Game #0 - Epilogue Part 2

Narrator’s Voice

When I woke up later that day, I felt relieved to have Kate snuggled up next to me. Unfortunately, that feeling of relief was only fleeting as my mind quickly descended into a thick fog of paranoia. As I laid there, with Kate in my arms, all I could think about were all the different ways that I could potentially lose Kate. Paranoid and riddled with angst I decided the only way to prevent someone from stealing Kate away from me was to never let her out of my sight. At least not until we had graduated and were no longer living on campus.

Those last 3 weeks of classes and the week of finals were hell. Whenever Kate left her dorm room I was by her side. When she was in class, I sat in the hallway keeping an eye on her through the classroom door window. When I was in class, Kate was locked in her dorm room with explicit instructions to study and not leave... As you might guess I wasn’t really of sound mind during those 4 weeks and my grades suffered. The only thing that saved me was the fact that the semester was almost over and there was only so much damage I could do to my grades in a few weeks.

While my modest GPA atrophied, Kate’s excellent GPA improved over those last 4 weeks of college. It turns out that combining the On Switch Stuck and the Eidetic Erotica cards allowed me to transform Kate into a savant just by getting her horny. Getting Kate horny was quite easy to do because I had also selected the Erogenous Lips card for her. On top of that, if I got her horny enough that it was considered edging her mana would start to recharge because of the Spell: Transform Body card... Look it’s called synergy and no I did not plan for things to work out like this... It was all a happy accident.

At the end of those ulcer inducing 4 weeks was graduation, which neither of us attended... Kate and I both had... Um... Food poisoning... At least that’s what we told our families which were pissed at us. Anyways, Kate and I both moved back to our respective homes for the 4 weeks following graduation. I didn’t have a job lined up and with Kate’s “condition” she wasn’t even wasting her time looking for a job. During that long distance period I had Kate call and text me every 30 minutes to make sure she was okay... And yes, I was a miserable paranoid fuck who was brimming with angst during those 4 weeks while I was trying to find a job. And for those of you who don’t remember, the job market in ‘09 was the drizzling shits....

Being **** I opted to use a temp agency to find work instead of trying to find a job that utilized my BBA in finance. After a couple weeks of radio silence from the temp agency they finally contacted me about a receptionist job at a bank in a small rural city named Centerville with a population of around 10,000 people. The position didn’t pay much, and I was only guaranteed 20 hours of work a week, but I figured we could make it work because Centerville had an extremely low cost of living. Though it was geographically isolated, Centerville's economy had historically relied heavily on manufacturing. But as more and more jobs were outsourced, unsurprisingly, the city began to whither economically. I’m sure most people viewed Centerville as a dying husk of a city, but I saw it as a cheap oasis that was insulated from civilization by a 2-hour drive.

With a part-time job in hand, Kate and I packed up our meager belongings and moved into a shitty little studio apartment in Centerville. Having spent my entire life living in suburbia I hadn’t considered what life in a small rural city would be like and I hadn't planned on our renting options being so limited... Centerville had two apartment complexes in it, and our options were between the complex with a mold problem and meth-heads or the complex with shitty insulation and meth-heads... So yeah not great...

We ended up subletting an apartment in the complex with shitty insulation. It was our cheapest option and the person whose lease we were taking over agreed to shave off $150 a month in rent and pay for internet service for the 7 months remaining on the lease. Now I’m sure some of you might have realized that concessions like that probably meant the place was a miserable shit-hole, and it was... But Kate and I were just a couple of wide-eyed kids who didn’t know any better. The 7 months that we lived in that place were miserable. Our neighbors were meth-heads, the cops were at the complex at least twice a week, and did I mention there was like there was no insulation in the damn building... Anyways, when December rolled around Kate and I ran into a new issue. If we wanted to stay in the shitty little apartment our rent would go up $200 a month, and considering our finances had yet to see a month in the green we just couldn’t afford that.

With the prospect of being homeless inching closer to becoming our reality, our luck changed when an old farmer named Ray happened to hear me discussing my situation with a coworker. I had been giving Cindy the watered-down version of our situation, when Ray had walked into the lobby of the bank. As he waited in line he listened in on our conversation. When he had finished up his banking business, he pulled me aside to ask me if I would be interested in renting his old farmhouse. He told me that his last tenant moved out over the summer and the place needed a bit of work... But he said he would rent it cheap, and if we did some work on the place he would reduce our rent even further. Again, his odd offer should have raised a thousand red flags in my head, but I was **** and took him up on it sight unseen.

When January hit, Kate and I packed up our stuff and moved into the farmhouse that sat a short drive outside of town... Yeah... Kids always check a place out before you sign anything... The farmhouse had a lot of amenities. It had electricity, running water, a phone line, and even a roof... Hopefully by now you’re picking up on my sarcasm. The place was absolutely trashed. Both bedrooms, upstairs and downstairs, were filthy and uninhabitable. The bathroom and kitchen were biohazards and the basement was an old earth-floor basement that felt like a cave. The only room that wasn’t completely trashed was the living room, which is where we set up camp... I mean we basically camped in the house because it was such a shit-hole. O and I forgot to mention that the farmhouse a wood stove! Which was pretty awesome considering that it was the furnace...

January was rough to say the least. We tried to do some work on the place, but neither of us really knew what we were doing so all of our effort was for naught. By the start of February, I was beginning to mentally break. The living situation, Kate’s situation, and our finances were all weighing heavily on me, and I started to fantasize about wrapping my car around a tree on my way into work... What? Life isn’t always peaches and cream, but I digress... Teetering on the brink of a psychological breakdown, fate threw me a lifeline in the form of the public library. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the public library really did save us. So let me explain...

I hadn’t given the library much thought, but after spending a month essentially camping indoors, the prospect of reading was becoming more and more appealing. One cold February day I decided to stop at the library after work. It wasn’t a huge fancy library, but as I nosed about an idea began to blossom in my head after I saw some books on woodworking. I can remember thinking, “Why couldn’t Kate learn woodworking, or better yet why couldn’t Kate teach herself to become a carpenter, or a plumber, or an electrician, or all of them?” With the outline of a plan in my head, I checked out a couple books on woodworking and took them home to Kate.

The next day before I left for work, I made sure to get Kate as horny as I possibly could without sending her over the edge. Then, just like I did in that last semester of college, I gave her very specific instructions to study and not to masturbate. I left my sexy little savant to absorb as much woodworking information as possible. When I got home that night, I picked up one of the books Kate had read and began to quiz her. Question after question she answered correctly. Unable to stump my sexy tomboy, I rewarded her with a sensual round of love making.

Realizing that my plan had legs this became our routine. While I was at work, Kate was at home studying all facets of home renovation. By the middle of March Kate was ready to tackle the decerped farmhouse, but we had a new problem. We really didn’t have the tools that Kate needed to begin demoing portions of the house. The shitty screw driver set and a couple of hammers that I brought with us when we moved, just didn’t cut it. After scouring the second hand store for a couple weeks I decided to hit up Ray. He was excited to hear we were going to start work on the old farmhouse, and gladly loaned us some of his old tools.

As winter turned into spring our living situation was beginning to improve. We were still poor as shit, but Kate was able to make a ton of progress on the demolition. Both bedrooms, upstairs and downstairs, had basically been stripped down to the studs and insulation. In the kitchen she had torn out the water damaged cabinets, and in the bathroom she had torn out the water damaged drywall. Ray held true to his word and rewarded Kate’s effort by cutting our rent down to $100/month during April and May. Rather than banking that money, we reinvested it into Kate’s efforts by scouring yard sales for more tools and building supplies. It turns out horny old men will really cut you a deal on things, when their distracted by Kate’s juicy sideboob... And yes, Kate would always expand the girls before we started negotiating.

Kate continued to make progress on the house throughout the summer and the man stuck to his word and kept our rent frozen at $100/month. Though I was still only working about 20 hours a week at the bank, the reduced rent allowed us to greatly improve our living situation. By the time the calendar turned to September Kate had the old farmhouse in pretty decent shape. We had moved our bed into the downstairs bedroom, the upstairs bedroom was used for storage, and the kitchen and bathrooms were no longer biohazards. It was amazing what Kate was able to accomplish with a shoestring budget and a lot of hard work.

In celebration of all Kate’s hard work, we decided that we would sign up for dial up internet. I know 56k dial up doesn’t sound sexy, but after living without internet for 9 months it was like a dream come true. No longer did we have to sit in the Wendy’s parking lot with our laptops to get on the internet. We were going to have home internet bay bay!

Now remember when I said that my personal hell lasted 18 months? Well October 2010 was when that period ended. Kate and I had internet and Ray had decided to leave our rent at $100/month because of all of the work Kate had done on the farmhouse. We didn’t know this at the time, but Ray had really taken a liking to us and kind of saw us as the kids he never had. When he told us about his decision to leave our rent at $100/month we were on Cloud 9. That night we decided to buy four cheap bottles of wine and celebrate....