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[NSFW] - Gamer Power In Real Life (Commission)

 

Owning A Car Is Cool (2,270 Words)

Shortly after summer break started, I finished all the driver's courses and finally got a proper license to drive without my dad occupying the passenger seat. We had two cars, though, and my parents both worked at different places, so I was only able to drive when they were already home for the day, which was a pretty limited amount of time.

I also had a lot of spare money, though, even with me blowing a bit getting some college textbooks. I wound up buying some manuals on cars, going through various websites for different dealerships within walking distance, and finally settled on a used sedan priced at just $4,200 - it was the cheapest in the city at that price tag. I'd have to check it over myself, but combined with a test drive, I was reasonably sure I could be sure about it. Even if it turned out to be a secret lemon, I figured it would just provide me a chance to build up a new skill of car repair. That was one of the nice things about the Gamer power that you might not think about, the way that it made even a potential failure into a success.

Once I had actually driven the half-hour to the car lot in question to inspect the car listed on their website, I was pretty much immediately set upon by a car salesman. He was a fairly average looking guy, not much remarkable about him, but he obviously seemed eager to sell me on it.

"I want the used 2005 Nissan Tiida," I told the salesman. "The price tag on the site is $4,200 - can you take that down at all?" I asked. I figured he probably couldn't, since the internet was already driving down all these kinds of prices. People like me could and did pick out the place with the lowest price, but, there was no harm asking.

"Oh, that car? No, that's pretty much as low as it can go. What kind of financing scheme were you looking for?"

"If I'm willing to pay in cash," I started, careful not to say that I planned to. I did, sure, but no reason for him to know that. "Can you lower the price at all?"

He paused at that, seeming to consider it. "Sure, I think we can knock a couple hundred off it for that. Can you pay in cash?"

"Yep," I said. "I'd like to take it for a drive, first, make sure it works," I told him, and he let me. It was an exhilerating experience, driving a car for the first time, and I pretty much ignored my dad as he asked the guy about this or that feature of the car. It seemed to very subtly list to one side if you didn't keep control of the wheel, but it was easy to manage once you noticed it; I had some guesses as to what was making it do that and was kind of curious to see if I could fix it. I checked under the hood just to make sure there wasn't anything obviously wrong, and there wasn't, as far as my new car skills suggested.

"The car lists a bit," I noted. "To the left, when you let up on the wheel, you can feel it. Just a degree or two, but that could be dangerous, and I'm going to have to fix that."

The guy let out a somewhat-pained laugh at that. "You seemed to drive it just fine."

"I'm going to have to spend the time and effort and money to fix it," I repeated. "So it seems to me like the car's worth less because of that. Unless you think my time, effort, and money aren't worth anything." I knew I needed to be aggressive with my position, because car salesmen were aggressive with theirs - these marginal, less than ten percent differences we were talking about, were hundreds of dollars on a used, crappy car. The margins got insane if it was bigger.

"I'm just not sure I can take it down any further. It'd be up to my boss."

"Then go talk to him. I'll leave if you're trying to charge me four k for a car I have to fix up anyway." My dad actually let out a laugh at that, this sort of proud thing, which was good, since I'd had to drag him out for an hour long round trip to get here.

"I'll go speak to him," he said, bowing his head for a moment and pretending to discuss it with his boss. I was pretty sure this was all theater, but whatever, as long as the price came down, that was hundreds of dollars I was getting back. I was grabbing some ticks of a Negotiation skill from doing this, too, which made me almost want to haggle the guy to hell - but he'd generally been decent, so I didn't want to hugely waste his time over what would wind up being small change. When he emerged from the office, he nodded to me. "He says I can take it down by another $300, for $500 total."

"Great," I said. Maybe I could have kept scraping, but honestly, it was already the cheapest in its class I could find in the city, so five hundred off was a huge win. In short order I was looking over the paperwork... which had a price tag of $4,700 on it. I did not sign. "This isn't right," I said. "The price tag is $4200. Subtract $500 from that, and it's $3700." I half thought it was a typo, but I could see there were a fuckton of stupid extra fees for 'reconditioning' that they'd tacked on.

"There are fees."

"There are not. $4200 was the price on your website. It's the price that was quoted to me when I called on the phone, it's the price you agreed with when I arrived. I don't want any of these other add-ons, and I will walk if you don't knock them off."

That one took longer to get an agreement on, some haggling and him talking to his boss and me making it very clear that I was not going to buy a car with an extra $1000 of tacked-on fees, but eventually, he finally did take off all the bullshit extra fees, and I got my papers signed and paid the $3,700 for the car. As we left the office, my dad clapped me on the back, a proud smile on his lips. "Honestly, good work, Shaun. I kind of expected to have to step in, but you did a damn fine job at negotiating. I probably wouldn't have managed the same now, much less when I was your age."

I felt a glow of pride at that. Sure, part of it was that I had Gamer Mind, but still, it was nice. I drove my new car that I owned home.

* * *

Obviously, one of the first things I did with the car was take Amber out on a date. It was unbelievably nice to be able to go places, easily, without parental involvement or riding busses or walking stupid distances. I could drive over to Amber's house; she could get in my passenger seat; and then the two of us could drive however far away I felt like.

We wound up going to the mall to shop for clothes. I figured that I'd spent $3700 on myself, I could spend some more money on getting Amber a nice dress. Yes, the car had taken a decent chunk out of my nest egg, but I was making money pretty much constantly, so I could afford to drop a couple hundred dollars on making Amber feel pretty.

I felt like a king as we stepped into a store full of nice clothes, Amber going through them one by one, a look of interest in her gaze as she tried to pick one out. The presence of a salesperson who was clearly watching us with a bit too much interest (because she thought we were too poor to afford the clothes there) didn't mess up my high mood, and I didn't mention it to Amber.

Of course, I was rather rapidly approached with the cliche that going clothes-shopping with your girlfriend was extremely boring for a guy. I did have Gamer Mind, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been, and as she changed in and out of clothes, carefully considering this or that shade of black dress, wondering about cleavages and skirt lengths and other things like that that I really could only care about holistically when the clothing was actually on her body, I could distract myself by playing solitaire in my head.

Eventually, she did settle on a dress that cost $55, and I gladly paid the price for it. It was a neat, sleek, dark red thing, which hugged her upper body and revealed her shoulders but not any cleavage, then slid down to rest around her ankles. She wound up wearing it to our next destination, Olive Garden, which at the time seemed like a cool, fancy, upper class restaurant, with dishes that were $20 a pop.

"Is this really okay?" Amber asked, looking around somewhat awkwardly, a faint smile on her lips despite the words. "It's so expensive..."

"It's not that expensive," I reassured her. "I bought that car with my own money. I can afford to spend a little money on one nice date for you." Or two, or three. Not an infinite number, though - I wasn't made of money, and it was fairly expensive. But I was feeling flush with cash after spending several thousand dollars and still having thousands more in the bank.

"Thanks," she said, a smile on her lips. "Maybe I could just drink water and eat the breadsticks," she said, as she glanced down at the menu again.

"No, buy something you want," I told her.

She nodded at that, looking through the menu carefully, then letting out a laugh. "I don't know what half this stuff is," she admitted, as she stared down at the menu.

"I don't either, don't worry," I told her. "How about we ask the waiter for a couple recommendations, then share?" I suggested.

"That's smart," Amber said, putting down the menu. "So..." she trailed off for a moment. "Do you have more planned after this, or are we going to go to your place?" She prompted. There was a sort of wet swallow that followed the words, like she was already looking forward to the sex.

I didn't have to carefully consider that question - I was a horny teenage boy out with his girlfriend, and also I didn't have anything planned for after lunch, other than maybe a walk in the park. "We can go back to my place if you want?" She gave this shy little smile, a faint flush to her cheeks, and nodded, glancing down at the menu for just a moment.

"So..." she trailed off again. "I was wondering what you were thinking of doing... after high school?" She played with her hair, more a nervous movement than a flirty one. "Do you have a college picked out?"

Up until that point, I had mostly been thinking that I would wind up going with whatever college gave me a scholarship, thanks to my football scores... the thought suddenly came to mind that I was probably making enough money from my art to pay my way through college myself. Still, no sense spending money on college. "I'm probably just going to go with whoever will give me the best scholarship," I told her. "You?"

"Oh." There was a long silence as she sat there. "I don't know..." she sighed. "I mean, I got... Bs, Cs, and Ds at our school. I dunno if I can get into college." She rubbed the back of her neck awkwardly. "Or do good in one, even if I got in..."

"There's community college," I suggested. She just hummed at that, sort of staring into the middle distance. I decided to let her be on the subject. "Whatever you decide, you'll be fine," I promised her. "You're a really cool person." She let out a small laugh at that.

"You're like... the smartest and strongest guy at our school, and you draw really well too," she said. "You're way cooler than me."

"Then I guess that makes my opinion the most valuable," I pointed out, with a somewhat exaggerated, lecturing tone. She let out another laugh, and I quickly changed the subject to what was on TV at the time to give her more space to think. We ate in amiable companionship, just talking about this and that, and I felt really cool when I gave the waiter a 20% tip without really having to worry too much. Once we got in the car, I buckled up and glanced over her way. "You want to go to the park, or back to my place?"

"Mm..." she hummed. "I guess the park, first," she said, and she got changed into more casual clothes in the bathroom there before we took a few laps around the place, holding hands; once we were done, though, we did drive back to my place and had lots of hot monkey sex. All that melancholy seemed to have completely dissipated by the time her sweat-slick body wound up clinging to my own naked form.View This ThreadUnread Watched Threads

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