Downstairs, Mom was setting the table. “Could you get the broccoli out of the freezer? It’s rotisserie chicken night.”
“I thought Wednesdays were rotisserie chicken night?”
She grinned. “Yes, but we decided to do impromptu pizza night yesterday. So tonight is now rotisserie chicken night.”
“Sounds fine to me, I’ll eat whatever.” Nick opened the freezer drawer. “I was thinking about what you said about the tree.”
“Oh?”
He could almost hear what she hadn’t said: ‘in the five minutes between logging off and coming downstairs?’ But seriously, his brain worked fast sometimes. “Yeah. I’m worried about protecting the village, not just the tree. From something worse than a deer.”
“Won’t the centaurs handle it?”
“Whatever butchered the first batch of NPCs can handle the centaurs.” He shook his head. “But I don’t know much about designing villages so they can defend themselves.”
“Didn’t they have something in school about frontier towns?”
As if he’d paid attention. He might have, if they’d said anything interesting, but they never did. “I just want a better plan.”
His mother, having set the table, was now back on the couch. “Mmm. Maybe you can ask your dad. He’s an engineer.”
“Is that… like… the kind of thing he’d know?”
“Oh… it never hurts to ask.”
He couldn’t tell if that was a typical mom answer—giving life advice—or a typical his-mom answer, which could also be a ‘I know something you don’t and I find it funny’ situation. That kind of thing used to annoy him. A lot. But then he’d discovered the wonders of not interacting much with his parents and that had solved that problem. Ordinarily he would have checked out at this point, but Nick cared more about helping Donner’s Beck than avoiding annoying adult quirks.
Now, why he cared about it… he didn’t really want to go into that, even in his own head. It was enough that he wanted to do something about it.
When Dad arrived, grocery bags in hand, Nick ambushed him at the door. “Dad, what do you know about fortifying villages?” When he hesitated, Nick said, “It’s about the town Mom and I are trying to rebuild. We want to make it better than it was. And more defensible.”
His dad set the bags on the counter. “If you’re serious about this—”
“Yes! Obviously!”
“Do you have a map?”
Wait, what? “You mean of the village before it was razed? Or the zone?”
“Both, preferably.”
“I can find them.”
“Then do that while your mother and I get the food on the table, and we’ll talk about it after dinner.”
Nick raced upstairs. He’d said he could find maps without thinking that promise through. Except… didn’t he have the fancy poster version from the special edition of the game he’d bought five years ago? He rooted through his bookcase until he found it jammed against one of the sides and unfolded it, smoothing the creases. The zone was beautifully rendered, but the village was represented as a collection of squares… not very useful, but a quick search online popped up a better graphic, which he sent to the printer. Then he was downstairs in time for chicken and vegetables… kind of boring, but Dad had been unable to resist the fancy salted caramels that went on sale every so often, so dessert made up for the healthy stuff. Nick cleared away the plates and went to get the print-out, and when he came back… “Oh, wow.”
His father had set out an enormous piece of tracing paper, a T-square, and a few pens—no, pencils, but in sleeves that made them look like pens. Nick picked one up; it had the fattest, dullest lead he’d ever seen, until his father plucked it from his hand and spun it in a weird cylinder. What came out was sharper than any mechanical pencil. “Put the map down and let’s do some planning.”
The whole set-up was so cool Nick blurted, “Do you think we could record this?”
Both his parents looked at him.
“I mean, we have a channel and the only thing it’s for is streaming our gameplay,” Nick continued. “And our last few streams have to have been about us doing stuff for the village. But this… this looks really neat. And it’s related to the game. I think it should be on the channel. If you don’t mind sharing it, Dad.”
“I mind our living room being broadcast to the internet,” Mom said.
“We can make sure the camera doesn’t see the rest of the room,” Nick said. “If we point it at the table… come on, Mom, please? If Dad’s gonna help us, it’s not fair for us to get all the glory.” He grinned. “Right?” Another of those pauses that made parents look like they had some kind of mutual telepathy.
Then his mom grinned back. “Absolutely.”
His father smoothed the tracing paper over the poster. “They might not even put it on the channel, reina.”
“But they might….”
Dad shook his head, chuckling. “All right, I can see I’m outnumbered. I don’t mind, Nick. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up. I’ve got an old webcam in my office. Go grab it, then let’s talk urban planning. With a side order of medieval fortification.”
The next two hours were some of the coolest Nick could remember spending with his father, because his dad had forgotten things about logistics that Nick had never imagined. Everything from sanitation to traffic flow to resource management crossed his father’s mind, and if some of it seemed unnecessary for Omen Galaxica Version One, Nick could see making a case for it in the new Omen Galaxica, because how cool would it be to not cut too much of the forest down, and only harvest the right kind of trees? Nick was glad a camera was rolling, because he wouldn’t have remembered any of this without evidence. He even wished, briefly, that he’d cared enough to take good notes in school because it would probably have helped him figure out how to get something out of lectures.
By the time Nick stopped the recording, he had more questions than he had plans, but the prospect of logging in to do the research was exciting.
Of course, he had a task to do before that. Retreating to his room, he checked the info packet he’d gotten from the company about the beta. Then he opened his email client, dropped in the address, and shot his channel manager a request for a chat.
