"Hmm, I dunno. Hell of a way to split hairs? She said the people in the hexadome aren't my friends, kinda can't tell fuck all whether she was counting herself or not. It's a good question though, thanks Creek."

Sammy pulls her phone out and looks at her group bracket again. "Yeah, all good questions. I guess the real lesson tonight was that insane prep is normal prep."

She pulls out one of those floaty graph apps and starts sorting her group into different piles for Creek. "So like, there's two utterly fucked versions of this group, and then one weirdly balanced one that comes into twenty flavors of ice cream. Fucked ones are where Argeltia and the Kraken end up on the same team. They're both just, like, terrain, you know? Like you're not fighting one bitch in a suit, you're fighting like a billion tentacles or teleporting giant hands or whatever. So if they're on the same side, the arena is just a hellzone full of crap. If I'm on that team, that means I'm playing a scorer and it's like me and whoever using the terrain to score and avoiding getting ganged up on. Honestly, probably my easiest match, just ride a teleporting giant hand to victory while everybody else is playing hentai simulator."

She smiles a toothy smile at that one, and polishes the meat off a chicken bone. "If I'm against that team, well, depends a bit on comp, but I'm probably a fighter except in the one comp where it's Kraken, Argeltia, Bit and Kiss, and Pashadiah, where I kinda gotta do the scoring because nobody else can manage it. I can't tell if that's the worst match or the best match, depends on speed." She tosses that one specific comp into its own corner of her holomap with a big circle and question mark drawn around it. "But yeah, other than that one, if I'm against the field control side, I'm just punching as many girls as possible so that the scorers on my team can navigate the obstacles and punch a bunch of fucking tentacles in their tentacle faces."

She puts the entire terrain set off to the side in her diagram and starts a new section, finishing off her mug of beer in the process.

"If Argeltia and Kraken aren't on the same team, then we get the ice cream menu variety show. Every side gets some weird surprise terrain thing, and there's probably some combo fighter and scorer on each team, I guess except for the one other weird comp where Pashadiah and Bit and Kiss are on the same side in that situation and they have Astra, so if I'm against that I'm the scorer again while the rest of my team rips into them. But otherwise everybody gets a mixed comp in some flavor of fucking punch your face in while navigating surprise the floor exploded and trying to hit the scoring zone."

Sammy looks over the list again, and lets out a belch and a sigh. "Damn Creek, you know what. There's a clear starting point here. Thanks for being cool. Like, now that I look at it, the obvious practice partner is Decima. She's the only long-range fighter. If I'm on her team, figuring out how I can set her up for shots in weird terrain will crush most of these comps. If I'm not, figuring out how she aims will give me an edge. She was even nice enough to ask. Maybe we'll be friends." 

Sammy laughs a sharp laugh and sends Decima a scheduling note in reply to Decima's message.