Gamer Girls 4 (Old) (Patreon)

Error: Unable to connect to the Destined Souls 2 servers. Please check your network connection and try again. For more information, please contact Bungle support net.

   Brilliant. At first, Geneva’d thought it was hilarious. National DS2 PvP Invitational, and someone forgot to configure the gorram router? That’s rich. 

   “Undead, you should go buy me some pop!” she grinned, elbowing the competitor on her right, a thin black man in his early twenties. “Since we got a minute.”

   “Bitch, plez...” he laughed. "You still owe me twenty bucks.”

   “For what!” She giggled.

   “That network card you just couldn't wait on last week,” he rolled his eyes. "Actually, throw in ten more, for emotes last month...”

   “All the more reason to buy me pop, eh?”

   “Howso?!” He gave her an incredulous look.

   “Soooo I can save up to pay YOU back—for emotes and network cards and stuff!!” She beamed at him.

   “T-that doesn't even make sense?!” He stuttered.

   “Sure it do!" She grinned, “Check this right? I owe you, say, fifteen—”

   “—Thirty,” he corrected.

   “—Whatever, bucks right?” she nodded to herself. “So, if I only have thirteen on me right now,” Geneva explained, “and I go use three of it, to buy myself pop—that's literally ten percent of my debt repayment pool... gone.” She made a poof gesture with her fingertips.

   “Gimme the thirteen, then,” he insisted smugly. “By that logic, it's almost halfway there.”

   “But, I'm thirsty,” Geneva pouted, leaning toward the monitor. The pale redhead was wearing a fairly shredded pair of tight blue jeans that showed more skin than blue. Goldimouse, the iconic mascot of Monster Battlers, was featured on her shirt—cut open at the sides into a rather sexy muscle tee. It hung open slightly as she leaned over, revealing the designer bra within.

   “Nope. Not gonna work.” 

   “'Cause you like men?” She winked.

   “'Cause you ugly...” He winked back.

   Insults went back and forth, as was their custom. Eventually Geneva produced two energy drinks from her backpack, and gave one to her friend. They drank quietly, silently preparing to unleash hell upon the lobby trash surrounding them—their bodies visually signifying hapless chumps the world over.

   Amusement quickly dissolved. Disbelief came next, as the awkward minutes stretched on and on. The gathered rabble within AnimeCon’s second game room began to get impatient. 

   “You think these plebs even got GED's?” Geneva scoffed, pointing to the tech support scurrying around the edges of their game space. Anger was bubbling from the pit of her stomach.

   “Haha good one—hold up.” Undead paused “Do you?”

   “Nerp,” she beamed. “I can't even read.”

   Geneva forced herself to smile at the joke, but it was a lost cause. Each passing second wore down another piece of her fragile calm. Geneva resolved to stay positive, desperation clawing at her brain.

   “Hell, if it wasn't for my widdle zombie manservant? I couldn't figure out what armour to use in game! Or how to equip it!”

   “That is true...” he grinned. Khari 'Undead' Patton was their Guild's source for weapon and armour Metas. 

   The two spent another minute trash talking event personnel and equipment. Then, the news came. It wasn’t the convention staff; Destined Souls 2's servers were down, all of them.

   “Alright everyone, we still have all your names. We obviously can’t hold the event at this moment. On a provisional basis, we’re switching the timetable to eight o’clock tomorrow morning—”

   The players bitched and moaned, grumbled and swore, and most of them stood to leave. Undead looked toward his dumbstruck friend, suddenly fearing for his safety. She could be, irrational at times..

   “I'm, uh, gonna see how Johnny's doing..” he offered, joining the exodus.

   She didn't reply. Couldn't find the words—in any language.

   THIS WAS MY FUCKING YEAR!! She screamed, silently. All the hours. Scores of hours honing her unique strategy. The untold piles of digital corpses, unwilling but necessary sacrifices... Geneva had swiftly climbed within the top one hundred overall kill to death ratio worldwide, and was poised for top ten. All but certain victory was assured. How?!? HOW could THIS happen...

   Geneva lingered on, simmering with anger and swiping through her phone for information. Her fingers danced furiously, eyes narrowed to the absolute point of focus. Gunslinger's eyes. It took but a few minutes to browse the net for answers. To her horrified stupefaction, opinion journalism was alight with the Destined Souls server topic, and the headlines seemed to paint a clear culprit.

Destined Souls Franchise Contributes to Today’s Problematic Rape Culture

Fourteen Reasons Why the DDOS of Destined Souls 2 is a Victory for Intersectional Feminism

Yes, the Destined Souls 2 Servers are Down, and Why That’s a Good Thing

   Something was very wrong.

   It's too soon! She realized. The servers weren't even down when some of these pieces were written!! This, was blatantly deliberate, calculated, and surgically executed... the game was afoot.

   I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for sympathy, I can tell you I don't have any. Geneva felt raw violence tickle just beneath the skin, and had to forcibly restrain herself from unleashing it upon those vacating Game Room two. 

   But, what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my precious Destined Souls go now—that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But, if you don't, I will look for you. I will find you. And I will kill you.

   Although the rest of the room bailed, GiGi felt the Titan she’d summoned within her had a precious need to kill things; to crush them in close combat, in a brutal and gruesome way. She sent out several texts to her beau; angrily garbled gibberish, a mixture of numbers and letters. Johnny would understand, by virtue of the fact she was able to text at all, that something had gone terribly wrong for the PvP invitational—he would also know just where to find her blowing off steam.

   While the second game room had been a dedicated LAN-party room, running completely dark save for the rectangular glow of the dozens of LCD monitors, the first one was brightly lit and more roomy, console games hooked into large-screen TVs for split-screen play, and with only the far portion of the room devoted to PC gaming. Those machines looked to be dedicated to Grail 5, which Geneva couldn’t help but think of as Destine’s kid brother of a game, despite the Grail series predating it. She snorted.

   “I need to play, now.” Geneva informed the nearest seated Grail 5 player, a little proud of her own restraint. She tasted blood, had probably broken her own lip open again. “It’s an emergency.”

   “Uhhh…” the frazzled looking guy only meant to look up. Look for enough time to spare her a sardonic look; but before he knew what was happening, he stood, and was holding the chair for her. Something about the gorgeous girl with the manic look in her eyes—pupils shaking with scarcely-contained savagery—and her bleeding lip, had him convinced he’d played enough today, anyways. He was a little unable to pull his eyes away from her, for fear of missing whatever she would do next.

   Though his soldier, Giddybits, had been locked in a standoff shoot-out with another player, both sniping at each other from behind cover… as soon as Geneva sat down, she had Giddybits break cover in a sprint for her opponent. The enemy, clad as all the avatars were in futuristic armor, rose from the broken wall he’d been ducked behind, switched weapons to a shotgun, and unloaded a shot into her character, obliterating her safety shield with a single blast.

   It was the only shot he got off. Geneva’s hand on the mouse shook, the viewpoint careening off to the side, and then it spun back just in time to show the butt of her rifle slamming into the enemy soldier’s helmet. With a twitch the camera looked instead off in the opposite direction, and with a whirl of the surroundings Giddybit turned to deliver another crippling point-blank smash.

   “How the hell are you doing that?!” the guy who’d given her his seat asked. “Your melee doesn’t have lunge delay?”

   “Not locking,” Geneva grunted. When targeting onto an opponent for a melee strike, the game locked your character into a specific striking animation players called lunge delay. The furious young woman wasn’t locking onto her target, however—she was tapping melee while looking aside, and then simply maneuvering the shortened striking animation into her foe. It was far easier said than done, of course, but watching her play it looked as though she was simply twisting Giddybits’ upper body left and right to smash her weapon across with more force.

   In that bare handful of seconds, GiGi used her rifle-toting supersoldier like a character from a hack and slash game, battering and stunning her opponent into submission before he could fire again. After a series of grotesque bashing noises, the enemy supersoldier let out a muffled groan and crumpled to the ground, weapons and ammunition popping up above the corpse.

   That's better.

   Swapping out weapons to take the man’s shotgun, Giddybits sprinted forward towards the gunfire and explosions at the heart of the map. She moved through the battlefield at full speed, sprinting to point blank range whenever she saw an enemy and summarily dispatching them with an onslaught of melee attacks, occasionally punctuated with a finishing salvo from the shotgun that sent supersoldiers flying in ragdoll physics.

   She favored mobility over any form of cover, becoming the least viable target for long-range fire by simply never being in any one room for any longer than it took to slaughter the nearby players. Grenades she picked up were afterthoughts, bounced off the edges of doorways as she passed through, a nasty surprise for anyone unlucky enough to chance pursuit.

   “Out of the way, Peck,” Geneva swore, timing her shotgun blast so that she was able to pass through a dead character rather than the game’s collision detection bumping her off a living one.

   “Don’t call me a Peck,” A voice called over from one of the other LAN tables.

   “Peck!!! Peck peck peck peck peck!”

   “Heeey! You’re not the real Giddybits!” A girl’s giggling voice accused, breaking through the haze of bloodlust enveloping Geneva. At the PC station on the table across from her, a dark haired girl with large breasts threatening to burst out of a too-small top was leaning around the monitor to get a look at her.

   Another girl? GiGi blinked. It wasn’t terribly surprising to be playing against another girl, but being sat across from a cute girl with the Japanese word for ‘wanton slut’ emblazoned across a freely bouncing bust warranted a second look. Maddi'll get a kick out of her.

   “You are…?” 

   “I’m Melanie!” A chipper voice responded. “My my friends call me Mel. Or Neko! Melaneko! that’s my new—”

   “In the game?” Geneva interrupted, her character flicking more shells into her shotgun and pumping the action. Hitting tab revealed the player list, and a glance told her none of those monikers were present.

   “Oh, uh… Commisar Crabs,” Melanie chuckled. “Of course, I’m not the real Commisar Crabs. Let’s meet up in the middle!”

   Not having any reason not to oblige, Giddybits skidded beneath half-drawn shutter doors, sprinted through doorways, and entered the center of the map. There she found Commisar Crabs, who was likewise maintaining a highly mobile offense similar to hers. The armored soldier was strafing and bobbing while hip-firing the map’s only sniper rifle— it looked like she was using it to open-scope at mid-range, and to great success.

   She instantly decided she liked this girl. After all, she seemed fairly talented, and even better, she was denying the sniper rifle to actual snipers, which were the players Geneva hated the most.

   “Crabby, rocket behind you,” Geneva warned, sprinting forward so that she’d be able to jump up one of the walkway ramps for cover.

   “Hey, thanks, Giddy!” the teenage girl across from her at the LAN tables had a smile that could be heard in her voice. The Commisar Crabs character spun and perforated the approaching soldier toting a rocket launcher with a tracer-lined bevy of sniper shots before he could set up his shot.

   “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” One of the other players groaned, and several of them tabbed the player list to see both of the girls climbing to the top. With the two of them working in concert, the center of the map was completely dominated. Geneva held off on her shots until she could tell her battle-buddy needed to reload, and she found that some of the more troublesome distant enemies were forced to hide behind armored bulkheads under withering suppressive fire from the sniper rifle. By the time Commisar Crabs had exhausted her rather small rifle clip and the enemies eagerly popped out of cover, Giddybits had already closed the distance and was waiting for them.

   This is what real girls are, Geneva thought with a swelling of pride, methodically circling around the central zone and dispatching other players. Not those screeching feminazi creamsmears who don’t even play vidya. Real girl gamers have each other’s back. With shotguns.

   Before she could help herself, she fired a blast into her new friend’s back, sending the armored character flailing and very dead.

   “Aww, Giddy!” She could hear a pout in the other girl’s voice.

   “I’m a bad friend,” Geneva apologized, and had Giddybits pump the action of his shotgun and crouch reverently beside the corpse of their friend. “I love you. I-I didn’t want it to be like this!”

   “I forgive you!” Melanie called over. “I’m on my way to forgive you a whole bunch. Don’t you go anywhere!”

   “I think I’m done,” a black girl in a Dmitri Dhampir cosplay stood up from one of the other tables with a smile. “Sad meme frog loggin’ out, if anyone else wants a shot.”

   Whoa. Geneva did a double-take at seeing this girl as well—her cosplay looked amazing, and she wanted to go give the girl a friendly glomp for being a HellState fan alone.

   “But, Synn,” Melanie protested, looking up from her screen for long enough for her character to fall beneath a veritable hailstorm of enemy fire from several different directions. “We were having so much fun together!”

   “I’m in the mood for some Rhythm Rhythm Rebellion,” Jordyn said, patting Melanie on the shoulder as she passed by. “Come play when you’re done here.”

   “Is that the dance pad game board thing?!” Melanie exclaimed, eyes lighting up. “I’ve always wanted to play that! I bet I’m like, super amazing at it!”

   “Uh… oh wait, you don’t have any, y’know, support, though,” Jordyn realized, giving Melanie a look.

   “No one’ll care if I don’t got a bra,” Melanie stood up with a noticeable jiggle. “Psshaw. Right, guys?”

   A distracted chorus of affirmatives sounded out in response, and Geneva felt like the IQ of her fellow players dropped sharply. She mowed her way through hapless soldiers with successive shotgun blasts, resistance dropping to bare dregs as she took the lead on the scoreboard. Her ammunition indicator finally fell to zero and she heard her weapon dry click empty, so she discarded her mouse and stood up as well.

   I’m still pissed, she thought, scanning the room. But, Crabby’s cute, and dancing off this energy with her seems kinda hot. Johnny’s gonna win big at his event, maybe he deserves yet another big AnimeCon surprise?

/// 1/7 Updated with several sections pertinent to Geneva rewritten by her Waifu-tier patron, Miss Stephanie.