Page 56 of The Nanny and the Nerd
Silence.
From the moment she set foot in the building, the roar of activity hadn’t let up until now.
Even the phone had stopped ringing.
She stood and twisted from side to side, working out the kinks, then walked over to the staircase. They must be in a meeting. She didn’t even know if there was a dedicated gathering room. She’d only seen the first floor. Removing the headset, she allowed it to rest around the back of her neck. And that’s when a strange reality set in. In the melee of her arrival, she hadn’t put together that she and the tech mogul had been in the same office all morning. She’d barely had a moment to catch her breath until now. Carefully, she ascended the first, then the second step. Moving slowly, she listened for a ping or a pop or a computer-generated explosion. But got nothing.
Like a cat burglar, she crept up the final steps, then gasped. The place looked like what would happen if you gave a thirteen-year-old boy an unlimited supply of sugar and a monster budget to spend on video games. A neon tech mecca was the only way to describe it. Screens lined the walls. Ping-pong tables and posh seating areas peppered the space while computer workstations teeming with laptops, cords, and gaming controllers sprawled out before her.
She glanced up. There was a third level—not quite a level but a large, frosted glass enclosure. That had to be where everyone had gone unless there was a backdoor out of this place. A chill danced down her spine as she walked through the abandoned mass of gaming tech. She came to a floor-to-ceiling board—the first thing in this place that looked remotely familiar to her.
A storyboard.
The outline for the AI-77 saga.
As a writer, this literary tool was second nature to her. But as she read the narrative, she winced.
It was absolutely atrocious!
This Princess Amelia appeared to be important, but the character had zero agency and zero story arc. Not to mention, she looked more like a call girl with her breasts popping out of a leather bustier. She continued to read, and her frown deepened. This AI-77 wouldn’t do either.
No, no! She couldn’t allow this to stand as is. She surveyed the empty room, then zig-zagged through the space toward the stairs. She took them two at a time as the characters of Princess Amelia and AI-77 took shape in her mind. She didn’t know a damned thing about how to make a video game, but if it required a story, that was right up her wheelhouse. She grabbed her tote and headed back to the fancy computerized whiteboard. She dug around her bag and found what she needed. A tremor of excitement passed through her as she jotted ideas onto sticky note after sticky note, affixing the edits, tweaks, and rewrites to the glowing screen.
Who knew that video games relied so heavily on a cohesive narrative? AI-77 was a mix of historical fiction, incorporating a Camelot feel, with a dystopian fantasy sci-fi edge—not so different from the short story that had been eluding her for weeks. The last words she’d written, the line of dialogue she’d shared with Rowen, came to mind. The tingle of excitement at the sight of the storyboard now morphed into an all-encompassing heady buzz.
This arrow might have struck my heart, but you’re the one who’s stolen it.
This video game needed a romance—a love story to carry the reader or player or whatever the heck video game people called themselves through to the end. Sure, there was plenty of blood and gore. The images on the screen illustrated the battles and roadblocks in the quest, but there needed to be more.
The breath caught in her throat, and she was back in the flow. She could picture Princess Amelia—picture the true journey of AI-77. Scratching out dialogue as fast as she could, she switched to whole sheets of paper, laying out scene after scene on the floor.
She stared down at the pages, lost in thought, when a man’s voice cut through the air.
“Princess Amelia? Are you real, or have I hit the part of game development where I start hallucinating?”
Penny turned to find three men, each dressed in a crumpled hoody and dark circles under their eyes. A burly guy with wild, curly hair, a tall thin man in a Gale Gaming beanie, and a short guy with auburn locks and his hands stuffed in his pockets stared at her, slack-jawed.
“I’m Penny, not Amelia,” she said slowly because, at the moment, these guys didn’t appear too quick on the uptake.
“Is she talking, or am I losing it?” the burly guy asked, narrowing his gaze.
She surveyed the glazed trio. “I’m real. I work for Rowen.”
The tall man cocked his head to the side, and his glasses slipped to the tip of his nose. He pushed them back into place. “Are you here to do motion capture?”
Now she was the one with the glazed expression. “I don’t know what that is,” she replied to the men, who were not firing on all cylinders. Perhaps, she wasn’t either. She tried again. “I’m Rowen’s niece’s nanny. I was helping out with the phones today, then came up here, and…” she trailed off, gesturing to the wall and the floor littered with her notes.
“What did you do to the touchscreen?” the burly guy asked, taking it in.
“I added a few suggestions,” she said as the men approached the board.
The tall guy touched one of the yellow squares of paper and leaned forward, examining it like an archeologist unearthing a rare artifact. She took a step back as a thread of trepidation edged out the rush of adrenaline that had carried her through the last—she checked her watch—three hours! Holy crap-ton of sticky notes! She’d completely lost track of time! She stared at the board. Now that she’d moved back a few steps and could view it in its entirety, she could understand the men’s stupefied expressions. She’d papered over the majority of the gigantic screen. And then it hit her. What if the gaming people didn’t care about her ideas? These guys didn’t know her from a hole in the wall, and Rowen—what would he think?
She felt her cheeks heat. “I read through the game’s narrative and made a few notes—a few recommendations,” she explained.
“A few?” the redhead remarked.
She pulled at her collar. It had gotten warm in here. “Okay, more than a few. You see, I’m a writer, and I couldn’t help myself! Your concept is solid, but it lacks a hook—a conflict that doesn’t only have to do with killing things and getting from point A to point B.” She checked the board. “The Grand Hollow to the Ruby Castle, right?”
