Can we get dinner, son? Tonight?
“Shoot,” Mark muttered to himself as he read through the message his father, or more likely his father’s assistant, had sent him. “What does he want?”
What’s up? Mark’s fingers tapped out his question and he settled in to wait for the reply that was likely to take hours.
I have some things I have to discuss with you. How about we meet up at Gregory’s?
“I’m going to have to put on my nice dress shirt,” Mark muttered to himself as he accepted his father’s suggestion. “That was also way too fast for him, definitely his assistant.”
“Well,” Mark said to himself while looking around his bedroom for something to do, “Can’t jump back into Astrana while I’m waiting for the clock to tick over. What should I do now?”
“Hello, your name?” the well-dressed host asked Mark as he stepped into the very nice four star restaurant his father had suggested for their meeting.
“Smithwick,” Mark answered him. “I’m supposed to be meeting with my father, Percival Smithwick.”
“Mr. Smithwick hasn’t arrived yet,” the host told him. “However, your table is ready upstairs. If you’ll just follow me.”
As the host led him through the dining floor of the restaurant, Mark was reminded of why he hated accepting his father’s invitations to eat any meal with him. The few tables they passed held two, sometimes three, people eating from plates and bowls that held half-portions as they worked their way through meals that were likely three courses. And of course, he wasn’t blind to the bottles of wine that rested just to the side of the tables in engraved silver ice buckets, each of those bottles was likely worth enough money to pay for the entire meal.
“Here you are, sir,” the host said as he led Mark to a table next to a window that overlooked the restaurant’s greenhouse garden that was in full-bloom with a veritable rainbow of flowers. “Would you like to peruse the wine list?”
“No,” Mark answered him as he sat down. “Thank you.”
“Thank you, sir,” the host said respectfully as he turned and left Mark sitting alone at the table waiting for his father.
Several minutes passed as Mark waited for his father’s arrival, as he waited he drank the water that the young waitress had brought out to him and he examined the garden.
“Here you are, sir, miss,” the host’s voice caused Mark to turn in his seat to see that his father and a younger woman had arrived. As the host seated the young woman, Mark studied his father, trying not to let his anger show at the presence of the woman.
Strong jaw, straight nose, hazel eyes. Mark’s father, Percival, was who he could credit for many of his own features, though age had softened the older man’s harsher points, as much as the perpetual frown that rested on his face sharpened them again, leaving many young people wondering if they had angered the man before.
“Markus,” Percival greeted his son with his full name.
“Father,” Mark returned his greeting coldly. “What did you want to see me about?”
“I have some things I wanted to discuss with you,” Percival said. “But first, let me introduce Lana Albrook to you. Lana has agreed to work on a project of mine that I would like to discuss with you.”
“It’s very nice to meet you,” the young woman said with a smile, extending her hand toward Mark. “Mr. Smithwick has told me so much about you, it’s wonderful to meet you in person. I hope we can get along.”
Mark accepted her hand for a brief moment before turning back toward his father who had waved their table’s waitress over and was in the process of ordering food and wine.
“-- and if you could make sure the bottle is open already when you arrive here, that would be fine,” Percival told her. “That vintage needs to breathe for a moment before it’s poured.”
With a quick nod, the waitress left quickly and made her way to the kitchen to place their order and retrieve their wine.
“Patience, Markus,” Percival told him as he turned back to his son. “Let’s enjoy dinner before we get into the details of why I wanted to talk to you. Have you spoken to your sisters lately?”
Trying not to clench his jaw, Mark passed through the dinner mechanically, answering his father’s questions as cordially as he could and doing his best not to glare a hole through the man. Finally, as the last dish was cleared away, Percival leaned back in his chair and took one final drink of his wine before setting the glass down and looking at his son.
“Why did you want to see me?” Mark asked his father again.
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“I have a business proposition that I wanted your opinion on, if not your outright control of it,” Percival told him. “Ms. Albrook was kind enough to hear out my idea and she accepted my offer to have her be a part of it.”
“What’s the idea?” Mark asked, tired of his father giving vague answers.
“Before that,” Percival said, “let me tell you a bit about what’s happening in the business world as a result of your new game, Astrana is it? What the company C99 has done with their technology is nothing short of the next step in communication and work ethic. With a simple Pod device, they have made it possible for a group of Asian businessmen to have a full conversation with their varied European partners without leaving their home cities or having to learn five other languages. With those same devices, they have made it possible for them to hold a twelve hour meeting in the space of three hours. Many who work from home or work in data entry positions have also reported that they are able to use the Pod’s functions to accomplish their full workload in a fraction of the time it would usually take.
“Already, there is talk among the courts and prisons to use the technology to force the more heinous criminals to serve out multi-century sentences in the span of their life. There have been just as many talks about doubling or even tripling the sentences of less violent criminals and having them serve their sentences in the time-span of five years.”
“What does all this have to do with your idea?” Mark asked his father, interest growing at the many ideas that people had already come up with using C99’s Pod technology for.
“All these discussions, and none of them are even considering the technology’s tried and tested use,” Percival said. “Entertainment. My idea is to have a team of people, perhaps actors, using the technology to create a television show or movie within the bounds of the current limitations that Astrana brings. I want your opinion or partnership on this.”
“Really?” Mark asked, now skeptical. “Your company doesn’t have enough on its plate?”
“They do,” Percival said. “That’s why I’d like you to join me on this. The idea is to have you control the day-to-day of this venture, planning, hiring, production; while I supply the capital that will be used to make it a success.”
“And I’m sure there’s a reason you wanted Ms. Albrook here,” Mark said.
“Yes,” Percival nodded. “Ms. Albrook would work with you in whatever capacity you would need her to. Whether that be as an assistant or a manager would be up to you.”
“Please rest assured, Mr. Smithwick,” Lana said to Mark, “I have a Master’s Degree of Business with Minors in Accounting and Management. I won’t let you down.”
“And the whole time this is going on, you’ll be using it as a way to advertise your company and their subsidiaries?” Mark asked as he looked at his father.
“Perhaps,” the older man said. “It would largely depend on what you were doing with it. Sponsorship would certainly be something guaranteed until outright failure, but for the most part, you would have control of the direction this idea would grow and you would be able to use whatever resources you created with this for whatever you wanted to.”
“And then if it’s a great success, you’ll have someone else step in and take over the project,” Mark said. “Killing it with corporate greed, most likely.”
“No,” Percival said bluntly. “Not for this. When I had this idea, I decided to offer it to you. I know how passion for a project can make or break the whole thing, and I know that you’re already working toward your own goals in the game, so I hoped you would be willing to take control of this and make it into something that was yours. Something great.”
“And as we’ve said,” Lana pointed out. “I’m here now so that if you agree, then I can help you begin making this a reality. Nothing more. If you were in control, you would have final say on whether or not I was actually a part of this project.”
“So I’m hearing that you want me to make this whole thing a reality,” Mark said. “And that for now, I would have total control over the way this whole thing went.”
“Yes,” Percival nodded.
“So if I decided that the best way to make this whole idea a success was to have a guild created in-game and funded by you, that would be what I could do?” Mark asked.
“If you feel that’s the best way to do this, then do it,” Percival said. “I will need all paid members of this guild to be interviewed by Ms. Albrook, myself, or another person that is made a manager.”
“Alright,” Mark nodded. “I think that I can do this, Ms. Albrook will have to control the actual people that are making the content that we sell off, and I’ll focus on making sure that they have a support base in-game that they can use to keep interesting content coming in.”
“That’s great,” Percival said with a grin, before standing. “I’ll leave you two to discuss the minor details of this. When you have a plan for what you want to do, send a copy of it my way and go ahead. I’m trusting the two of you to keep this moving. Markus, it was good to see you. We should do this more often.”
“It was good to you too, Father,” Mark said automatically. “Have a good night.”
“Good night, Ms. Albrook,” Percival said to Lana with a kind smile before he turned and left.
“Do you mind if I call you Markus?” Lana asked Mark. “If we’re going to be working so closely together, it makes more sense.”
“I prefer Mark,” he told her. “Is it alright if I call you Lana?”
“I’d insist on it,” she said with a smile. “Do you have any ideas for where to start?”
“I’m working on making a main Party for myself right now,” Mark told her. “I spent the last day I was in the game interviewing potential Party members and I was thinking of approaching some of them with offers to join my Clan when I finally get it off the ground.”
“That sounds like a good start,” Lana said with a nod. “I’ll need to talk with the ones you want to hire as paid members of the Clan. Have you decided on a name for your Clan?”
“I was thinking of calling it Clan Starwalk,” Mark told her. “It’s what I usually use when I make my own guild or clan in games.”
“Clan Starwalk sounds good to me,” Lana said. “Do you know how you’re going to grow your Clan? How many people will I have control over hiring? Will you need me to use funds from our new company to buy my own Pod to access the game and talk to you more easily? Do you have a preference for the main office location? Would you like me to make the necessary purchases and fill out the correct forms to create our company? Do we use Starwalk as the name for our company and the Clan? What sort of ideas do you have for the actual growth of the Clan in comparison to the growth of the company?”
As Lana asked her questions more rapidly than Mark could answer, he wondered if it was too late for him to opt out of forming this company for his father’s idea.