[Nintendo Femicom: Still on for our comp game girl?]
The text sat still on the screen, unwilling to move no matter how long Owen sat and stared at it. The blinking caret of his own text box blinked monotonously in front of an empty message block. A minute stretched into two minutes. Two minutes protracted into five minutes. Five minutes had sludged along into a whopping fifteen minutes of aimless pondering as Owen thought of a response to the seemingly inconsequential message. One word stuck out among the rest to turn inconsequential into disastrous. Girl.
“Fuck. She was really cool.” Owen spoke to no one in particular. His roommate had dipped out of college earlier in the semester, leaving him with double the space and none of the complaints a roommate might have about his late night gaming habits. The room was completely dark, save for the unnatural light of his two monitors beaming into his face and illuminating his side of the room. Or- one half of his room. It wasn’t like the other side was being used anymore. Not for long at least. Owen had gotten incredibly lucky with a nearly two month long period of being in a double room alone, but his luck was bound to run out at some point. He had been informed a few days ago by the administration that a student was transferring from a different dorm into this one, and they would be filling the other half of the room.
A new roommate meant that Owen would have a much harder time pulling late nights of gaming until obscene hours of the morning without complaints from others. He was only a little ashamed of his current sleep schedule that had evolved into waking up for his first class at noon, getting back from classes at around 6 or 7pm, and then gaming until usually 4 or 5am, when the sun cutting through the blinds told him it was time to get some rest. Was it healthy? Probably not. But this was college, unhealthy habits were practically part of the curriculum.
“I guess all good things come to an end.” Owen, once more, spoke to no one in particular. He leaned forwards from his chair, and began typing a response to his online friend. Nintendo Femicom had been his go-to online friend for the past month or so. The two had met on Owen’s favorite game, UltraMegaDeathKiller, a crudely named online multiplayer shooter that had all but absorbed Owen’s free time in college. The game had only been released for six months, coming out in July of the previous year, but in that time alone, Owen had already racked up almost 2,000 hours of playtime. A little math would tell you that would account for nearly half of the time that the game had been out, showing quite the unhealthy obsession with Owen’s favorite way to escape the day to day monotony of college classes. Femicom also happened to be a huge fan of UltraMegaDeathKiller (UMDK for short), which is exactly why the two of them became friends after running into each other in a public match.
Why was Owen under the assumption that this friendship was about to end? Well, he believed that the same thing that always happened, would happen once more. Owen would make a friend with an online friend, get close to them, play nearly every day with them, and then soon enough they would ask a few too many questions, find out that he was actually a guy irl, and then ghost him. With how many times it had happened, Owen was certain that a part of it was his fault. The combination of username and profile picture on top of his ‘main’ character that he used in the game, a pink haired crazed graffitiing woman, seemed to always implied the unspoken.
[Witchofthew3st: Hey femicom, i dont wanna fuck things up between us but I just thought that maybe youd wanna know-
That was as far as Owen had gotten into writing the message before stopping once more. It didn’t feel fair that this might be the fifth friend he made on UMDK that he was going to lose because they made an assumption on their own terms. Owen started to consider the different ways to avoid telling Femicom that he was actually a guy, to preserve whatever friendship that the two of them had cultivated.
Owen thought he could just ignore the comment.
[Witchofthew3st: Hi femicom! I’m def down for the comp match, ill invite you to a lobby in a sec-
No, it would be weird to pretend not to see it entirely, he thought. Next, Owen tried to address it in a way to not scare the girl off.
[Witchofthew3st: Yo femi! Im actually a dude, but I just want you to know that youre safe and i actually have like a tooooon of female friends so like-
Female friends? Nope, next attempt. The next draft of a message, Owen thought maybe if she thought he was a gay man that she wouldn’t be uncomfortable?
[Witchofthew3st: omg yaaas queen of course I wanna queue with you. Just to let you know I’m actually a guy, gag, I know-
No. It felt very wrong and possibly stereotypical to go down that route, Owen thought. Owen let out a frustrated groan and held his head in his hands.
“How the fuck do I keep ending up in this situation!” Nintendo Femicom was the longest a friend on UMDK had taken to get to this point. Usually after about two weeks, the topics of his gender would come up, and this same uncomfortable situation would play on repeat like a terrible nightmare.
[Nintendo Femicom: u good? If you got homewrk i can just queue up for comp alone, its no problem.]
She had no doubt seen the popup message of [Witchofthew3st is typing…] show up and disappear many times in the past few minutes. Owen wouldn’t be able to use being offline as an excuse to not respond anymore if she had seen that. Eventually, Owen sat back up in his chair and awkwardly scooted back under the desk to begin typing a response for the fifth, and hopefully final, time. As he placed finger to key, a thought crossed his mind. The two of them only ever used text chat to communicate, would it really be that bad to just pretend to be a girl? Femicom was a delight to chat with, so even if this gave him only another week of talking to the girl, it was better than it all ending now.
[Witchofthew3st: Inviting you now! sry i spilled some cup noodle on my desk]
Owen sent the invite to Femicom and waited. UMDK had two halves to it. Or rather, one third and two thirds. One third of the game was a sort of social lobby game, where squads of people could mess around in the dynamic and customizable lobby worlds with their avatars. The other two thirds was the real meat of the game, a fast paced, adrenaline fueled swath of colors that would make a pilgrim instantly die of a heart attack, then come back to life to play a match because it’s just that addicting. Perhaps it wasn’t as interesting for everyone, but for Owen, it scratched that specific part of his brain that adored the constant assault of textures and effects that were splattered across the screen over the course of a match. It was far more interesting than the slow paced drawl of college classes.
Soon enough after the invite was sent, Nintendo Femicom’s avatar sizzled into existence through a portal, stepping out into Owen’s lobby with the same swagger that she always did. Femicom’s avatar was a very tall woman, made even taller by the black glassy stilettos that made her stand at a frankly ridiculous 7ft 5in tall. Her avatar had an extravagant amount of auburn hair that wrapped around her body from her torso all the way down her left leg. It completely defied the logic of physics, staying tightly wrapped to her body like it was a ribbon that had been twirled and super glued across the black bodysuit she wore. Her avatar had always towered over Owen’s avatar. Owen was instead a 5ft tall spiky looking woman with bubblegum pink hair that bounced just above her shoulders. Every bit of the neon green latex suit that the avatar wore was covered in some sort of metal spike, possibly the most condensed approximation of ‘punk’ that someone could manage.
Owen thought that the aesthetics matched their own playstyles fairly well. Femicom had always preferred a distanced sniping playstyle, while Owen had instead focused on an extremely fast paced shotgunning playstyle.
[Nintendo Femicom: hey! How’s it goin’, witch?]
Owen let out a groan behind his screen, cursing himself for the now obvious mistake that he had made. ‘Witch’ was the nickname that he had always gotten, which had made plenty of sense considering the full username. But with the recent reminder of how Femicom had mistaken his gender, it made him feel stupid for never connecting the dots before. Sure ‘witch’ was kind of a gendered term, but there were guy witches in media, right? Owen felt that it was now something that he would have to ‘fix’, which was upsetting to him, considering it had been the username that he made when he was eight years old.
[Witchofthew3st: its goin’. Its been a long day, femi.]
[Nintendo Femicom: oooo, classes? I get that, shit’s been rough recently. College is a drag]
[Witchofthew3st: kinda classes, kinda life. I feel like some UMDK will fix it right up]
[Nintendo Femicom: hah! Thats the witch i know, always ready to gun down some bozos. Time to get our giddy gooey groove on, yeah?]
Owen smiled as the text box above Nintendo Femicom lit up to display the woman’s typical catchphrase. He always thought it was stupid, but in an endearing way that he would never admit out loud.
[Witchofthew3st: laaaaaaame, you can’t make a catchphrase cool by saying it over and over again, that’s not how it works]
[Nintendo Femicom: It is if you’re cool and sexy like me so shut up. Dont think i havent noticed you type it once before]
[Witchofthew3st: ironically!!! I was making fun of you obviously]
Owen leaned back into his chair with a wide smile on his face. This was the kind of bickering that he lived for. It was absolutely the reason that he had become such good friends with Femicom over the past month. They had an incredible chemistry that existed solely on the fact that they both loved to make fun of each other in a sarcastic fashion. Neither of them had ever said that they were doing it sarcastically, but it was obvious from every conversation that the two of them had. Owen had always seemed to find friends easier to make and maintain in an online setting than in person.
[Nintendo Femicom: I give it like 3 days before you start saying it in your sleep with how catchy it is]
[Witchofthew3st: okay you dork, let’s just get into a comp match ‘kay?]
Owen and Femicom loaded into a match fairly quickly despite the late hour of the night. The servers of this game had to be divided into smaller sections of the United States after the initial launch of the game was plagued with overwhelmed servers and long wait times. Their fix had been to spread out their online matchmaking into many smaller servers across the United States to allow for a nicer dispersal of online traffic. For Owen and Femicom, it meant that the two of them most likely lived either in the same state, or an adjacent one. With how many players were on at nearly midnight on a Sunday night, it was clear that most of their matchmaking would be with college or high school students that were soaking up the last of the weekend before returning to classes in the morning to dread the fact they hadn’t done their homework over the weekend.
When Owen and Femicom loaded into a match, they were already locked in and prepared to boost their rank up. The two of them had been hovering around the highest tiers of diamond, and had been trying for the past few days to break into the bottom of the masters rank. The match went fairly smoothly for the two midnight gamers, Owen and Femi using their standard strategy of sending Owen in first to cause absolute chaos within the enemy team, only for Femicom to pick off the distracted individuals with her sniper. It was an effective strategy that could only be countered once the enemy team had figured out what was going on, and by that point they were usually down enough points to be facing an uphill battle for the rest of the match.
[ULTRA MEGA VICTORY!]
A win. But not their first of the night. Not by a wide margin. Owen had gotten into the habit of hopping on UMDK at around 8:00pm and playing until the brain fog of 4:00am crept into his head. In their duo queue, Nintendo Femicom and Witchofthew3st secured 12 wins, 5 losses, and a single draw, which was not common at all in their comp matches. They were in a prime position to rank up once they finished their next match. The two bombastic avatars loaded back into Owen’s lobby, and with the same practiced muscle memory, Owen clicked the ready up button faster than you could even say the words “ready up”.
[Nintendo Femicom: Not so fast, girlie. Im gonna have to call it here for tonight]
Owen let out a barely audible “huh?” from his slouched position on his chair before pushing himself forwards and towards the keyboard to quickly respond.
[Witchofthew3st: your stand up material still sucks plz get better jokes before you go on stage]
[Nintendo Femicom: oh shit my computer is lagging. Must be all the readme.txt files ive made that all say “Fuck You” in them. Srsly tho, I need to hop off for tonight, girl]
Owen smiled. Owen then frowned upon realizing the very reason the smile had crept onto his face. Femicom hadn’t called him a girl up until this very night, but it was almost as if a lightswitch had been flipped a few hours ago. The amount of times that Nintendo Femicom had referred to Owen with “girl”,”girlie”, or similar feminine titles had skyrocketed in just the few hours they had been playing. Each time it happened, a flicker of excitement would flutter through his stomach before he would continue as normal. Maybe one too many Monster energy drinks this night had resulted in the odd sensation that Owen was experiencing.
[Witchofthew3st: it’s 1:30, we usually grind until like 3:30 or 4. I can’t believe you’d leave me in such a Nintendo-less world]
[Nintendo Femicom: awwww, can’t bear the thought of being without me? Xoxo]
[Witchofthew3st: I can bear the thought plenty. Imagine it. peace and happiness spread worldwide. Crops would grow in sandstorms and no baby animals would ever die. It’s beautiful.]
[Nintendo Femicom: oooo you sound like my dad!]
Owen pulled away from the screen after reading the text bubble that had appeared over Femicom’s avatar. They hadn’t talked about it much after the initial conversation, but around a month ago Femicom had mentioned her relationship with her father, and how strained and tense it had been. The two of them had made jokes about it ever since she had told Owen that the jokes sort of helped her work out her feelings. Something about the comparison to her father after the past five and a half hours of being referred to in a feminine fashion had almost felt like a swift jab to the gut.
[Nintendo Femicom: nah fr tho. Im moving dorms tomorrow cuz of my roommate, so im gonna need to get up early to move my shit]
Moving dorms was ever the hassle. Owen had moved dorms twice throughout his first two years of college. Both times, he had learned to keep less and less possessions in order to make the next move less painful, if there was to be a next move, that is. He didn’t envy Femicom, transferring rooms midway through a semester was a sure fire way to ignite conflict in whatever room you moved into. With new roommates, came the potential for new friction, and with it, new arguments and troubles. It was part of the reason Owen adored the two months he’d spent alone in this room. Drama was easy to avoid with no one to start it.
[Witchofthew3st: bummer, I was really hoping we could rank up. Tomorrow then?]
[Nintendo Femicom: yea! I’ll have my computer set up by the afternoon and we can get our asses into masters rank. Just don’t make me carry you again tomorrow, girl]
There it was again. Owen smiled once more, and started to think about how silly he’d been up until now. Why had he even confessed his identity to the other friends? Pretending to be a girl online was easy, and saved him the heartache of losing such a good friend. All he had to do was let Femicom address him as a girl, and he got to keep playing with her! It wasn’t like he minded being called a girl that much. It wasn’t that bad of a price to pay to remain friends with Femicom. He’d always picked female characters when available, and created ones when given the choice to. It wasn’t like it was that hard to do the final step in people’s assumptions. Was it even bad if they assumed it in the first place? He wasn’t even lying so much as… not correcting them.
[Witchofthew3st: pleaseeee like I wasn’t top fragging every other game tonight]
[Nintendo Femicom: we played against so many snipers today! It’s not fair that you’re the perfect counter to them. You just got lucky]
[Witchofthew3st: hopefully your new dorm room has a shower so you can wash the overwhelming salt off of your body]
[Nintendo Femicom: ugh, you’ve already been reported for bullying, don’t make me tell my dad, he works at ULTRA MEGA DEATH KILLER and he’ll get you banned]
Owen laughed, a part of him hoping that wherever Femicom was, she was doing the same. She had such an effortless charm to her, their chemistry linking together as if it were the natural laws of science.
[Nintendo Femicom: anyway, ttyl. Goodnight cutie]
[Nintendo Femicom has left the party]
[Nintendo Femicom has gone offline]
Owen sat and studied her last message like he was deciphering ancient text as an archeologist. “Cutie” had to be flirting, right? Owen wracked his mind, considering that maybe since Femicom thought he was a girl, it was just something girls said to each other. That could be a thing, right? He thought that there were some odd ritualistic ribbing that happened between guys, and that this could be a kind of equivalent.
The alternative was that it actually was meant to be flirty. But Femicom thought that Owen was a girl, which led him to consider the possibility that she was a lesbian. But if that was the case, it would be super shitty to lead her on, right?
Feeling too overwhelmed with thoughts that he never would have had to consider had he just told Femicom the truth, Owen decided to just hop off UMDK. It seemed to lose its luster when the fun duo queuing had ended. It was Owen’s favorite game, and yet the idea of playing more of it without Femicom seemed incredibly dull. They could always pick up where they left off tomorrow.
For the first time in almost two months, Owen was in bed by two in the morning, curled tightly into a fetal position on his bed, legs wrapped around his pillow, and his head resting on the mattress itself. His parents had always commented on how odd his sleeping position was, but he always thought “why change a good thing”? The comfort of having something soft to hold onto in bed always sets his mind at ease. Owen’s body was clearly not adjusted to such an early bedtime, leaving him tossing and turning for another thirty minutes before he was finally able to drift off into sleep.
Dreams were not a frequent occasion for Owen. At least, if they were, he never seemed to remember them as soon as he woke up. Tonight was different, however.
“It’s the Wicked Witch! Get her!”
Owen, or rather, his avatar in UMDK was surrounded by Machnum operatives. In the lore of ULTRA MEGA DEATH KILLER, they were supposed to be the standard sort of fascist megacorp that stood as the antagonists to the R3BELS, the playable characters. The game itself was exclusively multiplayer, which meant that the lore and storyline of the game was dolled out discreetly through the seasonal updates and changes to maps. Owen had always appreciated the amount of effort they put into setting up a living narrative despite not caring too much for the lore. He was in it for the blistering, fast paced gunplay that pushed the boundaries of the genre more than any new IP had in recent years. Of course, when you’re dreaming non-lucidly, you aren’t considering any of the specifics of the dream, you’re living in the moment. For a R3BEL surrounded by Machnum operatives, that meant blasting your way out in the way one would expect from a pink haired, dual-shotgun wielding, spiked leather woman. Absolute mayhem, in the sexy way that anarchy always felt.
Ducking, weaving, and sliding were all used to Owen’s advantage as he dispatched the fascist operatives with the kind of skill you expect from an almost-masters rank player. Not that the skill in the video game had anything to do with his skills in a dream, where the power fantasy of it all allowed him to rebound off of the megacorp soldiers faced with spiked boots, to tuck and roll into a Sonic the hedgehog style ball of electric pink spikes. It was ever so fortunate for Owen that back pain didn’t seem to exist within this dream.
By the time he had blasted away all of the threats, he was really getting into the rhythm of it all. The body of the “Wicked Witch”, as they had called him-or-her, was far more lithe and athletic than his own body in a way that felt positively electric. The glimpses of his own reflection that he managed to see in the pristine black shiny armor of the operatives showed a girl that he could help but want to crush on. She had a fiery chaos in her eyes that pulled Owen in, despite it simply being a reflection of his own character from UMDK. Being distracted in a narcissistic fashion led Owen open to be stunned by one of the cattle prod batons that the operatives wielded. He had thought that each of the guards had been dealt with, but one must have done their best impression of a possum to give him a false sense of security.
Falling to the ground like a sack of punk rock potatoes, Owen was forced to look up at the off-brand Death Troopers from Star Wars. The operatives were decked out in black and red, sci-fi shorthand for “these are the bad guys”, which Owen couldn’t blame them for, it wasn’t like the narrative of the game was subtle in it’s messaging. They had a plastic looking sheen to whatever sci-fi material that their armor was made of, with masks that covered their entire faces. Two sockets on the cheeks seemed to function as gas masks, and also transmitted their voices, which became more obvious when the operative raised his wrist to his mask to speak in a cool, semi-robotic tone of voice.
“The Wicked Witch is down. I’ll bring her in now.”
After relaying his message, the Machnum operative reactivated the cattle prod and moved it towards Owen’s prone body. A sudden crack resounded through the room, causing Owen to flinch and move his fingerless gloves over his face. The sound of a body hitting the floor, which clearly wasn’t him, caused him to open his eyes once more to see a familiar sight in the doorway of the small room he found himself in.
“Looks like I had to carry your ass again, Witch.”
The avatar Owen knew to be Nintendo Femicom moved towards him to offer her left hand to help lift him off of the floor, her right hand occupied with the still smoking sniper rifle that had been fired far closer than it was realistically supposed to be fired at. Owen accepted the help, quipping back in a way that felt oddly natural.
“I had to let them get one hit in. An act of charity, Femicom.”
Owen smirked at the woman, having yet to realize that his normal voice had been completely replaced by the much high pitched voice of the punk girl he was playing as.
“More of them are on their way, it’s time to get our giddy gooey groove on, Witch.”
Owen nodded in response to the woman’s catchphrase, it felt so normal to hear despite having never had a voice to put with the text he saw on a screen. When the two turned to leave the room, the door Femicom had entered through was locked. Owen hadn’t heard the door close, but he swore that Femicom had just walked through it only moments ago. It seems that Femicom was already on the case, however, jiggling the knob to no avail, as if someone had snuck by and locked it while they stood mere feet away.
Knock Knock
There was no answer on the other side. Owen began to wonder why on earth Femicom would knock instead of attempting to kick the door down entirely.
Knock Knock Knock
Again, the tall woman with the sniper rifle was deciding to knock at the door, as if there weren't a hundred other ways to open the door with the fantastical abilities that they had access to as R3BELS. The more she knocked on the door, the louder it seemed to ring in Owen’s ears.
Knock Knock Knock Knock
Owen shot awake to the rampant knocking at his dormitory door. What time was it? The light of the window burned at the sleep filled retinas of the college guy. He slipped out of the bed and onto the floor as he scrambled for the door. His blanket and his pillow were dragged out of bed as he dragged himself out. The blanket found itself wrapped around his foot like a magician had tied it into a knot around his ankle as he slept. Owen looked like a complete mess as he pulled the door open to greet whoever had been knocking.
Before him stood a pale woman with blonde shoulder length hair. The hair was obviously dyed considering the entire top half of her hair was black roots that blended together into a pretty clean blonde and black half and half style. She wore large circular glasses, with an incredibly oversized t-shirt, the text of it blocked by the cardboard box she held in her hands. Owen was immediately stunned by the presence of such a woman standing in wait, like she was expecting something from him.
“Uh… Hi.”
He spoke softly. He felt sad for a brief moment as the dream played vividly in his mind. The voice he had in the dream felt a lot more pleasant to listen to than the deep monotone which had just fallen out of his mouth. The more his mind drifted into comparison between the Witch he was in the dream, and the man he was now, the more he became confused. The dream was a violent sci-fi fight scene, and yet the memory of it stuck out as incredibly comfortable.
“Hi. Seemed like you were dead in there, I was knocking for a little bit.”
“Oh, shit. I-I’m so sorry I was up late and I had the craziest dream. Not an excuse, but-”
“You don’t need an excuse, I was just worried I had the wrong door.”
“Right.”
A silence lingered in the air between them, begging and taunting them to even dare break it by speaking. The two of them awkwardly stood in the doorway, Owen putting his hands into his sweatpants, only to pull them out, and put them right back in a few different times. The woman gently tapped her fingers on the cardboard box that she held with both hands, supporting the weight of the contents by resting it on her hip bone.
“So… why are you here?”
“I’m your new roommate. Didn’t they tell you?”
“Oh. Oh!”
It was as if the straight tetris piece had finally fallen into place along the edge of a perfectly set up chunk of blocks. The administration had informed him that he’d be getting a new roommate a few days ago, and while they never said when the move in date was, it suddenly made sense that it would be on a Monday morning. He quickly tried to adjust his appearance, as if neatening his look now would erase what the woman had already seen of him. He flattened the black hoodie that he wore, and straightened the black sweatpants so that the strings faced the front instead of the off center they had been pushed towards while he was sleeping. He patted down his frizzy brown hair and pushed the less manageable parts away from his brown eyes so that hair wasn’t covering them any longer. He reached out his hand to shake the woman’s hand.
“Nice to meet you! I’m Owen.”
“...nice to meet you, Owen. I don’t have a third hand unfortunately.”
He looked down to see that the woman was still holding the cardboard box with both hands, preventing her from accepting the greeting from him. Feeling silly for making the offer in the first place, he blushed and moved to lift the box from her hands. It was heavier than he imagined it would be, which suddenly made him feel bad for the awkward silence earlier where she had continued to stand holding it. He attempted to hold the box with his left hand, laying the other side across the top of his right forearm to allow his hand to still extend out for a handshake. The woman furrowed her brow in confusion, but steadily reached out to shake the hand that was balancing her possessions.
“I’m Aoife, and if you drop that box I’ll cry and then kill both of us.”
“Uh. What?”
“I’m joking, Owen. But seriously, that has my computer shit in it so I’ll be super pissed.”
The way that the woman “joked” was laced in sarcasm. Even when she clarified she was joking, it was done so in such a deadpan that Owen wondered if she was even joking about joking. Not that he wasn’t against that kind of humor, it ran parallel with his own brand of humor, but it wasn’t something he expected to hear from the woman. Hopefully it was a sign that they might get along together. Something which Owen had long dreaded during the past few days after finding out he’d get a new roommate. If they didn’t get along, it wasn’t like he could do much to solve it. Sure, he could ask for another roommate, but without a valid reason aside from “don’t like them”, the request was likely going to be denied.
Owen carefully moved the box towards the completely barren desk that sat on the opposite side of the room as his. He knew just how upset he would be if someone dropped any of his equipment, so he handled it more carefully than he would a box of glass sculptures.
“This is pretty heavy. Do you game or something?”
“Yup.”
Her response was short, but Owen wrote it off as a product of her motion. She was currently making short trips back and forth to the cart that sat outside in the hallway, bringing cardboard box after cardboard box inside the room. None of them were particularly large aside from the first one that Owen had carried, but they were numerous.
“Uh. What games?” Owen asked tentatively as he stood awkwardly by the desk. He wasn’t sure where Aoife wanted her stuff to go, so he didn’t risk making any of the decisions himself. If he was the one moving into a place, he’d be upset at someone else trying to unpack and place his possessions around the room.
“Shooters, mostly.” She replied as she brought the final box into the room, kicking the door closed with her foot as she passed it. When Owen showed surprise at her answers, she rolled her eyes. “Please don’t say you were expecting something else like Animal Crossing or Cooking Mama.” She let out a sigh, as if this was a conversation that she had to have with people time and time again. Owen waved his hands around as he spoke, hoping it might emphasize his point better.
“No! No, I was just surprised. Not like in a bad way or anything! I also play shooters, so it’s exciting to hear, y’know?” Owen flashed a smile, and for the first time since she had shown up at his doorstep, or their doorstep rather, she flashed a smile.
“Oh shit, really?”
Owen nodded and awkwardly pointed over to his side of the room to show his own gaming setup, as if looking at it would show her that he played shooters and not just any kind of game. After Aoife glanced at the setup, she let out a breathy laugh. “You’ve got a whole setup, huh? Maybe we can play together sometime, if you don’t suck. I don’t wanna have to carry your ass.” Her words only served to remind Owen of the dream that he had, and the way that Dream Femicom had lifted him off of the ground effortlessly. Was she just really strong? Or did he weigh less in the form of Witch? Owen scolded himself for getting distracted once more with thinking about his dream, and the pleasant experience of inhabiting a different body.
“Yeah, I’d be down for that.” Owen smiled, before following up his statement with a question. “Do you need help unpacking or anything? I’m not usually up this early so I have a ton of time before my first class.” With Owen’s first class at noon, and the time on his monitor reading 9:16am, he had plenty of time to help out. He was not one to care much about his appearance, which meant that his morning routine would consist of showering, and then grabbing whichever pants and shirt he happened to touch first in his drawer. He figured there was no reason to care much about how he looked because it never quite felt “right”. If everything was equally as unappealing, then it didn’t matter which t-shirt he put with which pants. As long as it covered his body, it got the job done.
“I mean if you want to I won’t stop you. Just put things where I tell you to, ‘kay?”
The two of them made idle conversation as they unpacked her boxes over the next two hours. The amount in each box was relatively small, which made the somewhat overwhelming task much more manageable once the boxes were opened up to reveal their contents. The two of them found a way to crack a joke back and forth towards each other as they put up some of her posters and displayed her figurines, all of which Owen recognized from the last decade of video games. When the two of them had finished, Owen was surprised at just how quickly time had passed. Owen wasn’t the best at making friends with others in real life, but despite his concerns, he hadn’t crashed and burned just yet with Aoife.
“That’s gotta be a record for getting moved in. It always takes me a couple more hours by myself.”
“You have records? How often do you move for that to be something you keep track of?” Owen asked as he took a seat on Aoife’s chair. It was the standard chair that came with the standard desk in the room, which means it was identical to his own, aside from being significantly less used than his own.
Aoife seemed to hesitate before she responded to the question, her eyes darting towards the floor as she spoke. “I’ve had my fair share of moves, yeah. Not just college dorms, though.” Owen tried to lighten the mood, noticing the colder tone her voice took as she spoke. “This is why I can’t get into competitive moving, too many sweats these days.” Aoife looked up at Owen after his joke, and for a painful second or two, he feared that he had massively overstepped by making such a joke. When she broke out into laughter, a warm wave of mirth washed over Owen. It seemed to do the trick of easing the tension that was created at the topic of moving a lot. Owen thought she might have come from a military family or something, to have made so many moves throughout her life.
“Anyway, I gotta get that cart turned back in downstairs before they find more fees to add to my account.”
Owen laughed, standing up from Aoife’s seat to move back towards his side of the room. “You don’t want another ‘student pavement privilege fee’? Maybe a ‘window polishing upkeep fee’ to go with it?” The two gave a chuckle at his joke as Aoife crossed the room back towards the door. She flipped the lock of the door back to “open”, which reminded Owen of how curious he thought it was that she had locked the door earlier as they were unpacking. Perhaps it was a force of habit.
“Once I get back though, you’re gonna have to show me what games you play. When I get back from classes today I wanna get our giddy gooey groove on, y’know?”
“What?” Owen froze in place, looking at Aoife with wide eyes, like he was staring down an extraterrestrial creature that found its way into his dorm room.
“Oh, sorry. It’s just a stupid little saying I have. Nevermind. I’ll be back in a bit.” Aoife closed the door behind her, leaving Owen standing in the dorm room by himself. He stood agape at the now closed door, before looking over towards the gaming setup that she had on her side of the room. Dots connected like a head on collision in his mind.
“Fuck me.”