Detective Time - Gamer Jade

 

Jade focused her awareness into the version of her that was entering the Game Room.

Arlo, always on the hunt for new players and new cards to add to Missing Piece, watches as the strange woman reorients herself to the surroundings and scans the area. He excuses himself from the game he’s playing and goes to meet her.

“Welcome to Red’s Gaming Room” he says, trying to get a hint of where and when she’s from.

“Hi, I’m Jade. And you must be *the* Arlo. I saw you were here on the...”

“...the crashed Timeship display?” finishes Arlo. “I know. The bot gave me a heads up. It says you’re still there though. I mean, it’s a Timeship and this is Metric, but it usually compensates for that.”

“Fractal Integration” said Jade. Arlo paused for the explanation, when it didn’t come, he spoke up “And that is... oh wait you, have a card on it. I see. Interesting. That would mean a new board style to really account for that.”

“It’s just a game though...” said Jade “I wouldn’t bother with that just for me.”

“It’s more than a game.” said Arlo, a little defensively. “I’m sorry, I mean. It is a game, but it can help you plan something that isn’t, and if the previews are any indication – you have a lot on your plate.”

“Well, when you put it that way.” said Jade, still feeling a bit flustered over the unsolicited help.

Arlo walked over to the design computer and typed in a few instructions for the AI to ponder over. Jade joined him shortly after a momentary attention swap to another self.

Arlo could sense she wasn’t quite all there, but mostly because he knew enough about how her watch worked from the card. He explained the process of board redesign anyway, knowing that an infodump was probably the best use of the time.

Despite the supposed lack of attention, this version of Jade seemed to pick up on most of the finer areas of game design. She even asked a few pointed questions that Arlo had to think about before answering.

“Missing Piece can be played in any kind of Time Environment. So in your University I’d probably be the guy that does the class schedule for time neutral areas.”

Jade Focused didn’t like that part of the faculty tasks, but had to pick it up to get past the double paradox and worst timequake. In the end she delegated that job to her ‘relax’ persona – this one – which promptly made a game for it, with the help from the Programming persona.

The goal was to get most of the students through unscathed and with minimal disruption. She tried getting a ‘high score’ with those criteria. Her dean self was happy with the results, but eventually found a group of students who would be willing to lose some days anyway, and act as lab rats for class credit. With that twist, the new objective was to have that many people affected, but with variations of severity for a fuller study.

As much as this persona didn’t like to study, she was pretty good at game theory, and making sacrifices to help the whole.

She saw the situation board, a version of the timeship’s temporal display, but shown here as individual games being played. “What’s happening with Nathan?” she asked, noticing that everyone was playing the same cards over and over again.

“That?” Arlo watched a few rounds and rewound again to be sure. “It looks like a game loop. It’s like a time loop but everybody feels like they’re covering new ground. Any suggestions?”

“Have they earned any new cards?” asked Jade, who had picked up the gist of the game from the people playing around her.

“No” said Arlo, “but they’re new. So far it’s just tokens for their current cards.” “Yes...” said Jade, “but they’re not dumb, they’ve just got too much and too little to work with.” she said, looking at the text for the Stanley Environment they’re working in. “And my non-gamer selves just have them in a timeout, so not helping the plot. They’re just doing set dressing.”

Arlo brought up the Stanley board and made it take up the full screen. He asked “Red” for more specific environment/item cards for the Apartments to work with. “Red” wasn’t a person, but rather a voice AI for the whole Game Pocket Environment. She, and it was definitely a she, sounded a bit familiar to Jade, but it was someone her other selves had heard and didn’t think more of it.

“Red” created a card for a person called “Typer” and seeded the name in a few other Pocket Realms. There was no obvious conflict, so the change was backdated a bit before the current arrivals.

The story around “Typer” was from a place familiar with some of the current actors and directors, and also in a version of “Deliberate 1.1” time. It populated the Stanley Apartments with a computer that was similar to Arlo’s Time Experiment game, and various movies and TV shows containing the actors. They currently couldn’t remember anything outside of Metric, so it was a bit of a shock to them.

The computer was currently blank, except for an Easy OS, and a link to something called Nightside Interweb.

Jade looked over the cards it spat out on playing field, but also the tiers of cards that could be unlocked by carefully going over the clues and resetting the Stanley game.

Arlo seemed a little lost, and a bit surprised at “Red’s” specificity, Jade’s intuition rang like an alarm. She was about to refocus but decided to write Nathan on Ant-Talk instead. “Next time you see the girl, ask her about ‘Red’” She then deleted the message from her end and pushed the specific memory under ‘Sent message to Time Detective”. Depending on how her focused self cared about details and what was happening when she tuned in, it might go unnoticed.

If there was going to be a ‘heroine’ of her Metric Adventures, wouldn’t it be funny if it was Gamer Jade, acting on her own.

“Red” noticing the message sent decided to give a heads up to her human self who was still waiting in the Media room alone. “How do I get to the Game Room?” she asked.