[Day 6] Delivery Word from Teddy Ursa to The Gamemakers

As the bird flies off it’s honestly kind of confused. The boy may have told it to go to The Gamemakers, but who is “The Gamemakers?” That’s not a tribute in its memory, so how is it supposed to compute this new information?

(Can birds even compute? Do Delivery Words have a B.S. in Computer Science? The world may never know.)

The only thing that seems reasonable is to return to home base for more information, so that’s what it does, diving into the recesses of the jungle and through a hidden passageway in the ground. The lighting turns from pitch black to fluorescent beige, and just as the bird begins to wonder whether it’ll spend the rest of its life hurtling down this passageway it lands.

The lab technician on his lunch break shouts with alarm as a bird lands with a large thump on the table. It seems to be alive though, just a bit dazed and confused.

“The fuck are you doing here, lil guy?” With furrowed eyebrows he pokes at the photo wrapped around the bird’s leg, untying and unfurling the item.

Oh, shit. Okay so, lab technicians normally aren’t trained with what to do when a tribute sends the GMs a manifesto from inside the arena. Is there protocol for this? Do they ignore it? Do they give it to the Gamemakers (they’re very busy after all)? Should he be handling this with gloves? Should he sell this on the black market instead? No, not the last one, at least for now. After speaking quietly to the girl next to him he resolves to just give it to the Gamemakers. Because screw it, why not?

What’s the worst that could happen?

---

Whatever Callie had felt about the mutt itself, she has to give credit to Charlie for a fantastic entrance. She keeps her eyes on the screen as she can feel in her bones that the death of Hero Marvray is near. Her fingers move along the control panel, tapping away at both her organization pad and the controls for the arena, but her eyes stare with intent as Hero leaves a mark on Charlie’s mutt and the mutt rears herself and--her name is called with the softest of voices but with an urgency that she has not heard in a long time. “What?” she responds rather sharply to see a lowly lab technician standing there with something in his hand. “This better be good,” she mutters as she turns back and sees Hero Marvray floating in the ocean, dead.

Fury has no control over Callie as she realizes that not only has she been interrupted from her work, but that it is a technician who has deprived her of seeing the death of the district 4 male. She grabs the square from the technician’s hand and glowers at him, daring him to say a word. The technician appears to have understood that message as he wastes no time to leave the space, and Callie turns back to the square to read the writing on it. Her eyes scan back and forth, and whatever anger they once held changes to laughter. “This boy is more stupid than I thought,” she chuckles as she hands the message to Charlie.

---

The image that Callie hands to her is slightly crumpled from what seems to be a journey through the earth, and when Charlie’s eyes glance at the signature for a moment she just thinks Who?

After all, she’s just finished studying five years of her life in action as the Serpentine screams in anguish. Her mind hasn’t had time to even recover from the fact that she has three back-to-back meetings on proper end of day procedure because apparently no one remembers that each night they need to reset the star simulation not the moon phases (not to mention the Visual Dev team requesting a change in Pathfinder bug hue because “Gold is the in color, Purple is very 64th” and they still haven’t been able to find the source of why the anthem’s pixels keep dying. Cam Dialate doesn’t need to have her pupils dotted with white, that’s just unnerving). And at the end of the day, she’s down two more tribs, both at the top of her favorites list.

So forgive her for forgetting a boy who wanted to do nothing but heal others this entire time. Which is illogical, and which he did not show in his Training Session, if she remembers correctly (was he Speech and Debate #1? She thinks so).


“Hmm,” she mumbles, passing the letter to Amethyst.

---

By the time the message got to Amethyst, her attention had already flitted back and forth between the comments of her co-workers and the numerous screens in front of her half a dozen times, to the point that when Charlie finally passes it over to her, she’d already mostly forgotten even what the whole fuss was about.

In her defense, she had just gone through the process of trying and failing to maneuver yet another giant chicken into something resembling a threat, and then had promptly squandered that when the unexpected, ironic death of the Dialate girl had momentarily sent a wave of shock through her system. By the time she had regained her bearings enough to once again take control, the chicken had already darted a quarter of the way around the arena, its giant size and speed coming in handy at, of course, the most inopportune moment possible.

By the time the gargantuan piece of poultry had once again been placed under her full control, the remaining tributes had scattered, rendering the entire point of introducing it yet again moot.

So focused was she on this debacle that she had barely noticed Marvray’s cannon firing, courtesy of yet another one of Charlie’s prized muttations, and the subject of a delivery word message directly to them had barely skimmed the surface of her consciousness until the crumpled piece of parchment reached her hands.

She skims it once, twice, before an exasperated sigh escapes her lungs. “All I see is another prime example of an unworthy tribute trying to act tough,” she exclaimed. “If this boy had managed to kill Namething during one of his many attempts, even if he had taken someone else’s life for that matter - then, and only then, might I have bothered to care about what he thinks.”

With one quick toss, the letter goes flying over her shoulder, and the sharp of ear might have managed to pick up the faint muttering of upstarts who thought themselves better than they actually were.

---

An hour later, Charlie Garnet notices it still lying on the floor, and silently takes it for her own. Delicately, she places it on her desk, lying next to Adelaide Throes’ poison vial.

Unlike Callie or Amethyst, if anything she’s intrigued. He’s stupid, yes. But also, somehow, somewhat, brave.

Thoughts trace back to Kirito, even though she doesn’t want them to.

If he wants to prove that he “deserves to be here” he’ll need to channel this energy into his actions instead. But this Theodore Ursa is much different from the one that stood in front of her not even a week ago. An improvement, she thinks. Whether it’ll allow him his life, she’ll have to see for herself.