I wasn't supposed to be this guy.
The type who stays past seven because the alternative is going home to nothing. Who has convinced himself that presence equals productivity, because at least the office gives the illusion of purpose.
The floor had mostly emptied. Overhead lights buzzed at a frequency designed, it seemed, specifically to remind you of your own smallness. I'd been staring at the same spreadsheet for twenty minutes without moving a single cell.
The numbers didn't need me. They just needed someone to sit in front of them.
Across the room, Yusuf was pulling on his jacket, saying something to Clara that made her laugh with her whole body. A third coworker — Dae, I think — leaned against the partition, already halfway into a story about a date. His third this week, apparently.
Talent, he said, when they asked him how.
They laughed. I turned back to my screen.
Not because the joke wasn't funny. I just had nothing to add. That was the whole problem, distilled: I could watch the shape of other people's lives from ten feet away and still have no idea how to enter one.
Twenty-eight years old. Stable job. Salary that covered rent with enough left over to feel vaguely guilty about not saving more.
Zero love life.
I'd tried to correct that framing once — zero implied a neutral baseline, but this felt more like a deficit. Like everyone else had been handed something I'd somehow missed at distribution. Maybe I'd been in the bathroom. Maybe I'd overthought the line.
Probably that.
"Adrian." Yusuf paused at the door. "Don't let them find you here in the morning."
"I'll be gone in five."
"You said that yesterday."
"I meant it more this time."
He laughed and left. The lights seemed to get louder.
I packed up slowly, the way you do when you're not sure what you're going home to.
The sky had gone full dark by the time I got back. Streetlights threw orange shapes through the window glass as I unlocked the door, stepped inside, and exhaled — that involuntary deflation that happens when you finally stop pretending you're fine.
"Took you long enough."
I stopped.
Maya was leaning against the arm of the couch, one knee drawn up, scrolling through her phone with the particular ease of someone who had never once questioned whether they were welcome somewhere. She looked up at me with the expression she reserved for situations she found mildly amusing — which, in my experience, was most of them.
She was my stepsister. Had been for eleven years, long enough that the step part felt bureaucratic rather than meaningful, a legal prefix attached to something that was just real. Childhood friend first, then family by paperwork, then — I didn't finish that thought. I never did.
"You look like you lost an argument with a building," she said.
"I lost an argument with a spreadsheet. Different villain."
"Equally pathetic."
"Thank you."
She uncurled from the couch and moved toward the kitchen without being asked, which meant she'd already decided I needed feeding. That was Maya — she assessed a situation, made a call, and acted, all before most people had finished processing that something needed doing. It was impressive and faintly maddening.
"Dinner's in the pan," she said. "Don't thank me."
"I wasn't going to."
"Yes you were."
She wasn't wrong.
After dinner I collapsed onto the couch and made the mistake of opening my phone.
Social media had, as always, arranged itself into a highlight reel of everyone else's romantic competence. Couples. Trips. Anniversary posts with paragraphs I half-read before the secondhand embarrassment got too thick.
I put the phone face-down.
Then the screen lit up anyway.
I frowned. Flipped it back over.
[ SEDUCTION SYSTEM — INITIALIZED ]
The text sat there, clean and white against black. No notification source. No app icon. Just the words, and below them:
Welcome, Host.
Objective: Comprehensive development of social and interpersonal capability.
Beginning assessment.
"...Okay," I said, to no one.
HOST PROFILE
Name: Adrian
Age: 28
Intelligence: 5 | Charisma: 2 | Presence: 3 | Physicality: 4
I stared at the charisma score for longer than was dignified.
The worst part wasn't that it said 2. The worst part was that my first instinct wasn't to argue.
[ QUEST AVAILABLE ]
Deliver a genuine compliment to a woman you know.
Reward: Charisma +1
Conditions: Must be specific. Must be meant.
I set the phone down on my knee and looked across the room.
Maya had returned to the couch, feet tucked under her, reading something on her own phone with that particular stillness she had — the kind that looked like relaxation but was actually attention pointed somewhere else. She held herself like someone who had long ago stopped waiting for permission to take up space.
I looked back at my phone.
Must be meant.
That was the stipulation that complicated things. A hollow compliment would be obvious — Maya had a radar for performance that had, over the years, neutralized every attempt anyone had ever made to impress her. I'd watched it happen to other people. I had no illusions about my own chances under standard conditions.
So it would have to be real.
"Hey," I said.
She didn't look up. "What."
"Your hair. It looks good today."
Silence.
Then she lowered her phone, slowly, the way someone does when they want to confirm they heard what they think they heard. She looked at me with the expression of a person performing a calibration.
"...What?"
"I said it looks good."
"You complimented my hair."
"That's what happened, yes."
She sat up slightly. Not much — Maya didn't give you much — but the shift in posture was there. Something recalibrating behind her eyes.
"You're being weird," she said.
"I'm being normal."
"You don't compliment me."
"I do now, apparently."
She studied me for a moment longer. There was a version of this where she made a joke and dissolved the tension. She was good at that. She had a catalog of deflections she deployed with surgical precision when conversations moved toward something she hadn't decided she wanted yet.
She didn't reach for it.
"...It suits you," I added. "Wearing it down."
Something shifted. Not dramatically — not the way it would in a lesser story. Just a small repositioning around the mouth, a fraction of softness in an expression that was usually sealed.
She looked away.
That was the tell. Maya didn't look away from things. She faced them down until they blinked first. I had watched her do it to clients, to relatives, to people twice her age who thought confidence was a function of volume.
She looked away from me.
[ QUEST COMPLETE ]
Charisma +1 → Current: 3
New quest incoming.
I felt it happen, which was the strangest part — not a transformation, nothing so dramatic. More like a dial turning a notch. The words came a little easier. The resistance in my chest, that low-grade friction I'd always assumed was just personality, had loosened by something small but measurable.
"Don't make it a habit," Maya said. Still not looking at me.
"No promises."
She turned back to her phone. But I noticed she didn't actually read anything.
[ NEW QUEST LOADING… ]
I had no idea where this was going.
For the first time in a long time, that didn't feel like a problem.