Bryce,

Trent and I got together over coffee this afternoon to talk about wrapping up Symon's story rather than playing out another session since neither of us had a good scenario to run him through in a traditional role-playing fashion. I didn't take any notes but he told me to send you some recap from our discussion, and some of the things I'm planning to do with Symon's character as I go back and fill in the pieces:

> I realized I had no idea what it was I wanted Symon to do or be when I first started. I thought it would be cool to play an anti-social loner with a drug habit but I realized that this really wasn't that much fun at all. The point of role-playing is the personal relationships you make both inside and outside the game and I felt that the character I created (and the fashion in which we played) didn't help me do that. If I were to do this again, I want to create a more social character.

> I am disappointed that my schedule really interfered with the RPG sessions. Having a kid AND a wife AND a job AND school didn't leave much room for other activities and a work crisis and other school projects blew up my campaign. I'm also wondering if, psychologically, I didn't try hard enough to find makeup times/dates because I wasn't that invested in Meli.

> Before we started playing, you both talked a lot about motivations and I kept wondering what motivated Meli and had no good answer. So instead of him just being a loner anti-social a-hole, I started thinking about what if he lost his reason to live, that he was living without motivation. I asked Trent if I could create other characters from his past and he said sure. I created for him a wife and daughter who were the center of his world, just like my wife and kid are to me. If anything happened to them I'd probably stop caring too. When I wrote/am writing my vignettes, the past looms large for Meli. The fact that I switched his drug of addiction from rundown to jack also helped me get inside his head and develop him more.

> I also added a bit to the last session that didn't actually happen in the RPG session but Trent encouraged me to do it. I had Meli make a connection with the robot kid who got all shot up. Bryce and I have the same class where we're reading about cyborgs and artificial intelligence and how robots can be more human than human (like in Capek's RUR or some of the Philip K Dick stuff) and I thought that maybe Meli was disconnected from humanity and how this quirky robot-kid could be a path back. So he grabs him in his big arms and holds him, like he held his own dying daughter years before, and that act helps get him back on more stable footing. Sure he's still got the drugs coursing through his system, but Trent said since I created his affliction I could also create a cure. As of now, the intensity of the nightmares is waning and Meli is in a position where he might be able to make some baby steps toward finding meaning in life again, and then he will also find a motivation.

I'm sorry again for screwing up so many sessions but I'll do my best to repair the damage by writing up all the vignettes that I owe.

Simon