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CASS DIDN’T APPRECIATE my gaming metaphor, but Ben was right: Working on the game helped me process my real problems. It kept turning them over and approaching familiar things from unfamiliar angles.
I kept coming back to the apartment complex. And the admin building. And everything that had gone wrong. I opened the Location Editor and started fixing the layout and doors in the locked hallway. I put Hauser’s thugs in the fourth room on the left, then set up several events along the hallway that might alert them and bring them running out.
“In a stealth game...” I said, thinking aloud. But the thought stopped there.
Ben waited long enough that I thought he hadn’t heard me. Then he snapped his laptop shut, looked me in the eye, and asked, “Do you mean like ‘Thief’ or the Tom Clancy one?”
“I was just thinking of Warcraft rogues, but Thief is a better example.”
“You want me to add water arrows to your game?”
“Noisemakers. ‘Distraction’ in Warcraft. And ‘Setup.’ ‘Setup Shot?’ I don’t remember what the ability was called.”
He shrugged. “I only played healers.”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is the preparation. I had to go in with zero preparation.”
He nodded. “You complained about that already. So we added strategy elements. Now you want more stealth?”
I took a deep breath, thinking through the changes we had made. The enemies were now auto-spending experience, so they got stronger and stronger whether you did or not. But you could secure a few safehouses and get a little advantage of your own.
I could add more stealth. The changes seemed pretty obvious. I had also talked about adding base-building, and I could imagine several ways to do that, but they didn’t suggest any solutions to Cass and Trina’s situation.
My heart started racing again, and I closed my laptop, too. I took a slow breath and said, “I’m trying to do too much.”
“You need a break?”
No. My answer was no. Too much was happening. Too much stood undecided. Too much depended on me. I could not afford to take a break.
But I couldn’t put any of that into words. I couldn’t make an answer at all, and he took that as confirmation. “Yeah, you need a break. ‘Three Musketeers’ or ‘Three Amigos’?”
“Make it Amigos,” I said, “I’m too tired to deal with Richelieu.”
He checked Netflix first, then gave up in disappointment and checked a few other streaming services before he found one with the movie we wanted. He could rent it for three dollars.
“Don’t we already own this?” I asked.
“By my count, between us, we now own twelve amigos, and we’ve rented nine more besides.” He pressed the button on his remote and put in his PIN. “Twelve and twelve.”
“Wow. We’ve got a lot of amigos.”
“You wish, man.”
I did. Ben was as good a friend as a guy could ask for, but a proper gang would’ve been handy right about then.
We barely made it to Flugelman’s office before Ben had his laptop out again.
For me it was the German and his friends. And the promise of guns. And remembering how it all worked out. A few minutes after Ben, I had my laptop out again too, adding follower NPCs who could help you in combat and distract the cops in a stealth scenario. I tied that into the day/night cycle, letting the game “heal” any followers you lost during the day up to the max number allowed by your number of owned bases.
“You play as the girl with the gun,” I said aloud, over Lucky Day whimpering that he’d been shot already.
Ben perked up. “Yeah. That sounds right.”
“But the girl can’t do all that much. The gun is almost worthless.”
“That’s normal for starting weapons.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to solve,” I said. “I’m thinking about the strategy. It isn’t about the girl. It isn’t about the gun. It’s about what she can accomplish with resources and allies.”
“But the resources keep disappearing, and the allies are faceless numbers, right?” He considered his own argument a moment, then nodded. “Strategy or not, it still comes back to the girl with the gun.”
That felt right when he said it.
But where did that leave me? Was I a player character in my own life? Was I a girl with a gun? Or was I just a faceless number going out to die for the real one?
I missed the rest of the movie, caught up thinking. Ben heated up some mac-and-cheese and foraged until he found a copy of ‘Three Musketeers.’ Richelieu was stamping around the throne room before I noticed the change.
“You’ve been quiet for a while.” Ben said, just as I looked up.
“I’ve been quiet way too long,” I said. “It’s time to make some noise.”