Calling in Sick

🌹🎮🌹

The gals at work were expecting me to clock in at the bank any minute now… But they had to take a backseat, because my man needed me more! The problem was that I had to figure out a way to convince them I couldn’t go in for the day.

“Okay… Calm down, Rose…” I did a series of breathing exercises to get some composure. “We rehearsed this before. Just make the call, sound like death, and get the day off.”

On such short notice I couldn’t pull out vacation time without a very good reason, especially on a Friday. I needed a better excuse than “My husband is stuck in his broken video game and now I need to play him out of it.” Something was telling me that wouldn't fly with them. I had to whip out a sudden sickness or it was off to the races with me.

I scooted Ray’s desk chair back and pulled out my phone. As I dialed up my boss I spun around in the chair and waited for the ringer to start.

*Booooop…*

*Booooop….*

*Bo–ooo…*

*Plunk Kunk!*

She picked up!

“Rose! Where are you?” Nancy finally answered. I could hear the other girls chatting behind her. “That HR girl left yesterday, so we're all celebrating. Why aren't you here?”

I totally forgot that we were going to have an early morning party for that. I even bought these little low fat mini cupcakes for the occasion. They each had a letter on them that spelled out ‘GOOD RIDDANCE!’

“Heeey…” I faked a deathly sick tone. I might as well have put the speaker up to a frog, because this beautiful lady was croaking. “Nan… *Cough Cough* Waaaa…”

“Oh my god, Rose…” Nan uttered in shock. “You don’t sound so good. Did you catch that flu going around?”

My plan was working! This wasn’t any time to ease up though, because I had to sell it hard.

“I think so… I don't feel sooo… I don’t feel sooo gooo…” I spiced it up with a few gags. Without a convincing performance, there was no way I'd get the day off without a doctor's note. “I… I don’t think I can come to… Come to… Work today…”

Maybe I was laying it on a little thick. Too much and she’d know I was faking and write me up. Too little and I’d get to work and find an extra box of tissues at my station.

There was some tapping on the other side, like she was walking around. An echo sounded like it was coming from the bank staircase.

Then I heard a door close. Was she in her office?

“Hmm…” She hummed on her end. “Well…”

*Gulp…*

This was it. It was a fifty-fifty if my act was convincing or not. Friday was our busy day. People flooded in to cash those checks in from a hard work week.

I was so tense, but kept my eyes on Ray on the screen.

“Listen, I’ll call someone in to cover for you. Actually, most of the girls are already here… So don’t worry!”

Yeah baby! Let’s go!!!

I held back a cheer, but threw my arm up into the air excitedly.

“You just stay home and get better.” she said in a concerned voice. “But next time we get coffee, you're buying. Got it?”

“You’re the best, Nan.”

The moment I hung up the phone, I squealed and spun the chair around until I got dizzy.

Day off secured! And since today was Friday, the whole weekend was wide open for me to help Ray. We were going to see this adventure through to the very end, no matter how long it took.

Originally, that sick-act was supposed to be for a spa day. But hanging out with Ray was far more therapeutic than lounging in mud, even if it was through a game. Maybe therapeutic was the wrong word, but I didn’t care.

“Time to order a pizza to celebrate!”

I was going to need food, but I didn’t have the time to cook or go out. A stuffed crust deep dish would be more than enough to get me through the weekend. And of course, calories weren't counting either!

💻⚔️💻

The Dev Access Point ran on the same sort of operating system that the computers did back in the office, so it was easy to navigate. And with how it synced up with the company's cloud storage database, I had access to just about any element anyone in the team had ever saved on their computer since the studio was started.

That was why fixing the animations was so easy, because I literally just needed to copy and paste back in the proper files so the NPC’s could use them again. The game’s engine did the rest.

Here was the problem. In theory fixing the dialogue to work properly was just as simple, maybe even more so since I just needed to swap tags around so they’d properly respond to things the players would say. But ‘easy fix’ did not mean it was going to be quick.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Roberts?” Tensei asked as she noticed a vain swell on my forehead. “Are you having troubles?”

“You could say that…” I sighed, dealing with the unquenchable urge to brush my hair back in frustration. “Did you know that there’s over 200,000 lines of dialogue in this game, Tensei?”

“I sure did!” she floated up and spun with a twinkle effect in her wings. “Isn’t that amazing? You humans really can talk a lot!”

Oh, how I wish I thought it was as amazing as her. Because right now I had to sift through all of that and label them. So far I’d gotten through about 50 and I was already tapped out.

-RAY! RAY MY DARLING! I GOT THE DAY OFF!!!!!!! (づ ◕‿◕ )づ LETS PLAY ALL NIGHT LIKE WERE !% AGAIN!-

“That’s nice honey, but I’ve got a few issues here…”

-BWAHAHA WAIT! I WAS HOLDING SHIFT AND PUT !% INSTEAD OF 15!-

“Congratulations,” I replied in a dry tone.

“Woah, Rose!” Tensei cheered as she flew into my face to look at Rose’s hud. “That’s really amazing! Good job!”

-TY TY. I had to really play it up like I was sick. But hey? I got the day! Oooh, did that just rhyme? I’m in such a good mood!-

If only I could have said the same thing. I was in as absolutely a foul mood as I could have been.

“Tensei, you're in my way,” I grumbled as she blocked the computer.

“O-okay!” she tried not to cry and floated to the side. “Sorry, Mr. Roberts.”

-HEY! Don’t be a jerk to my girl, Ray! Teny-Chan is just trying to help!-

Being a jerk? Wait, what? I didn’t think I was being a jerk at all, was I?

“Look, sorry you two,” I said as my eyes stayed peeled on the computer. “It’s just, this really sucks and I don’t want to do it.”

Neither of them thankfully had to go through this mind numbing work of tagging each audio file individually. That Virus really mixed things up and I couldn’t have hated it more. It only got worse the more I wondered what else it screwed up in the game.

-Okay, I forgive U. Can you explain what's going on? Maybe we can help.-

“Well, I have to manually edit each piece of dialogue so it properly responds to what a player says…or another NPC for that matter.”

-Wait, these responses aren’t all computer generated?-

“Not at all…” I replied. “The NPC's here don't actually generate new speech. They have a list of thousands upon thousands of voice lines that they can pull from in order to best respond to whatever the player says into their mics, or through the in-game chat feature.”

-I'm still not understanding. What exactly is the problem?-

“Think of it like this. If a player says ‘Hello’ to an NPC, then that NPC's AI will look in the directory for a proper response that matches the situation. When it finds a voice line tagged ‘Greetings,’ it will respond with that to the player.”

The more complicated a thing the player says, the harder it would be for the NPC to give a good reply. Don’t even get me started on quest lines… The audio team had a nightmare trying to figure this system out.

“The Virus mixed up all the tags the AI were supposed to look for. So now if a player says ‘Hi,’ the AI will respond improperly and maybe say something like ‘I hate you for stealing my future husband. It should have been me.'”

Yes. That is a line in the game.

-So you’re just swapping tags around?-

“Pretty much.” I replied.

-And the issue is that it’s taking a long time?-

“Yep…”

Honestly, it wasn’t that bad of work, just extremely tedious and it required focus.

“Mmm…” Tensei fluttered close to me. “Maybe I can help?”

“How so?” my brow raised curiously.

“I’m a program that understands human speech on a very sophisticated level. If you let me into the system, maybe I can fix all the tags super quick.”

Tensei was extremely advanced compared to anything else in the game, so it probably wouldn't take too long for her to alter the tags now that we knew what we were looking for.

-Teny-chan, why didn’t you try that before?-

“I can’t use the access points unless a dev is logged in, I suppose,” she replied.

It was worth a shot. In theory she could work at light speed to get this done, which would…

“Ding! Done!” Tensei said as she snapped her fingers to get us looking at the NPC’s gathered in the pig pen.

“My brother, your face is looking pale,” said a lady to her sibling. “Shall I fetch you a bucket of water?”

“If it gets you away from me, you can do whatever you want. You make me sick.”

-Is……Is that fixed?-

“Y…yeah…”

It was good enough. That was probably a sub quest or something that I didn’t really care to follow up on. Whatever was going on with those siblings was none of my problem.

-Teny-chan, you did it!-

“Seriously, great work.” I really wanted to give her a proper thumbs up, so I just moved my fingers across the keyboard as best I could to do it. “You saved my sanity, Tensei.”

“Ahh… Shucks…” she smiled and posed shyly mid air. “I’m just doing my job.”

I was seeing a lot of potential for her to help me out here, so maybe bug fixing wouldn’t be the worst possible thing. We’d just have to see what other bugs and glitches came up in the other regions. And from my understanding, it only got worse the further out we’d go from spawn…