We turn up at their door three hours before their next shift starts, apparently the usual time for us to start this sort of revel. We knock, and then stand looking at each other as we hear a clatter and a string of thuds.

Alex opens the door with an out-of-breath “Heyy!”

“How’s it going?” I ask, as we file into their quarters.

“A good sleep, and then a bit of preparation for some good times with friends? I’ve had worse times.”

Destiny calls from the couch, “He means to say he’s been hovering close to the door for the past half-hour.”

The intro music for the game begins playing from the other room, and we pile in, onto the couch, and each grab a controller.

The first few rounds go by without much discussion apart from joking about particularly disastrous mistakes, as we each are trying to get into the flow of the game. Alex sticks to one of the fantasy sword characters, but the rest of us switch around and enjoy the variety of characters in the game.

As we get into the flow of things, I decide to return to the topic that hadn’t really left my mind since it last came up. “So, what does it mean to figure oneself out?”

My question, meant to be lighthearted and simple, stuns everyone into thought for a full half-second, all of their characters even pausing mid-battle as their inputs halt for the moment.

“I mean, some of it is pretty easy,” Alex breaks the silence, as our gameplay properly resumes. “Like, it was super simple to figure out that I love this character, and she fits a pattern I’ve followed from one piece of fiction to another. It’s just part of me that I like her archetype.”

“Most of it isn’t quite that simple, though.” Sylvie counters. “It took ages for me to figure out I was bi. I just kept getting confused with all the talk of straight or gay, because both made sense to me. God, I wish I’d known in highschool. Sooo many crushes I could’ve tried to act on, if I’d just known a bit sooner.”

“What part of yourself are you wondering about, though, Ash?” Alex bounces his question back to me, along with a particularly nasty uppercut of his character’s sword.

“The part which can block your sword, for one,” I giggle. “Also just gender stuff, I guess?” It feels super awkward to ask this – Ash doesn’t have any problems, at all. All of the problems are on Caleb’s side. I feel like an intruder into myself. Why am I even bringing this stuff up? Caleb’s life belongs out there. I should focus on Ash right now. Caleb can only mess up and ruin the whole game. The larger game, not the one I am currently losing to Destiny's luck and well-timed combos.

“I’ve always felt like I belonged as a girl, myself,” Destiny replies, glancing at me. “But my brother... he really hated it. When we were young, just us two, he always shunned being the princess, always acted the knight in shining armour. And so many other little things, as well. Took a while to actually figure out his heart, but it still worked out in the end. Though, I'm the one in armour nowadays.”

“In my school,” Sylvie says, “There was one kid who always didn’t quite fit as a boy. She’d be totally into normal guy things, but never quite like a guy would’ve? It was weird. When she came out, the entire school just accepted it, it was just so obvious in retrospect. She’s still the crazy dinosaur girl, if you get me, you only need to mention feathers and she’ll start describing the coolest and most bizarre facts. Like they’re genetically fractal or some crazy thing like that, I forget the details.” She sniffed in thought. “I need to write her, and get me a pile of curated cool dinosaur info. But she didn’t, you know, change at all. Same soul, same mind, same body, same person. Just a different name and a slight tweak to the juices, right? And ‘Jennifer’ fit her perfectly – I know that some people didn’t even hear that she was transitioning, they just heard her name and understood what was up.”

“But...” I begin, then pause, pulling off a big combo on Alex’s character. “What does it mean to ‘feel like’ a guy, or girl?” Don’t get me wrong, Ash’s body feels great. But am I feeling gender, or body, or what is even the difference?

“I got that answer,” Alex says, leaning his head back as his character gets thrown off the map. “I never really understood that, either. Being a guy wasn’t part of me. I tried being a girl, a bit, after hearing about this stuff. Didn’t really work better. I’m just me. Am I non-binary? You tell me. Letting people assume I’m a guy doesn’t get on my nerves. Letting my body assume I’m a guy doesn’t get on my nerves. I guess I got lucky?”

“Do you want me to use they/them, Alex?” I ask, trying and failing to avoid Destiny’s massive ultimate attack beam.

“Ehh, that just tends to make people overthink.” He lands an uppercut swing onto Destiny as her ultimate wears off, sending her bouncing around the arena. “You want to try using he/him for a bit?”

“Um?” I try to think, getting punished with a groundslam by Sylvie. I had just told Sylvie I didn’t want to try messing with my pronouns, but... this talk was making me question some of my assumptions. Like, who even was I at heart? When I was Caleb? Did I have another name just waiting to be me so perfectly? I couldn’t figure out a name that would fit me. And I had tried, a lot – Caleb definitely wasn’t me.

“Wow, he just totally failed to avoid that,” Alex says tentatively, “He was thinking about a hard question, though.”

Nope. “Nope. Please no. She/her.” Nopenopenope.

“You got it, sis,” Alex bops into my shoulder with his, without taking his focus off the screen. “Sorry if that hurt at all.”

“I’ll be fine, I get what you were doing. Thanks for helping me out.”

“Hey, we’re in this together,” Des chimes in. “Least we can do is find happiness for each other.”

Sylvie activates her ultimate attack, a shockwave knocking all of us off the arena and claiming a victory. “... unless it is a round of Brother Combat, then you’re all suckers and you’re going down.”

== * ==

So it turns out that Sylvie is an absolute monster with Doctor Minerva. We manage to take her down once, after that first victory, and only by me and Des sacrificing our characters to give Alex enough power. After that victory, though, she rejoined us as we randomised our way through the time. Her short stint of dominance was awe-inspiring, to be honest. She could do things that looked frame-perfect, at will. I honestly am not sure if she wasn’t being helped by the game, or if whatever simulation was running her character had just tripped its way into perfection. It is just crazy enough that I don’t think anyone would’ve written it as part of a story. Nobody complains that they can’t find their groove and then manages to pull that sort of mastery off.

Even with that, though, our small party was a blast. The one downside was that I was just genre-savvy enough to realise that something was going to start happening, very soon.