[Randomize Appearance]
“No.”
[Randomize Appearance]
“Ew.”
[Randomize Appearance]
“Blegh.”
[Randomize Appearance]
“That’s not even-”
“Michaelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni over there. Are you making the most perfect specimen to ever exist?” Aoife had clearly gotten bored of sitting and listening to the distant yammerings and perturbed commentary of Owen. It had been a mixture of “no”s, “ew”s, and “gross”es for the past five minutes.
“Did you just cast a fucking spell?”
“That’s Michelangelo’s full name.”
“...the turtle?”
“The- what?! The fucking sculptor!” Aoife’s voice peaked at such a pitch that her voice cracked and squeaked. Owen laughed at her overly animated uproar, knowing full well that she wasn’t referring to the ninja turtle. Though he did find it fascinating that she knew the entire name of the italian sculptor. That couldn’t be common knowledge amongst anyone other than art historians and the like. Upon Owen laughing, Aoife pressed herself back into her chair, internally annoyed she had even taken the bait.
“How on earth do you know his full name? Are you in the Michelangelo di ludacris buccal fat-or-whatever fan club?” Owen hadn’t paid enough attention to the full name that she had thrown out earlier, and he was under the belief that even if he had paid attention to it, the name would escape him before he could speak it aloud. “So what if I was part of the Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni fan club?” Aoife retorted, crossing her arms across her chest even though Owen had no way to see her unless he stood up and walked across to her side of the room.
“Well now you’re just trying to show off.” Aoife shrugged. She was definitely trying to show off. “But no, I doubt you’d be that interested in a man that is famous for sculpting giant penises.” Owen mused as he clicked another few times through the randomize button. Nothing at all was striking any chords, they were just about as interesting as a make your own cardboard kit that was already made of cardboard.
“Damn, it only took one day and you already pegged me as a lesbian.” Owen blinked and leaned back in his chair to digest what she had just said. Owen had made the joke in the first place out of his suspicions that Femicom was a lesbian, but they were nothing more than just suspicions until now. He hadn’t expected her to come out and say it so clearly, but he supposed she must have been open enough about her identity to take it in stride as she did. “In all honesty, I only know it because of my art major.” Aoife continued, unaware of the fact that Owen was processing the last thing that she had said.
“You’re an art major?”
“Guess it’s not as obvious since I haven’t hung up my dykey paintings yet.” Aoife hummed and looked over to two of the cardboard boxes that had yet to be unpacked. They were all of her old art, and although some of them really dated her skills, they meant a lot to her. Unfortunately, the paintings she’d thrown up in her previous dorm rooms had only led to complaints and arguments. They’d stay in the boxes until she could be sure that Owen was enough of an ally that he wouldn’t throw a fit about them. “The heat death of the universe is gonna happen before we even get to start playing, Owen. Just make whatever character you usually make in games so we can get our giddy gooey groove on already.” She was honestly impressed with just how long he was taking. The character creator of ULTRA MEGA DEATH KILLER was pretty extensive, but only after you had gotten enough cosmetics to make it interesting. For a new player, the only options you had were the basic customization you could expect in any other game.
Owen was tired of clicking through random avatar after random avatar and decided he would just need to pull the trigger and get it over with. He closed his eyes, spam clicked the button and then opened his eyes to see what guy he was stuck with. Like all the others, it was boring, lifeless, and reminiscent of the generic soldiers they would put on the cover art of Call of Duty games a decade prior. Tall, muscled, incredibly short black hair, with enough revolting stubble to make Owen trace his own fingers across his face to make sure he had remembered to shave that morning. He had. When others asked why he kept a clean shave he would always respond with “it gives me sensory issues”, which was what he always thought his aversion to facial hair was.
He needed a character, and with how unappealing they had all been up until now, he figured he would just need to bite the bullet and continue. He confirmed the character and loaded into his own personal lobby, one which was vastly inferior to the customized lobby area that he had on his own personal account. What he had managed to turn into a neon colored cluster of exotic furnishings and decorations on his other account was just a boring default room on this character. Just as dull as the character he was playing as, he thought. He wouldn’t have to stay in this lobby for long, however, as Aoife had sent an invite over to her own party soon after he arrived. He accepted the invite and found himself in the clean, modern layout that Femicom had turned her lobby into. It could not have been more different to the lobby of Witchofthew3st, the scattered colorings of the whole rainbow being replaced with slick whites and blacks. Femicom’s lobby looked like you had turned a corner into the interior of a modern art museum, which suddenly made a lot more sense to him after finding out about her major in college.
“Okay, trial by fire, Mr. Horse, I’m gonna throw you into the deep end. You’ve played other fps games so the fundamentals should be the same. You’ll figure out the other mechanics soon enough, and if you have questions, just holler over at me, yeah?” Aoife seemed to be confident that she would be able to hear Owen talk, which made him tuck the right side of his headphones behind his ear. Talking during a match was new for him. The two of them had only ever communicated over the in-game text chat, which is how so much of their communication became nonverbal and expressed through their chats between matches. The two of them were surprisingly in sync whenever they were coordinating their attacks, like they were operating with the same brain controlling two different bodies.
“Okay, yeah.”
“You gotta learn quickly, Owen, I wanna be able to throw you into a match with my friend sometime, but she won’t wanna play with someone who’s helplessly new.”
Owen mulled over the idea that she was referring to him when she talked about her friend. That was almost certainly who was being discussed, but Owen didn’t feel like he was that harsh to give the impression that he’d be unforgiving towards a new player. After a deep breath that held with it a thousand different questions he wished to ask, he deigned to break the tension and just ask one. “This friend, uh, is she like mean or something?” He hoped that wasn’t what she thought of him, though their method of joking might have made sarcasm turn into rudeness if it wasn’t taken in stride.
“Huh? Oh, not really no. She’s really cool actually. I just don’t wanna waste her time by pulling her into matches where we lose a bunch. I have a reputation to uphold PertinentHorse.” She laughed as she spoke his username aloud again. He couldn’t hold it against her for laughing. Hearing about Aoife’s thoughts about himself was somewhat disorienting for Owen. It wasn’t every day that someone would candidly discuss their feelings about you face to face. Or- voice to voice, with how their faces were obscured from the desks.
“...you want her to think of you as cool or something?” Owen was worried that he might be pushing his luck by continuing to ask questions about Witchofthew3st, but from his perspective, there was no way that Aoife could have made the connection between his two identities, and there was a burning kind of desire in his chest, the flames of which licked at him to learn more about what Aoife thought.
“Maybe. Not that it concerns you, Mr. Horse.”
“Sounds a little gayyyyyy” Owen mocked, hoping that the risk he took with the joke would pay off. He truly didn’t mean anything malicious by it, but it felt like the most normal way to approach the question of Aoife’s feelings of Witchofthew3st.
“Oh please. So what if I have a little lesbian crush.” Aoife spoke her words so plainly. There was no pomp and circumstance, there was just a simple acknowledgement of her feelings towards some random girl on the internet. Except it wasn’t some random girl. It wasn’t even a girl. Owen felt his heart skip a beat as he fidgeted with his hands and focused on the character model of Femicom rotating through her idle animations as they talked. “Seriously though, if you say a single thing to her about my feelings when we play together I will fuck your shit up.” Aoife threatened Owen, and although he was under the assumption it was just her standard intense jokes that relied on how seriously she would deliver punchlines, it felt like there was a real weight behind this one. Owen, of course, had nothing to gain, and everything to lose by messing with the strange dynamic the three of them were about to have. Not three, two, Owen assured himself. The more he started to think of Witchofthew3st as another person, the more confused he became.
“Anyway, ready up. I wanna see how bad you do.”
For Aoife, the match was a mind numbing walk in the park. The skill based matchmaking must have accounted for Owen being a brand new player, because it threw them into a match with people who were woefully underprepared for Nintendo Femicom and her unmatched flick shots that she could pull off with her sniper rifle. For Owen, the match was a tricky mixture of “almost”s that began to really throw him for a loop. The game itself was second nature, but lumbering around with a completely different character, one that lacked all of the finesse and agility of his usual one felt like he was playing inebriated. He had gotten so used to using shotguns that needing to aim specifically for heads as opposed to just above center mass for the spread of the shotguns was tricky. While things were certainly different, it was the same game, and as such he had no problem winning most of the gun fights that he stumbled into. An unexpected issue that he was running into was the sound design, strangely enough.
Like most multiplayer shooters, fps or otherwise, the soundscape of the game was an important layer to find out where enemies are located and to prevent being snuck up on. Footsteps, grunts, yelps of pain, all of them might have been decorative dressing for new players, but for the kind of competitive player that Owen was, they were essential to ensuring that he was always prepared for engagements before they happened. Witchofthew3st, by design, made very little sound. Her light footed slides down hallways were silent enough that Owen was always able to pinpoint nearby enemies before they even knew that he was coming. If Witchofthew3st was the gentle gale slipping effortlessly through the grass of a meadow, PertinentHorse was a jammed, smoking lawnmower that was a safety hazard to the entire yard it mowed. Owen was constantly under the impression that he was going to be attacked due to the grunting of a nearby man, only to then realize that the nearby man that he was hearing grunt and huff was his own character. Each time he would sleuth through a hallway to flank enemies, the lumbering footsteps of the buff man would remind him just how undesirable playing as this character was. He thought it probably wasn’t even the gender of the character as much as it was the dramatically slower pace of play from what he was used to. Each time he got into a gun fight and died, he felt entirely ambivalent. The man he was playing as was just some algorithmically generated buff man, not the carefully customized, fine tuned, exhilarating thrill of Witch that he was used to.
His attitude on his current avatar was certainly affecting his gameplay. Each time he took a peek at the scoreboard while respawning he was painfully aware of just how poorly he was doing. Once he was caught up in the reverie of a fast paced shoot out, he would perform just fine. But the in-betweens, the slugging through hallways with a standard rifle instead of the familiar shotgun, those were the parts that drained him.
He didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of Aoife, however. If she was going to want to play with him ever again, he would need to not be an utter nuisance in her matches. Dead weight was not something Femicom would want to pull along. Then again, Owen thought, if he was labeled as dead weight, Aoife wouldn’t care much to keep playing with him, leaving her with more time to play with Witchofthew3st, her “favorite”. The idea of being able to spend his evenings playing with Femicom on his usual account was infinitely more appealing. He’d be able to play his own meticulously designed character. He might even score a couple of compliments from Femicom, something which he was afraid might have him hooked like some kind of drug.
Maybe it was for the best if he let his feet drag this match.
“God our team fuckin’ sucks. It’s like our teammates put their 6 year old sibling in front of a keyboard for the first time.”
Owen let out an entertained huff through his nose. It really was a sad state of affairs on their team. Right now the scoreboard showed that Aoife was handily carrying the entire team on her back. Given that they loaded into the standard team deathmatch mode of first to 50 kills, and she was currently racking up her 28th kill of the match, it was clear who on the team was putting in the work. Owen was second on their team with only 10 kills, the ones that he had earned at the beginning of the match before he decided to take it easy and aimlessly wander through the map. The enemy team had a much nicer spread of kills between them, putting them at a total of 45, while we sat just barely above them at 46. Owen thought that if they were able to pull out the win, it would still certainly be due to Femicom putting in far more effort than anyone else.
The rest of the match only lasted another minute, ending in a heartbreaking loss of 50 to 48. Aoife was clearly sad that they hadn’t been able to pull out a victory with their lead, but unlike their usual matches, they were just queued up in a quick play match, nothing serious. Her frustrations melted away pretty quickly as she realized it was only their first match together, and without any ranks on the line, it was nothing more than a warm up for the woman.
“What happened, oh Horse of the Pertinent variety? You were doing great to start out.”
“Beginner’s luck I guess. The shooting is fine, but I don’t think I understand enough of the UI or abilities yet.” Owen lied, but in a nonchalant manner that made it seem entirely reasonable. It might have been weird for him to purposefully disappoint the woman, but his pride could take as many hits as necessary if it meant that Owen and Aoife could return to playing UMDK as Witch and Femicom. That was far more important than him winning any matches as a blocky amalgamation of every military shooter protagonist.
“Eh, that’s fine. You’ll get better! You’ve definitely got some skill with how you handled the first few minutes.” Aoife reassured Owen, which was not at all what he was hoping for. It seemed she was being far more willing to teach than Owen had ever imagined she would be. No amount of charitable instruction could combat weaponized incompetence, however. Owen just thought that he would need to try harder to be more useless, that way she would give up on her noble crusade of teaching him, and he could return to the comforts of his other character.
His simple plan of weaponized incompetence proved to be frustrating to put into action. Over the next few hours of playing matches, Owen dragged his feet, ended with negative kill/death ratios, and subtly did his very best to throw the matches without it being so obvious that he was purposely sabotaging their games. Aoife, for as much as she was trying to hide it, was clearly baffled by how poorly he was performing. Yet every time a match would end, and Owen would think to himself “that had to do it”, she would simply queue them up for another quick play match. That same routine had played on repeat for most of the night, beginning to test even Owen’s patience with how patient Aoife was being. It had gotten to the point where he was beginning to become paranoid that she knew something was up. He never thought Femicom was a mean person, but he was almost certain from what he knew that she would not have been so willing to help someone that was clearly so helpless at UMDK. She must have had a reason for continuing to play with him, something that was driving Owen crazy as he attempted to figure it out during their matches. Eventually, and to Owen’s surprise, he was the first to tap out. It was only 2:00am, yet he felt that he couldn’t take any more of the odd dynamic that was forming between a deliberately useless Owen and the ever patient Aoife that was putting up with far more than he ever expected her to.
“I’m gonna head to bed, I think I’m getting a headache or something.”
“Yeah, no problem. It was nice playing with you, Owen.”
It was almost certainly not nice to play with him, he thought. The matches that they had managed to win were because Femicom was able to carry the entire team on her back to victory. Her patience was nagging at Owen like a scab that just begged to be picked at. Did she think that he was downplaying his own skill? He thought it was possible that he had overdone just how much he was throwing the matches.
“I’ll have you top fragging with me in no time.” Owen rolled his eyes at her joke as he turned off his monitor and slinked underneath his covers. Aoife had not been joking. Owen managed to fall asleep to the soft sounds of key and mouse clicks, an unusual experience for someone so accustomed to being completely alone. Owen would have to remind himself that it was not just his own room anymore. He imagined that it would be far more troubling to need to share the space, but with their aligned interests in playing games late into the night, it seemed his habits would be perfectly acceptable. If anything, it was almost exciting to be sharing the room with someone else. Cohabitation did not necessitate friendship, but it certainly benefited from it. Having another person to share the complaints of the day’s classes might be nice. A friend could be just the thing to lift his spirits. Until she discovered his secret, of course, but he thought with any luck, it might be some time before he needed to. Owen had already forgotten about his prior plan to tell Aoife about his secret.
* * * * *
An alarm, the same as always, was the sound that pulled Owen from his slumber. It was Tuesday, and it was time for the same monotony of his college classes that he was begrudgingly acclimated to. Upon rolling out of bed and stumbling towards his dresser, Owen noticed that Aoife was already gone from the room. Figuring she must have had an earlier class than him today, he gathered the usual handful of shower supplies and walked towards the shower. Before he entered the shower cubicle on the far side of the bathroom, he saw a notification pop up on his phone. That was far from usual for Owen. After disabling push notifications for nearly every app on his phone, text messages and calls were the only times that his phone would buzz.
[Richie?: hey its richie, you still coming to the first meet tomorrow?]
His phone had automatically attempted to put a name to the contact, since Owen had yet to fill in the information himself. He didn’t think to, because he truly hadn’t expected Richie to text him again. A mistake on his part, since he was almost certainly going to hear from again when this event rolled around. It was one that Owen had truly forgotten about, being pressured to sign up for it at the beginning of the semester two months ago. It was part of the standard start of the semester race for all of the college clubs and activities to try to suck up new students into their ranks. Owen had offhandedly mentioned that he played UMDK to one of the guys in the student union, and the next thing he knew he was signed up for the prospective esports team that Evrett University had. Richie, was the guy that had pressured him into doing so. Thinking he could sign up in the moment and forget about it later, Owen agreed and went on his merry way. Forget, was exactly what Owen had done. He rolled his eyes at the text message and entered the shower at the far side, the one that he always used due to its distance from the entrance of the bathroom. It always made Owen feel a little bit more safe from any eyes, not that there happened to be any at this time of the morning.
After his shower, Owen made his way back to his dorm room, hugging his wad of clothes to his chest while his towel covered the lower part of his body. He hated the short walk each morning, mostly due to the vulnerability that it implied. He thought it was irrational for anything to happen, yet idle fears still nagged at him anyway.
“CHANGING!!!”
“Fuck!”
“Door?”
“Door!”
Almost beat for beat, Owen had managed to recreate the previous morning of walking in on Aoife, slamming his face into the door as he turned away, followed by the awkward ten seconds of silence that followed.
“I’m sor-”
“Damnit, Owen! I told you to fucking knock!” Aoife’s words were sharp. They cut with a surprising degree of hostility, something that Owen was utterly unprepared for. Fight or flight is the standard stress response people are told. Of course, it’s more nuanced than the two, instead being comprised of fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Even with those four, people don’t always slot easily into a prescribed set of responses. For Owen, conflict had always been a surefire way to switch his brain off. An odd exception or two would throw him into a fight response when he was pressed, but more often than not, he would freeze in place and wait until the conflict passed.
That left him in the uncomfortable position of being pressed against his dormitory door with damp hair brushing against his neck while he waited for an opportunity to apologize. In truth, he felt incredibly foolish for making the same mistake immediately after assuring her that it wouldn’t happen again.
“I’m dressed.”
Aoife stood by her desk, dressed in ripped jeans and a long sleeved black and white checkered shirt. The ripped jeans might not have been the most practical for the chilly weather, but she was adjusted to wearing them in far colder weather. Owen had yet to move from the door, causing Aoife to feel a pang of guilt as she watched the guy patiently clutch his clothing to his chest. She could tell he was truly sorry for barging in, but it didn’t change the fact his mistake had sent Aoife through the same panic she had already felt time and time again in her previous dorm rooms.
“You can turn around, Owen.”
Owen did so, turning to see the now-dressed Aoife with hair that was still slick with the dampness of a morning shower. That must have been where she had been, he thought.
“I’m sorry, dude, I didn’t mean to yell I just-” Aoife paused her sentence halfway through like she had decided to completely change what she was about to say. After seemingly finding a better way to phrase her thoughts, she continued. “Like I said before, I value my privacy. I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to see you naked, yeah? I don’t want another fiasco to come from changing in my dorm room. If you want I can start changing in a differe-”
“Another?” Owen asked, cutting right through Aoife’s words to force her to stop. The widening of her eyes revealed to Owen that her choice of words was less than stellar.
“Yeah.” She nodded, thinking of a way to redirect the conversation back towards where it was moments prior, where she was about to suggest that she just take all of her clothes to the bathrooms in order to change. The thought of changing in the semi-public bathroom was somewhat mortifying, but it wasn’t like she wanted to move dorms yet again.
“That's why I moved dorms. It was a whole thing.” Aoife decided to keep it simple, offering only enough information to appease his curiosity and nothing more.
“That’s incredibly vague.”
“Intentionally so. Why do you care?”
Owen wondered if it was just the cold water dripping down the back of his neck that made the room feel suddenly cold. From what he could tell in the short time he’d been around Aoife, she was a very guarded woman. Say the right thing, and she softens up and jokes around. Say the wrong thing, and she clams shut and seems to become defensive. If he wasn’t actively having to figure out how to not set her off, he would think it was a truly fascinating personality to witness. He didn’t want to flip Aoife back into her cold defensive stance, so he attempted a joke to ease the air. It seemed to work for her previously, and he could only hope it would function the same way a second time.
“I just wanna make sure you’re not a serial killer or anything.” Owen shrugged, changing the flow of the conversation instantly.
“What?”
“You were just being mysterious, that’s all. I wanted to know if you’re a serial killer or something. I promise if you are, I'll help you clean your tracks in exchange for not dying.”
Aoife’s face was travelling through a journey of emotions, from initial confusion, to slight anger at the insinuation that she was a serial killer, followed by a realization of sorts that he was doing a kind of ‘bit’. Eventually, her face settled into a smirk, like she was accepting the challenge that was placed before her.
“You got me, I’m the famous Evrett killer, picking off college kids in each dorm.”
Owen smiled, a wave of relief spreading throughout him upon realizing that his attempt at lightening the mood had worked. Or at the very least, not made things worse. “I heard the killer picked off some sorority girls in Reed Hall, was that you?”
“Damn straight. I’ve killed in every dorm but Freidrich, it looks like your number’s up.” Aoife snatched up a pen from her desk and held it above her head, as if she were suddenly playing the part of a slasher villain. Her devilish smirk almost caught a laugh out of Owen. He was surprised that she had not only gone along with it, and even more surprised that she was now committing even more than he was. If choosing the username PertinentHorse hadn’t been proof enough, Owen was never one to back down from a joke, or a challenge. If she would play the killer, he’d play the very best victim there was.
“Oh no! What ever shall I do!” Owen exclaimed behind a wide smile. He threw his wad of clothes towards Aoife and ran to his side of the room. He couldn’t help but laugh when he turned around to see Aoife stabbing the pen through the air like she was recreating the infamous Psycho scene in their bedroom. He managed to make it to his bed to grab his pillow, and with a deliberately slow swing, he brought the pillow down on her head.
Aoife just laughed and threw the pillow to the side. Owen could tell she was trying to hide her smile as she spoke, but it was about as well hidden as an elephant behind a miniskirt. “You’ll be the final victim of the Evrett dorm room killer!” She dramatically raised the pen into the air.
“No Miss Evrett dorm killer, don’t kill me! I wanna be in the sequel!” Owen raised his voice as high as it could go and let out the most girlish pseudo scream he could manage as Aoife brough the pen down towards him. He made sure to keep his voice down enough that his fake death rattle wouldn’t make it into the hallway with how sound insulated the rooms were. Owen made a dramatic death as he fell back onto his bed, arms splayed out wide with his tongue firmly lolled out of his mouth like a child might do when pretending to be dead.
Aoife gave a hearty laugh and sat down next to Owen on the bed. His plan had certainly worked wonders, not that Aoife would know it. The walls that she had begun to build in their earlier conversation had been all but forgotten. She was far more preoccupied by the ridiculous scene they had just played out. A scene that might have been completely normal for Witchofthew3st and Nintendo Femicom to joke like, but something that was instead completely fresh when it was Owen and Aoife.
“You’d make a good final girl.”
Owen blushed initially, then shot up to sit next to Aoife on the edge of the bed. He hadn’t realized how he moved his arms across his chest to cover himself.
“What?”
“A final girl. Y’know, like in the horror movies?” Aoife asked, innocently, unaware of the several thoughts that were racing through Owen’s head as he sat next to her.
“Oh… yeah, okay.” Owen tried his best to nonchalantly shrug in response to Aoife. He had always been a fan of horror movies. That wasn’t the part of her sentence that was troubling him. Hearing her say that he’d made a good girl was the part that circulated the corners of his mind like a centrifuge on full force. It made him feel incredibly happy, but all the more fearful that she had somehow put the pieces together than he was pretending to be a girl online. Had she already solved it? Was this just a sneaky way of adding salt to the wound before she told him that she knew what he was up to?
“You good?”
“Yeah, yeah I’m good. We should probably go to classes.” Owen shot a weak smile at Aoife, one that she returned with a smile of her own. Noticeably, Aoife seemed to linger on his response for a moment longer before she got up from his bed. He wondered if she suspected something already with how her eyes fell across his entire body, trailing from his face down across his chest and to the towel wrapped around his waist.
Aoife, already dressed and ready for her first class, grabbed her bag that sat near the door to their room. As she swung the bag over her shoulder, she turned back to face Owen. “If you score higher than me in a match, I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Why I got kicked out of my previous dorms.”
“It didn’t look like you really wanted to tell me.”
Aoife hesitated at Owen’s response. She was setting a challenge for him, one that she hadn’t expected him to win, sure, but a challenge that she certainly expected him to take. It struck her as odd that he wasn’t interested in the idea.
“You don’t want to know?”
Owen shrugged. Sure, he was curious about the reasoning, but with how she guarded it earlier, it didn’t exactly seem like it was something she wanted to share. She had said it earlier, privacy was important to her, and he had no right to violate that privacy, especially after accidentally doing so just minutes ago.
“I already know. You’re the Evrett dorm room killer, right?”
Aoife was shocked, to say the least. The fact that he didn’t want to know her secret after she had presented it as a reward for beating her. She had always thought secrets were something everyone wanted to keep, while wanting to know everyone else’s secrets. She was so unprepared for his response that all she could muster in response was, “Good luck with your classes, Owen.”
While Aoife left the room to attempt to unravel the puzzle of Owen in her mind, Owen had begun to get dressed for the day. In his established ritual, he threw on whatever clothes he grabbed first, paid no attention to the way that his hair fell across his face as long as it was out of his eyes, and grabbed his bag. Before leaving, he turned on his monitor. Usually, Owen would send a message to Nintendo Femicom before his classes, or he would receive one from her. It was a small thing, but it had become part of his rhythm to check his UMDK messages before class. It was almost like a little treat that he could hold onto throughout the day. Sure enough, there was a message waiting for him. A message that put a smile on his face that barely wavered throughout the hours of his classes
[Nintendo Femicom: how’d the project go, cutie? You ready to get our giddy gooey groove on tonight? I’ll cry myself to sleep if not :P]