Champions, Craftsmen, Campaigns and Catastrophes
Copyright© 2026 by FozzieBare
Chapter 11: Too Good to Be True
Elias Voss had done a double-take that bordered on a triple-take when he realized who the two men were that he sat down with for lunch at a private restaurant. He waited for the server to seat the three of them before he spoke. “I suddenly understand why you didn’t attach your name to your email, Mr. Hale.”
That caused Adrian to throw a questioning look at Marcus.
Marcus waved off Adrian’s concerned face and replied steadily to Elias, “Was I right, though? If Marcus Hale, the so-called ‘King of the Esports Agents,’ had put his name to an email that asked you to show up at a restaurant because he wanted you to spearhead a World of WarMachines guild with one of the the first champions of the game, would you have believed it?”
Elias considered all the angles. “No.”
Marcus smiled, and it was that real smile again, although his words sounded like they’d come from just about any too-sure-of-themselves agent talking too fast. “Then I was right. Get used to it. It happens a lot.”
Adrian actually laughed at that. He then had to explain to Elias the whole story behind his ban. It was the sheer incongruity of Marcus telling someone he was almost always right. Adrian had never blamed him for the ban, but there were limits.
The company behind the tournaments that would eventually become the WarMAC league had snuck in a non-compete clause stating that one could not “endorse any product or game that does not fall under official WarMachines partners,” and had used Adrian as their test subject when it slipped past both Adrian and Marcus while reviewing the contract. Turns out that when Marcus had inked a deal with a peripherals company to make an official “ThunderRoad” mouse and keyboard set, the creators of the game, Kelto Software, had banned Adrian from competing professionally. Now, it was almost certain that such a broad ban wouldn’t hold up in court, but while Marcus wanted to sue Kelto for every last penny over restraint of trade and abuse of competitive position, Adrian had been so disgusted by the sheer grasping greed of the company that, while Marcus (who wasn’t “King of the Esports Agents” at the time) was telling off the executive who’d said with a smirk, “Well, too bad for you. We hold the cards here,” Adrian had decided he’d had enough of the bullshit and walked out in the middle of Marcus’s rant about how he really wished those corporate purveyors of intimate attention with their own mothers would be sued into the poorhouse. Then he admitted that wasn’t exactly what Marcus had said, he’d sanitized the actual phrase. It didn’t seem right to call someone that in the middle of a fancy restaurant.
Marcus laughed at Adrian’s restraint. “You always had a way of glossing over my messes, Adrian. Yes, I did call them motherfuckers in the middle of a corporate meeting to discuss settlement terms and then followed you out.”
Adrian just shook his head ruefully. He would dance through a delicate situation, and Marcus was the one who ended up rushing through it, like a bull in a china shop.
They had signed a two-year sponsorship deal with RealWorld Entertainment for their proposed “WarMAC-killer,” BattleUniverse Online. Too bad the game had never come out. They’d intended to use Adrian’s presence to raise venture capital. Of course, at that point, the video game industry had gone through one of its usual “correction” cycles, and no one wanted to tangle with the nine-hundred-pound gorilla in its favored cage, the one marked sci-fi robots.
Or as Marcus put it: “Their pitch was great. They had more charts than anyone should legally be allowed to put in one presentation, and a hell of a story. Too bad I hadn’t really refined my bullshit detector yet.”
Elias nodded. “You were so in love with the story that wanting it to be true replaced making sure it was true.”
Marcus looked very serious for a moment. “You know, I’m suddenly having second thoughts about this whole thing.” Then, before Elias could stammer out an apology, he said, “I’m not used to being called out on my bullshit so soon after meeting someone. It’s actually a nice change of pace. Adrian here still has to demand translations from a language he calls ‘Agent-ese’ from time to time.”
All three laughed softly, and Adrian replied, “That’s because if I make you speak plainly, I avoid stepping in the linguistic trap doors you put in front of me.”
Elias grinned as Marcus didn’t let Adrian get the last word. “That’s because if I handed it to you on a silver platter, you’d wonder if you could use it for WarMAC target practice.”
Marcus then turned to Elias and explained the end of the story. “Well, you know the rest. RWE went for a round of venture capital funding, found the whole industry had gone dryer than the Sahara Desert, and before they could finish saying ‘oops, my bad,’ was heading straight for bankruptcy.”
“Wait,” Elias said. “That actually happened? The venture capital thing?”
“Kid, I couldn’t invent something that embarrassing if I tried,” Marcus said. “I managed to get Adrian the money he was owed, because otherwise I was going to sue those bastards for everything they had, including their gym shorts, for misrepresenting the status of their game. It was cheaper to pay me off and dive into bankruptcy before their previous investors realized they’d been bullshitted. So Adrian had no career, Kelto was looking to keep him down because they were too busy working out if they could charge franchise fees, and Adrian had just about had enough of my ‘help.’”
Adrian didn’t argue the point. He just took a slow sip of water, which Elias was beginning to suspect was Adrian’s version of an eye-roll.
“We parted ways,” Marcus went on, “and I honestly thought that was it for my career. But I got damn lucky and found a fighting-game player named PomBux, and convinced him to get away from his drunkard friends long enough to actually practice for two straight weeks before a tournament.”
“Two weeks,” Elias repeated. “That was the whole turnaround?”
“Two weeks, kid. Some people just need someone to tell them to put the controller down, stop smoking and drinking for a couple weeks before a tournament and sleep occasionally. He went on a heater and won the King of the Fighting Street Megamix tournament at GameCon, and told everyone that this awesome super-agent named Marcus Hale had gotten his head straight and made him the champion he was. Suddenly I was the hottest thing going.”
“It helped that PomBux didn’t go straight into a drinking binge with his friends after the tournament ended,” Adrian put in, “and managed to sign an exclusive deal with the GameON Streaming Service. He never hit the highs of those two weeks again, but he’s still a top-one-percent fighting-game player, and he can still win a tournament here and there.”
“Meaning everyone had seen me do the impossible once,” Marcus said, “and decided that meant I did it on a regular schedule.”
“So you weren’t lucky,” Elias said, half a question.
“I am absolutely saying I wasn’t lucky. I worked damn hard and pulled off more than one case of not only making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but making Versace himself weep at the sheer luxury of it. That’s how ‘Marcus Hale’ became ‘Marcus Hale.’
“And now I’m stuck being ‘Marcus Hale,’ and I need something that needs a Marcus Hale instead of the Marcus Hale. So when Adrian accidentally announced to the world that he was still one of the best damn pilots around, I thought of an idea.”
“Turns out Hale Agency is worth a fortune because Marcus Hale runs Hale Agency. If Marcus Hale stops running Hale Agency the day after somebody buys it, suddenly Hale Agency is worth considerably less of a fortune.”
Elias nodded. He’d heard a term that applied before, usually when guild leadership complained about some indispensable diva on the pro team whom everyone loathed but nobody could afford to lose.
“Key-person risk.”
Marcus pointed at him. “Exactly. Except when the key person is you, they call it golden handcuffs and then try to convince you your new bracelets sparkle in the light.”
Adrian shook his head in wonder. “But what happens when the next crisis happens and they need to pull you back?”
Marcus grinned, and this one looked more like a shark’s, all teeth and oh, this fishie looks delicious energy. “I told them I was taking a leave of absence, and that the branding managers who handled most of my problem children could call me back in if a true emergency happened. However, if it was NOT a true emergency, then it would become a true emergency, meaning said brand manager would be looking for a new job.”
That got a laugh out of both men, and there was nothing quiet about it.
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