Chapter Text
The first time Leia heard of Battle Royale - Galactic Power, she had been fifteen and it had come up in an ad. From there, BR-GP had become infamous for both its stupidity and allure.
The premise of the game was that you built a house, stole other houses by creating an army (of your own design, if you paid extra) and stacked them on top of eachother, then you took over villages, towns, and then cities with that army.
After that, the holonet said, it actually got difficult.
To take over countries, you had to have an expert strategy to face off against the AI. Apparently, it was modelled after Separatist tactical droids. The holonet claimed that taking the planet was impossible. Leia was intrigued by the challenge.
When her parents noticed her growing fascination with it, they told her that she would not be getting addicted to a silly online game.
Across the holonet, it formed something of a cult-like following. People posted threads advising others how to beat the program and advance to the next stage of taking over multiple countries. But everytime they did, the game would be updated and those methods would become impossible. The algorithm shared information. A hive mind between the tactical droid programming. If your methods were similar to somebody else's- political decisions, battle plans, anything- the game adjusted. Most people quit after realising that they couldn’t win.
It took three months for someone to take over their planet. Not long after, someone else managed it.
And it was only then that the galaxy realised BR-GP was multiplayer. And that the winner- take over the galaxy and hold onto the position for three months- would receive a prize of a million credits.
Users flooded in. More advanced to having taken over a planet. Some were annihilated because of bad financial decisions in the past or because they hadn’t taken the time to build or steal ships in their mindless destruction. If you lost your planet, you were forced to restart the game. And unless you had some sneaky way of getting around it, the algorithm knew when the same person was playing for a second time.
For over a year, nobody had taken more than two neighbouring planets and kept them.
Leia still hadn’t downloaded the game, despite following its progress on the holonet. People were discovering new things everyday. There were made up planets, not controlled by any player, that allowed you to discover new things in the game. Unlock weapons, buildings, ships. Sometimes, BR-GP even lets you design your own things that could be added to your arsenal.
The closest anyone had come had been when Leia was seventeen and someone took twenty planets in six months in what the holonet dubbed the “fastest rise and fall anybody had ever seen.” Immediately after the player’s final nonsensical message of KKEnOooOBb, they disappeared entirely from the game. Nobody had ever found out who it was.
The next time it happened had been just before she turned nineteen. A player that went by the name of Mitth, accumulated fifty planets. Seemingly as easy as breathing. The holonet was saying that it was an Imperial strategist, others argued that Mitth was a Jedi in hiding. The number moved up to sixty within the next month. People were signing on to Mitth’s Empire left and right. One week after the player hit sixty, they had reached one hundred planets under their control. The holonet was convinced Mitth was going to win the game by the end of the year.
Then Mitth disappeared, too. After that, conspiracy theories raced around the holonet that the man behind the player was Grand Admiral Thrawn. No one could prove or disprove it.
She was nineteen when her own planet was destroyed.
It took her two days, after they escaped from and blew up the Death Star, to realise that she’d seen the weapon mentioned in a thread about the game. Stardust , the first person who created it, had named it.
Leia must’ve looked insane when she barged into Mon Mothma’s meeting room full of high-ranking rebel leaders.
“Battle Royale - Galactic Power!” she yelled.
They all turned to her incredulously.
She took a deep breath. “The Death Star, it was in the game months before any of us knew about it.”
The room froze. “The Empire had a leak… on a video game?” someone asked.
“Yes!” Leia said. “The first person who gained access to it called it Stardust . That was the code-name of the project.”
The members of the meeting broke into whispers.
“Ahem!” The room fell silent. “Do we have to…” Mon Mothma’s face scrunched, “play the game to get access to information?”
“It’s possible,” Leia agreed hesitantly.
And that was how Leia Organa teamed up with Mon Mothma to stay in the game long enough to find the Imperial leak. Of course, unable to admit that Leia was better at a video game, Han Solo re-downloaded it after a two year hiatus and bribed Luke and Chewie into helping him.
Mon let Leia handle the first bit, too busy with work to take any time off. So Leia had full reign to build her home, inspired by the holiday home she’d grown up with. She paid extra to design her soldiers to wear the traditional armour of Alderaan and to resemble chinar trees, which were native to her homeworld. With enough soldiers, they would combine to create a larger version of it- taller than a building, even. Then she overtook cities. City after city bowed to her warriors and strategy. It took Leia less than five hours to take over her first country.
That was how it started. Leia would’ve never thought that it would end the way it did.