The next morning, after spending the entire night at the hospital, Evan finally dragged himself home for a quick shower before heading straight to the office.
Last night, after he'd seen Emily and her mom off, he'd gotten another call from Emily's mother. They'd talked for what felt like forever. Every single time she tried to circle back to questions about his relationship with Emily, Evan had skillfully dodged and redirected the conversation to something else. She'd also mentioned that she'd be driving Emily to work herself this morning—which Evan understood was basically her way of fact-checking whether he'd been lying about the whole thing. Emily's mom could be a bit scattered and unreliable in general, but when something actually mattered to her, she was surprisingly sharp and dependable.
Anyway, today wasn't just about the systems designer he'd personally recruited. Today also marked the official launch of the Swallowing Heaven and Earth project. Starting from today, the company's previous failed project would be completely abandoned, and all resources would shift over to the new game. Which meant Evan was about to get incredibly busy.
When the elevator doors opened on the sixth floor, Evan immediately spotted Emily sitting on the lobby couch, looking visibly uncomfortable and restless.
Lana, the receptionist, was the first to greet him as he stepped out. She gave him this strange, knowing look before pointing toward Emily. "Director Carter, your mother-in-law brought your girlfriend here this morning. She said she wanted to come to our company to help you out."
"Cough, cough, cough!" Evan nearly choked on his own spit. Mother-in-law? Really? Things were moving way too fast here.
"What mother-in-law? I don't even have a girlfriend right now."
Lana looked at him with this scrutinizing expression, like she was trying to figure out if he was lying. "Oh really? But the lady who came this morning specifically said this young woman is your girlfriend, Director Carter. And she seemed very satisfied with you, too. So wouldn't that make her your mother-in-law?"
Evan barely kept himself from choking again. "No, no, you've got it all wrong. There's a whole backstory here. Look, you just need to know that Emily and I are completely innocent—we're just regular friends. She's a systems designer I hired, and today's her first day."
Then something occurred to him, and his tone shifted to confused. "Wait, speaking of which—what happened to the planners we already had at the company? I know the lead planner was unreliable, but there should still be other planners around, right? You know, for story design, level design, systems balance, that kind of thing."
When Evan asked about this, Lana's expression turned helpless and a bit exasperated. "After that lead planner's whole... situation came to light, their entire planning team pretty much fled the building collectively. They were probably terrified of getting implicated in the mess. Every single one of them applied for early resignation. They even declined the labor law compensation—they literally just wanted to get out of here as fast as possible. Grace from HR discussed it with the other supervisors and everyone agreed that forcing them to stay wouldn't accomplish anything, so they let them go. We're supposed to be posting new recruitment ads in the next couple of days."
Evan nodded slowly, processing this. Honestly, from his perspective, he could handle all these tasks himself if he needed to. It was totally fine without those people—he'd just do everything on his own if it came to that. Having Emily assist him with systems balance would be absolutely perfect. He didn't really need anyone else.
"If those recruitment ads haven't gone up yet, then hold off on posting them for now. If Grace has any questions about it, just tell her to come find me directly. Oh, and also—please arrange a meeting for me with the operations department sometime this afternoon."
Lana nodded and started taking notes, then she pointed discreetly at Emily and asked in a lower voice, "What about her, Director Carter? How should I handle her arrangement?"
"Her work for now will be following me around. Some of the projects I'm handling personally will require her oversight and involvement."
With that, Evan waved toward Emily, who was already looking pretty annoyed at this point, and gestured for her to follow him inside to talk privately.
He pushed open the door to one of the small conference rooms and sat down first, immediately stretching and letting out this enormous yawn. He'd barely gotten any sleep last night while keeping someone company at the hospital, and then he'd had to come into the office early this morning. On top of that, he had meetings scheduled for both the morning and the afternoon. Evan suddenly realized just how incredibly busy he actually was—but the most tragic part was that every single bit of this was completely self-inflicted, and there was basically no possibility of escape at this point.
Emily walked in behind him, closed the door, and sat down in the chair directly across from him. She sat there perfectly straight-backed, completely silent, just staring at him intently with this unreadable expression.
Evan gave an awkward little laugh. "Just go ahead and say whatever's on your mind. You staring at me like this is honestly giving me the creeps—I'm literally getting goosebumps."
"So this is the method you were talking about?" Emily's voice was grim and flat, like she was barely restraining herself from lunging across the table to strangle him. "This is your brilliant plan to stop my mother from supervising and monitoring me?"
"Okay, look—I'll admit the process might have been a bit more... unexpected than planned," Evan said with what he hoped was a conciliatory, apologetic smile. He really didn't dare push her any further right now. An irrational, angry woman was honestly one of the most terrifying forces in the universe.
Emily nodded slowly, her expression still cold. "Alright then. Since you're putting it that way, I'll just have my name officially listed at your company. I'll come in every morning to sign in and clock my attendance, and then I'll go out and do whatever I want for the rest of the day. If my mother calls asking about me, you just tell her I'm here working. Deal?"
Evan shook his head firmly. "That's not going to work. First of all, I'm not entirely sure whether your mom will personally come here to check on you in person. And second, I'm not about to run a losing business here. Since I went through the trouble of recruiting you, I genuinely need your help to make games together. You really think I'm going to pay you a full salary while you're just out there having fun and enjoying yourself? That would be way too much of a loss for me."
Emily frowned, clearly frustrated. "There are so many people out there in the industry. Why does it specifically have to be me?"
Evan's expression turned more serious and earnest. "Sure, there are plenty of people out there who could work as systems designers. But people who are actually talented and skilled at it? Those are few and far between. Compared to hiring some mediocre, average designer, I'd much rather trust the beautiful woman sitting right in front of me who has double degrees in both game design and mathematics. However—" He paused, genuinely curious now. "I am actually really curious about something. You mentioned that you worked as a game planner in Harborview City for a year, but now you seem extremely resistant to this whole position and career path. What happened?"
Emily was silent for a long moment, and Evan didn't push. Finally, she started speaking, her voice quiet.
"I'm naturally more sensitive to numbers than most people. Like, significantly more. So when I was choosing my major in college, my first choice was mathematics. But then during my freshman year, I discovered that with my natural talent for it, the entire math curriculum was relatively easy for me to learn and understand. So I decided to add game design as my second degree, a double major situation. The reason I picked game design specifically is because of family circumstances—I basically grew up surrounded by games from a very young age, so I've always had this really strong emotional connection to them."
She paused, organizing her thoughts. "After I graduated, I was recruited by Constellation Studios because my grades and portfolio were pretty outstanding. I started working there as a systems designer."
Evan nodded, understanding the context. Among the major gaming companies in the industry, Eastflare Interactive was definitely one of the giants, but Constellation Studios also had considerable strength and influence. The main difference was that unlike Eastflare's comprehensive development approach—where they made basically every kind of game imaginable—Constellation's games had a very specific focus. They specialized in 2D turn-based adventure games. Story and narrative were their absolute core strengths, and over the years they'd created so many memorable and beloved game characters that players still talked about.
"I was honestly pretty happy and excited when I first joined Constellation," Emily continued, and there was this wistfulness in her voice. "One of my absolute favorite games from when I was a kid was made by Constellation. It stayed with me for such a long time, meant so much to me growing up. So getting to work there felt like... I don't know, like coming home in a way. But after I actually started working there and saw how things operated from the inside..." Her voice trailed off, disappointment creeping in. "I felt pretty let down."
"A lot of people will tell you that Constellation's storytelling is some of the best in the entire country, maybe even the world. And that's true, it really is. But what they won't tell you is that Constellation's games have always had terrible replayability. The games are amazing the first time through, but once you've experienced the story, there's almost no reason to ever play them again."
Emily's hands clenched slightly on the table. "I used to think—back before I worked there—that maybe it was just because Constellation didn't have good systems designers to properly balance things. I genuinely believed that. And when I got hired, I had all these ambitions about helping them, about maybe even changing and improving the company that I'd loved for so long."
She didn't finish the sentence, but she didn't really need to. Evan could easily guess what had happened next.
A company with a long, established history. Decent size, solid reputation. They'd built their entire brand on having the "best story" in the industry. And then some fresh-faced new graduate walks in and starts pointing out that their games have fundamental, obvious flaws that nobody's addressing. That put Emily in an impossible position. If Emily's direct supervisor had actually reported her observations and suggestions up the chain, it would have directly exposed his own incompetence and failure to notice or address these issues himself. So instead of risking that, under all that corporate buck-passing and political maneuvering, the only outcome Emily could realistically expect was to be quietly cold-shouldered and frozen out until she got the message and left on her own.
Reach 300 powerstones for extra chapter.