“The work for Jason is just... It was supposed to build my résumé. If I get a real job, in an office at a studio, that sort of thing won’t happen,” I say hopefully. “Right?”
My mom looks at my dad, her mouth a thin line.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
“Aaron, I’ve read enough about game studios and the career you’re pushing toward to know a bit better. That is what happens.” She stands up and walks over to me, placing her hands on my shoulders. “I just want what’s best for you. I don’t want...”
She looks at my dad and winces.
“She doesn’t want you turning out like me,” Dad says, shrugging. “What? That’s what you were going to say.”
My mom leans over and kisses him on the forehead.
“I was going to be a bit more delicate than that.” She returns to her seat. “We can circle back to this later. Why don’t you tell us about this girl?”
My mom smiles, and Mira gives me a mischievous look. My dad squeezes my arm and slaps me on the back, and I can’t help but let out a little laugh.
“The, um. The girl. She’s only there on Friday,” I say, not wanting to get into too many details. All I need is Mom putting two and two together and figuring out I’m off to see D1V, the girl she wants me to avoid because she’s afraid of what people will find when they google me.
“Okay,” my dad says, “well, I can take over for—”
Our front door swings open with a crash, and Ryan tumbles into our living room.
My entire family shifts in our seats to look at him, and he scans the living room quickly, eventually spotting us on the opposite side of the room, in the adjoining dining room.
“Ryan!” my mom exclaims. “Are... Are you okay?”
“Hey, Mrs. Jericho, yeah I’m fine, I—”
She turns, glaring at me. “Someone didn’t tell me we were having company.” She looks back up at him. “Come over here, we’ve got plenty of pizza left.”
“I didn’t—” I start, but Ryan hurries over, looking harried and panicked.
“You weren’t answering your phone,” he pants, taking deep breaths, his voice high-pitched. He glances at my parents. “Evening Mr. Jericho, Mrs. Jericho. Sorry, but... Aaron. You have to see this.”
He pulls out his monster of a smartphone, which is practically the size of a tablet, and taps something on the screen. He hands the phone to me.
I almost drop it on the table.
It’s a post on ManaPunk’s website—the one that I wrote all the copy for and penned all the blogs for, by the way. The news update is all about their upcoming appearance at GamesCon’s Indie Game Showcase, featuring the game Ryan and I had worked so hard on and promptly been fired from.
Stop by ManaPunk’s booth to try out the next indie RPG hit, THUNDERTAIL. With stunning artwork, beautiful music, gorgeous prose, and unique, innovative gameplay that blends a randomly generated dungeon crawler with a powerful narrative, it’s the next level in indie role-playing games! We’ll have plenty of swag to give away, so you can show off your excitement for the game at home!
All the artwork in the post was clearly from Ryan, the finished illustrations and the like. And that post, that copy—I’d written that. I mean, I couldn’t care less about the actual blog post; it was just a blog post, after all.
But that gorgeous prose bit? That was mine.
Fury fills me. “I can’t believe he used your art without permission,” I tell him.
“It’s the stuff I gave him that day in the café. And it gets worse,” Ryan says, scrolling down some more. After the line break on the blog, there’s a link to purchase posters of the finished illustrations, in full color.
“You have got to be kidding me!” I exclaim.
Ryan looks at my family nervously. “Mind if I steal him away for a second?”
“You already have,” my mom grumbles.
“Excuse me,” I say quickly. I dart off with Ryan into the living room and up the stairs to my room, where he scrolls all the way down past the event details and the poster links.
It’s a video.
A trailer for the video game.
He clicks it, and the voice-over starts. In addition to all the familiar graphics and artwork in the game, the voice that’s speaking...it’s reading my words. My introduction to the game, my prologue. The beginning that I wrote. The characters I spent so many hours trying to breathe life into appear on the screen, renders of Ryan’s artwork, speaking the words I’d written. A story Jason said he hated and tore apart time and time again.
Here it is.
It’s this weird mixture of pure excitement and joy blended with crushing disappointment and anger. Jason fired us. Both of us. He didn’t pay us anything for any of this, and yet here it is in the game, in this demo he’s going to use to try to sell his new title to a bigger publisher at the showcase.
“I’ve been emailing and calling him and Laura all day,” Ryan says, taking the phone back and sliding it into his pocket. “Nothing. And you know the two of them are glued to their phones at all times.”
“They’re not answering on purpose,” I say slowly.
“Yup.”
There’s a pause, a beat in our conversation.
“So...what do we do?” I ask.
He pulls out two tickets for GamesCon. For Friday.
Tomorrow.
“It was sold out,” Ryan says, waving the tickets, “but I found these for sale on Facebook this morning. We got lucky—it’s not like we can rely on our former exhibitor badges. Something tells me they aren’t going to be waiting for us at registration.”
There’s a sense of elation in my chest, swirling about with a sinking feeling of...well, feeling foolish. What was I going to do tomorrow? Just show up, demand to be let in to an event that’s been sold out for months? Ask for my exhibitor badge, when chances are Jason got rid of it a long time ago or gave it to someone else? I didn’t even know if Jason was planning to give us badges in the first place, not that it mattered now.
“We’re going,” Ryan says, handing me a ticket. “You and me. Save our world, save your girl?”
“She’s not my—” He shoves me. “Hey!”
“For a writer, you really don’t have any kind of flair for the dramatic, you know.” He plucks the ticket out of my hand. “I’ll hold on to these—you pack. Résumés, business cards, all that fun stuff for when we’re done disrupting society. We’re heading there first thing in the morning. What time is her panel?”