“You want me to what?” I asked, looking up from my cubicle. It contained a messy collection of papers, Post-it notes, and a pewter dragon that was the only sign of my humanity permitted by employers. Such was the soul crushing nature of my job as an Epic DungeoneeringTM programmer.

Be a video game designer!

Write amazing stories!

Program new worlds!

It was difficult to imagine I'd been so naive in college but, somehow, I'd convinced myself that this was the career I'd wanted. I'd ended up signing a lifetime contract, which seems like I'm exaggerating but doesn't feel like it, with a company that had a non-compete clause for about a million years in every similar field. That was something that also should be illegal, but the company was fully willing to drag out in court as poor Sue Wilson had found out. Given the company was based in Ledziania (wasn't that where Doctor Doom lived?) but I operated from their office in Michigan, I suspected there may also be some international laws at play as well.

The thing was that I'd been working at programming and pitching game material at Epic DungeoneeringTM for about ten years now. So far, despite claiming we were a family, I was the deformed relative they kept tied up in the attic and every single idea I'd proposed had been shot down. It had been endless parades of crunch, bug fixing, and working on live service monetization that made me feel like I was preying on my fellow gamers.

"Meet with Larry C.C. Weis," Barbara Wojciechowski said. No, I have no idea how to pronounce that and my family was Polish. My mother is so ashamed. I only knew it from her nametag at the manager's office. I don't think she'd ever said her last name in person, or I might have been able to fake it.

Barbara was one of the Epic DungeoneeringTM staff that had transferred over from Eastern Europe to oversee the American part of the company and was an extremely pleasant fifty-something brown haired woman who I suspected had been a kindergarten teacher before communism fell. At least she treated her staff like children and sometimes pulled out a hand puppet to explain difficult concepts to us like, "You're going to be doing a lot of overtime and not getting paid any extra for it. Oh, and try to find a job in this economy. Bark-bark." The hand-puppet was a dog, you see. She dressed in a long cotton dress and tweed sweater that still had big mom energy, albeit the mom who locked her children in the aforementioned attic.

"You're kidding, right?" I asked, looking up.

Barbara scrunched her nose. "Why would I be kidding?"

I blinked, wondering if this was a prank before realizing I didn't want to know if it was. Larry C.C. Weis was the patron saint of Epic DungeoneeringTM and the reason it had gone from an obscure Eastern European gaming studio to an international phenomenon with multiple streaming shows and one other semi-successful franchise.

Sort of a Ledzianian George R.R. Martin or Iron Curtain Tolkien, Larry C.C. Weis had written the Dark Undermaster series and Epic DungeoneeringTM had bought the rights to it back it had probably cost sixty rupees and a goat. Okay, seriously, I'm not trying to be stereotypical here, but I just worked forty hours straight trying to get the Witch Queen of Angho'horak from clipping through her armor. Something I was pretty sure the base game programmers had done deliberately.

Well, in the wake of Game of Thrones, the Dark Undermaster series had ended up being an international success and the third one topped twenty-million sales. That was in addition to all the spin-offs and merchandising that had ticked off Larry C.C. Weis something fierce.

If you believed the online rumors, Larry had been so pissed off that he'd stopped writing the Dark Undermaster series right before the epic climax and was no longer interested in finishing it. This despite millions of fans anxiously waiting for the next installment and all the adaptations running out of material. Err, bring to life. It was particularly problematic for Epic DungeoneeringTM because they depended on their reputation as a scrappy underdog developer that honored the fandom despite keeping people like me chained up to our computers.

"The Larry C.C. Weis?" I asked, blinking. I briefly wondered if there was another Larry C.C. Weis in accounting or something. It wasn't entirely impossible since one of my fellow programmers was named Jon Snowman. I bet his parents were regretting that bit of naming convention. Then again, I couldn't really complain myself given my name.

Barbara sniffed the air as if there was something foul in it. Her accent became sharper and went into full Natasha Fatale territory. "Yes, the writer."

The executives at Epic DungeoneeringTM had developed a love-hate-hate relationship with Larry as I'd understood it and it had trickled down to the middle managers like Barbara. Some of my fellow programmers had even developed the hissing and spitting at his name that seemed in vogue but most of us kept a wry respect for the old dude. After all, we all had developed a burning hatred for the guys at the top. They may have started as fellow geeks, but they'd all ended up as Sauron rather than Frodo.

"Why the hell does Larry C.C. Weis want to speak with me?" I asked, wishing I had some coffee right now, but I'd have to fight six other guys at the break room who had been working even longer than I had. "How the hell does Larry C.C. Weis even know who the hell I am?"

"Listen, Aragorn," Barbara started to speak.

"Aaron," I said, softly correcting her for the fifteenth time.

"It says Aragorn on your employment sheet," Barbara said, as if I didn't know my own name.

"Yes, but I go by Aaron," I said, annoyed.

"Why?" Barbara asked.

"So, I could survive high school," I replied, sighing. "As Aaron Bartkowski is more likely to make it past their freshmen year."

"Mr. Aragorn Bartkowski," Barbara said, reaching into her dress pockets (which was a good thing to see they had) and removed the hand puppet. She then started speaking in a little children's dog voice. "Grr, you need to go meet with Mr. Weis and get some contracts signed. He requested you personally. Bark-bark."

I stared at her. "Is the hand puppet strictly necessary?"

I bet you thought I'd been kidding about the hand puppet? Well, welcome to my life.

"Ruff! Yes," Barbara said, not displaying any self-awareness. "Otherwise, it's your job. Bark."

I took a deep breath. "So, is he in Latveria? Do I have to get a plane ticket? Please tell me you're springing for it."

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Ledziania," Barbara corrected. "It's on the border between Poland and Romania."

"They don't share a border," I said, wondering if Barbara was aware of where the company's home country was. I mean, I wasn't, but I had an excuse. "It's supposed to be between Poland and Belarus, though I'm not sure where in the big national forest there that it's supposed to be."

"Whatever," Barbara said, wiggling her hand puppet's nose in the air. "Either way, he lives in America now and has since the first Dark Undermaster game. Louis."

A well-dressed bespectacled man with smoothed over red hair in a suit that he wore constantly came over. Louis Tolliver was Barbara's majordomo and reminded me suspiciously of Wayland Smithers from The Simpsons. The fact he was sucking up to Barbara made me wonder if he shouldn't have been slightly more ambitious as a yes man. In his hands was a black briefcase that he handed over to me like we were in Pulp Fiction.

"The code is 1-2-3-4-5," Louis said, nodding.

I stared at him. "Big Spaceballs fan, huh?"

Louis looked confused.

I shook my head and opened the briefcase, revealing a bunch of white sheets of paper as well as a gold bracelet that looked like an oversized Ring of Power. It even had the elvish looking writing on the side. My eyes watered a bit and I swear, I heard a little bit of whispering coming from it. I shook my head and the sound dissipated.

"This is the contract for Lords of Dragon Keep," Barbara said, looking from side to side as if she was spreading secret information.

Which it was. "What? Really? It's done?"

Lords of Dragon Keep was the mythical fourth and final volume of the Dark Undermaster saga. The one that he had been working on for the better part of eleven years and everyone had long since given up on him completing. I was surprisingly excited, and it reminded me of the fact that I used to be a fan of the series as well. Well, at least until Season Five of Dark Undermaster when they'd tried to wrap up the story and ruined everything.

Hell, there had been a time when I'd been a "Undermasterling" every bit as fanatical as any other in the fandom. I'd loved how dark and gritty Westeros had been but had done the teenage boy thing of thinking, "but what if they added more sex and violence." The kind of kid who didn't understand grimdark was meant to be a pejorative. Knowing that the story was going to be finished was something that caused a little chill to run down my spine. Even if it was nonsensical for me to be involved.

"Yes, the book is done. This contract provides us the rights to adapt the book to the game series as well as gives us all future rights to the franchise in exchange for a generous lump sum as well as a portion of all future merchandising rights," Barbara said, her tone suggesting the terms were excessive in the author's favor.

"Good," I said, before realizing what I was saying. "Err—"

"Yes, well, he was very specific," Barbara said, annoyed. "You're also supposed to wear the bracelet."

"Wear the bracelet," I said, looking at the gold band. "Am I being punked?"

"I don't know what that means," Barbara said. "However, I expect your instructions to be followed to the letter. Be sure to make sure he signs the contract, though."

"Isn't this the kind of thing that should be done by a lawyer?" I asked, getting the increasing sense something very weird was going on.

“The contract has been approved by both parties, Mr. Bartkowski,” Louis said, his voice cold and flat like a robot's. “Mr. Weis just enjoys meeting with the people he thinks are the important parts of game development.”

"Uh huh," I said, wondering where he'd been for the entirety of the previous three Dark Undermaster game developments. The guy had been born in 1948 and probably hadn't seen a computer until he was my dad's age. Then again, I was used to the suits lying their asses off. On the other hand, if the guy had picked my name out of a hat or off an employee registry, I wasn't about to complain. I could become the king of the internet by being the guy to leak this.

"You will, of course, be bound by all confidentiality agreements," Barbara said, immediately crushing my dream of internet fame.

"Of course," I said, sighing. I noted they still hadn't said if they were covering my plane ticket. "So where does the guy live in America? Los Angeles? Chicago."

"1313 Mockingbird Avenue," Louis said. "It's about a twenty-minute drive."

I blinked. "He lives in Livonia, Michigan?"

I suddenly felt like an idiot, wondering how I didn't know one of my favorite authors lived where I worked. Then again, he was supposed to be a recluse. Still, I would have thought that would have been the kind of thing I'd have found out.

"You are very easily surprised, Mr. Bartkowski," Barbara said, maneuvering her little toy dog puppet to look disapproving somehow.

"Please don't do that," I muttered, creeped out. "Okay, I'll go tomorrow morning."

I'd finally managed to fix the Witch Queen of Angho'horak's clipping nudity problem that would have been a selling point for the first game before they'd dramatically dialed back the Mature rating for DU3 so they could sell console versions on Xbox and Playstation. Now I was running on fumes and needed to collapse on my bed for at least four hours. I was going to be working through the weekend regardless, but I needed to make sure my brain didn't leak out the side of my ear. You wouldn't think it would be possible to become desensitized to boobs, digital or otherwise, but somehow it had happened.

"You'll go now," Barbara said, her voice sounding almost threatening. "Clock out of your workstation and head there immediately. Be sure to wear the bracelet and make sure he signs the contracts before you sign anything."

Why was I even surprised. "Sure, I guess. Fine. Wait, why would I sign anything?"

"Don't fail us like, Mr. Snowman did," Barbara said.

I blinked rapidly and looked around for him. I hadn't seen him in a few days but hadn't paid much attention in the fury of debugging. I wondered if they'd been fired. Honestly, non-compete clause or not, we had a high turnover rate. "Is he okay?"

"You have a bright future ahead of you in Epic DungeoneeringTM, Mr. Bartkowski," Louis said. "If you pull this off, you might be looking at a promotion. Imagine yourself as the Team Head for Pwiffle the Mobile Game."

Pwiffle was the card game that came with Dark Undermaster III and had managed to get a bunch of free publicity from the Far Right when they released a topless card set during a particularly slow news day. They'd recalled that, as they'd always planned to do so, and the current version was designed to be sold to eight-year-olds who had access to their parents' credit cards. The current Team Head, Becky, described it as being worse than an elementary school drug dealer.

"Super!" I said, faking as much as enthusiasm as I was humanly capable of, which wasn't much. It wasn't so much that I was opposed to selling out, but corporate life didn't even pay you very much for your soul. I think Becky made like two dollars extra an hour.

"Be sure to wear the bracelet," Barbara said before waving her hand puppet in the air and speaking in the dog voice. "Bark-bye!"

I watched them leave. "So, this is what the tenth circle of Hell is like."

As usual, there was no one there to appreciate my scintillating wit. Sighing, I reached into the briefcase and picked up the bracelet, which was a lot heavier than I expected. It almost felt like real gold.

"Huh," I said, sliding it on my wrist where it was far too big. Almost immediately, it shrunk down tightly, and the elvish runes glowed bright as I felt an intense stinging sensation like a bee jamming itself into my skin. "Muther—"

I was caught off-guard by the pain vanishing as a little holographic display of the kind you'd normally see in movies appeared above the bracelet, which was obviously some kind of badly designed theme telephone.

The display was a little white and black box that showed a bunch of information spread across several menu screens. It was clearly an RPG character sheet, and I could hear the Dark Undermaster theme [violin version] playing in the background.

ARAGORN "AARON" BARTKOWSKI

LVL: 1

CLASS: N/A (see Menu Options)

ALIGNMENT: GRAY

AGE: 34

SEX: MALE

RACE: HUMAN

STR: 10

AGI: 10

CON: 9

INT: 16

WIS: 7

COM: 15

CHA: 13

ARMOR CLASS: 0

ATTACK: 0

HEALTH: 5

FEAT: Taunt

SPECIAL ABILITIES: NA (see Menu Options)

Okay. that was weird and slightly insulting about my wisdom. A lot of the menu options were blacked out but there was a typical collection of maps (this one showed Livonia, Michigan as well as the office) as well as items, spell lists, and so on. I played it with for a bit but couldn't get the class options, so I just gave up. Also, for a cell phone, it didn't seem to be able to call anybody or play any games. Typical.

Anyway, I decided to do the job. It wasn't every day that one got the chance to meet one's favorite author.