The Legend of Juan Deag

Myna leaned back in his chair as he waited for the map to load for Counterstrike. Then he yelped slightly while trying to steady himself, as he had leaned just a touch too far back. Out here in the islands, his connection to the servers should have been absolutely insufficient. As it happened, the Manta Carlos Islands also happened to be highly magical, and therefore trivial things like nigh-incomprehensible data speeds were just a matter of finding somebody with the right set of skills and paying that somebody a decent sum. Most people would have paid a mint just to avoid the customer service of large ISPs, so Myna considered this just another perk of his new place in life. Taking another swig of iced tea, he leaned in slightly to the screen of his laptop as the map loaded. It was Dust II, because it was always Dust II.

As a middle school teacher, Myna had sadly few opportunities to meet many fellow gamers. To be fair, that sort of thing was less-called for on an island where the idle dreams of escapism were quite real. However, there was always a call for video games, no matter what level of magical development the world around him achieved. For one thing, people weren't so willing to curse as colorfully in person. Idly, he flipped a mental coin and decided to pick [T]errorist, but really it was what he was going to do all along. "Well, this'll take my mind off my day, I suppose," he said to no one in particular, since his in-game mic wasn't on.

Sometimes Myna wondered whether wars would one day be fought like games of CS:GO; people sitting in chairs controlling robotic soldiers. Bots could shoot with the greatest precision and foresight at full potential, but real-time tactics were a matter of some difficulty still. Currently, the smartest non-sentient A.I. had just managed to beat a human grandmaster at Go, and unfortunately, they tended to gain sentience when given enough intelligence for battlefield decisions, which went against the point really. And was a peace gained through virtualizing violence truly peace? Perhaps to destroy war would be to destroy some essential part of humanity (i.e. the part of humanity that made excellent video games).

Faced with such heavy thoughts, Myna did the only thing that a mere human could be expected to do and bought the most expensive weapon he could in warmups. He then immediately began spraying his nearest ally in the head, wondering if his poor victim had the headphones turned up too high for that sort of thing.

Myna stood over the corpse of his teammate. What had gone wrong? He'd only meant to give him a little love-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap with the Negev, and yet...

Too late, he had realized that friendly fire was a thing in this game. The teacher had spent far too much time playing Team Fortress 2 as a way of bonding with his students that he'd forgotten that spraying your teammates was not an acceptable greeting. Immediately, a concisely worded questioning of his actions sounded through the laptop speakers, after which he quickly plugged in his earphones in case anything more colorful was said. Then he prepared to initiate voice chat so that he could apologize and give account of his actions.

Never having been the type to rebind his keys, it took Myna a precious few seconds to figure out which key he had bound his voice chat to. He was somewhat dimly aware that the rest of his team was getting mowed down rushing B-tunnels, but he didn't think about it too much; birds sing, fish swim, the DMV sucks, and idiots rush B-tuns without flashes. Since it was pistol round, it might even work, but there was always the risk that people would continue doing so long after it became a poor idea. It was one of those immutable facts of life that even the magic of the Manta Carlos could not alter, for such an action would be akin to changing the universe.

"Oh, 'V', of course...", muttered Myna as a well-placed revolver shot down mid finally managed to blow his head off. He had, of course, had plenty of warning from the three missed shots which had sounded off earlier, but knowing one's keybindings was important in the long run. Now then...

Holding down the voice chat key, he said, very clearly into his laptop mic, "Whoops." And all was well. He could get a Sawed-off next round, maybe.