Story code: ST-001004
Part 2: The Wrong Person Kept Answering
Derek only meant to fill ten seconds of stream chatter, but the second he asked Rina for the trick behind Noah’s headset setup, the whole station tightened around one missing answer. She had taken the public credit in front of the warm-up row, Eli was still the one every practical question kept sliding toward, and now a simple headset explanation was hanging in the middle of the tournament hall where anybody could hear whether her story held up.
Maya stopped beside the endcap table with a sleeve of spare wristbands in one hand and a marker in the other. She had no reason to insert herself, and she did not. She just stayed where floor runners always stayed when something looked like it might delay a match.
Derek held the mic toward Rina. “For the gear nerds at home. Was it drivers? Port mapping? Bad cable?”
Rina smiled the way people smiled when they needed one more second than the room wanted to give them. “It was a mix of things. You know how these setups get.”
Derek laughed, expecting something cleaner. “Right, but what was the fix?”
Rina tapped the case again. “Mostly being organized before the rush.”
That answer sounded good from ten feet away, but not from one. Coach Janelle Price had moved back toward the station, and she was not looking at Derek anymore. She was looking at Noah’s monitor, the headset wire, and the adapter hanging from the front USB slot.
“Organized is not a fix,” Coach Price said. “Round call in twelve.”
Noah lifted one hand from the mouse. “My teammates still sound far away.”
Rina turned to him at once. “Try the volume wheel.”
“It is up.”
“Then check Discord.”
Noah stared at the screen. “We’re not on Discord. We’re on tournament comms.”
A couple of players from the next row glanced over. Derek lowered the mic a little, not enough to stop listening. Maya saw Eli shift his weight but stay quiet.
Coach Price pointed with her pen. “Who tuned that station?”
Rina answered first again. “I did the setup.”
Coach Price’s voice stayed flat. “Then fix the distance issue.”
Rina leaned over Noah’s shoulder and clicked through two tabs too quickly, then a third. She touched the headset wheel, unplugged the jack from the splitter, plugged it back in, and looked at Noah. “Try now.”
Noah listened. “Now I lost comms completely.”
The line of people behind Derek thinned as other matches got called, but the people nearest Station 14 stopped pretending not to watch. Maya had seen this kind of silence on the hall floor before. It was not a crowd speech kind of silence. It was the sharper kind, where everyone suddenly cared which adult actually knew what they claimed to know.
Rina straightened and looked toward Eli without fully turning her head. “You moved something after I set it, didn’t you?”
Eli was standing beside the chair now, cable tie in one hand. “No.”
“You were under the desk.”
“Because the left side was dead.”
Derek’s eyebrows went up at that. “Wait, so what fixed that part?”
Rina kept her face aimed toward Derek, but her next words went at Eli. “Tell Noah to refresh audio.”
Eli did not move. “You can tell him.”
Noah looked up at both of them. “Can somebody just get it back? We’re almost up.”
Coach Price checked the clock clipped to her board. “One person talks. One person fixes. Pick now.”
Rina put a hand out toward the adapter as if claiming territory. “Fine. Noah, refresh audio.”
He did. The headset stayed dead.
Maya saw Eli’s eyes go to the ports for half a second, then to the splitter, then back to Noah’s monitor. It was the same fast scan she had watched all morning whenever some station glitched. He knew the layout by sight. Rina, still occupying the front of the moment, asked Noah three questions in a row.
“Game sound?”
“No.”
“Lobby sound?”
“No.”
“Mic loopback?”
“I can’t hear anything.”
Coach Price stepped closer. “Which sequence did you use on this build?”
Rina’s hand stayed on the case handle. “Standard sequence.”
“What standard sequence?”
Rina gave a short laugh with no room in it. “Come on. Adapter, headset, settings. The usual.”
Coach Price did not nod. “In what order?”
Nothing in the hall actually went quiet, but around that station the nearby noise seemed to slide backward. Chairs still scraped. A caster still yelled from the far stage. Someone dropped a controller shell two rows over. Even so, Maya could hear the pause clearly because Rina had been talking without one for the last half hour.
Eli said nothing. He just held the cable tie and waited.
Derek lowered his mic all the way now. “Is there a special order?”
Noah answered before anyone else could. “Eli always does it in a specific order or my mic doubles and the left side dies.”
Coach Price turned from Rina to Eli with the kind of direct movement that changed a room before anybody admitted it had changed. “Show me the order,” she said.
Rina cut in fast. “He helps, but I manage the whole process.”
Coach Price did not look back at her. “I didn’t ask who manages. I asked who knows.”
Maya watched Rina’s hand tighten on the case handle while Eli stepped toward Noah’s station at last. The headset was still dead, Derek was still standing there with a dead stream question in his hand, and now the only thing that mattered in front of staff, family, and half a watching row was whether Eli could bring the setup back in a way Rina never had to explain.