Page 6 of The Player Next Door
Logan’s stomach plummeted. “Schneider is leaving?”
“Not yet,” she said, voice grim. “But he has complained. And he’s making noises about leaving us for Marc Wimberley.”
This time, there was no hiding his grimace. Wimberley worked at Confidential Wealth, their main rival in the Twin Cities. Logan and the Aidens played basketball against him occasionally and, quite frankly, he hated the smug bastard. “Schneider hasn’t said anything to me,” Logan protested.
“Well, he has doubts about your trustworthiness. His portfolio is performing adequately, but he reached out earlier this week to express some concerns about your . . . personal life.”
Logan immediately ran through his mental rolodex of recent hookups. He wasn’t the best at getting last names, since that was usually beside the point, but he was fairly sure he hadn’t slept with anyone related to Schneider. He hoped. If he had, he was fucked beyond belief.
Wimberley, though. He would know about Logan’s dating habits, thanks to the Aidens and their big dumb mouths bringing it up all the time, and was just shady enough to use it against him. Of course, Wimberley had been married to his high-school sweetheart since they were right out of undergrad, and thus was the exact type oftraditional family manSchneider would want.
Yeah, Logan was in serious, serious trouble.
“My personal life?” he asked, waiting for the hammer to drop.
She appeared to choose her words carefully. “Mr. Schneider has said he would be more comfortable with someone a bit more . . . traditional. More settled.”
Fuck. This wasbad. “What do I need to do, then?” He tried thinking of leads he had on new clients, wondering if any of them would have a portfolio large enough to replace the Schneider account. He suspected they didn’t, which was also very bad for him.
“Your personal life is your business, but I want to emphasize how important Schneider is to this company,” Peggy said. “I want to see you taking concrete steps to keep him. But there are several problems at play here. Schneider would like to see proof you’re mature and trustworthy, and we would like to see significantly less churn among your other clients. Your problem is not bringing in new clients, since you bring in more clients than most in this firm. But you also lose more clients than almost anyone else. Your churn rate is—well, it’s bad. No point in mincing words here. Clients don’t stick with you, and that’s a problem. And it goes without saying that if we lose Schneider, we will likely be letting you go.”
Logan knew better than to try and charm her, but he had to saysomething. “But if I’m bringing in new money, isn’t that enough? I could find someone to replace the Schneider money, if I have enough time.”
“To put it bluntly, no. That is largely the reason you’re not being fired today, but the firm cannot tolerate this sort of revolving door of clients. We’re namedLoyalty Investmentsfor a reason, Mr. Walsh. We want a client base who trusts us, rather than clients who feel they’ve been neglected after a year and move on.”
“I touch base with clients on a—”
“You like the chase,” Peggy said, apparently uninterested in anything he might say in his own defense. “That’s, shall we say, readily apparent. But then you lose interest and are off chasing the next client, rather than taking care of the ones you have. I suspect that is at the root of Schneider’s displeasure as well, but I’ll be frank: he is a man who likes to be wined and dined by his financial advisors. His portfolio might be performing adequately, but if he does not take a shine to you—and soon—you will be in serious trouble.” She looked him straight in the eye, taking her glasses from the top of her head and folding them in her hands. “I need to see more maturity from you. Some sort of proof that you’re someone that Loyalty Investments wants on their team, someone clients can trust.”
“Maturity?” Logan asked.
“Maturity. You’re very charming, of course, and that’s a useful asset in a business like this. But charming only gets you so far. I need to see that you’re dependable, someone people would trustlong term. Client–advisor relationships are more like a marriage than a courtship, and I’m going to need you to demonstrate you understand that.”
It was fitting, really. Amber had moved on because he wasn’t boyfriend material, and now he was in trouble at work because he wasn’t husband material.
“And if I can hang on to Schneider?”
“You need to hang on to Schneider and slow the rest of your churn, or else our next conversation will go very differently. Show me you’ve grown up, Mr. Walsh,” Peggy said, and just like that, he was dismissed.
Chapter Five
Clare filed into the conference room after Noah and Derek and took her usual seat, halfway down the table on the left, just under the painting of Golgath the Destroyer. He was one of her favorites in Sulzuris’s bestiary, a squid-like beast large enough to pull entire cities into the sea. She liked to think sitting in front of him gave her a little extra boost of confidence; her own personal tentacle-monster buddy.
And she was going to need it, because it was time to pitch their ideas for the new adventure. Being hired as an Associate Game Designer on the narrative team was literally her dream come true: a chance to worldbuild a sandbox for everyone else to play in. She got to create characters, develop new worlds, and write templates for new adventures. Sulzuris was a collaborative storytelling game, so Clare’s job was less to create a defined narrative than to give players exciting tools to create their own stories. She built guardrails and paths and then stepped back so players could take over. Every game had a Game Master, who was the person who directed the shape of the narrative, while individual players made choices and then rolled dice to see how successful their choices were. That meant if a Game Master wanted to entirely ignore every rule, character statistic, and option Sulzuris put in front of them, they could. Or they could take a world Clare herself had built and turn it into something new and exciting, perfectly tailored for the rest of the players in the group. Sulzuris was a game of endless possibilities.
It was an especially exciting time to work for Quest Gaming, because they were in a “time of transition,” as the CEO had said in a speech shortly after she was hired. Tabletop role-playing games had exploded in popularity in the last decade—“Thanks,Stranger Things,” Clare always said when she brought this factoid up—and Quest was in the process of retooling some of their products to appeal to a wider demographic.
These sorts of changes were always a tricky line to walk. Clare personally still held a grudge against the Third Edition, which had cut her character Yaen’s perception abilities almost in half by requiring her character’s class to use lower-value dice before an attack, so she understood why long-term fans were wary of any sort of revisions. But Clare also knew that there were thousands of people out there who might be interested in playing Quest for Sulzuris if they could just convince them that it wasn’tjusttentacle monsters and demons and inscrutable rules written in a confusing shorthand.
One of the easiest ways to get into a game like Quest was a one-off adventure campaign, where the Game Master used prepackaged materials and a self-contained narrative for their group. Once groups got a feel for the world of Sulzuris they could branch out, and these sorts of introductory campaigns were the perfect way to get people hooked.
But tabletop role-playing games also had a certain reputation, one which tended to scare off a lot of women, in particular. There was a strong segment of players who disdained anything that challenged the privileged position of white cis men, and who really felt women playing Sulzuris sullied the game’s purity. It was the “nerdy guys in their basements” stereotype, and while that wasn’t exactlywrong—Clare had played her fair share of campaigns in basements with a bunch of dudes—Quest for Sulzuris could be so much more than that. There were a lot of ways to broaden their appeal and shed that stereotype, and Clare was sure that romance was the perfect angle.
It wasn’t that there weren’t romances in Sulzuris. Game Masters and players had been running romance storylines as long as the game existed, and there weren’t any rules against it. But there was a big difference between something that happened amongst players and something that was encouraged by the game itself, and Clare wanted to bring that element into the sun as a way of catching new gamers.
Clare just had to convince her coworkers of that first. The pitch meeting was their first chance to throw out storylines and characters that could be incorporated into the general “travel” brief leadership had outlined. Each team in narrative and character development had a name that corresponded to a type of character within the game. Leadership felt this added to a sense of camaraderie within the teams, and gave them some friendly rivalries to spur on creativity. Clare was part of the Mages, and while she wished there could be at least one other woman on the team, she also knew she was lucky to be here.
Because there was a lot more riding on the all-teams pitch meeting than just a chance to help shape the direction of the new edition. Everyone knew that Noah was interviewing for Narrative Lead on the Dragon Army team, and that would leave an open Senior Game Designer on the Mages. Clare knew everyone would be gunning for that spot, but she wanted it more than the rest of them, she was sure of it.