The Devil's Details - Ch. 07

Chapter Seven

Of all the places that Tabitha had thought this journey was going to take her, where she currently found herself wasn't even the top one hundred of what she considered most likely. And the location and the inhabitants were in such stark contrast to one another that it was giving her a bit of cognitive dissonance.

The building itself was one she'd been in multiple times, because it was one of the most classic of New York City venues - Madison Square Garden. It was where many a concert and sporting event had been held for decades, but this? This was not the kind of sporting event that Tabitha had expected to find herself at.

There were team jerseys but not for basketball. There were fans in elaborate getups but not for hockey. The roar of the crowd would swell and fade but not for football. Matches were less than an hour long. Teams were only five people strong, with a coach and occasionally a stand-in, just in case someone was ill. And the entire tournament, which had just started yesterday, would be done sometime in the early evening of the upcoming Sunday. At the end of it, close to thirty million dollars' worth of prize money would be awarded.

It was all for some computer game called Immortal Guardians of Avalon.

"Tell me again what kind of game this is?" Tabitha asked Veronica, the two of them having decided to come to the arena on their own, leaving Kelly and Charlie at home.

"It's called a MOBA, or multiuser online battle arena," Roni told her. "Basically, the map is divided up into three main lanes, each of which has a steady stream of computer controlled units called creeps that will continually move towards the other team's sanctum. Each player controls a single hero unit with a handful of abilities. They move around the map, trying to farm the enemy creeps as well as the enemy heroes, while buying better gear and levelling up. Eventually, one side is able to break through the other team's defenses and destroy the sanctum, which means they win."

"You seem like you know quite a bit about this game, Roni," Tabitha said with a soft chortle. "Fangirl much?"

"I came across it, well the entire genre actually, when I was doing research on all the possible nephilim within the greater New York area, and once I started watching the games, well, I can understand how some people get hooked on sports and the like. You start to develop a loyalty to particular players or teams, and sometimes I'll just put on streams of the game on Twitch when I'm working on something I can afford to be distracted from now and again."

"And the nephilim we're looking for, she's a player, is she?"

"Emily? She used to be, but not anymore," Roni said. "Emily Barber started as a streamer about six years ago, and then after she and the rest of her team - Team Question - finished second at Planetary Showdown three years ago, she decided she wanted to go down a different path. She wanted to think bigger, wanted to do more, and felt like she was limiting herself by just being a player."

"So she's a coach," Tabby said.

"Still thinking too small. Two years ago, she founded her own e-sports organization, Queens of Ragetown," Roni said as the two of them moved over to an escalator, taking it up a few levels. "She's got about fifty players signed to her now, and they have teams in most of the major esports games - Avalon, Dota, League, Overwatch, Valorant, Smite, you name it."

"You made some of those games up, right?" Tabitha asked, causing Roni to giggle. "And there's money to be made here?"

"Loads. The game developers love these tournaments because it promotes the game itself, and many of these tournaments support their prize pool by having in-game cosmetics, team pennants, voice lines that you can play when you're playing on your own or even trading cards with players pictures and stats on them. In addition to prizes, the esports teams and organizations take on sponsors, people who pay to have their company's logo displayed on the players jerseys, and for the players to be using their products."

"What kind of sponsors?"

"Mostly computer peripheral companies, but there's been some headway made into the market by energy drink companies, snack food companies, apparel and even some crypto currency exchanges. We're even starting to see sponsorships from companies like Audi, Nike and Capitol One."

"But it's still sort of a niche thing, isn't it?"

"With thirty plus million viewers just here in the states, and an estimated half a billion viewers across the globe, esports is probably too big to be called 'niche' anymore," Roni said as the escalator reached a platform for them to step off onto. "There's something like five billion dollars in the ecosystem right now, and they have to worry about things like player images, doping scandals and immigration visas."

"How big is Queens of Ragetown?"

"Not as big as the titans of the industry, organizations like Team Liquid or Evil Geniuses, but most of those orgs have several owners, while Queens of Ragetown is completely owned by our girl. In addition to that, Queens of Ragetown has made a very concerted effort to house and train mostly female players, making them something of an oddity in the esports world."

"Not a lot of women playing videogames?"

"It's not that there isn't interest, but there's still something of a glass ceiling that the ladies are trying to break down, make the whole thing feel less like a sausage fest. Now, somewhere between eight and ten percent of professional gamers are women, which is something like a seventy-five percent increase in just a handful of years. And a lot of women are put off by the sort of rampant toxic sexism that a portion of the gaming community refuses to let go of."

Tabitha glanced over as a young woman dressed in a particular skimpy costume bounded by, heading towards her seat somewhere on the second floor. The outfit couldn't have been much more than three or four large patches of cloth held together by some string. The cloth was made to look like seaweed, and just strategically covered bits on the woman keeping her from being exposed. "I can't possibly imagine why."

"That's somebody cosplaying as the Lady of the Lake. Most of the female characters aren't dressed quite so scandalously, but I suppose there's got to be at least a couple of cheesecake outfits for people to make fan fiction about."

"And the Lady of the Lake drew the short straw, huh?"

"Well," Roni said with a smile. "Merlin sure as hell wasn't going to put Morgana La Fay in that kind of outfit or she'd have burned the company down."

Tabitha started to laugh before looking over at Veronica, the expression on her face quite serious. "Wait, are you telling me that Merlin, the real ancient Merlin, owns a game company that made a video game based on Arthurian mythos?"

"I think he thinks it's funny, playing into the stereotypes of what people expected."

"And Morgana La Fay's still around?"

"Yeah, she's something of a badass magician that even the angels and devils don't like to mess with. Same's true for Merlin, truth be told. If the two of them ever united behind an idea, Hells help us all, because I imagine they'd be unstoppable. Thankfully, they're both flightier than hummingbirds."

"Who the hell else from the Round Table's still around?"

"Almost nobody else," Roni said, waving her hand. "And I wouldn't worry about it. You're very unlikely to run into any of them any time soon. Other than Merlin and Morgana, they mostly prefer to hang out in Europe, and you're going to be pretty NYC focused, at least for the rest of the challenge. After that, though, it's anybody's game."

They walked into one of the VIP boxes, Roni typing a six digit code into the door code lock to let them in. "We have our own VIP box here at the Garden?" Tabitha asked as the door closed shut behind them.

"AOA does," Roni replied as they moved through the private suite. Roni must have called ahead, Tabby thought, because there were a number of appetizers set out for them, should they want to nosh on them, more food than the two of them needed. The inside of the suite had a number of televisions on the wall and there was a stocked bar in case they wanted to make drinks for themselves. "All of us know the key code, and there's just a two-hour advance notification to have snack food ready. I could've gotten us a bartender as well, but that seemed a touch excessive, you know?"

"I'm completely capable of making my own drinks, Roni," Tabitha said dismissively. "So... where's our girl?"

"They have the box next to ours, so you'll be able to sort of look over and see her, although she's going to mostly be working, so we'll have to figure out how your approach is going to be."

The two of them walked to the edge of the suite and down onto the ledge seats so they could glance over at the suite seats next to them. There were three women seated there with a variety of wild hair colors - pink, blue and green - most of them no longer than chin length. "What shade am I looking at?" Tabitha politely whispered to Veronica.

"The lass with the blue hair down to her collarbone," Veronica replied.

It was Tabitha's first chance to really size up Emily Barber, and the woman was a strange combination of both what she suspected and what she completely didn't. She looked to be in her mid or maybe even late 20s but was dressed in attire that made her look significantly younger. She had on black jean shorts with dark black fishnet stockings on beneath as well as shiny black leather lace up boots that came up to her knees and with platform bottoms that had to be a few inches thick. She wore a jersey for Queens of Ragetown - the colors black, purple and a shade of blue that matched her hair - and Tabby could see the word COACH written across the back of the shoulders. The jersey left much of the woman's arms exposed, although they were still covered, just with ink and not fabric. Emily seemed to be fully sleeved on both arms, and while Tabitha couldn't make out what was decorating the woman's skin, the colors were certainly bright and vibrant, meaning they weren't more than a few years old.

Emily's skin was a strikingly pale shade of white, almost like milk or alabaster, and Tabby found herself wondering just how much sunscreen the woman had to apply to not get immediately burned by the outside. Despite her bright blue hair, Emily's eyebrows were coal black and her lips a strangely soft shade of pink.

"Give me the rundown on her," Tabitha said as the two of them moved back towards the sliding glass doors of the suite, making sure they were well outside of incidental earshot range by Emily, although the constant swelling roars of the crowd made that a little bit questionable.

"Emily Barber, age 24, daughter of Chelsea Barber and the angel Jerahmeel, not that either Chelsea or Emily know that," Veronica said, reading from her notes on her iPad. "Started out as a streamer back in the early, early days of streaming, but she was also on a number of esports teams at the time. She had just turned 18. After she finished high school, her mother tried to convince her to go to college, but Emily was making more than enough money between pro-games and streaming that she just moved out into her own apartment instead."

"She was making that much?"

"Between the streaming and the gaming tournaments, she declared close to a quarter of a million dollars her first year living out on her own."

"For playing games?" Tabitha asked incredulously. "I got into the wrong damn business going into law."

"She's had to endure her fair share of people harassing her while she did it, though, simply because she's an attractive young woman, and women like that who stream are often subjected to all sorts of weird and gross sexual harassment."

"What, you mean like the 'show us your tits' stuff all women get?"

"Sure, but imagine you weren't just getting it from one or two people, but entire swarms of preprogrammed bots. And not just, like, once a week or once a month, but tens, sometimes hundreds of times every single day," Veronica said, scrolling through her notes. "That's partially what led Emily to start V-tubing."

Tabitha shook her head a little bit, looking a bit confused. "V-tubing?"

"So you get the basic idea of streaming, right?"

"It doesn't seem that complicated. You turn on a camera, you point it at yourself and you connect it to the Internet, where people can watch you if they want to. Sometimes I guess you're supposed to be playing a videogame or playing an instrument."

"Right. Now some people wanted to do that but didn't want how they look to be the focus of the stream, so they started what's called v-tubing, where they're wearing a motion capture outfit and it's translated into a virtual character - sometimes it's a Japanese anime girl but it can also be just about anything, including anthropomorphized animals."

"She's a very lovely woman," Tabitha said to her. "But I can imagine there would be days where she just wanted to talk and not worry about her make up, her hair, her outfit or whatever."

"Exactly. So when SheStorming went-"

"Excuse me, who?"

"Oh, that's her gamer tag SheStorming."

Tabitha grinned a little. "Do I get a cool gamer tag?"

"I can register you on all gaming platforms as DevilsOldestDaughter if you like."

"I would," Tabitha said with an approving nod. "Carry on."

"Oh? Oh! Right. As I was saying, when SheStorming went from live camera to v-tubing, I think she expected there to be a drop off in viewership, but instead she found a whole new audience that simply added on top of her existing audience. That stayed with her through her tenure with Team Question and their hot streak, finishing in the top four at a number of feeder tournaments before they qualified for Planetary Showdown 3, the annual high value tournament for Immortal Guardians of Avalon, or IGA for short. They were expected to finish in the top eight, but nobody thought they'd get to the Grand Finals, much less go to a game five."

"How many games do they play?"

"Most rounds are best of three, but the grand finals are best of five, although it rarely goes to a game five. Usually by game three, one team or the other has their opponents' strategies completely figured out. Instead, it went to game five and Team Question had a single mistake that cost them the match."

"Our girl's fault?"

"Nah," Veronica replied. "Em played position three, which meant it was her job to be front lining during team fights, but their position one, what's called the carry player, he got caught out farming up his next item and wasn't paying enough attention to the map. That's all it takes sometimes in games like these - lose an inch and suddenly it's all over in a flash."

"And so she quit?"

"Less quit and more retired," Veronica corrected. "She'd won half of a million dollars from that tournament alone, and she'd decided it was time for her to put her money where her mouth was. So she started up Queens of Ragetown with the intention of getting more women onto the scene. They weren't just going to be an Immortal Guardians of Avalon team, but a fully rounded e-sports organization. They wanted to have teams in most of the major esports games, and they were always going to prioritize female players over men. They've got a couple of men players, but the teams are always captained by women and there's always going to be a majority of women. I think she's supporting six or seven teams now, helping structure and train them."

"Just esports?"

"Well, she's also giving them media training, and helping many of them start up their own personal brands for streaming or merchandise. The problem with most of these kids who want to get into streaming or esports for a living is that they only see one little part of it, whereas Emily's got the total package, an understanding of all the various aspects of what it takes to get into the business and stay afloat. Nobody was training these kids before she started the program, so everyone was having to learn the same lessons over and over again. But now that Emily's got Queens of Ragetown, people who aren't even joining her rosters are coming to her for training or even tech support."

"Tech support?" Tabitha asked.

"You know what kind of web camera to use when you're streaming? How to set up an OBS overlay? How much bandwidth you're going to need from your network provider on a monthly basis?"

"Okay. Okay, okay, I get the point," she said as the crowd roared, something particularly exciting happening on stage, even if Tabitha didn't understand exactly what it was. "So she's making an entire little generation of Mini Me's out there in the videogame streaming community."

"She's expanding the idea of what it means to be a gamer for a living to a whole world of young women who never thought it could be them, because nobody else had done it yet."

The two teams on the stage were in the middle of some intense battle right now, as a pair of commentators were rattling on about how some play that had riled up the crowd was a "wombo combo," although Tabitha had no idea what the hell that meant.

"I'm sure there's another side to her that you've found out about her, though, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation, now, would we, pet?" Tabitha asked her.

"You know me oh so well, Mistress." Veronica started tapping on her iPad, swiping over to show an entirely different side of the blue-haired beauty. In the picture on her iPad, Emily was dressed in some very sheer lingerie, with one arm barred right across her petite breasts and the other draped lazily between her two legs. "As it turns out, Emily dabbled with being a cam girl for a little while. Nothing all together too explicit, but she liked the thrill of being naked and exhibiting herself for others to see, even if she decided she didn't want to make a career out of it."

"I'm certain this isn't the raciest photo you found for me, because if it is, you know I'm going to be severely disappointed."

"The last thing I would want is to disappoint you, Mistress." She tapped on the flat tablet to bring up another photo of Emily completely nude, her tiny pink nipples with silver barbells through them, a silver naval piercing dangling from her belly, and a patch of matching dyed blue public hair above her pink pussy, the whole image feeling almost like sexual cotton candy. She was on her back on a bed with shimmering silver silk sheets, her arms folded behind her head, giving a little pout to the camera, sticking out her pierced tongue playfully.

"Awww, doesn't she simply look delectable. I take it she's into girls?"

"Girls and boys, Mistress."

"Well then, after I've made her mine, maybe I'll let her play with a boy every now and then for a change of pace. How do we make our approach?" Tabitha said, glancing back up at the stage, where one team had apparently won the match and the other lost, as handshakes were being exchanged. "I don't have to go and talk to her about this game do I? Because I'm fairly certain that's the best way for me to go and make a fool of myself."

"Hells no, Mistress," Veronica giggled. "She hasn't even touched Immortal Guardians of Avalon in a couple of years now. No, she plays far less games than she used to, because she's entirely focused on making sure the business succeeds. That's her central focus and where she dedicates all of her time towards. And as much as she'd like to be bankrolling the entire business herself, she can't, and she needs investors. That's how I think you should make your approach."

"What, representing AOA?"

Veronica scowled a little. "Representing yourself, Mistress. As a private investor. You know, the whole 'go girl power' sort of thing?"