~I Refuse To Find A Speedgame At AGDQ!~

~I Refuse To Find A Speedgame At AGDQ!~
Chapter 1

She saved. She crowd funded. She begged her parents with the prospect of pay back. It seemed that Jacob South’s mother had done everything other than beg on the street to save up for her son’s full week stay at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Jacob was unemployed and living off of his parent’s dime already, so it seemed only natural that they should pay for his personal vacations as well. He had looked forward to this moment for a long, long time. Double, triple checking his bank account on his monitor, the lovely numbers he had done absolutely nothing to earn stared back at him.

The event in question was none other than the week long speedrunning marathon event, Awesome Games Done Quick; or AGDQ as it's known among people who like acronyms. For a week straight, speedrunners from all over fly in to one place and complete video games as fast as possible; all for charity. The last couple of GDQ's yielded over a million dollars in charity and with the hype already surrounding Buzzfeed, it would be safe to say that this year would be no different.  All proceeds go to the amazing medical movement Doctors Without Borders and the definitely less amazing Prevent Cancer Foundation.

However, Jacob really didn’t give a shit about any of that. “Actually, yeah, you’re right, I really DON’T give a shit about any of that” said Jacob out loud on the shuttle from the airport to the hotel, to nobody in particular. But Jacob wasn’t alone in feeling this: in fact, NOBODY really gave a shit about the charity aspect of GDQ events anymore, excluding the majority of casual viewers who think that all the hype is in the stream room and the GDQ staff higher-ups who act as ‘uranium anchors’, holding down the GDQ brand and lining their own pockets with overpay.

But this was neither here nor there, as it had little to do with why Jacob was attending the event in the first place. Ever since being introduced to speedrunning streams on Twitch TV by his good friend Ralphie, he’d been hooked. All day long, Jacob sat in his room, mesmerized by the insane technical spectacles that overflowed from his Following page on Twitch. Between Puncayshun speeding through Super Mario 64 in record time, Witwix becoming the Boshy just as fast as Flash Player would let him, and Trihex playing Super Mario Maker and then actually that’s it, he was completely addicted.

As a kid, Jacob had always thought he was a cut above the rest of his friends on the block when it came to video game skills. But with his eyes opened to these insane gaming gods on Twitch, he realized that he had to step up his game, literally. Thanks. Anyway, Jacob snapped back to reality and looked out the window of the crowded shuttle bus, barely able to make out the Crown Plaza logo on a large building just a few miles down the road. He had gotten so lost in thought that he’d neglected to even take in the people sitting near him.

Near the front of the shuttle in the seat closest to the driver sat a younger man in his 20’s, dressed in a plain black button-up and dark blue slim fitting jeans, quietly gazing out the window and listening to music. “Well, this guy can’t be one of the marathon attendees.” thought Jacob, “I mean, this shuttle is cool, but I wish there were a way to find all the geeks and gamers in the crowd.”  Opting to shift his gaze to the back of the shuttle instead, his eyes were immediately drawn towards two young adults seated near the corner of the bus next to the window. One of them sported a Fallout t-shirt and long, curly hair, while the other wore a Dry-Bones snapback and a plain black shirt with the “Rockstar” logo front and center on the chest.

After briefly listening in on their conversation, he realized they were discussing some new improvements and strategies that were recently implemented in a Kingdom Hearts game, where you clip out of bounds and use a unique hovering technique and a number of different items to skip a major section of the game and load the… But Jacob didn’t care. He thought Kingdom Hearts was a bad speedgame anyway. At least, that’s what his friends had told him, and they seemed to know a lot more about what constituted a good and bad speedgame than he did. In fact, this was one of the main reasons that Jacob desperately wanted to attend a GDQ event in the first place: to find the perfect speedgame that was right for him. He had spent hours upon hours searching online to find something that appealed to him directly, and was “easy to learn, but hard to master” as they say. He came up with nothing, ultimately. So many games he had considered, all of which had some sort of flaw that eventually ended up driving him away from it. He thought that maybe, if he could attend a GDQ in person and observe countless different individuals and groups to see what each of their games had to offer, he would finally find “The One” and could speedrun in peace. At least, that was the plan anyway. As the shuttle pulled up the main entrance of the Crown Plaza Hotel and Jacob lugged his suitcase out of the side compartment, he had no idea what this next week had in store for him.

The sliding glass doors hummed gently as they opened, allowing the shuttle occupants entrance into the hotel. Jacob looked around the lobby. Somehow it seemed even more magical in person than it did on the hotel’s website; the shimmer and sparkle of the huge chandelier as well as the polished floors and stair banisters made it feel almost like a dream.

Jacob walked to the front desk with luggage in hand and checked in: he wasn’t sharing a room with anyone else, but grabbed a few extra keycards anyway. If what Ralphie had said was true, he just might run into some hot speed-grills and “get lucky”. Whatever that meant. The last time a girl had touched Jacob’s genitals was when his mother was changing his diaper at age 4, and even she thought it was fucking gross. Jacob tucked the extra cards away into his back pocket, grabbed his luggage, and started to make his way down the main hallway to find his room.

Going further into the hotel, Jacob began to see more and more people who looked like they were here for AGDQ. He wasn’t even close to the stream room yet, but already he began to feel ostracized as different cliques of people loitering around the hallways sized him up and silently judged him. “Wow, it’s just like on the internet!” Jacob’s internal dialogue remarked.

He turned the corner to another hallway, where hopefully he would find his room. Number 169, just like the sex number except with a 1 in front of it. Apparently Jacob was a bit preoccupied with his thoughts, because as soon as he took the sharp right into the hallway he instantly ran head on into someone, the collision knocking both of them a few feet away from each other in a comical yet cool looking way (like in  Naruto).

“Oh shit, I’m sorry” Jacob gasped, “I was walking way too fast! This was totally my fault. Here, let me help you up.”
As he stretched out his hand to assist the unfortunate soul whom he had knocked over, Jacob got a good look at him for the first time. “S-sorry, I uhh didn’t s-see you it’s no big deal…” the man on the floor muttered. Actually, now that he saw his saw his face and heard him talk, Jacob thought that something about him was awfully familiar….

 “Hey,” Jacob said, struggling to pull him off the ground, “aren’t you ZFG? The speedrunner?”

Finally up off the floor, ZFG looked Jacob square in the face and gently mumbled the age old words: “Ocarina of Time.” Classic.

“Whoah, it really is you! I love watching your streams man, you rock! Your casual consistency with the wasteland HESS, your optimal movement and text mashing, the way you finger your control stick… it’s just so…”

Jacob wasn’t prepared for the way he was feeling. He had seen pictures of ZFG on twitter before, but he could never have imagined how it would feel to rape Jayson’s body with his eyes in person. Truly, this man was cut of the finest Esposito stock, the pinnacle of his family bloodline. Jacob shook himself out of it, we was becoming too infatuated with the beautiful hunk of man meat in front of him. He needed to remain pure and stay on course with his ultimate mission here; to find his perfect speedgame.

“S-so anyway, what have you been up to lately?”

“Oh, you know, the usual” ZFG replied matter of factly. “Just finished routing OoT 100% for the third time this month.”

“But it’s only the 2nd?”

ZFG just stared at him blankly. Jacob stared back. “Wow, this is really fucking awkward. I don’t want to be here anymore. I hope some well-timed comedic event happens right now to help advance the plot” Jacob thought. Just then, a door swung open a few yards down the hallway, revealing the only black person that Jacob had seen in the hotel yet. In fact, this was the first black person that Jacob had seen in his entire life. It had been only a few hours since most of the people at the event had arrived, but this guy seemed like he was already wasted.

“Haha, my nigga Jay. What’s good my man? Come on back to the room, Pheenoh just got back with the UV Blue and Dr. P hookup. And you know what they say Jay, nigga drunk, nigga cuck.”

“That doesn’t rhyme, Sean. It has to rhyme for it to be funny.” said ZFG, obviously annoyed. “Besides, I can’t I have to practice for my 100% run that’s coming up soon.”

“AAaaaahhh jay, you’re no fun man…. Mother fucker…. Wait.. isn’t your run like fuckin’ 4 days from now?”

But ZFG had already sprinted in the opposite direction towards what Jacob could only assume was the practice room.

“fuck! That’s classic Jay, man. Classic fuckin Jayson.”

Sean turned his attention towards Jacob.

“Hey uhhhh what about you? You look alright, want to have some fun? We got a smash setup in here too.”

Jacob perked up at that remark. He hated smash, but if there was any sort of setup in the room that probably meant that there was a chance to possibly learn about some new speedgames…. He hadn’t even gotten the chance to stop by his room yet, but he didn’t want to pass up this opportunity.

“Yeah sure, why not.” Jacob shrugged

“Hell fuckin’ yeah lets go! Who are you?”

Man, this guy was really fucked up. “My name’s Jacob.”

“Jacob? That’s like a second Jay! Fucking Mini Jay over here, I love it im not gay though”

“Nice to meet you too. Sean, right?”

He squinted at Jacob from the doorway and his face suddenly got very serious. “I. Am. The Nigga.” And with that, he receded into the room, leaving the door open as a sign of his previous invitation. Jacob sighed to himself as he headed towards the door.

“This is going to be an interesting week.”