Page 46 of Played By Design

Heat creeps up my neck as I clasp his warm, dry palm. “Thank you for letting me visit.”

“Of course. I’m thrilled you wanted to see the studio.”

As he releases my hand, the clean, woodsy scent of his cologne lingers.

He turns to Kain and offers his hand. “Good to see you again.”

Kain shakes it. “Thanks for having us.”

“Please. Having ZeroSignal in the building is worth at least three production meetings.” Julian gestures briefly toward me before returning his attention to Kain. “I have some people I want you both to meet.”

He leads us down the hallway, past more frames, these of environment concepts, weapon designs, and a hand-drawn map of the Ember District with streets labeled in fading pencil.

At the end of the hall, he opens one side of a set of double doors, and we step into an open-concept workspace.

Five people sit clustered around a long table covered in laptops, coffee mugs, and a scattered assortment of sticky notes.

They look up as we enter.

Julian clears his throat. “Everyone, I’d like you to meet Kain’s friend, Reef.”

Blank stares.

Julian’s mouth quirks. “ZeroSignal.”

A woman with silver-streaked black hair straightens in her chair. The man beside her, who wears a faded old band T-shirt, drops his pen. Someone at the far end of the table breathes, “Holy shit.”

“Oh my gosh.” The woman’s chair rolls back from the table. “You’re the one who wrote the Sentinel class analysis that got over a million pins.”

“That’s me,” I say.

The table erupts.

They all talk at once, overlapping, leaning forward, hands gesturing. The woman, Mira, according to her lanyard, launches into a story about the Sentinel’s patrol pathing in the eastern alley.

“We argued for three days on whether he should prioritize cover or sightlines,” she says, sketching invisible boxes in the air.

The band-tee guy, Derek, jumps in. “And don’t forget the barracks dialogue. We cut a line about him skipping a meal to stand watch, assuming no one would ever notice the continuity glitch.”

“I noticed,” I say.

They laugh. Someone slaps the table.

“The Sentinel’s declaration mechanic almost got cut,” Derek says, shaking his head. “We had this whole debate about whether players would find it too slow.”

“It’s the best part of the game!” The words burst out of me, ringing through the sudden quiet of the room.

I swallow. “The way the music drops when he declares, and the change in the bartender afterward. It’s the first time the player really understands the meaning of his role.”

Mira’s shoulders ease. “That’s exactly what we were going for.”

“I’ve played it a million times,” I say, “and I always sit through the whole declaration. I never skip it.”

Someone at the far end, a short, round-faced developer whose name I missed, leans forward. “What did you think of the Oracle’s prophecy in Chapter Nine? The one about the northern tower?”

“It’s a lie,” I answer without a pause. “The Oracle isn’t prophesying. She’s manipulating the Sentinel into retrieving the artifact because he’s the only one who can survive the tower’s defenses, and she’s already seen it happen. The prophecy syntax is wrong. It uses future-perfect instead of subjunctive, which means she’s describing something she’s already seen, not something she’s predicting.”

Dead silence.