This is a series of stories that are a sort of sequel to two text-adventure games. Each installment is a complete story on its own, but for a full understanding, the reader may want to start with Chapter 1.
This installment is again a fairly vanilla bridge between meatier stories.
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"Listen, Larry," I said to one of my smaller but quite reliable clients as we sat in his office, "next time I come in to see you, let's do it at the end of the day. We can go have a drink somewhere and go over our performance for you in a more comfortable seat than this damned thing." Larry liked to joke that the chairs provided in his office were medieval instrument of torture. They really weren't. They were just shit chairs.
"Sounds great," he replied enthusiastically. Larry didn't control a lot of business, so nobody who called on him spent a lot of money entertaining him, including me. I just thought that he deserved a couple of drinks... and I didn't want to sit in his chairs any more. "There's a fancy cocktail bar out in the western 'burbs a friend told me about. Mind going there?"
My budget for customers like Larry was more like beer and wings at BW3 than fancy craft cocktails, but I told him I'd check it out.
I promptly forgot about checking out the bar and by the time I remembered, a week or so later, I had forgotten the name of it. I pulled up the maps website on my egregiously large-screened office computer and started searching the area where I thought it was, which was out near where I lived. As I scrolled around, clicking on pins, something caught my eye as I transitioned from one commercial area to another. There was a huge, blank, nearly rectangular-shaped area with nothing in it. No roads, houses, or businesses. Nothing. I switched to satellite view and stared. It looked like a farm. I lunged for my drawer and grabbed a ruler. I measured the space, compared it to the scale of the map and did a quick calculation. It was a big ass farm, covering almost 800 acres, including the tree line that completely surrounded it.
And it was right there, smack in between two of the nicer suburbs on the western side of the city!
This was hugely important to me, because I had been planning for months, trying to find a way to build a country club in that area, which had lots of money, and no golf. The hiccup had been that I would have to put together at least 500-600 acres for a top course, club facilities, and enough housing plots to make it work financially. I had begun to despair that there was that much contiguous land left available anywhere closer than 15 miles beyond the city's perimeter interstate, yet here was nearly eight hundred acres in a near rectangle, with a natural stream cutting across the northeast corner, and it was barely three miles from the interstate, and less than a mile from the US highway that served as the main artery into the city.
Please Lord, let the owner be open to selling! Had there been any crop failures or droughts lately that I missed in the news? There was no information on the map, or online anywhere, that said word one about this farm. Damn.
I printed out a screenshot of the farm for future research and went back to finding the bar Larry wanted to go to. I found it pretty quickly. It was in an old commercial downtown of a village that had been completely absorbed by the city's expansion who knew how long ago. It was not very far from where I lived, and I resolved to check it out on my way home that evening.
I found Two Creeks Lounge to be in a former store-front bank. I could tell it was a bank long ago because the limestone facade still said "Two Creeks State Bank" in huge, slightly eroded letters. When was the last time you heard of a state bank, rather than federal? Since I usually leave work early on Wednesdays, I arrived just minutes after the place opened, and I was the first customer through the door, it seemed.