Corrupting Power
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The Seven Secrets Of Mr. Magpie - Finale
🕑 Added 2023-03-18 09:47:10 +0000 UTCPart Seven – A Secret Never To Be Told (finale)
I could open the last chapter of my story in a lot of different ways, but I chose this one. I’m so glad that Mrs. Magpie chose for my story to end with only seven secrets. There’s a longer version of the rhyme that goes on like this: “Eight for a wish, / Nine for a kiss, / Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss. / Eleven for health, / Twelve for wealth, / Thirteen beware it’s the devil himself.” The last thing I wanted to do was be dancing with the devil.
The nursery rhyme goes back several hundred years and is tied to the fact that magpies were considered an omen of bad luck. And for much of my life, I’d felt like all that bad luck was concentrated in one place – my own daily existence.
Things had gone wrong for me all over the place, but I’d tried never to just give up. Every day I’d get back up, pull on my pants and try to find a way to get through the next day, because there was always the chance of things getting better on the next one.
You ever hear people say that? “Never take a permanent solution for a temporary problem.” It’s meant to be truism that inspires people to avoid suicide and self-harm. And they’re absolutely right. As long as you are still breathing, things can get better. They can also get worse, that’s true also, and that’s something you shouldn’t forget either. Don’t ever believe in the concept of ‘rock bottom.’ Bottoming out is just a lack of imagination on your part. You can always go lower.
You’re wondering where I’m going with all of this. I get that. Be patient just a little bit longer; it’ll all make sense in the end, I promise you.
See, back when I was scraping vomit out of the backseat of my car at the beginning of all of this, I’d thought that particular moment was my bottoming out. I’d lost my job, I’d lost my dignity, I was even starting to lose my sense of self-identity. The very notion of who Rafael Corvis is, that was beginning to come into question, because I was on the border of feeling like I had nothing to give to the world. What, I kept asking myself each and every morning, was the point of it all?
I want to stress how pretty much everyone goes through this phase at some point in their lives. We all think we don’t matter. We all think as soon as we die that we’ll be forgotten and no one will speak our name ever again. We question why we can’t change the world, why we can’t do something that will live for centuries past our endpoint.
“Shakespeare’s name still lives on,” we think to ourselves, “so why can’t mine?”
From there, it’s just a short step to “I’m a failure because I can’t change the world.”
And that’s where I want you to look a little further, to expand your horizons just a little wider.
Because it’s not that you can’t change the world – it’s that you already have and you just didn’t realize it yet. You may never realize just how much impact you’ve had on the world around you. Most of us don’t get that chance, because the scope of it all is hard to understand.
Every day, you’re affecting all the people around you. You’re changing the lives of everyone around you simply by existing. You bring a perspective that none of them would ever have without you there, because your perspective isn’t anything like theirs. That’s important to remember.
The other thing I want to tell you about is that words don’t just have one meaning, which is something that’s very easy to forget in our modern day-to-day living. When Mrs. Choi told me she was giving me seven secrets, I thought I knew what that meant, but at this point, I’m suspecting I made the same mistake you’ve probably made.
Commonly, we think of “secret” to mean “kept from knowledge or view,” i.e. hidden. But it’s a word full of potential and has other interpretations. It can be taken as a method or process divulged only to one’s own company or craft. But it can also be taken as a specific needed that’s key to reaching a desired end, i.e. the secret of my success.
That’s where I made my biggest mistake.
That, and in my conversation with the ghost.
Oh right! I totally didn’t even tell you about the ghost!
In January of 2018, on a cold Sunday morning, I met one of the ghosts of the neighborhood, who’d come to file a complaint with me on behalf of all the other ghosts. It was about five in the morning, and I really should’ve been asleep, but there had been this constant tapping at the window just next to my bed, and it felt like it had been going on for an eternity, so I woke up just enough to peer out the window to see if it was a loose branch or a bird or something, and found myself staring directly into a semi-translucent face scowling at me.
I, naturally, fell out of bed, and that woke me up sharply. So I stood up in my boxers and my nightshirt, because I fully expected that I had been mostly still dreaming, and looked out my bedroom window into my back yard, seeing that same ethereal form floating there, looking annoyed at me.
The ghost was a rotund man dressed in a very expensive looking suit, a flurry of disheveled hair hanging around his face, a cigar resting on his lips. He had a thick scruffy black beard and eyebrows that were thicker than some walrus mustaches I’d seen in my time. “You gonna invite me in or what, kid?” the ghost said to me from his hovering perch.
“You’re… are you a ghost?”
The ghost scowled at me. “Are you an idiot?”
“I hope not.”
“Then stop asking idiotic questions and invite me in.”
I shrugged a little, stepping back as I waved a hand towards my room. “You wanna come in?”
The scowl disappeared and was replaced by a kind smile as he drifted through the wall and moved to levitate in the center of my bedroom. “Aaaahhhh. Much better. It’s cold out there, y’know?”
“Do… can ghosts get cold?”
“No, but yes,” the spirit said to me. “We don’t actually get cold, but if it’s cold out, and we think it looks cold, then we feel cold, even if we aren’t. It’s a whole thing. Anyways. You don’t remember me, do ya, kid?”
“You… you look vaguely familiar, but no, I can’t say I place you.”
“I was a friend of your grandfather’s. He introduced us once. Pizzacato. Alberto Pizzacato, at your service.”
“Oh! I do remember you. Sorry, you don’t smell like peppermint anymore, and the scent of it would’ve immediately connected the memory,” I told him. We’d been introduced when I’d first moved out to the area, but he’d died within a couple of months of my arrival. He’d always smelled heavily of peppermint, and my grandfather had told me Mister Pizzacato absolutely loved to suck on peppermint hard candies constantly.
“Probably for the best ghosts don’t smell of anything,” Alberto said to me. “Otherwise I doubt I’d smell much of peppermint. Mio Dio, how I miss my peppermints. But enough about me. How’ve you been, kid?”
“The last few years have been a fucking mess,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Every time I feel like I’m getting my shit together, something else comes along and messes it all up.”
The ghost pulled the cigar from his lips and stabbed it my direction. “See, that right there is a bad reading of your actual situation, kid.” He gestured around the room while he talked. “Why do you think it’s a mess now?”
“This job I’ve got could fall apart at any moment.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“The big sister of my coworker. The coworker who’s a goddamn time bomb I’m just waiting to blow up all over again.”
“No. Wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“She’s not your boss, and we both know it. Try again. Who’s your boss?”
I had to stop and think at that point. “I… I don’t have one?”
“You do,” the ghost insisted. “And it’s you. You are your own boss. You set the schedule. You decide what people are working on. You may have joined the project as the artist, but you’ve also somehow become the producer, and that means you’ve got control of your fate. You can do whatever you want to keep the time bomb in check, and nobody’s going to tell you otherwise. In fact, I’m pretty sure your team wants you to do what you can to keep everything running smoothly.”
“Yeah, but…”
“No! No ‘but,’ kid! You are where the buck stops. So if you’ve got a problem with your boss, you’ve got a problem with you. So is your boss the problem?”
“Well, when you put it like that…” I said to him.
“How else could you put it?”
“Ok. Fair. But it could still go tits up at any moment.”
“That’s all of life for you. If you want stability, you’re eternally going to be disappointed.”
I had to consider those words for a long moment before I spoke again. He was right – there was no guarantee for anything in life, but, for now, I was in probably the best professional place I’d been in for over a decade. We had a good project. We had a good team. I just had to keep it all together until we were ready for the next stage.
“Work’s not a complete disaster, okay, I’ll grant you that, but look at the rest of my life.”
“What about it?” the ghost asked, a smug look on his rotund face.
“It’s still so… empty,” I told him, gesturing to the house around me. “My grandfather had this big, giant, extensive house, and it’s… it’s still just me here. Mrs. Choi gave me this gift, and it’s had women come and go from my life, but…”
“But nobody ever stays,” the ghost finished for me.
“Exactly.”
“You ever think of why?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think the point of her gifts to you were?”
“The point?”
The ghost laughed, shaking his head. “You think she did something so powerful with nothing planned? No greater concept beyond making your life a little bit lighter here and there?”
“I mean… I hadn’t even considered that she might have had some sort of greater plan with what she did,” I admitted. “I thought she was just trying to cheer me up.”
“Kid, you’re adorable,” the ghost said, almost patting my cheek but not quite touching me. “All the ghosts of the neighborhood have always thought you were a good egg. You didn’t get mad at the Sandersons when their sewage pipe busted and spewed all over your back yard. You didn’t yell at anyone when old man McGillicutty backed into that power line and had the neighborhood without power for a few days. You’ve always been friendly and helpful, and the ghosts of the hills, we appreciate it.”
“How many–”
“Let’s stay on topic, kid,” the ghost interrupted. “If you’d wanted to go through a phase where you were being sort of a bit of an asshole after your company laid you all off for doing too good a job documenting how you’d made a great game, none of the ghosts up here would’ve blamed you. But you didn’t do that. Sure, you stayed up way too late more than a couple of times, and yeah, maybe once or twice you fell asleep in your clothes, maybe even with your t-shirt on backwards, but in terms of letting your anger out? Not even close. And that worried us all a little bit. We all thought, Mr. Choi especially, that you were something of a time bomb, just waiting to blow up on someone or something. And we wouldn’t have been happy about it, but it would’ve at least gotten it out of your system,” he sighed. “But you didn’t. You kept it all inside, and we got worried about you.”
“So, you’d have felt better if I’d gone through a week or so of just getting shitfaced drunk, watching Farscape reruns in my boxers or something?”
“Yes!” the ghost said, taking the cigar from his lips to stab in my direction once more. “It would’ve been a release! A catharsis! And you needed that! But you just kept putting up wall after wall after wall! You didn’t even really vent when that guy threw up all over the back of your car! You just sucked it up and dealt with it. But sometimes, and this thing, this is the thing Mrs. Choi’s first lesson was for you to learn, you have to have a release valve, to give way to that pressure, so you do not buckle down forever and just implode.”
“That was years ago, though,” I told the ghost.
“Well, it was just the first lesson. You had lots of things to learn to get you into a mindset where you’d be ready for a real relationship. You needed to learn how to compromise, how to stand up for yourself, how to listen and how to speak up. You needed to learn that despite the setbacks of being laid off, it wasn’t the end of you. You’d sort of laid down to die, and that’s not the state that anybody wants you in. You weren’t… well, for lack of a better expression, you weren’t you anymore. And until you’d incorporated the loss, Mrs. Choi’s magic was trying to get you back to being you again.”
“Did she?”
“Did she what?”
“Did she get me back to me?”
“Well, how do you feel?”
I sighed. “Still mostly alone. Isolated and frustrated. I mean, I get that I have control over the work life now, and you’re right, I should take some comfort in that, but I still feel like I’m spending my nights trapped working all the time. I come home, crawl into bed and then sleep, a little, then sleep… a little. And then I get up and do it all over again. It’s comforting in some ways, but frustrating in a lot of others. I want someone in my bed with me, y’know? So it was good having all sorts of cheap, easy, meaningless sex, but at the end of the day, it was unfulfilling.”
“Sure, because that was all to get you ready. You’ll be at the end of the line soon.”
“End of the line?” I asked nervously. “You mean I’m dying?”
“You kids are so ridiculously dramatic,” the ghost sighed. “No, you’re not dying. But in just a little bit, you’re going to get Mrs. Choi’s last gift, and then your life’s going to back to some kind of normal again. And you’re going to have to learn to live with that.”
“How do you mean?” I asked the ghost.
“After you’ve had a touch of what the life of magic can be, going back to a normal world might be difficult to take. You might find it all… rather dull.”
I remember being quite taken aback. “You mean… it’s all just… just going to stop? Like, after all of this, once it runs its course, it’s just back to complete normality?”
The apparition of my departed neighbor shrugged and nodded in one muddied gesture. “You’ll figure it out. At the end of the day, m’boy, we don’t all get to have the wonder forever. Anyway, I just wanted you to know that we, the ghosts of the high hills of San Jose, we’re all quite proud of you. Before it all wraps up, we felt we should tell you that we’re rooting for you to win. And maybe… maybe at some point we’ll peek in on you again, see how you’re doing.” The ghost drifted over towards the wall of my bedroom and started to phase through it. “Take care, kid.”
He disappeared through the wall and I never saw him again.
Not yet, anyway.
I’m still alive.
Heh.
Anyway, I realized the arrival day of the last secret was Feb. 14th, 2018. Valentine’s Day. And it was a goddamn Wednesday.
I spent the day at work, and thankfully things had gotten back to some kind of normalcy. Marc was finally taking his cues from me, and seeing as we had the Game Developers Conference in a little more than a month, he was mostly just heads down with the rest of us, making sure everything we had in our playable demo was going to be in tip-top shape to show off to possible publishers. He knew the stakes now, and just wanted to put together the best possible product. That said, I was doing everything I could to ensure that nobody was working too much crunch time, and sending people home at a reasonable time on Valentine’s Day was part of that. Marc had started dating someone, GG had a boyfriend and Astoria was going to be celebrating her first Valentine’s Day with her husband. That meant I forbade anyone from being in the office past six. And despite the fact that I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go, I included myself in that list.
I didn’t want to go home, so I decided to head into downtown San Jose. Valentine’s Day is usually the kind of night when single folk get crazy and connect with anyone anywhere. I didn’t intend to get utterly drunk, but I figured being out with people might make whatever magic Mrs. Choi had cause less disruption in the world around me. So I headed for a bar.
There’s a nice little neighborhood Irish tavern in downtown San Jose called Trials Pub. The place has got friendly bartenders, it’s not too big and you always feel like you can have a spot of space that’s your own. Dave, the bartender I know best, smiled at me as I came in. “You want your usual, Raf?”
“Yeah, but lemme get a plate of those excellent sausage rolls you guys make.”
“You got it, brother.”
And I settled in for what I thought would be a long night doing not a whole lot.
Jesus, I get a lot of shit wrong, don’t I?
I figured since it was a Wednesday, there wouldn’t be a lot of people swarming the bar, but apparently I underestimated the draw of people looking to find someone to fill their bed. And there were men and women by the droves trying to find someone to squish against. And I planned to just sit at the bar for the majority of the night. Sooner or later, either things would go right, or things would go wrong. I wasn’t particularly invested in either option.
So imagine my surprise when I heard a familiar voice coming up behind me. “Rafael Corvis, why the fuck are you never home when I swing by your house?” I turned on my barstool to see Cori Choi, Mrs. Choi’s oft-referenced granddaughter.
Cori was in her early 20s now, but the last time I’d seen her, she’d been a bubbly little high school senior, cute, but certainly not the gorgeous woman she had grown into. She was half-Korean and half-white, and she’d been into sports and athletics when she was in high school, but there had always been a very nervous energy around her, like she was terrified of getting too close to me, of spending time with me. I’d kind of always thought she didn’t like me. She was dressed in a snug pair of jeans, a giant American Football t-shirt and a denim jacket that looked like it was so far out of fashion that it had come back into fashion again. She was short, peppy, curvy but also fit as all get out. Fuck, she was beautiful right from the start.
“Well, I’m always working my ass off these days, so that’s why. Didn’t your grandmother tell you that you should call and schedule something with me before you showed up?”
Cori’s face fell just a little bit. “Oh. You haven’t heard. Grandma passed away a couple of months ago.”
“Oh god, no, I hadn’t heard,” I said, immediately moving to give her a hug. “I’m so sorry to hear that. She was an amazing woman.”
“She really was, Raf,” Cori said, a bittersweet smile spreading on her lips. “And she really liked you, you know. You were always her favorite neighbor. But now she’s in heaven with Grandpa, and I’m sure they’re having a blast causing trouble with every person they run into up there.”
“You come up here to try and sell her old house?” I asked her as she moved to sit down on a barstool next to me. “I know it’s been on the market for quite a while, but your grandmother set the asking price so damn high, you may have to lower it.”
“Well, that’s only one of the reasons I’m up here. I’m probably going to take it off the market for a little while at least while we try and get settled in.”
“We?” I asked. “You get married while you were away at college?”
She laughed and blushed a little bit, slapping me on the shoulder. “No no. Picked up a girlfriend though. Here she comes now,” Cori said to me as a scorching hot blonde walked down the bar towards us, holding two pints of Guiness, holding out one for Cori to take. “Raz, this is Rafael Corvis, the guy I was telling you about who lived next to my grandmother.”
Raz was like the other side of the coin in almost every aspect from Cori. Cori was 5’2” if she was lucky; Raz had to be at least a foot taller than that. Cori’s English was flawless and Raz’s had a subtle tinge of Israeli to it. Cori was an open book; Raz felt like she was keeping just about everything behind closed doors.
“He is a bit stronger than I expected. You said he was a computer artist, spent most of his time making videogames,” Raz said as she moved to sit down on the only other empty barstool, the one on the other side of me. She wore jeans so skin tight I imagined she’d have to peel them to take them off, a spaghetti strap blue top and a leather jacket over it. I could tell she didn’t have a bra on beneath it and that she had a barbell through one of her nipples, the fabric was that tight over her generous breasts. “I expected something more… geekish.”
“I can swap seats with you, so you two can sit together if you want.”
“No no,” Raz said, placing her beer on the bar before taking her hand and smoothing it along my back. “It’s much better like this if we have you pinned in-between us. More fun for us.”
For the next couple of hours, I tried to keep up with the conversation, as Cori sort of filled me in on what the last few years of her life had been like, finishing up college, hooking up with Raz, which was short for Raziah and was, in fact, a Hebrew name, and both of them trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. As it turned out, they’d both gotten jobs up in the Valley, Raz as a product manager for Nvidia, and Cori as a registered nurse at the Regional Medical Center. And until they got a place of their own, they were staying at Cori’s late grandmother’s house.
Now, I like to consider myself relatively quick on the uptake, but over the course of a couple of drinks, I got the distinct impression that both women were flirting with me. Raz liked to keep her fingers on my back, and repeatedly Cori would take my hand into hers and squeeze it. And they kept moving in a little closer each time. Cori’s leg was eventually pressed up against mine, and Raz’s hand had drifted from the back of my shoulders to the small of my back, just above my belt.
“We took a cab here,” Raz said to me. “Maybe we can take your car back to the house?”
“Uh, sure,” I said, motioning for Dave to close out our tabs and bring our credit cards back over. The drive from downtown to my place is about 13 minutes, give or take, but I think I did it in under ten, just pushing every even close to yellow light I could before we arrived back at my house, and sure enough, there were a couple of cars parked in front of Mrs. Choi’s old house, a grey Rav4 and very beat up old black Honda Civic.
I pulled my car into my garage and as soon as the garage door shut, Cori leaned over from her place in the passenger seat into mine, wrapping her arms around my neck and locking lips with me like she’d been aching to swallow me whole her entire life, a kiss that could melt the polar ice cap. “You’re gonna take us both inside and fuck the shit out of us, right?” she whispered to me with a sly grin, giggling as she wiggled her ass onto my lap.
“I, uh… are you sure?”
“Raf,” Raz said to me, reaching from the back seat to smooth her fingertips down the front of my shirt, teasing them through the dark thick thatch of hair there. “She’s been in love with you since she was just a girl. You were always the strong, smart, cute neighbor she wanted but couldn’t have, because she was too young.”
“But on my 18th birthday, my grandmother said I could have one wish, a wish for anything I wanted, no questions asked, nothing outside of the realm of possibility,” Cori said to me. “So, I wished for the perfect triad between you and me. I wanted you to be my husband so bad that I told my grandmother I would do anything to make it happen. And she told me all it would take would be a bit of time, during which I could change my mind. But I was greedy, and I wanted the perfect wife too, not just for me but for you as well. I love men and women, so I wanted one of each, but I wanted you to be the man. I was afraid it was too much to ask, but grandma told me it would all work out fine in the end, once you and I were ready for each other. Patience and time, she told me. And she said on my 22nd birthday, it would be.” She sighed a little bit, running her hand along my face. “I didn’t think she was going to go, but I think she felt like her time was up and she wanted to be with grandpa again.”
We slowly moved out of the car and headed into the house. “And you, Raz? You believe in all of this?”
“I would’ve said no before Cori and I met, but the amount of insane coincidences it took for her and I to end up sharing a taxi cab together…” Raz laughed a little, shaking her head. “I’ll tell you the story later, but after that, I believe now. And I got to meet and talk to Grandma. She was the kindest and most generous woman ever.”
“She really was,” I said with a sigh. “But why me, Cori?”
The three of us walked through my house, and I was a little surprised, but Cori was leading us straight to the bedroom. “When we first met, Raf, I was just sixteen and I’d just been dumped a couple of days earlier by my first real boyfriend because he wanted for us to have sex, and I wasn’t ready yet. And you’d come over with your grandfather for dinner, and I tried telling my parents and my grandparents that I just wasn’t in the mood for company, but they said I needed to. And during dinner I was I was pretty quiet, even when you tried to cheer me up. And after dinner I went out to sit on the back porch and you came out to talk to me. Told me that if my boyfriend couldn’t be patient, he wasn’t worth the time anyway. And you told me that I could do better, and that I would, because even if I was pouting, I seemed super smart. And then you went back inside, because you didn’t want to bother me if I needed my space. That night, I decided that you were exactly what I wanted, and for the next two years, I measured everybody against you. You were kind but not smothering; you were smart but not stuck up about it; you were what I wanted, who I wanted.” She pushed me backwards to sit on the side of my bed before reaching down to pull the American Football tour t-shirt up and over her head, revealing a very ornate red bra. “And now I’m going to do everything I can to convince you that we’re perfect for you. And so’s she.” Cori hooked one of her fingers in a belt loop of Raz’s jeans, pulling her close so they could merge together in a kiss while Cori pushed the jacket off of Raz, casting it to the floor.
It was clear they’d been a couple for a while now, because there was a familiarity and comfortableness they had with each other, as Cori reached down and pulled Raz’s top off, exposing those teardrop shaped tits of hers, the right nipple having the barbel of silver I’d seen through the cloth when we’d first been introduced at the bar. They worked on each other’s jeans next, having kicked off their shoes when we’d first come out of the garage. And before I knew it, they were both standing completely naked in front of me. Cori had a small V of black hair above her pussy, in contrast to the rectangular block of blonde above Raz’s. Both of the girls had pierced their navel.
The two of them approached me in unison, reaching together to pull my shirt up and over my head, kissing at my cheek and neck before I could feel hands on my waist. They pushed me down onto my back and before I knew it, they’d shoved my pants and boxers off and I was just as naked as they were, each of them having one hand somewhere on my cock, Cori’s fingers more towards the tip, Raz’s down near the base.
They were taking their time, and it was immediately far more intimate and emotional than anything I’d ever been a part of. They helped ease me back onto the bed, and before I knew it hands had shifted into lips and tongues, the two of them kissing along the length of my cock, meshing their mouths together over the tip, kissing each other while their tongues paid no small amount of attention to my tip. To call it a blowjob would be to do a disservice to the treatment they paid to my dick – it was a hymnal, a ceremony, a celebration.
But they didn’t stop there and before I knew it, Cori was moving to straddle her hips over mine, both of her hands on my chest to make her tits press together as she smiled down at me. “I told Raz that I wanted to go first, and she said that was fine,” Cori said as she slowly pushed her snatch down onto my cock. She was snug, but whatever patience she’d been holding onto wasn’t going to last forever. “God, you feel exactly how I wanted you to feel. Raz, you won’t believe—”
“Shhh,” Raz said, leaning over to press her fingertip to Cori’s lips. “Just enjoy him. I’ll know soon enough.”
Cori started thrusting her hips onto my cock like she’d been waiting for this moment her entire life, a wide and thirsty smile across her lips as she just bucked that clenched cunt up and down on my cock over and over again. The pace wasn’t intense or rushed, but just the perfect amount of pressure and tempo, as she leaned down and pressed her lips against mine just in time for my orgasm to match hers, her body seizing up like a defective engine to lock around my cock, trembling to force my orgasm to get her to relax slightly and unwind as my cum greased the wheels of her insides.
If Cori was a waltz, Raz was break dancing.
Our first time, I had her on her hands and knees, pounding into her doggy style while she made out with Cori, who was laying dazed lazily beneath her. Raz snapped her hips back into me, making her ass jiggle, and I teased her asshole with one of my fingertips just a little before she groaned and nodded in encouragement. I came inside of her with my finger pressed against my own shaft through the fleshy walls of her body.
In the morning, I half expected them to be gone, but instead I found them cuddled up on either side of me, each with a leg and an arm draped over me. I eventually slipped out from between the two of them and made them breakfast, because I figured, if I was being given this chance, I’d better make it work, and that meant treating them right.
That was three years ago.
The game launched in January of 2020 to great acclaim and found an audience almost immediately. We met up with the right producer at GDC 2018, and they helped us get the rest of the way there without growing the company too much. We’re only about twenty people now, and in addition to art director, I have co-founder on my business card.
The timing of launching the game was perfect, because just a few months later, everyone would be stuck at home, trying to avoid Covid, and it meant everyone had plenty of free time. People were discovering our game and telling their friends. We became one of the biggest hits of the year for mobile, and we did everything we could to make our game good first and earn money second, not the other way around.
Being home all the time also let me spend more time with my two girlfriends. Cori and Raz moved in with me, and we’re sort of perfect together. Cori was right, though. We wouldn’t have worked if she’d tried to hook up with me right out of high school – I wasn’t in the right headspace and neither was she. And I can’t overstate how important Raz is to balancing us out, calling both of us on our shit when we need it. We really are our best selves as a trio.
That’s my story. I’d love to tell you I learned something from all of it, but I think I sort of knew the lesson at the start – nothing is ever what you think it’s going to be, and you never, ever, ever know what’s just around the corner waiting for you. Cori, Raz and I are trying to figure out some way to make it legal, but at this point, they both call me their husband and the other one their wife, so I guess we really are this weird unit now.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is, life’s going to come at you pretty fast. Wherever you’re at, no matter how mad at the world you are, things’ll change. You never know what tomorrow’s going to hold, or where even just a few years will take you.
That’s the best secret of all.
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FlareNight
I'm confused, since the end of chapter 6 said one of the things he learned from gifts three and four is that he doesn't actually want two women and that he only had a couple experiences. That obviously can't be part of the lesson if the goal was to get him set up for Cori's throuple.
Don Alejo
"Bottoming out is just a lack of imagination on your part." That needs to be on coffee mugs or beer coozies. Throughout this series you really displayed a gift with how to make profound thoughts simple. I loved the blend of philosophy, personal development, and fucking. You hit the balance just right.
pohmii Holloman
Love the twist with the ghost. If you ever want to that could be the opening of an encore.
SovietDegendays
Damn good ending!
