Mated to the Ocean Dragon (Elemental Mates 3)

Chapter Twenty-One: Liana

They didn’t make it back to Wing Island until the next day. Everyone was still exhausted from the confrontation with the fire dragons, and so they made use of the guest rooms in Sky Home instead.

Liana slept for almost ten hours, nestled against Timothy. When they finally got up again, everyone else was getting ready to leave as well.

During their entire flight back to Wing Island, Li

ana felt anxious about the fire dragon’s mission. Now that she’d seen just what Steele was capable of, she didn’t like the thought of Braeden flying into danger.

Still, the chimera was right: someone needed to stop him. And as much as she didn’t want to see her new friend in danger, right now she was also relieved that it meant that she’d have Timothy to herself for a while.

So much had happened during such a short time that she was more than ready to collapse on the beach and nap in the sun for an entire week.

Only my boss won’t like that...

“Everything okay?” Timothy asked, pouring her coffee before she’d even asked.

She drank gratefully, then shook her head.

“Just not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow, that’s all.”

She’d told her boss there’d been a family emergency. He’d reluctantly granted her three further days off—no more than that. But those were almost over. And Liana knew that he expected her to make up for it with lots of overtime during the next week.

Ugh. He’s pushing for that stupid update which no one wants. People keep complaining and quitting the game. No one’s going to invest fifty dollars into getting a virtual dragon.

She gave Timothy a small smile. “It all seems quite silly now. Virtual dragons, when I know what the real deal looks like. I shouldn’t care that our new policies are dragging the game down. But it used to be a game I loved working on...”

“No one likes seeing things change for the worse,” Timothy said.

He rummaged in a drawer until he found two bowls, and then got a tub of ice cream out of the freezer.

“What would you do if it was your game? You’ve worked on it for quite a while. You must have thought about what changes you’d make.”

“Go back to our beginnings,” Liana said promptly.

She reached out for a small basket of strawberries, then began to wash and cut them.

“In the beginning, it was a game where everyone could succeed. All players could collect all of our dragons if they were willing to invest some time into it—and obviously you could also take a shortcut by throwing us some dollars. Because we like getting paid for our work.”

She shot Timothy a quick grin. “I suppose that approach is not very businesslike, and not how you become a billionaire CEO. But people loved our game. It was a really tight-knit community. You should have seen our players talk in our forums. Everyone was having fun with it, because it was—well, fair.”

“And now it’s not fair anymore?”

Liana shook her head. “I know it’s a business. But still... It feels wrong. Like all our new company overlords care about is money, money, money. And they don’t realize that our players aren’t stupid. I’ve stopped playing my fair share of games when I could feel it losing the magic and turning into just another rip-off. That’s how you kill a game.”

Timothy put the tub of ice cream back into the freezer, and Liana divided her strawberries among the two bowls.

“I’m not an expert when it comes to the gaming industry,” he finally said when he turned back to her. “But I’ve seen that sort of thing before, many times. You buy a small company that’s doing well. Not great, perhaps—but well. And then you start squeezing money out of it. Brutally. There are protests, of course—but the new CEOs don’t care. Because they don’t care about the company and its customers. They just want a year or two of the highest possible profits. Then, when the market is squeezed dry and the company is falling apart, they just drop it. Because there are always new companies to take over for them.”

“Or new games,” Liana said softly.

She swallowed, suddenly feeling unbearably sad when she thought of her virtual ocean dragon.

Of course it was just a game—but it was a game that contained years of memories. She’d made friends in it. It had been her first real job as a coder on an actual game.

And to see it all crash and burn just because someone didn’t care about their game, but just about the highest possible profit...

“Well, I guess there’s nothing to be done now,” she said sadly. “Our players are seeing the writing on the wall. I don’t give it more than two years. I guess it’s as good a reason as any to start using my free time to work on my own code. If I can’t rescue my dragon game, at least I can start working on my own game. I’ve been putting it off for way too long, because there was always something else coming up.”