Lobo Malo

Afterword

When I first started this, one of the inspirations of the storyline was the announced Division movie, which originally had Jake Gyllenhall and Jessica Chastain attached to the project. As far as I know, it's still in development hell. Much as I like Gyllenhall as an actor, there are some roles he's just not terribly convincing in, and playing a Division agent struck me as one of those roles. I'd been noodling my own ideas for a film script for a while (Ming Na as Faye Lau or GTFO), and it occurred to me I could use the setting for the final scene as the start of this story. So, yeah, Jake Gyllenhall was the inspiration for Roger Wanderley.

The members of Team Peacemaker are unquestionably composites of various people I've met and known over the years. And while there's a little bit of me in all of them, Lowell Ryckmen and Paxton Gregory probably have a little more of me than Ricky Tarvey or Annika Bundmeister. In some respects, Lowell's the version of me that didn't stay home after graduating high school and certainly not after 9/11. He's been an interesting character to write. By the same token, Paxton is probably closer to the version of me that exists right now, save for a couple different forks in the road and a far more lethal pandemic than COVID-19 to complicate his life.  Having an actual pandemic occur, even one as low key as what we've been going through, has proven to me once again that life sometimes outperforms art.

One of the big challenges on this project was trying to convey the story without making it seem too much like a canned description of a "let's play." I wanted to try and evoke the feeling of a good Tom Clancy novel (not all of them are great) rather than the video game which just uses his name. I also had to be mindful of tech advances that would be available around the time the game was set, and which ones would not have been available. It's easy to forget that within the game's setting, computer technology, electronics, material sciences, and a lot of other things basically flash froze at the end of 2015. Any technical errors or anachronisms in the text are purely my own fault.

Further complicating matters is the fact that in the wake of a global pandemic as godawful as Green Poison has been played up to be, populations become a significant factor for an author to keep in mind. The game can infinitely respawn faction members and bosses. The "real world" can only offer them up once. I tried very hard to avoid the idea of infinite mooks waiting in the wings. Hopefully, I pulled it off. To that end, I mostly kept things focused on the main missions as story fodder. Astute readers will notice that most of the game's side missions never showed up here. While there was a bit of handwaving involved, vaguely mentioning other teams of Division agents roaming around the city, I wanted to give the impression that Team Peacemaker was the varsity, the go-to guys for the toughest jobs in the city.

I'm the sort of writer who hates like hell to be writing something for the sake of a theme. Themes are good to have, particularly for long form pieces, but if you're spending all your time beating your readers over the head with ponderous writing that screams, "Look at my important theme!", you're not going to keep your readers very long. The steelbook for the game had a copy of Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" on the back of it, which I thought was nifty. Combine that with the splash screen/cover art shot from the Lincoln Memorial, and it was pretty much a no-brainer that Lincoln and the Civil War would be coloring a lot of scenes. The fact America is effectively finding itself in a new civil war within the game, and one far more savage and tangled up than the one in the 19th Century, made references to that earlier conflict not only sensible, but added a note of realism.

The Epilogue contains the first verse and chorus of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More," a song which was less than a decade old when the Civil War started, and popular enough that a more satirical version ("Hard Tack Come Again No More") sprang up during the war. There are a lot of really good renditions of the song out there, but I will cop to using an instrumental version which was recorded for Civilization VI as a reference for that initial portion of the Epilogue. If you've got the soundtrack for that game, it's the "America - Medieval Era" track. If you don't, I'm sure somebody who does can play it for you.

So, what happens now, gentle readers? One could argue I've been a bit of a jerk by finishing the story on the same sort of cliffhanger the developers left players with initially before the game's "Episode 1" content came out. I did shift away from our intrepid agents to briefly describe Black Tusk's arrival, and possibly tease a sequel, but at the time I finished writing this project in mid-January, even Massive hadn't finished telling that story completely.  When I initially posted this particular work on the Ubisoft forums, it was constrained by the forum's programming and filters.  What you've been reading is the "director's cut" version, one which doesn't have to worry about even passing resemblances to profanities being "bleeped" out.  Shortly after I finished, the Year 2 expansion Warlords of New York was released, and being honest, I haven't enjoyed the direction Massive took the story.  Yeah, yeah, it's their story and their call.  All I can say at this point is that, should a sequel be forthcoming at some time in the future, it's probably going to be rather different than Massive's official timeline.

For now, this story has finished. But Team Peacemaker is only getting started.