Quaranteam: Piper's Prelude (Ch. 01)

"I'm telling you," Fiona said, lifting her coffee to her lips. "She's absolutely a wizard or a ninja or a ninja-wizard."

"That's not a thing."

"Mark my words. Ninja. Wizard."

"I'm telling you, that's not a thing."

"I'm not so sure." Fi took a sip from her coffee then blew across the top of it. "So anyway, tell me how you got here."

"How far back do you want me to go?" Piper asked her.

"As far as you think you need to."

* * * * *

I could tell you all about my early life and childhood, but I don't know if that's at all relevant to your book, or to this story, so let me just blast through the early details first. I grew up in Gainesville, Florida and spent most of my life there, with two major exceptions. The first was college, where I went to University of Nebraska-Lincoln for four years, majoring in sports medicine and physiotherapy. The plan was that after I was done with my athletic career, I was going to either become a personal trainer for other athletes or I was going to work with veterans or other people going through physical therapy after traumatic experiences. I sort of knew I had plenty of time to think about that after my sports career, because I was very heavily recruited my sophomore year of college.

Before I was old enough to drink, I knew I was going to be going to the Olympics. I'd considered trying for the beach volleyball team, but I've always preferred the camaraderie of having a full team of twelve, so I stayed in the traditional volleyball program.

I graduated in 2015, and was part of the Olympic team that won the gold medal in 2016 in Rio, although all of that went by so fast, it barely even registered. The medal meant I got plenty of endorsement deals, which meant I could make volleyball a full-time thing for at least five to ten more years. I stayed with the National team and started playing with them regularly, training several hours a day, and in 2017, I relocated to Colorado Springs, to begin training around the clock with the rest of the team, who were also living there.

They say volleyball is a sport where you have to learn to trust everyone around you, and that can be hard for some people I guess, but it didn't take me long to develop a family relationship with the rest of my teammates. There are twelve people on a traditional volleyball team, and my position was outside hitter, which is sort of the lead person when you're on the offense. That meant I needed to have a very good jump and a very good spike, and I'm damn fine at both.

We were the defending champions at the World Championship in 2018, but the team had seen a lot of turnover and we weren't gelling as well as we needed to at that point, so we finished fifth. The coach was happy, though, considering he'd told us not to expect anything before we left.

Also, the World Championship in 2018 was where I suddenly became an internet sensation. Ever since I was in high school, I've had a little warm-up dance that I do before a match, but I'd always done it in the locker room where no one could see. For one of those games, though, we didn't have time to head into the locker room, so I did it on the side of the court, and one of the television cameras was pointed at me the whole time. Before I knew it, I was Internet Famous.

For the next month or so, that little animated GIF of me doing my shimmy and shake was everywhere, and it turned me into a flash-in-the-pan sensation. Shit, I even went on Jimmy Kimmel to talk about the whole thing, although I tried to spend as much time as I could hyping up the volleyball team itself, instead of what it was like to be a meme. Every so often, I still get one of those "Got me feelin' like..." meme gifs from my friends when they're getting excited for something, but the whole thing was really over as quick as it started. I got invited to a photoshoot for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, which I did, and then like a few weeks after, the fame basically disappeared and I went back to being myself again.

Being a professional athlete is a strange life. You spend almost all day either training or playing, and the outside world sort of fades into the background. Colorado Springs is a city of about half a million people, but the Olympic Training Grounds sort of looms large over the whole region, and the future Olympians sort of try to avoid mixing with the civilians too much. At least, that's what I tell myself to excuse the fact that I never had a boyfriend after college, that I just didn't have time for it. I would occasionally go trawling for dick now and again, but I always went to their places straight from the bar and then left before they woke up and never called them again. Hell, after I'd picked up a one night stand somewhere, I wrote off that entire bar off and never went back again.

Most of the girls on the team were like that, although a few of them had boyfriends or husbands, and the ones who did, well, they had the benefit of having someone to go home to at the end of the night. Anyone who had a boyfriend or a husband, however, had picked them up before they'd joined the Olympic team, simply because there wasn't time. Hell, I even attended one of my teammate's wedding, although they had to keep their honeymoon to just four days, because she couldn't afford to give up that much training.

You could have a sex life, as long as it didn't get in the way of staying on top of your game.

(There was also the orgiastic two days after we won the gold medal in Rio back in 2016, but honestly, the whole thing is mostly a blur at this point. I have a very distinct but hazy memory of being in a wobbly H with two men from some part of the diving competition while a couple of my teammates were riding on top of guys they'd just met a few hours earlier, like, three feet away from me. Their names, their countries? Shit, I dunno. Please don't write about that in the book, though. It's embarrassing enough just thinking about it now. I even told Andy and Ash once that I didn't do anything back then, mostly because I didn't want Andy to think less of me, although now I think he probably wouldn't have even cared, since it was before he met me, and he seems pretty chill about us having lived real lives that had sex with other people in them.)

In March, we were given lockdown orders like a week before the rest of the country was. We weren't even entirely certain what lockdown meant, since none of us generally went many places other than to the training center anyway. A few weeks later, we got clarification. We were to keep on individual training, but to do so at home, and to avoid contact with anyone else. Don't go out. Don't go to see friends. Don't go anywhere you don't have to.

I didn't really have much of a home, so to speak, at that point. Sure, I had a house that I'd bought where I lived, but it was so under decorated that even the Spartans would've looked at my place and gone "Damn girl, get some furniture. Hang some pictures. Make the place feel lived in." This meant that "stay at home" was especially brutal on me.

By May, things had gotten even weirder, what with reports of two competing plagues starting to kill what sounded like a decent number of people. Covid was bad, DuoHalo was worse, and both were getting very much out of hand.

In the middle of June, the members of my team had reached a consensus -- we would "bubble" together, coming to the training facility to practice, but we wouldn't interact with anyone else, so we would be doing the best we could to stay safe. We knew it was slightly risky behavior, but those of us without partners were starting to go a little bit stir crazy, so it seemed like the only option. We'd even heard rumors the men's team was doing the same on the other side of campus.

It wasn't ideal, but it worked for a time. The girls with partners were told their partners couldn't go out at all, and for a while, we thought about just basically locking ourselves in the training camp until it was all over, but the sleeping accommodations there weren't great, so everyone kept commuting back and forth from their own homes.

One day in mid July, it seemed like the whole world fell apart. The president fell into a coma and then when they went to swear in the vice president, he collapsed at the swearing in ceremony, which made the Speaker of the House go from President Pro Tempore to actual President. Trump and Pence both died a few days later, President Pelosi became the first woman President of the United States, and at that point, we knew shit was getting bad, because people had stopped talking about how soon we could get out and started talking about what the world was going to look like if we got out.

Nobody wanted to say it, but at that point, survival no longer felt like it was guaranteed.

It got even worse a week later when our coach, Coach Barry Parker, didn't show up for practice. We found out he'd been hospitalized with DuoHalo, and he died a few days later. We couldn't even have a funeral for him. We also stopped getting messages from the men's team around then, and knowing what I know now, I think most of them must've died around the same time. One man probably got sick and infected much of the rest of the training facility.

Coming to practice every day was a lot harder after that, but I think somehow, we all just decided we needed each other to get through the storm.

There was a very strange change in how the news was reported around then, and while it seemed like every major broadcaster was talking about the importance of staying home and staying masked (except for Fox News, naturally, who was claiming it was unproven science or some other nonsense), very few people were talking about the death toll, other than to say it was "sizable."

The whole country really doesn't know what that means yet, but in a couple of days they're going to find out that it means "catastrophic" and that most of the men in America are dead. I think a lot of us have had that sense that the news was going to be insanely bad for a while now, but it's one thing to feel that way and another thing entirely to have it confirmed in facts.

I'm not too proud to admit that there were a couple of nights where a handful of us girls slept in one bed holding onto each other, just to not feel so alone in the middle of the giant mess. For once in my life, I'd found myself desperately wishing I'd gotten a pet, just to keep me company.

It felt like the whole damn world might've been coming to an end. I tell you this, because I think it's important to stress what kind of state of mind I was in, and how desperate I was to connect with someone, anyone.

In the second week of September, a woman from the Air Force came to the training camp. I'll never forget it, because she was dressed in a goddamn hazmat suit, and that scared me right down to the bone. I remember thinking, "This is it. One of us has DuoHalo and they've infected all the rest of us, and we're all now dead, we just don't know it, but they sent this woman here to tell us that we're all gonna die any minute now."

That isn't what happened, though.

She said the Air Force had a stop gap solution that they were going to be employing, but it was very unconventional, it was experimental, it was very slowly getting rolled out and would involve pairing us up with a man, whom we'd need to be sexually active with regularly.

You can imagine after having been cooped up for so long, as ridiculous as it all sounded, if it meant it would get us out of there, we were all for it. I remember thinking that I'd fuck a bridge troll if it meant I could go somewhere new, talk to someone new. We were each tested for both Covid and DuoHalo, and when the tests came back negative, we were given a website link to something called The Oracle, which would help us get paired up with a good match for us.

I know you didn't have to take The Oracle Test, but you should get Niko to give you a copy of it, just so you can see how, uh, thorough it is. I'm a Florida girl, born and raised, so I'm no shrinking violet, but I don't think I've ever had to be that explicit about my sexual tastes with anyone or anything before or since.

Some of it is just your basic kinda stuff -- do you like men, women or both? Do you like your partners taller than you, shorter than you or do you not care? Do you like soft sex, aggressive sex, both or neither? But then it drilled down into all sorts of fetishes and philias that I'd never heard of, so many that I had to keep up a second tab on the browser to look up what a lot of things I was being asked about even were. Also, I don't want to judge what other people are into, but ick ick ick ick!

The test took about two hours to fill out, and I'd never felt so utterly scrutinized in my entire life. When we were given the links, we were also told to stay at our homes and not to come back to the training center until we'd been given the serum, or until the plague had passed, although the woman didn't seem to have any idea when that would be.

Because we weren't allowed to see anyone else in person anymore, the team started having day long Zoom calls where we would all sit around the house and talk with one another, but after a while, even that started getting difficult to maintain, since it felt like we didn't have any new stories to tell each other.

Nothing was happening.

Then, on October 18^th -- Jesus, was it really just a month or so ago? -- Anyway, on October 18^th, there was a knock on the front door of my house, and it was the woman from the Air Force again. She told me a match for me had been found, and she was taking me across the country to get injected with the serum and introduced to my new partner.

* * * * *

"Covington?" Fiona asked.

"Covington," Piper sighed. "But let's not jump ahead. If I'm going to tell this story, I need to tell you all about the trip, and the imprinting process, even if it's similar to your own. Let's start with the plane..."