Not In The Script!

~LAUREN~

There was something sickening about the sunset today. The deep orange light seemed to take pleasure in stripping the skin from my body, leaving me feeling raw beneath it. Or perhaps that feeling had more to do with the words that had just left Marion’s mouth.

“You… can’t be serious…” I stammered.

She smiled as though she were.

The unease crawled over my skin again. I could barely make out her face against the glare pouring through the windows. She sat across from me in her glass-walled office, with Seoul spread out beneath us and the Han River winding through the city, indifferent to my current predicament. The water caught the dying sunlight, glittering as though nothing in the world had changed.

Marion’s expression was placid and polished, the face of an executive who’d practiced this speech in the mirror a dozen times.

“The decision has been finalized,” she said, so cold it made the weak sunlight feel hot enough to burn me more than it already had.

I stared at the woman I had worked under for six years. The same woman who had praised my lore bibles, gushed over my intricate story arcs, and trusted me to ghostwrite her daughter’s code and half the emails she sent to the company’s investors. Apparently, I had been useful enough to do everyone else’s work, but not important enough to keep my own position.

Marion folded her hands on the desk.

She might as well have been discussing quarterly projections.

“No, you’re kidding, right?” I asked, trying to smile, like I wasn’t falling apart on the inside.

“We are restructuring,” she repeated. “With the upcoming release of the Shadow Fall expansion, Dusk Spire Interactive felt it was time for a creative refresh moving forward.”

“Creative refresh?” I repeated. “You mean gutting everything I’ve built and handing it over to your daughter?”

“The board wants—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Marion. To hell with what they want. You can’t seriously expect Livia to finish what I started.”

“She won’t have to. You’ve written everything she needs.”

I shot to my feet. My chair scraped across the floor like a banshee shrieking at its enemy.

“I am the lead developer of ROLO. I wrote the main questline and every branching side quest that goes with it. I designed most of the dungeons, and I built the entire Blackwood region because your daughter and her little team couldn’t stop dumping their responsibilities on mine. Eighty percent of this game is the work of me and my team. The other twenty percent barely deserves Livia’s name.”

“Lauren—”

“No. Seriously, Marion. Help me understand this.” I planted both hands on her desk and leaned forward. “You’re firing me, replacing my name in the credits with your daughter’s, and expecting me to walk out of here quietly. When did L. Blackwood become Livia instead of Lauren?”

Marion reached for a folder and pushed it across the desk. An envelope thick with cash followed.

“You will find your severance package quite generous.”

I stared at the envelope. I hated just looking at it.

“I’m not touching that.”

“Lauren, please be reasonable.”

“Reasonable?” I snatched my hands off the desk before I could do something that would get me escorted out in handcuffs. “You don’t get to bury me under a pile of zeros and call it severance, when you’re stealing my game and passing it off as your daughter’s work.”

“Listen, Lauren. We need a clean transition.”

The HR representative sitting beside her shifted in her chair. She was younger than me, with brown hair tucked neatly behind her ears and a folder full of legal documents resting on her lap. Her smile had the careful, practiced neutrality of someone who had been warned that the meeting might become unpleasant.

The sharpness in her eyes suggested she was paying closer attention than her expression let on.

Marion, meanwhile, looked entirely unbothered.

“This is blatant theft!”

My voice was loud, but not loud enough to count as a scream.

HR cleared her throat, but I was already talking over her.

“You think ROLO runs on dungeons and cosmetics? It doesn’t. It runs on story. I’m the reason players sit through cutscenes instead of scrolling through mindless live streams waiting for it to end. I’m the reason your forums are full of threads about which NPC broke their hearts, which quests made them cry so much they felt terrible for three days. I gave those characters lives. I made people care about them.”

Marion’s lips twitched.

“Writers are replaceable.”

The words landed harder than I wanted them to.

I straightened.

“No,” I said. “They’re not.”

Her expression sharpened, and I finally understood what she was doing. She wanted me angry. She wanted me to lose control, to give her something she could point to as justification for everything that followed.

HR slid the documents across the desk.

“You signed away your rights to your work,” she said flatly. “When you joined the company, your creative contributions became the intellectual property of Dusk Spire Interactive. You are entitled to disagree with the decision, but the terms of your contract are clear. Your employment is being terminated, and the transition will proceed as planned.”

I looked down at the documents without touching them.

“I can accept being fired, Marion. I can accept that the company wants someone else in charge. But I will not accept being scrubbed from the credits. Livia Blackwood and Lauren Blackwood are two different people, and I refuse to watch you pretend otherwise.”

Marion opened her mouth, but I continued before she could interrupt.

“What about my team? They’ve spent the last six years working alongside me. Are they being fired too?”

“The Lead Narrative Designer and Lead Narrative Developer teams are being unified,” HR explained. “The smaller teams are also being restructured. This will allow us to move in a direction that better aligns with player interests.”

“Player interests?” A short, incredulous laugh escaped me. “She hasn’t even played the damn game.”

Marion tilted her head.

“Well, Lauren, I think you’re the last person who should bring that up. You may have developed the game and written most of its story, but I don’t recall seeing you play it yourself either.”

‘Because you kept throwing me around the company to clean up after your daughter!’

The words burned behind my teeth. I wanted to scream them. I wanted to tell her exactly how many nights I had spent fixing problems that should never have existed in the first place, how many deadlines I had salvaged, how much of my own work had been pushed aside so that Livia could play at being a developer without ever having to face the consequences of her mistakes.

Instead, I swallowed the words.

I wouldn’t give Marion the satisfaction.

“Fine,” I said. “Let her work on my game. But she doesn’t get to change what’s already there. Everything I created stays as it is. The main story, the side quests, the characters, the quest rewards, the starting zones, the starter items. All of it. She can release whatever she wants after Shadow Fall. Everything that came before it stays untouched.”

Marion didn’t flinch.

She sat back in her chair, her silhouette darkened by the frame of orange light. Her shadow stretched across the desk, swallowing the paperwork between us, like it was trying to spit it out.

“We did not call you here to negotiate.”

For a moment, I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

Six years at Dusk Spire Interactive. Four years working on ROLO before that. Lore bibles, flowcharts, script revisions at two in the morning, endless bug fixes, and emotional payoffs carefully built across thousands of quests. Ten years of my life poured into a game that had become more than a job to me.

And they wanted to take it all for themselves. Not because the game had failed, or because the players hated it. ROLO had been a success beyond anything we had expected. Its launch had broken records, and the community had grown faster than our servers could handle. We already prepared the first major expansion, it’s release date was barely two weeks away.

But now that the game was successful, the company had decided my work was worth more without my name attached to it.

“I should sue you.” My jaw ached from clenching my teeth. “No. I will sue you. You can’t do this.”

“You’re welcome to try,” Marion replied smoothly.

HR opened the folder on her lap.

“The employment contract you signed states otherwise. Ruins of Loria Online, ROLO, as players refer to it these days, became the intellectual property of Dusk Spire Interactive upon its release twelve months ago. You developed the game and served as its lead narrative director, but the terms you agreed to are unambiguous. Any unauthorized disclosure concerning the restructuring or transfer of responsibilities may result in legal action and a claim for damages.”

I could feel my hands shaking.

Six years ago, I had signed a six-year contract with the company. I had promised them the first truly immersive virtual reality experience in the form of a massively multiplayer role-playing game. The largest world ever built for a game of its kind, with a level of narrative complexity that would make players feel as though they were living inside another world.

I had promised them to get it done within six years.

I delivered on that promise in five.

Then I spent the following twelve months working on Shadow Fall, building the first major content expansion while helping maintain the game we had just released. I had given them more than they had asked for, and I had done it because I believed in what we were making.

Apparently, that had been my biggest mistake.

“You should be proud, Lauren,” Marion said.

I stared at her.

“Yes. I’ll be incredibly proud when the players set their pods on fire and demand compensation. Maybe they’ll even ask for a full refund.”

I snatched the contract and the envelope off the desk. If Marion wanted me to sign anything, she could wait until I was no longer one badly chosen word away from throwing the entire stack at her head.

“Expect to hear from my lawyers.”

Then I turned and walked out.