The 7 Secrets of Mr. Magpie Ch. 05

Part Five - Silver

So, by this point, I think we can agree I'm not a complete idiot. I'd recognized there was a pattern in how long things were in between their occurrences and it was descending. That meant I should expect the fifth gift or secret or whatever to be springing up sometime in August of 2017.

There was something strange about knowing what the timeframe was. Like, having no indication it was coming was part of the fun of it before then, but now that I knew I had four months before it came back around, there wasn't any pressure or anticipation of things going off in the middle of it.

That wasn't too bad, and it had let me back off driving for Uber, because I'd been starting to go crazy with that shit. There's only so many dumb fucking twenty-somethings any one person can be expected to tolerate, and during the summer, they tend to get even crazier than usual. Not entirely sure what that was all about, but there were times the previous summer where they'd get into the car after finishing their night at the bar and begin doing everything shy of having actual sex in the back of my vehicle. And we were repeatedly told not to rate customers less than five stars unless it was absolutely necessary.

The deciding factor was when they even called me up to ask me about why I'd rated a customer one-star. I informed them that she'd been giving the guy a handjob in the back of my car despite me telling them to stop.

You know what their reply was?

They asked me if I had recorded footage of them doing it.

When I told them that I hadn't, they informed me it would be my word versus hers and that they typically believed riders more than they did drivers. That was the sort of thing that was typical of the company, at least back in in 2017. They told me that if I didn't have footage, they were just going to reverse my rating. But they weren't going to reverse the 1-star rating that the passenger had given me. Because I got so many ratings in a night, they felt that a single 1-star rating on my record wouldn't be anywhere near as impactful as my 1-star rating of them.

I informed them it was likely to affect how much driving I did for them moving forward. They said they understood that and hoped I would reconsider, since I'd done such excellent work for them over the past few years. I said that I'd have to have a long think about it, and they'd be able to tell what my decision was based on my activity moving forward.

So after that phone call, I decided I was going to start hustling even harder to avoid having to drive for that shitty company ever again. That meant I needed to up my portfolio, start hustling for new clients and just in general up my game professionally.

That was going to come to figure in a lot of things for the tail end of my tale, but I didn't realize that. It would actually play into more things than I thought it possibly could. But let's not get ahead of myself.

I found it odd, but once I started pushing to get things done and to find new gigs, I started seeing that there was a need for people with my skillset again. And that was nice to see, because I very quickly picked up that I shouldn't be mentioning rates or taking on large scale gigs.

In fact, more than a couple of time I was talking about picking up short term work and people were asking me if I'd considered going back to work on a full-time basis to which I responded yeah, of course, but I'd need a reasonable salary and a bit of actual stability.

That always seemed to be the sticking point.

And always they had the same story.

They hadn't quite found funding yet. They were working other jobs on the side and needed someone who could do the same. They weren't ready yet to pay anyone salaries, because nobody had any money.

It was a refrain he kept hearing over and over and over again.

"We'd love to have you join us. We can't pay you anything."

And as much fun as a lot of these projects sounded, none of them paid the bills. And I have bills to pay, y'know? The house may be paid for, but I still had to pay utilities, phone, internet, food, the whole lot. And the cost of living in the Bay Area isn't anything cheap.

On the plus side, I was getting a load of leads for contract gigs, and that wasn't terrible. I hadn't really been pulling my weight in doing outreach to search for work, and I guess that's on me. The work had been there during the dry spells, I think, but it had been harder to find.

Mrs. Choi's house also finally had the "for sale" sign adjusted after years on the market to a "sale pending" sign. The real estate market especially in the Bay had been more than a little rocky, but I think Mrs. Choi hadn't been willing to lower her price even a penny, so the house had remained on the market for what felt like the longest time ever.

While I'd been sleeping, I'd gotten a phone call which had gone straight to voicemail from an unknown number. It came from an unknown number but I recognized the voice from the very first syllable. It was Mrs. Choi.

"My dear Mr. Magpie! My house is being sold, so my granddaughter Cori will be coming by relatively soon to do an inspection. I want her to come by and see you, for her to say hello! It's been years since you two have seen each other, so be sure to welcome her when she stops by!"

It had been years since I'd seen Cori - she'd been a high school student the last time she'd come by, and that had been at least three or four years ago, but she'd seemed nice enough. A bit hyperactive, but super friendly and kind. She'd been fascinated by watching me work, how I'd built a digital model, got it rigged up and could make it move around my screen in such a short period of time. It wasn't well textured, but she'd always assumed that making videogames was something being done by nameless, faceless drones in an office park somewhere.

I made a note that I was going to have to ask her for her grandmother's new address, putting it on a post-it note on my fridge. It was up a surprisingly bit longer than I thought it would be.

During my downtime, I did a little bit of searching to see if I could find anything more about Madi, Saffron and Alistair, but that came back dry. I also got a card in the mail from overseas with something that absolutely blew my mind. It was a baby announcement, from Freya. And in looking at the picture, I knew why she'd sent it to me in a heartbeat. Between Freya and Christof, there was no way they'd produced a kid with such dark hair.

That was my kid in the picture.

During the morning after, right before Freya had left, we'd had a talk about what to do if, against insanely overwhelming odds, she had gotten pregnant from our encounter. I'd told her that as long as Christof was cool with it - as she'd claimed he was - then the two of them could just raise it as their own, and they didn't ever need to bring me up. I'd like to keep tabs on the kid, so if they could just send me a picture once a year, that'd be more than plenty.

I'd never really planned on being a parent, and the idea of having a kid was more than a little terrifying to me. But the idea of my lineage not dying out when I died? That was kind of a nice thought to have. I didn't want to interfere with Freya's life, so I wanted them to basically not worry about me getting in the way of anything.

This, it seemed, was the announcement that I had indeed fathered a child with Freya, and that she and Christof were going to raise it in Denmark without the kid having any knowledge that his father wasn't his biological father. If the two of them were happy with it, then who the hell was I to tell them otherwise? Who was anybody to tell them they shouldn't have had it?

Just last year, I found out that as part of Christof winning, he got the right to father a child with his high school sweetheart Lara. Lara and her partner, Abigail, had been talking about adopting a kid or going through IVF, but had come to an accord that if Christof in his farewell to singledom night could get Lara pregnant, the two women would keep that child. The two couples had briefly entertained the idea of swapping the children at birth, but in the end, the mothers felt they would be too attached to the children they had carried within them for nine months to let them go, and so Christof's child stayed with Lara and Abigail, and my child stayed with Freya and Christof.

The photo also included the child's name.

Krage Schumann.

Schumann was, of course, Freya and Christof's last name, and Krage I'd learn quickly was Dutch for crow.

He really was an adorable baby. Every year they send me a picture, and that's always nice to get. I also get a yearly phone call from Freya, usually in the middle of the night, to talk about what's going on in both my life and hers, and for them to give me little updates on how Krage's growing up.

One of the things about working in the games industry is that there are loads of mixers going on, some on a monthly basis and some on a quarterly basis, where loads of small and indie game developers from around the Bay Area (as well as a handful of larger ones) have a cocktail party that doubles as both exposure for the developers as well as a chance for them to get free focus testing.

GameMix, GameDevJam, GameScramble, Cindy's Indies, NoBudgetParties... the list goes on and on and on. I've got a standing invite to most of them, but there's only so many nights out seeing the same odd indie titles that I can manage. But it's good networking and so I try to get to each one of the parties at least once a season.

That was true for all of them except GameScramble, which was held at a games incubator in downtown San Francisco. You're probably not familiar with the idea of a games incubator, so let me try and break it down for you. It's like a co-location, where a bunch of tiny game developers (studios with usually only 1-2 people in them) share office space and bounce off each other for ideas and assistance. Everybody pays a small share into the rent, power and internet, and everybody has a workspace that isn't their own home. There were a number of attempts to try and do this (before the pandemic anyway) with a company called WeWork being the biggest and most spectacular failure. Others have seemed to get it working okay, though.

I hadn't been to GameScramble in a couple of years, because there were a number of developers there that I just didn't care for. The last time I'd been there, one of the game devs there told me that by having a love of giant mechs, I was engaging in cultural appropriation of Asian culture, and that I should be ashamed of myself. Yeah, I wanted to punch the kid in the face too.

At some point, things just become genres unto themselves, as I'd tried to explain to the kid. Edgar Allan Poe had invented the modern mystery story, so did that mean that Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, or all the great Agatha Christie murder mysteries, were all those cultural appropriation?

The whole thing had devolved over the course of the evening, and battle lines were drawn. Some people accused me of trying to drive a wedge between two groups at GameScramble, but I'd pointed out to them that I'd just been defending myself and my portfolio.

They continued to invite me to events after that, but I felt it better for both them and me if I didn't take them up on it.

But enough time had passed that I felt like I should probably give them another go, so I'd schlepped my way into downtown San Francisco on a Thursday night for the autumn GameScramble event. I remember hoping like hell it wasn't going to bite me in the ass. And whatever I expected to come of that evening, what actually happened was way stranger.

The thing about all of these game incubators is that they're generally above or in back of something else, so you almost feel like you're going to a speakeasy to get to one of them, through some back alleyway and up a set of stairs that spirals into seemingly nowhere only to open up into this weird hidden loft area, half the time in the shadow of the freeway overpasses. You almost feel like someone's going to offer you a Sidecar on your way in and ask if you need any reefer or molly. It's such a weird vibe.

There were about a dozen indie developers working out of the GameScramble offices, and while it was nice to network and press the flesh, many of the games were the sorts of things that just held zero interest to me - precision side-scrollers with elaborate sequences, point-and-click adventures that often told a deeply personal story to the creator that they hadn't bothered to make accessible (or even comprehensible) to anyone else, some weird mish-mash of game genres that didn't seem to have any unifying theme, and always, always, always at least one creator who spent all night bitching to everyone trying his game that "you just don't get it," and always saw that as a failure of the audience and not of himself as a creator.

Just after walking into the place, someone I'd never met handed me a drink and asked me to come try their "latest masterpiece" (spoiler alert: it wasn't) and we were off to the races.

About an hour into the night, I'd tried a handful of games that were still far too ripe to be getting any useful feedback and was just about to head out of the joint when a familiar face wandered up to me, and I let out a deep whistle of admiration.

"Well, goddamn, Rose Winslow!" I said as she strolled up towards me with a sly smile on her face. Rose was the older sister of a guy I'd worked with for a couple of years, and I'd always said that if she was ever single, he should try and set me up with her, which he never did or she was never single, I could never really figure out which.

She was a 6'6" brunette who worked as a venture capitalist investor for startups in the Valley. Rose had a striking beauty to her, something that just stood out in the center of the room, and lots of people joked that she could've been a model if she'd been a bit stupider. But she was far too smart for that kind of thing, and instead she used her beauty to put people at ease who really should've known better than to underestimate her. Thin and slender, as gorgeous as she was, I'd often joked around that she needed to eat more, but she'd always taken it as good-natured ribbing.

Tonight, she was dressed like she wanted everyone to look at her as soon as she entered, a short red dress that was low on top, short on bottom and dangerously tight all around, so much so that I was pretty certain she wasn't wearing a bra or panties beneath it. Of course, being as tall as she was, short on bottom meant it came down to almost her knees, simply so she wasn't flashing everyone everywhere she went.

Rose couldn't have been in the room long, because the entire vibe changed when she entered. Rose worked for IllumEyeNation, a local investment firm that had a great track record of knowing when to get in, when to get out, when to flip and how to pick the perfect things to be angel investors for. She'd gotten a reputation as something of a kingmaker in the indie games space, with their last major investment having gone to a games studio made up of complete first-timers that had gone on to win multiple Game of the Year awards with their first title. Every single person wanted to say hello to her, to get her attention on their project for just a few seconds in the hope that she would pluck them from obscurity and fund the living shit out of their pipe dreams.

But as it turned out, she wasn't there for them.

"Heya Raf," she said to me with a big smile, bending down and wrapping her arms around me to give me a welcoming hug as well as a kiss on each of my cheeks. "I normally don't come to these things, but my girl Bonnie sent me a text message when she spotted you arriving, because lord knows, nobody's seen you in a good long while."

"You came to see me?" I laughed. "I can't imagine why, Rose. I ain't got shit to sell."

"C'mon, let's go outside and down to Crepes A-GoGo where we can hear each other talk," she said, pulling me from the crowd and leading us towards the stairs, having to politely excuse herself at least half a dozen times before we even made it to the stairwell.

There was something kind and warm about her touch, as she held my hand in hers. We hadn't really ever known each other all that well, but there was a familiarity in the way that she was treating me that I have to admit I didn't hate.

We wove our way down the stairwell, past a number of people trying to hand her their business cards, and out onto the street, heading down the block towards a crepes truck that was open until 2:30 am any given night, offering food for people after the bars closed.

As we were walking down the street, I tried to remind myself Rose had always used her beauty as a weapon and a tool, and that if she'd come looking for me, I had to have my guard up, because it was entirely possible that she was going to leave me without my shirt or a prayer to my name.

"So what's it been? Three, four years?" I asked her.

"Something like that," she agreed. "I don't think I've seen you since that last night of hard drinking the day Arcadia Games shut down."

"How is Marc anyway?" I asked, not really wanting the answer to the question, because her brother and I hadn't often seen eye-to-eye on a number of things.

"He's actually the reason I came out to find you tonight," she said to me with a smile, her long slender fingers wrapped around my forearm. "He's got a new project he's working on, and he needs an art director. I was thinking maybe that could be you."

Two things you need to realize at this point. Number one, I'd never been a director before and the idea of being in charge of a team of artists made me more than a little bit nervous. Number two, her brother Marc could be a real pain-in-the-ass to work with for a lot of reasons, and though we'd been co-workers before, we'd always had a producer liaisoning between us, making sure we didn't kill each other, because Marc wasn't real respectful of deadlines.

To make a videogame, you really only need three things, and in the very indie studios, one person can often do two or three of these things. You need a programmer, you need a game designer and you need an artist. There's lots of other things around that are helpful (a producer, for one, who is often doing little more than arbitrating between bickering parties), but at the absolute base of making a game, that's all you need.

Marc was a game designer who'd never met an idea too late to integrate into whatever it was he was working on. Back at Arcadia, we used to jokingly call him CK, which was short for Creeper King. Feature Creep is when you're deep into a project and suddenly you have a great idea that you think you can add into the project. Because you're adding something (a feature) along the way, the amount of time it takes to do anything goes up and your expected done date gets pushed out. Feature Creep is the number one reason that games don't get finished, because some designer gets a wild hair up his ass and keeps trying to add feature after feature. Marc Winslow did this so much that at one point, the executive producer on our project just stuck up a Post-It Note on his office door that said 'Whatever it is, Marc, the answer is no.'

Now, don't get me wrong - Marc was also a great game designer. He had a knack for coming up with interesting game designs that straddled between things people already knew and things they'd never tried before, and he understood that fun was the most important thing to have. I'd sort of wondered where he'd ended up, because I figured someone somewhere would've scooped him up early.