On the top floor of a particular office building in downtown Seattle there was a luxurious penthouse, with a magnificent view of the city skyline… Well, there would be a magnificent view if all curtains weren’t drawn, and maybe the place was ok, but you can’t call a house luxurious when your whole furniture consist of your state-of-the-art pc-gamer setup, a fridge, a microwave and a lone mattress on the floor.

  But Nate like it that way; the less there was around, the less places filth could hide from his cleaning.

  No sir! There shall be no bacteria on Nathan Brooks watch! And for that purpose, this was the optimal configuration… Well, at one point he had a wardrove too, and managed ok cleaning around it, but the laundry people kept making a half ass job when ironing his clothes, and then he would have to spent hours doing it himself, burning must of them in the process, so now a days Nate just ordered new clothes straight from factory, and threw away his old ones. Some would call that a waste, but is not like a few jeans and hoodies would make a dent in the finances of Brook’s Transpacific S.A.

  “Finally!” in the dark apartment Nate grinned at his left monitor in manic glee, “With this, my primary team’s color pallets match! And it only took me fifty-nine gachas to get the right skins and seventy-four hours of non-stop grinding to get all the characters to max level…! Hmm… I don’t like those numbers... Let’s fire another gacha and throw in another hour of grinding to round things up…”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  *boing* a notification dinged on the corner of his right monitor; a message from his dad’s secretary.

  “Huh… so is that time of year already.”

  Nate quickly tipped a thank you, not even bothering to read the bland digital birthday card, though he did take a look to his bank account to see the number 57.171.7 $.

  He grimaced.

  Harper always did these things. The secretary new that if she messed with the numbers on his bank account like this, he would have no choice but to buy something to round things down. That she had transferred exactly 17.171.7 $ for his seventeen birthday, wasn’t lost on him.

  “She thinks she is cute.” Nate grown, “Well, I suppose I’ll start by ordering some more frozen pizza… I should count how many are left in the fridge… Uhh… What…?”

  The moment he stood, his knee buckled and his vision darken.

  That night, on the top floor of a particular office building in downtown Seattle, Nathan Brooks fainted, his temple smashing against the corner of his only peace of furniture. With no one around to notice, he would die a couple hours later.