Page 47 of Played By Design

Julian barks a delighted laugh, filling the room. “I told you. You all said I was just being a geek, but I fucking told you someone would catch it.”

The round-faced developer’s mouth hangs open. “We left that in as an easter egg. We assumed no one would ever⁠—”

“I caught it on my third pull-through,” I say. “It took me six more to be sure.”

The conversation collapses back into chaos.

I’m talking, sentences pouring out of me in paragraphs instead of fragments, my hands moving as I describe the barracks scene, the meal continuity, and the evolution of the Sentinel skill tree.

Then a question that’s bothered me for fifteen years shoves everything else aside.

“The Bartender.”

Three people go quiet.

I point at Mira. “There was supposed to be a romance path.”

Her eyebrows shoot up.

“I mapped every romance-coded interaction in the game. Every single one predicts an available path except the Bartender. The declaration changes his dialogue. His affinity responses are structured exactly like the romanceable NPCs. There are two conversations in Chapter Six that serve no mechanical purpose unless they were supposed to feed into something that got removed.”

Derek groans and drops his head into his hands.

I stop breathing.

“Oh my God.” I grab the edge of the table. “There was.”

“There was,” Mira admits.

I make a high-pitched squee.

“It got cut because of funding,” Derek says. “We were already over budget, and that path branched late enough that finishing it meant more dialogue, more scenes, more testing. Something had to go.”

Fifteen years.

Fifteen years of spreadsheets.

“I was right.”