girl." And then he staggered over to the bed and fell face first onto it. "Close the door for me?"
"Night, Jeff."
"Night, Rhaven."
His words made her feel better, but they also made her more determined. These people wanted someone to hate? Well, she was more than willing to give them one. The moment she reached her desk, she began going through the automatically moderated comments and banning anyone with intentional hate speech. Not the accidental use of letters that just happened to be in the middle of a word, or a phrase that was clearly a joke between friends. She was looking for the comments that were truly evil.
That was how they spent the entire day. Around noon, Amy began coming around and telling pairs to take lunch. Then she brought coffee to the others. She even asked Rhaven how she liked hers. Hyped up on caffeine and determination, the only thing that bothered her more than the attacks was that she still had yet to get to work on designing a new graphical interface for Renegade!
Since she'd started working here, she'd spent more time dealing with the fallout of her getting hired than anything else. She'd finally learned how their system worked, and she honestly believed she could start coding, but KoG simply wouldn't leave them alone! They were delaying the progress of the next game in their attempt to "keep women from ruining them."
The whole thing made no sense! It was just some angry person hoping they could hurt another, and it wasn't fair! Around the room, the devs were all stressed and worn out. Too many heads were propped up in hands, and this wasn't their fight, but they were still throwing themselves into the middle of it, yet things were only getting worse.
The posts had gone from saying Rhaven should be fired to talking about how she needed to be killed. The strange thing was that it didn't hurt. All of this felt like it was happening to someone else. Maybe that was because she'd been looking at so much hate for so long, or possibly she'd just become numb.
And then Braden jumped to his feet. "Dez!" he roared.
"I'm on it," Dez assured him. "I'd prefer she doesn't see it, though."
Rhaven couldn't help herself. She clicked, opening up the latest moderated message and just froze. This wasn't some short and sweet post about how sick she was. It didn't even have some graphic of a little black bird being plucked or beheaded. No, this was a very long, very detailed write up of what exactly should happen to her, and it started out by saying that someone should grab her in the parking lot.
There were graphic descriptions of mutilating her genitals, cutting her open, and hanging her like meat. The standard slurs of raping her or how, if she wanted to be a woman, she should've put herself in the kitchen and stayed there, but that didn't matter. Rhaven had seen the Flawed trailer. She'd heard the rumors. She'd even gone back and read Dez's old blog and had seen the messages. This felt like the same M.O. Like someone was letting her know what was in store for her if she didn't quit - and fast.
"Rhaven?" Braden asked.
"This is what they did to Dez?" She looked up to find him leaning over her.
"I'm not going to let anyone hurt you," he promised. "We're fixing it."
"You can't fix this, Braden. You can't make them like me!"
Dez's voice carried from her corner. "Watch me."
And then a new post appeared at the top of every sub-forum in every category on every Deviant Games forum. The selection page all showed the same snippet and that the post was from Kohl, which was Dez's developer name. Rhaven clicked it.
From the front of the room, a slow clapping of hands started. Rhaven turned to see Amy walking into the room. Gavin started next, then another dev and another. The associate developers around the room quickly joined in, and then people began to stand. None of them were looking at Dez. All of their eyes were turned to Rhaven.
She was not alone. KoG couldn't hurt her because she had this army. It was no different than how Riley had formed a group to protect the gamer girls in the PLG. There was a power in standing together, and each of these people was making it clear - even more than they had up until now - that they truly were with her.
Then her