Fuck... we got slammed. The entire day was consumed by trying to deal with the line of people, and regardless of how quickly we were trying to go, the line just seemed to get longer. Miguel showed up with prototype business cards and wanted us to rebrand as Aegis, Inc., looking to trade on my own self-imposed moniker. The business cards themselves were kinda cool actually, a translucent blue with silver lettering that looked kind of sci-fi. Broadly, we started sorting people between companies. Portland had heard about our hiring of people like Beth and Miguel, as well as SolCo's restructuring and upcoming move. I ended up having to call Beth and see if we could get her here any faster, offering to put her and her daughter up, mentioning that her daughter and my sister Merida were around the same age. When Beth asked why, I considered explaining, but instead put her on Zoom, walked into the lobby, and just... turned. We were three hours in, and there were more people than we'd started with. To help ease things up a bit, I'd had to have to have lunch brought in.

Beth gave several immediate suggestions that were immensely helpful. First, split them up by what company they were looking for employment at so that we could each interview the people that were more specific to the individual company's needs. So now, instead of one interview at a time, we were running four deep: Miguel handled the finance folks, Dad pulled things together for the real estate end, Fred handled the non-profit, with me on game development. We then turned and made Susan an interviewer as well, tasked with building what would be our secretarial pool. Susan opted to start doing 'working interviews', grabbing those interviewing to help manage the chaos.

I quickly developed a simple system for initial weeding: If they started pushing microtransactions, gacha mechanics, or anything akin to loot boxes, that was the end of the interview. I wanted to take my cues from studios like Larian and Paradox Interactive. DLC is fine, as long as it enhances and/or deepens gameplay, but the concept of trying to flip gamers over and shake them for the loose change was never going to make it into our company. Pay-to-win and gambling mechanics had no place here.

Next, there was a skills assessment, and one poor girl was absolutely paranoid about not knowing how to code but had artwork with her. After getting her some tea to calm down, I explained that artists were needed too, pulling up concept art from games like Final Fantasy, Doom, and other games that had unique art designs. She had skills, but just lacked confidence. Eh... that can be worked on.

And then... the ultimate frat guy. Couldn't code, and didn't do artwork, but strangely enough, when I asked him for ideas for games, he had a ton. Apparently, he and his buddies had done stuff like Fortnite, Call of Duty, and just about every FPS that hit the market, and while he might not know the technical side of video games, his actual level of genre awareness was massive. I didn't quite have the heart to break it to him that, at some point, he had in fact become an FPS nerd. He had that weird energy of the guy that walks into a room, loudly exclaims, "We're going caving!" and, despite no one in the room having any prior interest in, or knowledge of caving, they would still all find themselves outside a cave in the middle of nowhere, questioning how they got talked into this. I might not know exactly how to use that, but it had its uses.

There's an odd tendency I noticed in studying, that beginning indy studios tended to focus far too much on technical coding ability, but with my 1%, I didn't need to worry over coding as much. By now, I was crushing my way through C, C+, and C#, the main coding languages used for games, across engines like Unity and Unreal engine. Neither of them were the most elegant platforms, but it gave us a place to start producing games, and I could always just build my own individual engine later custom-tailored to my needs. So I focused on the sides of the gaming industry instead, artists, music, sound, QA, the things that it was better if I had more people for. I did hire on some coders, but it was less about technical ability for me, and more about if I could rely on them, and if they would be willing to call me out on stuff. A bunch of yesmen singing the praises of their lead developer had cratered game studios across the range.

Other people also showed up, less for employment, and more for advertising their services. Cleaners, food truck operators, it just kept going. We didn't even get out of the office until around six-thirty, and I was sitting with this bombed-out expression on my face in Cubo, a Cuban restaurant near the office, Miguel sitting across from me, happily chattering away with Susan about how much ass he was about to kick with the team he'd pulled together. I know I ate... I just don't really remember eating. Swear to God, I'm pretty sure I'd rather fight Reaver again than go through that insane process again.

Not that the experience had been a bad one. I'd learned a lot about interviewing, what I needed, and how to look at traits that might not otherwise be considered. Still... Jesus Christ.

Tuesday was a bit more of the same, but I got through it faster, and as afternoon rolled around, Dad let me know that the sale on the mall had gone through. It was officially ours, but with the new hires, we would need to hold off on the second mall purchase. It made sense, he didn't want to go too close to the line. Besides, we were now furiously moving forward. I unveiled my initial game idea to my new team, a concoction of Darryl's based off of an old PS1 game, called Azure Dreams. It was a combination of dungeon crawler and city-builder... well, town-builder, but Darryl had found a bunch of stuff that could be added, done better, or expanded on.

C.J., (a.k.a Frat Guy) put forward that we could probably get started with some quick mobile games to get us going while we worked on the larger game, and the coders seemed to think it was plausible despite their immediate dislike of frat guys. By making a bunch of smaller games first, we could get ourselves together as a team, start making some income, and get our names out there in at least some context. Sarah (Artist) surprised us by suggesting that we could dovetail the games together, maybe making all of them a section of lore-building for the eventual game release. It went surprisingly well, though I knew tensions would arise eventually. I'd seen it in Scouts, I'd seen it at school: Anyone passionate enough to do something creative was going to get creased with each other at some point. Right now, however, we have a firing solution.

Dad focused on a smaller, more targeted team. He had come up with an interesting plan: One of the problems of housing costs was, well, houses themselves. This meant mortgages and plenty of people around Portland had already defaulted on their loans or were in the process of defaulting, and according to Dad, there was an opportunity here. We'd gotten 'lucky', buying a property in foreclosure when he and Mom were first starting out, and they had then built the home up. The thing was, once a bank forecloses a mortgage, they're really just trying to get the debt off their books, even if they take a loss. What we could do is buy up the bad debt for pennies on the dollar, and for those we could help, restructure the thing as a much more equitable refinance or rent-to-own arrangement. We would still make a profit off of the deal, and interested people could keep their homes. For those that weren't, we could simply forgive the debt, get it off their credit, and flip the house, though this would involve realtors and agents. Fortunately, there were plenty around, and Dad had hired a few.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Miguel essentially built his own little financial group within the company, and approached me late on Tuesday with a proposition: To look at and learn the various algorithms that tracked markets, and design the next logical step. He also had a USB drive full of stuff on a range of economic theories, market trading, the works. He was taking no chances, here. He wanted an accurate prediction model that no one else had. While my technical powers could eventually be considered market manipulation past a point, a legitimate computer program that was just accurately collating data did not run afoul of this.

On Fred's end, he had not only people who had been hired on for regular positions, which he worked out with Beth but a mass of volunteers. The only issue for volunteers is keeping up motivation. If things stalled, we would quickly lose all but the most ardent, so Fred was getting them to work immediately, using their schedules to spread out volunteers between different organizations. Combined with what I was putting into the food banks and shelters, it would provide an immediate relief while we worked on a more long-term solution.

The problem arose on Fred's end: Therapy. Even if someone was fully cognitively normative at the point where they became homeless, the sheer stressors and daily living conditions of homelessness would batter that down, whether drugs and/or alcohol ever became involved or not. You had to be completely ruthless to survive, even with yourself, and it changed people, to say nothing of those who had become homeless due to addictions, or some undiagnosed or untreated mental disorder. Worse was, it was likely that a number had been misdiagnosed, and prescribed drugs that not only weren't helping them, but causing bigger ones. Again, I drew parallels to Reaver, trapped by not only a lack of understanding but also being given generations of added trauma from misinformation. In some ways, misdiagnosis was worse than being undiagnosed.

It led to drug and alcohol abuse, for just anything that could numb the pain, even if just for a few hours. When Miguel questioned me, saying it was the junkie problem, I countered, explaining it thusly: You've had a long day at work, you're tired, just drained. You go out after work to have a beer and unwind, right? Now, imagine that horrible day is your entire life, with no real view of where it gets better, and no weekend to look forward to. The best you can hope for is that the weather holds out, that you manage to get to the food bank before all the good food is gone, and that no one steals or destroys your tent while you're away from it. Wouldn't you be drinking a bit more?

At the same time, much as they needed help, the help they were getting was... steeply lacking, we'll call it. It wasn't just a matter of underfunded and undermanned organizations, but the entire system around those organizations. They were under counter-productive regulations, and inadequate systems in place to deal with the homeless life. So many of these programs were well-intentioned, but if I mean to cook you dinner, and instead, I burn down your house, do my intentions really matter that much?

Serious therapy was needed, and people who could get to the root causes behind the addictions and address them, but the lack of trust issue rears its ugly head there. Those in the worst shape were also those who'd been mangled up by the system the most, unwilling to trust it because they'd been repeatedly betrayed by that system. Accidentally relapse? Well, you just lost your home, only now, you've also lost all the stuff you had built up to survive on the streets because you trusted them. It didn't really matter who the they were. But how do you get around it?

Aimee provided the answer. She came by the office to see the tail end of the mayhem, and meet the new game dev team, to hear me and Miguel going back and forth with Fred about the various problems. Much as you might think less of Miguel for his hard stances, they were actually really helpful. He had the same view most people did, unlike myself and Fred, and I needed those crossed opinions, if for no other reason than to learn to get past them.

She was hanging back, just sort of waiting around for us to break up the conversation as she worked on one of the gourmet lollipops a local place carried. Then, suddenly, she clapped her hands like I'd seen her do dozens of times at practice when the girls were getting too caught up. We snapped around, "You should hire Anna. I mean, she reads minds doesn't she? And like, she works for the government... how much could she really be making?"

Motherfucker. I grabbed my jacket, and me and Aimee grabbed an Uber to the H.A.A., waiting for them to close up, when Anna came out. She saw us and waved, "Oh, hey Marcus, and you must be Aimee. So glad to meet you. Did something come up?"

"I mean, yes, but it's pretty tame this time. Do you have a minute?"

We stopped off at a coffee shop, got drinks, and had a seat in the corner, "I want to hire you."

That startled her, "I mean, my services are free for you."

"No, I mean, I want to hire you for my company. You said you wanted to help, yeah? So here it is. I need a unique therapist for my non-profit, someone who can reach people in a way no one else can. This is a job offer," I hadn't touched my coffee yet. I didn't want to spare a ton of time on idle chit-chat.

Anna breathed, deflating after a moment of hope, "That's going to be difficult..."

Fuck it, "Anna, I know about the contracts. I found Blacklash's online. It took work, but I talked to her wife. Here's the thing, though: The money you owe the H.A.A. is structured like student loan debt. I checked with my Dad, and we can offer full tuition reimbursement after a year. Plus, we pay more."

Her hands shook, and Aimee gave me a look. She didn't know what the contract thing was about, and that was a conversation I'd have to have later. Anna's hands shook, "It's not that simple. If I leave, they-"

I nodded, "They'll pursue a hero's court-martial, but here's the thing: They still have to prove that you violated H.A.A. ethics, and you are entitled to representation that meets with H.A.A. approval. You're not taking a job with a Fortune 500 company; you're working for a non-profit helping the homeless. How precisely does that violate the codes set forth by the H.A.A.? And as far as loan repayment goes, just keep making the payments til reimbursement time hits, then we clear the remainder."

There it was: That same look Fred had talked about the homeless having. That instinctive lack of trust based on years of failure. Anna wanted to believe me, but her experiences told her that I couldn't do it. Unlike the majority of people, however, I'm built different. I fished out Blacklash's contract, and set it down in front of Anna, "Follow along, and when I get one word wrong, stop me."