make herself well-liked by people she did know.
As another customer stepped up to the register, Uzi continued to have the stream playing through one ear, unknowingly smiling partially at the streamer’s delight when he received a new upgrade for his character.
The time revealed a blaring two in the morning when Uzi finally checked it. She squinted at the numbers, juggling choices in her mind, before she picked the not-good one. She did make a decent choice when it came to her beverage, though. Sipping at her water because soda was starting to make her stomach hurt, she continued to venture through the decimated, snowy forest.
She needed to kill some Ice Wyverns for their scales, and this was the one location in the game where they spawned. Although her combat wasn’t that great yet, she was confident she could take some down with enough potions in her inventory and luck on her side.
What she learned very quickly, however, was that luck was not on her side.
Ice Wyverns spawned with a range of levels, and for some reason, they were all spawning with very high levels. Much higher than hers, and with movesets that were much more complicated than she was used to. Uzi felt sweat bead down her face as she stared at her character’s health bar. She was out of potions, and if she died here, then she would lose all the measly scales she was able to gather from the snowy ground, as well as half of her other items she worked so hard for.
Her character was hiding inside of what looked like an abandoned spaceship, an apparently impenetrable site in the spawn of the Ice Wyverns. She had a fire going to try to raise her health bar by some points, but it was so slow, and even if she did have all of her health back, she was most likely going to lose it all over again.
Uzi sighed as she leaned back into her chair and massaged her temples. Why, oh why, did she decide to do this? Curse her poor late-night decision-making!
“Hello? Anyone in here?”
Uzi was startled at the sudden voice that emitted from her headset. She forgot that proximity voice chat was turned on in areas with less than twenty players, and people don’t actually use it super often. Additionally, this voice was oddly familiar.
However, she wavered with replying, since player-versus-player combat was enabled and could be initiated with players not in her party and in areas outside of safe zones such as cities.
“I promise I won’t do anything! I saw that there was someone hiding in here, I just wanted to see if you needed any help.”
Uzi suspected that the player must have been a high-leveled one if he had tracking abilities. Her suspicion increased, but there was something about his voice that didn’t make her afraid. With her poor late-night decision-making, she cleared her throat and unmuted her microphone, before saying, “Yeah, I’m, uh, hiding over here.”
“Oh! You have a mic, too? Nice! I’ll be there in a sec!”
When his character rounded the corner and appeared on her monitor, she froze in shock.
“Hiya! Nice to meet you! I hope you don’t mind me here, I was also looking for some Ice Wyvern scales for some power-ups. Did you wanna party-up? We can get it together!”
It’s… N. He’s N. N is talking to me. Why is he here? Wait, he just said why. Why do I care so much? He’s just a random, bigshot streamer!
Uzi swallowed down her sudden shock, then before she responded, she checked the browser she had up in the background. N wasn’t streaming at the moment, and if she recalled, he actually bade everyone goodnight a few hours ago. She didn’t think she would ever run into him like this, and knowing that it was just the two of them was making her heart race.
Damn, Uzi, calm down. Getting nervous for what? You literally didn’t care about him like a couple of weeks ago. Get a grip!
“I, uh, I mean… if you want to, I guess…” Uzi didn’t want to admit that she was struggling to slay the mobs just a few minutes ago, and was getting excited about having such a high-leveled and skilled player help her. She could hear the smile in his voice, “Awesome, I’ll send you the invite.”
Without a moment’s notice, a notification popped up in the middle of her screen with a tiny ding. She accepted N’s invitation to his party, and his model jumped up and down in front of hers.
“This will be so cool! I have never partied up with an Absolute Solver before. Oh, your health is low! Do you want some health pots?”
Before she could respond, his avatar started spraying out health potions at hers. She felt a little uncomfortable at how nice he was, even off recording. Uzi hissed, “Hey, I didn’t need that much! And I didn’t even say ‘okay'!”
“That’s fine, I get a lot of health potions from other people! I totally don’t mind sparing some.” His character started crouching repeatedly, “Heal up so we can go! I’m excited to see what you can do!”
Uzi felt a massive pressure drop on her shoulders. She was definitely going to disappoint him, and for some reason, that bothered her immensely.
Maybe accepting the invite was a mistake…
“Also, you can just call me N. But do you want me to just call you ‘darkXwolf17’?”
Heat burned her cheeks, and she sputtered out, “I-I made that name when I was, like, eight! And, no, don’t say the whole thing! Maybe just Dark Wolf or something, gah, uh, I don’t know…”
Even being called “Dark Wolf” sounded mortifying, but she wasn’t used to having anyone to play with online, so she never felt embarrassed enough to change her display name.
“M-Maybe just, err…” she felt the heat go to her head, but paid it no mind, “Uzi. You can call me Uzi. It’s my name.”
Her poor late-night decision-making was even allowing her to release her name to a stranger on the internet, but she felt that it was better than being called “Dark Wolf.”
“Uzi it is, then!”
Her heart fluttered, and in turn, she slapped the shit out of her chest. Her heart wasn’t calming, however, and she was getting annoyed.
Am I having heart problems at age eighteen? Already?
His character was now circling around hers. She smirked a little, finding it strangely cute.
“Are you all set to go?”
“Yeah, I am.” After downing the health potions, she took a breath and set her mind to all the combos she knew how to use. She wanted to be of some use, after all.
“Great, I’ll lead the way! Follow meeee!”
And so she did.
The time was around four in the morning, but Uzi was still glued to the game and stuck in her party with N. After he helped her clear the Ice Wyverns for their scales, she thought that would be the end of their journey together. But as he invited her out on more side quests, she realized that this was the time when he didn't worry about the main storyline and just wanted to explore the rest of the game. She wasn't sure why he was letting her tag along though.
Maybe he just wanted someone who would stay up until four in the morning with him? Oh, wait, unless…
"Hey, N?"
"Yeah, Uzi?"
She still couldn't wrap her mind around him saying her name, but she decided that her sleep-deprived brain didn't know what to focus on and therefore it was actually unimportant.
"What time is it for you?"
Their two characters were sitting across from each other at a dinner table that N decided to set up outside. She wasn't sure why he went for a cooking skill, since they were robots in-game, but it sure made the in-game "food" look good. Well, as appetizing as batteries and oil were going to get. Their characters were eating perpetually, their health bars slowly refilling.
"It's 4 AM for me. Why?"
Her eyes blinked in astonishment. She was surprised they lived in the same time zone. Hell, she was surprised that he decided to stay up this late just to play the game, considering he begins his daily streams at noon.
Feigning ignorance, she asked, "Well, why are you still up? Don't you have work or something?"
"Sort of? But it's okay. I've been having so much fun playing with you, I totally forgot to check the time!"
She swore her heart skipped a beat. He specifically said "with you," and he was talking to her, so that meant he was having fun with her? And not just because of the game?
"Oh no, Uzi! What time is it for you?"
"...Also four?"
"In the…?"
She winced. "In the morning."
"Biscuits! I didn't mean to make you stay up so late, too! We can head to bed, I'm sorry if you're sleepy in the morning."
Uzi rolled her eyes, unsure why his concern for her made her cheeks hot. Maybe because she was also a little mad. Yes, she was just angry.
"You don't have to mother me. I'll be fine. But if you wanna sleep, you can log off."
"Sleep is good for you. If I log off, you should too. Okay?"
Uzi rolled her eyes again, but to get him off her back and to get the weird sensations out of her stomach, she obliged.
"Okay, geez."
"Good!"
She was sure that this encounter would be a one-time event, but she was astounded for the tenth time that night when a notification appeared before her.
"We should play again soon!"
It was a friend request.
From N.
Through her sleep-ridden mind, she was barely able to register the bar of text. Dumbly, she answered, "Uh… uh-huh, sure."
And then she slowly hit the check mark for 'Yes.'
"Yay! New gamer buddy!" N cheered from the other side, "Okay, sleep tight! Have a good night!"
Uzi frowned heavily at his joyous voice, and just let the redness take over her face.
"You too, N."
When the game indicated he was offline, she found herself logging off, too. She could have stayed up more, but…
Uzi stared at the now black screen, then huffed. What was she getting so worked up for, again? A popular streamer? A guy who is handsome and cute and is good at the game she really likes? Some man who also really likes the game she really likes? Please, she was too cool and self-aware for parasocial relationships. Even if they had played together directly for the last two hours, online friendships were… flimsy, at best. He probably won't even remember her tomorrow.
He's just another guy like any other guy on the internet. He's just another person like any other person in real life.
Uzi collapsed on her bed after she brushed her teeth, feeling drowsiness wash over her. Her darkened room was the last thing she saw when her eyelids slid shut. Before sleep pulled her under, an oddly sad notion nibbled at her brain.
Someone I'll never get close to in a million years.