Chapter Text
It all started with Michaela Stirling being right about something and refusing to shut up about it, and a stupid tiger.
"You're addicted," she said.
John did not look up from his monitor. He was too focused doing something rapid and violent to the keyboard with his left hand and the mouse with his right hand. On his screen, a tall man in blue armour leapt into the air and came down on a white tiger.
"I'm not addicted. I'm committed."
"You have not blinked in nine minutes."
"I've blinked plenty."
"You said you'd be off at eight. It's already nine now. You made me let myself in with the spare key and I have watched you try kill the same tiger four times."
"It's a hard tiger, Michaela." The blue man died and John groaned at his defeat. His blue man spawning back to the start facing the white tiger. "I'm trying to beat it solo just to prove a point to my healer."
Michaela had came over because she had two days off in a row for the first time since March and she'd foolishly thought that her cousin might want to spend time with her together after such a long time not seeing each other. She'd thought that maybe he might want to watch a movie with her, or eat a nice dinner together, or at the bare minimum exist in a room together with her while she complained about her work.
What she'd found instead was John, in a hoodie hunched forward to his monitor, playing the game.
The game. She'd been hearing about it for a year or two. It came up like other people's girlfriend did, casually at first and then all the time, with a private smile she wasn't invited into. It was like John had suddenly acquired a girlfriend in the form of a video game.
Sorry, I can't. It's raid night.
Sorry, I can't on that day. It's my FC's anniversary.
Sorry, Kae, my healer would kill me.
"Your healer? the one that would kill you." she said now, testing it out. "You keep saying that. What does that mean? Is that a person?"
"Fran? Yeah, she's my friend who heals for our party. She doesn't really kill me kill me, she would just not heal me and let me die. She does that when I'm being annoying."
"When are you not annoying?"
"That's exactly why I'm dead so often."
He returned back to his monitor and pressed his keyboard. His little blue idiot ran to attack the white tiger again and John immediately began muttering to himself, something about the stupid white tiger and its annoying mechanics which Michaela could not understand at all.
She dropped onto the sofa behind him. "I don't get it," she said. "Genuinely. Explain it to me like I'm five. What's the appeal of the game? You come home from work, you sit down, and you do a second job where a woman is angry at you."
"She's not angry. She's disappointed. It's worse." John finally turned around and there was something almost evangelical in his face, the particular light of a person who has been waiting months or even years to be asked. "Okay. So the game is called Final Fantasy Fourteen—"
"There are thirteen others?"
"No, those are different. This one is an MMO, a big online world, thousands of people. You make a character and you do the story and dungeons and— okay, it sounds stupid when I say it out loud."
"It does sound very stupid."
"But it's good, Kae. It's not just the game. It's the people. It's the friends. It's the FC. It's—" He gestured helplessly at his screen, at the little blue man, at the white tiger. He tried to explain the joy and the feelings he got from the game over the last two years and could not get for the life of him able to explain it, so he gave up. "You would have to play the game to understand it."
And there it was. Michaela took it as a dare, a challenge, without John even meaning it to be.
"So let me play it."
John blinked. Actually blinked, for the first time in what she was fairly sure was ten minutes. "What?"
"You keep saying I wouldn't get it unless I played. Fine. I'll play. Prove me wrong." She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and gave him a grin. "You're always going on about how you are not addicted to it even though both of us know that you are. You keep saying it's good and that it's a community. So put your money on the game. I bet you I play for a week and I still don't get it. I bet you I'll be bored within an hour."
She expected him to wave her off. Not tonight, it's a whole thing, you need to register an account and make a character, the download is massive.
Instead John got very, very still, as if he has been handed a gift he was not expecting and is trying not to fumble it.
"You're on." He had grinned back at her. "Oh, you are so on. Give me your laptop."
"Right now?"
"You said a week and an hour. Clock is ticking, coz. But I am not counting the download and registration period in that one hour." He was already up, already dragging a second chair over, white tiger ignored as it attacks his blue man over and over. John was already vibrating at the frequency she associated with children and puppies. "This is going to be so good. I have to text Fran."
"Why do you have to text Fran?"
"Because she runs the newbie stuff and she's going to lose it." He had his phone out, his thumbs were already moving to type something. "And because if I bring someone new to the FC, I get to be smug about it for at least a month."
"I still don't know what's an FC, and John, it's nine o'clock! You're not texting some stranger about me at—"
"Don't worry, she's awake. She's always awake." He turned his phone around so Michaela could see. There was a message thread with a contact saved as Fran (healer, menace), and a little green dot to indicate that she's online. Above the reply box, three animated grey dots popped up, indicating that Fran was already typing back.
"Fine," she said. "One hour. And when I'm bored, you are buying me a kebab and never mentioning this game to me again."
"Deal," John shook her hand like they were closing on a business deal. "You are going to be so wrong about this."
Character creation took forty of the sixty minutes, which John swore was fast.
"Most people take hours," he said."My friend Thea took a whole day. She restarted twice because the eyebrows weren't right."
Michaela had not intended to take character creation this seriously. She had intended to click through it with contempt. But the game handed her a lot of choices for her character and a horrifying quantity of sliders, and something competitive and completely unfamiliar woke up in her chest that made her goes, no, my character has to look sick.
She was in the race selection menu, looking at all the different races offered for her to pick. "Which one's the tallest?"
"Roegadyn are massive, but they aren't tall. They are the widest probably. Hrothgar are big too, the female Hrothgar is actually the latest race to be released. Look, if you want tall, tall is—"
"That one." She'd rotated the camera and stopped dead, because the game had shown her a female Viera. A rabbit-human race with tall slender frames of long limbs and long bunny ears on top of the head. "Her. That one. She could kill a man."
"You're playing a woman?"
"Of course I'm playing a woman. Why would I ever want to play as a man? I don't want to look at a man for hours." She said it lightly, clicking to select the female Viera. She did not think about the hours she had mentioned and John didn't comment on it as well, but she could already see his smile from the corner of her eyes. "There's two kinds, what's the difference?"
"That's the clans. Each race will have two different clans for you to pick. For Viera, there's Rava and Veena. Rava are from the jungle so they have darker skins, and Veena are from the snowy mountains so they have lighter skins. It's basically just cosmetics."
"Rava." She'd already chosen. The skin the game offered her under the menu was a deep warm brown, umber, the exact tone of a woman who belonged somewhere green. Michaela clicked it without ceremony and moved on to the part she actually cared about. The height menu.
Michaela dragged the height slider to the top and her tall bunny woman kept going and going, and arrived somewhere the game called maximum and Michaela called correct. "Now. The ears. John, can I make the ears bigger? Can I make them longer? John, why is there a limit on anything in this—"
"Why are you like this?"
"Because if I'm going to be a rabbit, I'm going to commit."
By the time she was done, her character existed. A female Rava Viera two heads taller than the other race she'd seen in the character preview, umber skinned, white haired, white ears stood tall on top of the head, built long and lean, with an expression the game called "confident" and Michaela called "about to ruin someone's day."
Then the game asked for a name, and Michaela, who was on the clock, who was doing this to win a bet and had no intention of caring, decided to hit the random button.
It gave her Theja Golmarr.
"What in God's name is Theja?"
"It's Viera. They're all like that. It's meant to be their forest name, they've got this whole—"
"I can't even say it. I'm not going to spend hours answering to a word I can't say." She deleted it, kept the surname because it sounded like an axe going into something, and typed her own nickname in front of it. She thought about it for approximately no seconds.
Kaela Golmarr. Done.
And then John had asked her, "What class do you want to start as?" and read out the list. He explained how the game categorised it into three roles: Tank, Healer, and DPS. He'd got to the word tank and explained that a tank was the one who ran in first and made all the monsters angry so they'd hit the tank instead of everyone else—
"That one," Michaela cut him off before he could finish the rest of his explanation. "That's me. That's obviously me."
"You don't even know what any of the others—"
"I run in first. John. That's my entire personality." She spread her hands. "I'm a nurse. I stand between people and the bad thing all day. That sounds literally like my job. I want to make things angry and take the hits so no one behind me gets hurt. Give me the big axe."
There was a pause and John looked at her for a long second.
"Warrior it is," John said, and there was a note in his voice that sounded something like the sound of a delighted resignation of a man who is slowly watching his prediction come true. "Okay, okay. You're going to spawn in a city. I'm going to teleport my character over and I'm going to summon the cavalry."
"The cavalry being?"
"My healer." John grinned at his own screen. "You are going to love her. Everyone loves her. It's a whole thing. She's the best in the game out of all of us in the FC."
Michaela rolled her eyes so hard. There's a pop up menu on screen that read Begin a new game with this character? and she'd pressed OK without a second thought. She had no idea that clicking that small button would end up changing her life.
Her long white haired bunny woman was in a cutscene she didn't understand, something about a dream with a hooded man and a warrior man. Eventually Kaela opened her eyes inside a ship. The ship that John explained will bring her to the starting city in the game. "Right. Time to show me what's so good about the game."
Somewhere across the country, a piano teacher named Francesca Bridgerton lifted her hands from the piano keys. She'd been playing the piano when the text arrived. She played the piano when she couldn't sleep and she couldn't sleep most nights.
She'd reach her phone to read the message John had texted her.
John (dragoon, always dead)
Newbie incoming
She's my cousin, be nice
She thinks the game is stupid
Francesca had smiled at her phone in her dark living room and typed back.
Fran (healer, menace)
I am always nice
and then a few seconds later.
ish
and gone to her desk and logged in.
The first thing Michaela noticed once she reached the starting city was that she was apparently a plant.
There was a little green icon beside Kaela's name, a leaf that marked her to the entire population of the server as new player. John explained in the game newbies are called sprouts. It meant that veterans would be nice to her and it meant that people would go easy, offer help, and forgive mistakes.
"It's like an L-plate," he explained. "But for monster murder."
"I feel patronised."
"You'll miss it when it's gone. Enjoy your sprout status while you still got it." He pressed a tab. "Right, Fran is online. She's coming to Limsa. Just— stand there. Emote at her."
"How do I emote?"
"Type slash wave."
Michaela typed /wave. Kaela lifted one long umber arm and waved it at the empty air of a city she'd been alive for less than five minutes. She felt ridiculous. She waved again.
And then a person arrived.
Michaela had built an image of Fran the healer, Fran the menace, the angry woman who lets John die. She'd pictured something armoured or something imposing to match the reputation.
What actually came sprinting toward her at the aetheryte plaza, tiny legs pumping, was the smallest person Michaela had ever seen. A Lalafell, the dwarf race in the game. She stood only slightly taller than Kaela's knee, with round cheeks and enormous eyes. The Lalafell wore white and blue robes, with a glowing staff strapped to her back that seemed taller than she was and a wizard's hat nearly half her height.
The nameplate said Wisteria Nocturne.
Wisteria skidded to a stop, tilted her whole tiny body to look up at the six foot three bunny woman looming over her. There was a pause.
Then a line of text arrived in the corner of Michaela's screen, in a pink colour John had told her meant a private message. A tell. From one person only to her.
Wisteria: oh my god, you're enormous
Michaela laughed out loud. Actually out loud in her cousin's flat at a stranger about her rabbit woman.
"How do I answer her? John, how do I reply?"
"Press Alt and R. Then type your reply."
Kaela: I wanted to be tall
Wisteria: well, you succeeded. you succeeded SO much.
Wisteria: I'm going to have to look up at you for hours. I hope you're happy
Kaela: extremely
Wisteria: John warned me you'd be like this
Kaela: John talks a lot of nonsense. what did he say?
Wisteria: that you think the game is stupid and you're only playing to win a bet
Kaela: …okay that part is true
There was a pause. Long enough that Michaela was worried she'd been rude to a stranger in the first ninety seconds.
Then Wisteria did something. Michaela would learn the emote later, /pet, a little animation of the small Lalafell reaching her hand out and patting her tall bunny woman. Then the tiny White Mage looked up at the enormous Warrior with an expression that the low-resolution face somehow managed to make read as entirely warmly amused, and the next tell arrived.
Wisteria: good. I love a nonbeliever. I'll have you converted by the weekend.
Wisteria: let's get you to do your main scenario quests so you can unlock Sastasha
Wisteria: Kaela, you're going to run in front of me and get hit by things. does that work for you philosophically?
Kaela: that works for me on every level I have
Michaela didn't know it yet, but that was more or less the entire relationship, laid out in pink coloured text on a black background before either of them had heard the other's voice. Michaela runs in front. Fran keeps her alive.
Sastasha was a cave full of pirates and murderous aquatic creatures. Michaela was terrible at it, but it was the best hour she'd had in months.
The way it worked, John explained, was four of them: him on his blue leaping idiot (he'd pointed it out that he's a dragoon, a DPS), Kaela the tank up front, Wisteria the healer at the back, and a fourth stranger (another DPS) the game had matched them with. A quiet person playing an archer who typed "hi" at the start and "ty" at the end, and otherwise communicated exclusively through violence towards the monsters in the dungeon.
Michaela's job, per Wisteria's instructions, was to walk towards the monsters, press the button that made them angry at her specifically, and hit them until they die.
"I have a lot of buttons," Michaela said to nobody in particular. Somehow, without hearing a word, Fran had known exactly what she said.
Wisteria: you have SO many buttons. don't worry about most of them yet
Wisteria: press 1, 2, 3 in a rotation. run into the monsters and attack them. I'll keep your health topped up
Wisteria: I will not let you die. this is a promise
Kaela: what if I want to die?
Wisteria: then you'll be sorely disappointed. I'm very good at this
Fran was indeed very good at this. Michaela didn't yet understand enough to know how good, but she understood the feeling of it. She could be reckless, she ran into rooms before the others could catch up to her. She pressed the button that made everything angry—two dogs, five small pirates, and one bigger pirate with a big axe—and the whole cave turned to attack her at once.
Her health bar started plummeting, and some part of Michaela's brain immediately went oh no, the exact same lurch she felt when a patient's obs went south fast.
And then it stopped. The health bar refilled. Soft white light poured down over Kaela's enormous shoulder. At the back of the room the tiny Lalafell was standing in place, staff up, doing something rapid, and every time Michaela should have died she simply didn't, because someone very small and very unbothered had decided she wouldn't.
Wisteria: see? I got you
Wisteria: pull as many mobs as you want. I dare you
Kaela: you should not have said that
Michaela pulled the entire next hallway. Every aquatic monsters. Every pirates. Every mobs she could see on her screen. John shouted something joyful and profane from four feet away. The archer typed a single exclamation mark. And Kaela stood in the middle of it, all legs and ears at the center of the angry group of mobs.
Her health bar dancing at the edge of catastrophe and never once emptying, because the white light kept coming, steady and stubborn, from the small person at the back who had said I got you and apparently meant it wholeheartedly, as a promise.
They cleared the dungeon. The archer typed "ty" and vanished into the anonymous ocean of the server, gone from the dungeon.
Kaela: wait where did they go?
Wisteria: duty finder. it's random matchmaking. you'll play with a thousand strangers you never see again
Wisteria: it's kind of beautiful actually. everyone just helping each other through the dungeon for twenty minutes and then going home
Kaela: that's weirdly nice
Wisteria: I'm a weirdly nice person. don't tell John, he thinks I'm scary
"She's lying," John called. "She is terrifying. She let me die in a raid last week because I said her glamour was 'a lot.'"
Wisteria: in my defence, his death last week was not intentional and he caused it himself
Wisteria: Kaela, how do you feel? be honest. is it stupid?
Michaela looked at the clock. It's half past midnight. In the span of three hours, she had waved at a stranger, become a sprout, run into a cave, and been kept alive by a knee-high White Mage through what appeared to be sheer personal will.
She laughed, actually laughed out loud, more than once throughout those three hours, something she could not remember doing recently.
She should have said yeah, it's stupid, I win. Buy me a kebab, John. That was the correct move. That was the whole point of the evening. But instead she typed.
Kaela: the jury's still out
Kaela: I might need to play a bit more to be sure
Kaela: for science
A pause. Then a /cheer, the tiny Lalafell bounces energetically into the air, raising her right hand in a cheering motion with an expression of pure delight and excitement. More tell begin to arrive.
Wisteria: I KNEW IT. John owes me a kebab
Kaela: wait, why does he owe YOU a kebab?
Wisteria: we had a side bet. I said you'd be hooked in one dungeon and I got it right
Wisteria: add me on discord and I'll send you a beginner's guide before your next shift, nurse
Wisteria: get some sleep, you did very well tonight. genuinely, for a nonbeliever
Michaela added her on Discord. Of course she added her on Discord. She'd have added her on anything Fran wanted her to.
The username was fran.wisteria, and the profile picture was a photograph of piano keyboard shot directly from above. Michaela looked at it in the back of the taxi for slightly too long before she typed.
Kaela
Hi
It's the tall idiot
She got back a reply, almost instantly.
Fran
Hi tall idiot
Welcome to the rest of your life 🌱
She stared at her phone and smiled. She had lost the bet. She never bought John his kebab, and he never asked her to. In light of everything, it seemed like something she was very glad to have been wrong about.