"Pullman. Earth to Janis Pullman! Wake up please!"

I snapped out my train of thought as I looked up toward my team's head coach, Kalysta Rockwell. She stood there with an amused grin. I shuffled around in my seat a bit to regain my composure. My chair was all the way on the left of the room along with three other ones to my right based on our roles in Umbra Warriors.

Top. Jungler. Bottom. Support.

As the starting top laner, this meant I always sat on the farthest left in our seating arrangements. My other teammates like Madison Shard would sit beside me in their given roles. We applied the same seating setup when it came time to play on stage at a tournament or event.

In our scrim room, we had super, really high-end computers with the best keyboards, gaming chairs and other essentials gamers splurged on to show off their hobby. Think computer lab, but this was a "professional" one meant for highly competitive gaming. For a professional gaming team, companies sponsored and hooked us up with their products.

"Are you OK, Janis? You seemed less focused than usual," Kalysta asked endearingly.

"Uh, yeah. I'm fine. I'm sorry," I tried to keep looking at her straight in the eye as I said that. My mind was elsewhere.

Team: Good Game Girls (GGG) Player: Kalysta "HistoryRocks" Rockwell Role: Head Coach

A former history professor at the local university here in Pacific City, Kalysta decided to opt out of her tenured career to pursue coaching professionally. When she was not busy lecturing or grading papers, Kalysta had an obsession with Umbra Warriors in her spare time. There were rumors that many classes got canceled because Kalysta was too busy finishing up a few extra ranked matches here and there.

As a player, she rose up to a decent ranking on the ladder. But when gaming organizations reached out to her, Kalysta realized she enjoyed coaching others when it came to Umbra Warriors more than anything else. Her teaching experience proved to be a natural segue into coaching a bunch of college-aged girls like ourselves.

She approached coaching as she did when it came to teaching. She studied the material intensely and wanted to impart her strategies and knowledge to us. Kalysta treated us as her special students.

A perfect fit in all honesty.

"Daydreaming is fine on your downtime, but the scrimmage is about to start," Kalysta uttered in a strict tone.

"Yes, ma'am," I replied softly as I faced toward my computer monitor.

"We've been over this before, Janis. Please just call me Ms. Rockwell," she sighed and continued to walk around the room. "Ma'am makes me feel old..."

I never did find out her age (she refused to tell any of us), but all of my teammates and I suspected she had to be in her 40s. She took care of herself and looked like somewhere in her mid-20s.

Objectively, she was a beautiful woman by society's standards.

Tall, slender, gorgeous free-flowing hair and chestnut-brown skin from her Native American roots. In fact, Kalysta grew up in the same Native American community as my mother. At one point, the two even did some tribal activities together — what a small world.

Aside from being into anything having to do with history and Umbra Warriors, Kalysta kept to herself. Interestingly enough. She mentioned how she was married at one point (they even had a daughter who she does not like to talk about who lived with her ex instead of her).

Something Kalysta emphasized a lot was how she chose her careers over everything else. Like history demonstrated, everything had an appropriate price to pay or something like that. It sounded poignant when Kalysta was coaching us one evening.

When I first moved into this gaming house, Kalysta and I hit it off pretty well immediately. She took me under her wing and really tried to mentor me enthusiastically. She always mentioned how bright I was. Maybe because I was part of the same tribe as hers by blood. Nevertheless, she always reminded me about how I had a lot of potential in Umbra Warriors and life beyond professional gaming.

Whenever I had questions or needed to chat about other matters, Kalysta took the time to let me vent to her. I truly appreciated what she brought to Good Game Girls. I thought of Kalysta as both my head coach and as a friend.

"OK, we have about five minutes before our match begins," Kalysta mumbled to herself as she paced around the room looking through her notes. "Wait. Where did Ngoc go?"

I was too busy fretting over what had happened at the bridge with Yuuko earlier to realize that our starting squad was not wholly present. A few minutes before our scrim was going to start no less.

"No idea," Madison said with no emotion. Typical of her. Nothing unusual. She sounded like a robot at times, but her mind was always focused when it was time to game.

"I think she went back to her room to get something," said Selena Zafiro Gonzalez, our starting support player who sat at the end of the table.

She had caramel-colored skin that glistened in bright sunlight. Long black hair that was shiny like silk that shimmered with other colors at the right angles. A cute little nose with an equally cute mouth. Intense eyes with a brown tone like an artist's palette. But her appearance was deceiving. This was a chick who had a mouth ready to say what was needed.

Selena was a Latina gal with a tough upbringing, but she was deep down a nice girl despite growing up in a rough neighborhood. Her friends always referred to her as "Doll" because they always thought she would make something of herself. After all, dolls usually increased in value over time.

Plus, like her Zafiro namesake (Spanish for sapphire), whether during a scrim or on stage, Selena had to wear her sapphire blue bandana. She always wanted to represent her roots no matter what.

Team: Good Game Girls (GGG) Player: Selena Zafiro "Muñeca" Gonzalez Role: Starting Support In Umbra Warriors, Selena played her role well. No matter the situation, Selena put a lot of stock in helping her teammates with what she could do. Growing up in Rolling Hills where it was mostly small-town vibes and farming country, I did not have to go through what Selena did. Selena was a beautiful part from an otherwise ugly environment. A broken home forced her to grow up fast, but that did not break her spirit. She vowed to make something of herself.

Fortunately for her, she was able to play soccer. You did not need to be rich to play as long as you had a ball to kick around in the neighborhood. A narrow alleyway with a few other kids playing some soccer sufficed to pass the time. Just enough to make the kids forget, even for a moment, how lousy everything technically was. Selena continued to play soccer.

She developed an athletic build because of it. She perhaps had the potential to play in college and beyond. At the very least, she was up to snuff to play high-level varsity at her local high school. Before matches of Umbra Warriors, she often went outside to kick a ball around as a warmup to get her head in the game.

Eventually, she turned to Umbra Warriors by discovering the game at her local library one fateful day. A regular visitor was playing a match, and she got instantly hooked the moment the regular taught her the basics. Her family did not have the money to buy her own computer, and she practiced the game when she could.

The librarians were friendly enough to let her play there as long as she was quiet. After a while, she really found her niche and was quickly discovered by our gaming organization. She saw people she loved and cared about literally die in the streets from violence and other tragedies, so my simple life in Rolling Hills was nothing but roses by comparison.

With being a pro at Umbra Warriors, she earned enough to send over to her family. No matter what Selena went through up to this point, I was glad she was now my teammate on Good Game Girls. She did not have the easiest path, but she still pushed on through.

"Ngoc, there you are!" Kalysta snapped at Ngoc Nguyen, our Vietnamese bottom laner as she returned to the scrim room with her makeup kit. Ngoc was a skinny girl with short hair. "You shouldn't disappear like that!"

"Yeah, yeah! I know," Ngoc chimed back in a rude tone as she applied the last touches of her makeup to her face. Team: Good Game Girls (GGG) Player: Ngoc "NGOC-OUT" Nguyen Role: Starting Bottom Laner

Compared to Selena, truthfully, I did not care for Ngoc in the same vein. Ngoc was a self-proclaimed, bratty, spoiled diva. Arrogant. Egotistical. Selfish... Well, for a cutesy Asian girl, she was the definition of someone who looked great on the surface until you saw what was underneath...

Ngoc was Vietnamese for "gem," so her fans often praised her looks. She put up a huge act at events and tried to behave nicely when the public was watching her. Behind the scenes, she showed her ugly side underneath the glitz and glamor. I just thought of Ngoc as too fake and unpleasant to work with, but she had talent as our starting bottom laner.

Whereas Selena had actual hardships in her life to overcome, Ngoc had a straightforward path with basically little resistance. Her family worked hard to provide every possible resource they could for Ngoc.

She had a support structure. She had stability. She had this and that. But instead of being grateful, she was more inclined to think it was just the bare minimum for her. Ngoc thought the world revolved around her.

The annoying aspects or not, Ngoc performed brilliantly in our scrims and events as far as gameplay goes. I just wished her attitude was better overall. Everything was about her. She thought too highly of herself. She wanted the glory just for herself as well. It hurt our team chemistry and morale when Ngoc turned toxic.

"OK, headsets on. Let's get this scrim with STORM underway," Kalysta motioned for us to get ready.

Gaming headsets on, our fingers were warmed up, and we all sat there staring at our screens waiting for our scrim opponent to log into the private lobby. Kalysta stood behind us with her notebook prepared to call out her plan of attack and coach us through this scrim.

We were all ready to play some Umbra Warriors.