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YOUTUBE CHURCH, IT turned out, wasn’t the worst thing. I kinda liked the break from my usual routine. Sure, I almost fell asleep during the sermon. I kept it together, though. And as soon as the youth minister came back on the screen to thank us for watching, Mom sprang up and headed to the kitchen. “Chicken casserole for lunch. You staying?”
“Yeah, I’m staying.” She made the best chicken casserole.
Dad nodded approvingly. “Glad you’re sticking around. Got any other plans for the afternoon?”
I didn’t, really. Cass wanted me to move quickly, but she was sure we should wait until dark. So all I had to do for the next six hours was cool my heels and worry.
I couldn’t tell my dad any of that, though, so I shrugged. “Work on my game. Always more to do, you know?”
“Want to show me what you’ve got?”
I didn’t. No. No, no, no. I didn’t want to walk clammy-handed through my game while Dad sat there silently judging it all as childish and pointless and unfinished. No way. No.
“Sure!” I said. “Let me grab my laptop.”
It wasn’t that bad. I showed him the intro, and he laughed at the setup. He recognized my apartment right away. And when we moved to the gas station around the corner, he was really impressed.
“You wrote all this?”
“Ben helped with the story some, but I’ve put most of it together. He’s the one who told me about it in the first place, though.”
“This is really good,” he said. That was it, but that was enough.
“This...” I started to say, but I choked up a little. It felt stupid to be so emotional about it, but it cut deep. I cleared my throat and said, “This is what I want to do. This is what I’ve always wanted to do.”
“You should,” he said. “That’s really cute stuff.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said.
“Nothing good ever is. You’ve just got to put in the work.”
“Dad—” I wanted to argue with him, but what was there to say?
He clapped me on the shoulder. “Your room is yours as long as you need it. Why not give it a try?”
“You always want me to have a plan. What’s the plan here?”
He frowned. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
“I do. With all my heart.”
“Then do it.”’
“How?”
He looked in my eyes a long time, then patted my knee. “With all your heart. Obviously.”
Mom called from the other room, and he rose. He held my eye a moment longer, Dadly serious, and jabbed a finger at me. “You get to work. Lunch is in twenty.”
I did get to work. I rolled out two more zones, three new enemies, and half a dozen new armor pieces that all had different effects in-game. Some of them gave you new abilities, while others improved your chance of success with the skills you already had. Either way, they were an improvement.
And in a sense, that was the same thing I was doing every time I sat down to work. When I was creating, I was always either gaining new abilities or improving the ones I had.
And every little bit helped.
Lunch was delicious, but I barely noticed. I was hard at work in my head figuring out what all to put in the Midtown zone and connecting side quests up to the main storyline. Exelichai didn’t make me do that last part, but Ben always wanted to know how every plot point fit into the main story line.
I found ways. And when lunch was done, I rushed back to my laptop and spent all afternoon working. By dinnertime, I had three fully interconnected zones, and maybe twenty minutes of straight through gameplay.
I was so caught up in it that Cass’s message caught me flat. “u rdy?” at ten minutes to five.
“Almost,” I answered. Then I saved my progress and shut everything down. Jumping up in a sudden panic, I yelled, “Dad! Mom! Do you have any ski masks?”