“So there I was, the only kid of color in the nerd club, but it was okay, because those people were more like me. None of us were cool. None of us were the jocks or the popular people. Hey, we felt lucky to even be in the yearbook. But we were a group, and we saw each other every week and we were always there for each other, every week. And when the Lich Queen tried to take your buddy’s head off, the rest of the group came to save him, and it started to feel like maybe that could happen in real life too.”
He glanced over and she nodded, eyes on the road.
“So like I said, it sounds stupid and made up, but I think my life would’ve been really different without tabletop games.”
She nodded again. “Yeah, I can see that. Wow.”
“So I wrote my first scenario when I was in high school, and it was awful. Like, you don’t even understand how terrible and cliché this was. But hey, it was my first try, and I think everybody starts with that, y’know?” He pushed at his hair.
Cassandra giggled. “Pretty sure.”
“My group laughed a lot about it when we played it, but then they told me to do another one, and then I did another one, and then I did another one. And then in college, I wrote a couple for my college gaming group. And those actually weren’t so bad. It was like I had gotten most of the derivative and awful out of my system by then. Not all of it of course, there are always new mistakes to make, but it was better.
“Then my junior year of college, I actually sent a scenario to a game company to look at. They didn’t take it of course, but it was the first time I thought, Hey, I could do this. I was getting my degree in accounting, so why couldn’t I mess around a little bit with games on the side?
“I graduated, and I got a ‘real’ job, and I found a new gaming group, and finally I felt comfortable enough to write a scenario for them. And they liked it. I wrote another one, and they liked that one too. And I sent one off again, this time for a contest, and it didn’t win but I got a nice note back saying, This was one of our favorite non-winners, send us more sometime in the future. That was like heaven had opened and dumped music and sparkles all over me. I was good enough that an actual game company liked it too! I started thinking, what if I can do this?”
He was fully into his story now, probably boring her, but it was too late to stop. She didn’t look too bored, not really, because staring at the road was normal while driving, right?
“So I kept on doing accounting by day and gaming by night. And I kept sending scenarios out. Then Playmor bought one of my scenarios. That was my first sale and I went a little giddy, and that fueled me right through the next one, which also sold.”
“To Playmor?”
Oh good, he wasn’t totally boring her, maybe. “To Playmor again, yes, and another one to End Run, just a quick demo game. I started setting new goals, and I started writing bigger things, and I started trying to promote a little bit at conventions, and things kept going until, well, I finally got hired on the Hellraisers project. Which was frakkin’ amazing, I’m not gonna lie.”
She laughed. “I’ll bet. That was a pretty big announcement, even before we knew all the details.”
“So what about you?”
“Oh, I was always a gamer. Grew up watching Mom and Dad play on weekends.”
“Now you play with the kids at the hospital?”
“Well, that’s kind of a weird situation.” She bobbed her head from side to side, considering. “I mean, it’s got some backstory.”
He gestured at the road. “We’ve got nothing but miles and time.”
“Okay, then. It’s not like you know anyone involved.” She took a breath. “I had a friend, a really good friend, who got pregnant. She had her baby, a little boy, and things were cool. But she was really busy with the baby, you know how it goes.”
“Of course.” He didn’t know, but it seemed the right answer, and anyway it was reasonable to suppose babies were time-sucks.
“She had lots of new friends now, women from the hospital classes and mommy chats and babysitting trades and stuff, so we weren’t seeing each other as much, but that wasn’t such a big deal. I’m not really the jealous type.
“But about six months after Lucas was born, Carly emailed me to say she was pregnant again and that—well, that we couldn’t be friends. For a while, she said, as weird as that sounds. That she was busy with her kid stuff and I probably wanted to be busy with video games and work and things, and we didn’t have anything to talk about.”
“Ouch.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“She said she still wanted to be friends, but not while her kids were young. That we could talk again when her kids were all in school.”
“So, she just put you on hold for a few years?” He stared at her. “Can you do that with a friendship?”
“That was three years ago. She’s six months pregnant right now. So that’s eight years of storage time so far, longer if she has another.”
He didn’t have an answer for that.
“So I got locked in carbonite, waiting to be thawed out whenever she decided she could have non-mommy friends again, and I got a little freezer-burned. I mean, we used to talk about games and books and movies and all kinds of stuff before she had kids, so it was pretty cold to say now we had nothing to talk about just because she had kids and I didn’t.
“But the worst part was, people saw we weren’t hanging out and assumed we’d had some sort of fight. I didn’t tell anyone about the email, of course, and I guess she didn’t tell anyone either. Word started going around that I hated kids and wouldn’t hang out with her now that she had them.”
“But that’s not what happened.”
“I started getting lots of passive-aggressive comments about needing to accept kids, and needing to be understanding of devotion to a cause greater than myself, and needing children to support me someday when I’m old, and all kinds of stupid stuff. I couldn’t tell anyone about her freezing our friendship, because it seemed mean and petty to say that about her even if it was true, and anyway how do you explain your best friend dumped you because she had new mommy-friends? And not even dumped you, but actually thought she could just put you on pause for years and expect to pick up again like nothing happened, like you’re some sort of video game instead of a person? That’s cold. All the comments kept coming and finally, in a fit of rage and desperation, I signed up to volunteer at the children’s hospital, just so I could post about working with kids and shut down some of the child-hater stories.”
“You need new friends.”
“Don’t I know it? But I got some, because the kids turned out to be pretty cool, and some of the nurses there too. I ended up organizing some gaming groups and we started playing.”
“That’s why you need the new Hellraisers module.”
“For Danny to play. While he still can.”
He sensed the heavy truth behind her words. “Danny’s one of the kids?”
Cassandra pressed her lips together. “You’ve got these kids and they’re living in the hospital. These kids don’t have the option to go out and play soccer, or to go for a walk in the park, or to go for a hike. These kids play games because they can’t do anything else.
“But while they can’t leave the hospital, they can go literally anywhere in the universe. Places we can only imagine. So they can’t go to a playground, but they can fight a Dark Master of the Skeleton Soldiers or solve a series of cult murders or find a lost ninja kitten or something, and that helps.
“So games are a mainstay for these kids. When I saw how much it meant to them, I kind of made that a focus of my volunteering. And then the Hellraisers announcements started coming out, and the kids just went crazy. It was almost all they could talk about.
“And this one kid Danny really, really wants to play the Hellraisers scenario. But Danny’s not doing well. He’s… really not doing well. For a while we weren’t sure Danny was going to get to play Hellraisers even if I made my ten stars and brought
the game back from XPO.
“But he rallied and he pulled through, and his mom told me she thinks it’s at least partly because he has something to look forward to, to hang on for. I’ve been working so hard to make this happen, to bring it back for him and we were all going to play the scenario together. Then the game wasn’t there, it wasn’t at XPO. And it wasn’t going to be at XPO. And I just kind of went crazy, because all I could think of was going back and telling those kids, and telling Danny, that I didn’t have it, that we weren’t going to be able to play. I didn’t know how I was going to do that.”
She took a breath. “So yeah, I was kind of bitchy and more than a little over-sensitive. And I’m sorry. It wasn’t really about you, it wasn’t entirely about the things you said, it was about a lot of things. Things that you didn’t have any way of knowing about.”
In that moment he realized he wanted to get it right, wanted them to be friends. “I think,” Adam said carefully, “a lot of times people get angry because they care. We get into trouble when we get angry at the wrong things because we care about the right things.”
“That’s a good way to put it,” said Cassandra. She gave him a smile, and it looked sincere. “Pretty deep. You should put that on a t-shirt.”
Adam took a breath. “Truce?”
“Truce,” answered Cassandra.
He nodded once. “We’re good?”
She turned and tipped her head to regard him. “We’re good,” she said, and there was another smile in her voice.
Adam felt a warm little quiver run through him at that smile. “Look,” he said. “Playmor has a pretty strict policy about not sharing releases ahead of time, for obvious reasons. But life is not as clear as policy would like it to be, and whatever condition Danny has, it probably doesn’t care much for Playmor’s written policies. We’re going to get these games! But whatever the worst-case scenario might be, your kids’ hospital is getting games too. And I’m going to come and GM for them personally.”
Cassandra looked at him, her eyebrows lifted.” You don’t even know what part of the country I live in.”
Adam shrugged. “I don’t think that should make a difference. I’m traveling already, to try to hit different conventions, so I’ll just consider this an additional tour stop. Then I can pretend I have a tour.”
“That would be very cool,” said Cassandra. “The kids would really like having a game writer there too.” She grinned. “And I’d like you to come.”
The warmth spread into a glow.
Acceptance
Cassandra glanced at Adam, sleeping against the passenger window, and allowed herself to wonder.
Okay, so he was kind of cute. More importantly, he’d called her out when she was wrong and then hadn’t held it against her when she admitted her mistake. Then he’d offered to GM for the kids, and that probably wouldn’t happen for any number of logistical reasons, but at least he’d thought of it.
She didn’t want to use voice-to-text while he was sleeping, but she wished for a moment she could send a message to Angie. Hey, that guy, he’s not so bad as I thought. And he’s cute. Where do I go from here?
But, she thought as she glanced at him again, she didn’t think she needed a friend’s aid. This road trip seemed to be working just fine on its own.
No, she hadn’t thought XP Expo would go anything like this. But unplanned wasn’t so awful, after all.
“Where are we?” Adam sat up from leaning against the window, checked surreptitiously for drool, and looked out the windshield.
“Somewhere west of Columbia,” Cassandra said. “We’ve got to be getting close.”
Adam reached for the phone and checked the navigation. “Yeah, real close. The truck stop is about five miles ahead.”
“Good thing you woke up; I might have kept going right into Kansas. I’m starting to feel a bit brain-fuzzed.” She took another drink from the can beside her. “I still can’t believe they just left the truck without sending another driver. And a broken leg? How does that even happen? Okay, it can happen, I mean if you had bone cancer or something you could break your leg just walking, but they didn’t say he had cancer, though I guess they might not know about the cancer yet, you know, just that his leg broke when it shouldn’t have, and maybe they’ll figure out the cancer later. Am I rambling? I think that’s the energy drinks.”
“Yeah, you are. But you and the caffeine are right, it really doesn’t make any sense.”
Signs blazed the truck stop’s location, and Cassandra pulled into the broad parking lot. “Seems an odd place to stay with a broken leg.”
“Well, he can’t drive, and he can’t stay in the hospital forever. Might as well stay with your truck until help comes. DPS Trucking, there it is. Head that way.”
They noticed a man approaching the DPS truck, wearing jeans and an over-sized shirt showing three howling wolves throwing their muzzles to the white moon sitting just over his pectoral muscle. His gut hung over the snap of his jeans. He looked up as they pulled alongside the truck, one hand clutching a cup of coffee, the other a package of jerky.
“Hi!” called Adam. “We’re here from Playmor, to pick up this truck. Do you know where we can pick up the keys?”
“Keys?” The man hesitated, surprised and a little nervous. His eyes flicked from Adam to Cassandra to the truck, as if measuring distances.
“Where’s the driver?” asked Cassandra.
“I’m the driver,” he said. “And I’m not handing over my keys.”
“What?” Adam looked at his legs, clad in jeans without visible braces or crutches.
“Your leg’s not broken,” observed Cassandra.
“I didn’t think it was.” The man looked back and forth between them. “Do I know you?”
“You don’t know us per se,” said Adam, “but we’re with the company whose merchandise you’re hauling. Playmor Games. We came to collect the cargo after your delay.”
“My delay?” The driver sounded more than a bit indignant. “I’m just following instructions. I thought there was a problem at your end.”
“Our end?” Cassandra glanced to Adam and then back at the driver. “I think we had better back up and start over.”
“My name is Adam Sullivan.”
“Tom Alonso,” said the driver suspiciously.
“Nice to meet you, Tom. As I said, I’m with Playmor Games. And we got word yesterday that your truck had trouble, a flat tire. The delay was a problem, but we were dealing with it, and then we heard later that you couldn’t drive at all because of your broken leg.”
“When you say you heard this,” said Driver Tom slowly, “where did you hear it from? Because I sure as hell didn’t call in any such thing.”
Adam looked at Cassandra. “Well, Brenda told me. I presume she got the information from somewhere. Could it have been a miscommunication on the part of DPS?”
Cassandra looked dubious. “A flat tire and a broken leg and codeine is a pretty massive miscommunication,” she said. “And it doesn’t explain why the truck is sitting here in Missouri if there’s no problem.”
“I’m sitting here in Missouri,” said Tom, “because I was told there was a problem on site and you couldn’t take delivery. That you would pay the penalty for keeping the truck tied up while you got things sorted and found a new place to put the cargo.”
Adam frowned. “That is also quite a miscommunication,” he said. “One that strains credulity well past the usual breaking point. Who told you this about our problems?”
“My dispatcher. She called me yesterday and said there might be a change of address and to delay a bit so I wouldn’t have to backtrack. And then she called me back and told me just to stay here until further notice.”
Cassandra shook her head. “This smells like conspiracy,” she said. “I don’t usually go for that sort of thing, but this doesn’t smell like anything but wrong.”
Adam gestured at the truck stop parking lot. “So you’ve just been parked here for
the last day waiting for someone to tell you to move?”
Tom nodded. “I’m just the driver. I followed the dispatcher’s instructions. If the dispatcher says to change destination or hold cargo, then I change destination or hold cargo. I don’t have any contact with the customers themselves.”
Cassandra nodded. “We’re not blaming you, Tom. Clearly something else is going on here. But at first glance, it sounds like the misinformation might be coming from your dispatcher, if she’s telling you to wait and telling Brenda that you can’t go at all. But what possible motivation could a dispatcher have to delay a shipment of games to a convention?”
“Hold on a minute,” said Tom. He pulled out his phone and began thumbing across the screen. “Every one of those changes she called in to me. That’s not too unusual, but now that I’m checking, I don’t see anything logged onto my truck records.”
“What does that mean?” asked Adam.
“It means there’s no official record of her telling me to kill time,” answered Tom with new heat in his voice. “It means if your company filed a complaint with my company, the records would show that I simply failed to make delivery. That I stayed in Missouri, drinking cheap beer and eating stale taquitos at a truck stop for thirty-six hours, instead of making miles and making time. It means Elaine was probably setting me up to take the blame for whatever she was doing to delay this truck. Screwing us both over at the same time.” His face was hard. “This could cost me my job!”
Cassandra was incensed. “That’s just low! Burning you to cover her tracks as she killed Playmor’s debut event and ruined the weekend of a hundred ticketed gamers! Who would do such a thing?”
“Well, clearly Elaine Buczkowski, for one.”
Adam tipped his head as if trying to hear better. “Say that name again?”
Tom repeated the name.
Adam nodded once, his face angry. “I wonder if this Elaine Buczkowski is any relation to Randy Buczkowski, the marketing VP of Combine Games?”
Covalent Bonds Page 15