✅3️⃣ Treating the Babysitter [Camp NaNoWriMo July 2023]

20. Challenging Authority

Finally passed my 40000-word target for the story's first month; now let's see if I can actually finish it this month.

This chapter is dedicated to Peter. Thank you again for all your support!

"What's that?" Claudia exclaimed, sounding for all the world like a little kid seeing some scientific marvel for the first time. Adam was surprised too, seeing the grotesque glory of the Omnifactorix represented on the screen in front of them for the first time. But he wondered for a second if Claudia had managed to mentally regress herself so much that she genuinely didn't remember the earlier games in the franchise. But then he thought a little deeper, and realised that it could actually be new to her.

"Did you ever finish the story mode on Guidance Operations?" he asked. It was hard to believe that there was anything in the universe of her favourite game franchise that she wasn't intimately familiar with, but he didn't know how else to respond.

"I played some," she said. "Mobile games just aren't my thing." Adam noticed that she wasn't sounding quite so childish now; but that could just as easily be because she couldn't imagine a little kid talking about this kind of stuff at all, and she had to answer because he'd asked a question.

"That's where we meet this thing for the first time," he said. "You had to have noticed that the Admiral and Central Command weren't being entirely honest with each other, right? Well, that's because they were both trying to create a situation where AIs right out of basic programming would start to create combat androids without being trained to. Both trying to keep it secret from each other. And they built... well, this thing."

"Wow," Claudia said, and turned back to the screen. The thought of fighting the thing in front of them was exciting her, and he guessed that she might feel like she was missing something through not knowing its backstory. He felt like he had to help her understand a little more.

"It's not a big deal," he said. "You never actually see its capabilities, just the hint that it exists." He didn't mention that he was seeing all kinds of parallels between the last few hours of plot and events he'd already seen from a very different point of view in the mobile game. That couldn't be relevant here, it would just be a little bonus for anyone who had spotted the connection. And he was sure that she would go back to play SC:GO now that she knew there was a tie-in in the story.

"Yeah, it's kinda a love story really, isn't it?" she said, and this time it was Adam's turn to be a bit confused. Was there some subtext that he just hadn't seen? "Maybe I'll play it."

They didn't interrupt the game, though. The game they were playing was just too exciting. It really felt like they were closing in on some kind of ultimate mastermind behind all the plots and double-crosses that they had investigated so far. Adam was just as invested, and seeing the ultimate fighting machine rendered on a high-spec gaming PC rather than his cell phone made him determined to see just how powerful this enemy really was.