by Jon Auerbach
“Macallan 12, neat,” he said, gesturing to the drink.
I locked eyes with him and then at the drink, before picking it up and swirling the brown liquid around counterclockwise.
“Trying to see if I poisoned you?”
I stopped the glass, the scotch cresting against the side and spilling slightly over the breech.
“No, just pondering why I am here, in this bar, contemplating a sip of a scotch that I absolutely hate, with you, who seemed more interested in doing due diligence on what’s underneath my sweater. Honestly, did you spend your entire time at RPGLab staring at me?”
I put the glass down and slid it toward the bar, waving over the bartender.
“Laphroaig 25, on the rocks, and put it on his tab, please.”
The bartender obliged, and a few moments later, I sipped my new cold scotch.
“You know,” said Duncan with a grin, “it’s rude to drink without cheers-ing first.”
I stared at him, debating whether to chew him out again or to go along with the banter. I chose the latter.
“You’re right, how rude of me. What should we toast to?”
Duncan thought for a minute before he raised his glass towards mine.
“To not missing out on a promising investment,” he said.
Our glasses clinked and I took a sip. The whiskey burned my throat as it went down, enough to make me forget for a second Duncan’s second lame attempt at a pick-up line. I began to reply and that was when a cab drove right through a huge puddle behind me, the resulting wake drenching me from head to toe.
I was still outside the bar. Duncan, inside.
Our conversation: within the confines of my head.
I had not actually gone in, but had stopped to look through the window of the bar, trying to work up the courage to walk in and make the bold entrance that had just played out in my mind.
Duncan turned toward the window and I darted out of his view. Whatever courage remained had been washed away by the dirty rain water wave. And so I retreated.
The next day, I was in the middle of debugging the new inventory APIs when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I swiveled to see Duncan, who had grabbed a chair and was sitting directly behind me. I yelped.
“W-what are you doing here?” I stammered out. “Don’t you know it’s rude to sneak up on someone?”
Duncan chuckled.
“And don’t you know it’s rude to stand someone up? I had to cook up a really good explanation for my boss as to why I couldn’t take the early flight out this morning.”
I stood up and stared down at Duncan, trying to gain control by talking down to him as so many men had done to me.
“It doesn’t count as standing someone up if the invitation was unsolicited and not accepted. You’re the one who chose to wait there, not knowing if I was going to come. Which I couldn’t, because I was here last night until 12:30 making up the work I could have been doing if we didn’t have to spend three days getting a build ready for you and Bret. For all the good that did anyway, seeing as how you’re more interested in me than my code.”
I cringed at that last line. Not only because it made me sound like a 16-year-old, but also because my boss would be furious if he found out I told off a potential investor.
There was a silence between us for only a few moments, but it dragged on for what seemed like ages. Then Duncan got up from his chair and we stood, facing each other eye to eye.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have presumed anything and it was wrong of me to come back here after you clearly weren’t interested in me.” His eyes shifted from mine to the floor, and then back again. I considered him again during this moment of vulnerability. He was cute in a used-to-be-dorky-in-high-school-but-then-became-an-investment-banker-sort-of-way. His dirty blond hair was an unkempt mess and I didn’t really like the sweater-vest/button-down combo he was rocking, but he had done what a lot of guys would never do: admit that he had made a mistake. I decided to relieve him of some of his guilt.
“Well,” I said. “You weren’t completely wrong.”
Our actual first date did not go down like I had imagined it. He insisted on buying me a proper dinner and we ended up closing the place down. Then, the next day, in what would be an annoying pattern that still persisted to this day, Duncan left town. He did come back, but never for more than a week or two at a time. He even convinced his boss to throw in a bit of money in the end. And so our relationship had proceeded at a glacial pace, despite it being a year and a half that we’d “officially” been together.
So he was not there when I (eventually) decided to confront the dragon. I took the leftovers from my fridge, grabbed the shovel from the lobby, and then waited in the alley for the beast to appear. It did, and my first attempts were not pretty. The rat was quicker than I expected, it ignored the food, and the super’s shovel was too heavy, so that every time I swung, the little bastard just scurried away. I discarded my coat for added mobility, leaving me in the alley with nothing but a ratty old t-shirt, but the increased speed was not enough. Eventually I just chucked the shovel blindly, hoping that the vermin wouldn’t expect a flying projectile attack, but the shovel just skirted harmlessly across the pavement. This Quest was going to get the best of me, it seemed.
I collapsed to the ground, exhausted. As I did though, the locket around my neck fell free from my t-shirt. It had been my mother’s and she had given it to me for my 11th birthday as my sole present. At the time I thought it was a pretty terrible gift, but now she was gone and I just had the locket.
That’s when it hit me. You couldn’t just give the dragon some crappy food and expect it to turn away so you could stab it in the back. No, it wanted something valuable, something special. And suddenly I realized what I had to do.
I unclasped the locket from around my neck and held it in my hands. It was silver, the size of a dollar coin, and the clasp had long since rusted over. I don’t remember if I opened it at the time my mother gave it to me and if I had, its contents were now lost in my memory along with the rest of my childhood.
The rat’s squeak interrupted my reminiscing and I refocused on the task at hand. It was now or never. I skipped the locket down the alley like a stone on a lake. The sound it made bouncing against the pavement made me cringe. Was this even worth it?
My opponent didn’t care about my moral crisis and finally emerged from the shadows. It studied the locket for a few seconds before deciding that it was more appetizing than the actual food offering I had made earlier and sunk its teeth into the silver.
With cat-like stealth, I crept along the alley walls to my discarded shovel, grabbed it in-stride, and with one last lunge brought the head down into the rodent’s flesh. It was over.
But not really. The rat corpse needed transporting, and there was the matter of retrieving my locket from the jaws of the dead creature. So I did what any normal 27-year old woman did on a Tuesday night: I stuck my hand in a rat’s mouth and pulled.
3
Kansas City Shuffle
“We bought the island for the equivalent of 60 guilders, an absolute bargain.”
There was not enough silver polish in the world to remove the rat essence from my mother’s locket and after the 14th time I had buffed every arc and curve, I contemplated shutting it away in a drawer with the three stupid tokens it had earned me.
But I couldn’t and back it went around my neck. One day soon I hoped not to remember in crystal-clear detail what I had gone through to get it back, but that day had not yet come.
The momentary burst of courage I felt when I faced down the rat hadn’t taken root and so I was skittish in my selection of the next few Quests, staying within the safe parameters of fetching tchotchkes from random stores around town. It was boring and I knew it, but I couldn’t bring myself to venture outside of my Questing comfort zone.
Besides, what was the point of this whole exercise? I was still half-convinced that this was an elaborate marketing campaign for some ne
w game (maybe even my own company’s) and if so, I probably wouldn’t even have cared. Any game that spent this much on advertising was probably going to be something incredible. Or a PR nightmare. “Woman sues gaming company after catching rabies from rat.” Heh.
But I was growing tired of the fetch Quests for random junk. And I was tired of watching my stack of wooden and iron tokens grow taller bit by bit with absolutely no idea of what to do with them. Fortunately, good things come to those wait, because one night when I went to check the Quests, there was a new section:
“D. Quester Profile”
I hit D and a new screen appeared:
“Quester: JadePhoenix42
Quests completed: 11
Tokens earned: 23 wood, 2 iron
Level: 1
Token experience: 27
Level up: 30”
Now we’re talking! If there’s one thing that will get someone to keep playing a game, it’s the sense of making progress. It doesn’t matter if it’s steps on an endless, meaningless ladder, people will continue to climb even after their fingers are numb and their wallets are empty. It’s one of the directives we received from the higher-ups at work: keep the fish coming back for more.
And now they had a hook in me too. As much as I wanted to think that I was immune to such tactics, in truth it activated the same dopamine trigger in my brain like everyone else. Show me that I’m three experience away from the next level and I’ll play all night to get there.
I clicked from the profile screen to the Quest list to look for something that would get me there in one hit: either a three wood for three experience or a two iron for four. I scrolled through several pages, looking for the perfect Quest that would elevate me. Finally, on the fifth page, I found one that stood apart from all the others:
“Testing out a new shell game in Times Square. If you win, or even if you don’t, I’ll give you two iron. Come by the northwest corner of 47th and Broadway tomorrow at 2 PM.”
I clicked quickly to accept. Two iron for losing at an obvious con game was a no-brainer, and I didn’t want anyone to grab it first. Plus, I would actually get to meet a fellow Quester in the flesh.
Eleven Quests in and I still hadn’t made contact with the people whose Quests I had completed, or Requesters, as I had dubbed them. My standard operating procedure was to have the token sent to the front desk of my office building, which was 70 stories tall and afforded me anonymity from potentially crazy Requesters.
I had to sweet talk the security guy to be on the lookout for envelopes addressed to JadePhoenix42. It took a bunch of cups of coffee, plus some borderline flirting, but he finally agreed. I’m sure he thought the whole thing was a poor attempt at covering up a pot delivery, but thankfully he never opened any of the envelopes. And, after all, this was Manhattan, the land where people hired other people to do every menial task they couldn’t be bothered with.
Now I know the Quest said that win or lose, I would still get the two iron, but that didn’t stop me from looking up all ways to win the shell game or its cousin, three-card monte.
You could just refuse to play the game, knowing that you were going to be cheated, but that didn’t seem appropriate. You could delusionally convince yourself that you could follow the correct shell all the way to the end, but somewhere along the way you would miss the trick and lose everything. Or, you could just trust your fate to the goddess of chance and guess a shell at random. That seemed to be the best option at the end of the day.
I sat at my desk all morning, watching the minutes tick by, until finally it was 1:30, and I darted out to the subway. When I got to the Times Square station, I bounded up the stairs and into the madness of thousands of people looking up at giant billboards while walking very slowly. Finally, I arrived at the designated corner. Which was empty. I looked at my watch and then at my phone to make sure I wasn’t late. I wasn’t. In fact, it was precisely 2:00 on the dot. I pulled out my phone again, trying to access the Quest Board to see if I had misread the Quest when I suddenly felt something sharp push into my back.
I turned and looked down, half expecting to see a bloody knife sticking out of me, but it was just a cardboard box. A sharp box at that, but still only a box. Phew. I stepped back as the box was lowered to the ground by its owner, who I could now see was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than 12.
“Oh, hey! Sorry about that! Are you Jade?” the girl asked cheerfully. She was on the shorter side, with blond hair done up in pigtails, big gold hoops in her ears, and a denim knapsack on her back.
“Umm, yeah, that’s me, and you are?”
“I’m Polly!”
The girl stuck out her hand, which I reluctantly took, and she gave me a vigorous handshake.
“Of course you are,” I said. “Aren’t you a little, err, young to be trying to scam people out here? I was expecting someone who looked a little more like your typical grifter. You know, worn face, missing teeth, poorly made leather jacket.”
She frowned, and let go of my hand.
“I’m not so young, I’ll be 11 next week!”
“OK, OK, sorry I asked. And happy birthday I guess. So, are you going to show me this trick of yours, or what? I need to head back to work soon.”
Polly bent down to push the box toward the Starbucks near the corner and I walked with her as she positioned it just so.
“Yes, yes, have a little patience, lady. I need a few minutes to set up.”
Polly plopped down her backpack on the box and began rummaging inside. I tried to look away to avoid the passing judgment of the Starbucks patrons filtering in and out of the store, but no one seemed to pay any attention to us.
“So, Polly. You been Questing long?”
The girl looked up at me as if I was her grandma asking how to use an iPhone.
“Whatever gave you the idea that I was that desperate?”
“Well, uh, because you’re posting Quests on the Board?”
“Right, exactly. I’m paying you. Not the other way around. If one day we ran out of money then I gueesssss I would have to start from the bottom like you. But if that ever happens, shoot me. Can you imagine, me, a Janssen, Questing? Ridiculous.”
Ohhh-kay then. Obviously what I thought was a simple question was actually laced with insulting underpinnings. This girl’s family was evidently a big deal in the Questing social circle, but what that circle even was, I had no clue, and was a tiny bit scared to ask more. I didn’t get the chance though, as Polly had finished setting up, and on the cardboard box were three identical shells, painted in bright pink. In front of them was a little blue ball that I guessed fit under the shells.
“All right, Jade. Time to play. Now, I’m not sure if I got all the kinks out, so that’s why I’m giving you two iron even if you lose. Which you probably will, just going to warn you.”
“I know, don’t worry about my ego. So how do I play?”
Polly smiled.
“Easy. I’m going to put the ball under one of these shells, like so.” She covered the ball with the leftmost shell. “Then I’ll shuffle all the shells around.” Her hands deftly swapped the leftmost and rightmost shells, then further swapped the rightmost shell, which had the ball, with the middle shell. “And now you guess under which shell the ball is hiding. This first one’s easy, so you should get it ... if you’re not a total idiot.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. The middle one.” I tapped it twice with my index finger for extra emphasis and she turned it over, revealing the ball.
“Very good! Well, not really. That’s the warm-up, the one you do to show the mar-errr, contestant that they have a chance. Now I’ll speed it up a bit, to see what you’ve got.”
Polly put the ball back under the middle shell and then began swapping at random with blazing speed. Sometimes she would move the shell to a different spot; other times, she would move it right back to where it was. Luckily my years of gaming had trained my eyes well and I spotted all of her feints and swaps with re
lative ease. So when the shells stopped and I pointed to the left one, I wasn’t surprised to see the ball underneath.
“Well done, lady. Most people usually can’t follow me that quickly. I think it’s time, though, for the real game to begin.”
The ball disappeared back under the left shell and off it went. The speed was even greater and I felt myself losing the ball several times. It was then that I noticed the tell. To move the shell with the ball required just a little more energy, which Polly’s hand betrayed ever so slightly. With that piece of intel, I stopped watching the shells and focused only on Polly’s hands. But when I confidently tapped the rightmost shell at the end of the round, it was empty.
“Ooh, so close. Care to go again?”
I cursed under my breath. I was not going to let this little punk best me so easily.
“Yes, let’s do it.”
This time I had the benefit of my hidden edge the whole round and, again, I felt sure that I had tapped the correct shell, only to come up empty-handed a second time.
“Again,” I said.
Polly just smiled as the shells began their dance anew.
Finally, after countless more rounds, I relented.
“Enough, enough. You are something else.”
“Why thank you Jade,” said Polly with a smile dripping in condescension. “You were watching my hands, weren’t you? That’s smart, but it won’t do you any good with these particular shells.”
“And why’s that?”
“Oh come now. If I told you that, I’d have to kill you, now wouldn’t I?”
I stared at her as she made her pronouncement with a matter-of-fact tone.
“Just kidding. Geez, can’t you take a joke? Tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. If you can win the next round, I’ll not only show you how the shells work, but I’ll double your tokens. If you lose, you get nothing, plus you’ll owe me a favor. Do we have a deal?”
I didn’t give it a second thought.
