“Scarlet Woman?”
“It’s the name of the virus and it’s a twist on the cliché of the bad girl being a useless skank.”
Max smirked, the dimple in his chin emerging. How many times had Julia painstakingly drawn that cleft? Traced the square jaw and black eyes? Eli was originally supposed to be blond but once Tiff saw her demos of a black-eyed, square-jawed man she was forbidden from changing them back.
“That’s the hottest cartoon guy I’veeverseen,” Tiff gushed. “Besides, you don’t reallyknowMax. There’s a one in a billion chance he’ll find out.”
Those one-in-a-billion odds were growing appallingly narrow.
“Scarlet Woman, huh? How long ’til I can play it?” the man who was never supposed to find out about her game asked.
Julia tried to keep her eyes from goingtoowide. “No idea. We’ll need to get picked up by a parent company first.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“I’m not. Investors aren’t exactly hungry for indie games designed by women and it’s a pretty expensive business.”
“How much would it cost to make yours?”
Julia looked away, uncomfortable as always about discussing money. “Bare minimum, three hundred grand. Ideally? Two million.”
Max whistled.
“Exactly why I’m not holding my breath. My partner Tiff has an uncle who’s a lecturer at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment. That’s the only reason we got a processor big enough to build a ten-minute beta version for trials and feedback. Without major sponsors, we’ll never get made and without money for a decent pitch we’ll never get sponsors.”
“That sucks.” Max folded his arms across his chest. “Any way you can raise the money for advertising yourselves?”
Julia’s skin crawled. That word. The subject of so many childhood screaming matches. The only remnant of her poor white trash girlhood she couldn’t shake. She knew she should talk to a shrink, but the thought of sitting on some squishy couch and having to actually articulate the phraseI’m scared of moneywas too embarrassing. Instead, she never checked her bank account, avoided ATMs, and let Ash handle all the bills. Fully functioning neurotic, just add technology.
“A few months ago Tiff made a Kickstarter account. You know, those platforms where you bribe strangers into giving you funds in exchange for naming characters after them?”
“Sure. Didn’t work?”
“To put it mildly. No.”
“To put it less mildly?”
Julia sighed. “We were getting a little buzz and then some bullshit men’s rights group found out about the feminist angle and it all went to hell. They started blowing up our social media accounts, sending us torture porn, putting our home addresses online. It was a complete nightmare. For a while we tried to fight fire with fire; sending them dildos and doxing them back but it’s like fighting a hydra. Cut off a head and ten grow in its place. We were barely getting any work done we were so busy battling those asshats. Eventually we had to shut our whole site down.”
She traced a fingernail over the floor, remembering Tiff’s tears and her paranoia. She’d never been so tempted to buy a gun. Or kill someone with it. “The website’s back up now but we stopped doing the self-promotion thing. As it is, I get like ten death threats a week.”
Max’s face was like stone. “I have no idea how anyone could do that.”
“Trolls are the scourge of the earth. Who knows, if Scarlet Woman gets made you’ll probably have to come to my house and defuse a pipe bomb.”
Max gave a pained chuckle. “I fucking hope not. What was their point anyway? Why did they hate your game so much?”
“Who knows? All Tiff and I wanted to do was make a female friendly game and they act like we showed up at their houses and tried to cut their dicks off.”
She paused, remembering who it was she was speaking to. “Sorry, I don’t normally rant but this is kind of a red zone for me.”
Max pressed his boot against hers. “On behalf of men everywhere I’m sorry and the next time you get a serious threat tell me. I have friends who work in cyber crimes. And I throw a mean right hook.”
Julia didn’t know what to say. There was a weird stinging feeling in the backs of her eyes and to her horror she realized she was going to fuckingcry. She blinked rapidly, trying to push the unwelcome tears back into her ducts.
“Thanks,” she muttered. “I don’t think trolls have the ovaries to do anything except type in all caps but I’ll definitely consider your offer.”
The pressure of his foot on hers increased. “Good.”