Second floor common room, Tuesday afternoon

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae had decided today was a good day to have a lazy afternoon. She had her crappy (actually, perfectly servicable) tote bag she'd made in class to decorate, a whole bottle of white-out to stink the place up with, and she'd barely watched any TV since she'd gotten here, so she had lots of shows she could catch up on.

Theoretically, anyway. All she could find were weird preteen sitcoms, where kids were excited to get to go to school, and everyone spent the majority of their time screaming.

"Where's the sells-weed-out-behind-the-equipment-shed character?" she wondered, as she watched two girls freak out about being caught rearranging the letters on a highway sign. "Or the 'burnouts vaping in the stairwell' characters? These shows are so unrealistic."

[open!]

Comments

[justice_undone]

"I didn't think those shows aimed for realism," Breq said as she entered the common room, heading towards the kettle.

"At least not where I'm from."

[thishouseishaunted]

"You're probably right," Mae said. "They're probably supposed to make kids think being a teenager is all about bright happy parties and only breaking the little rules."

[justice_undone]

"I'm guessing that's not what your life is like, then."

Breq poured water into the kettle.

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae snorted. "What, and yours is?"

Admittedly, it was possible that was exactly what Breq's life was like. Mae had only been here a week so far, after all.

[justice_undone]

"No. But some people's are."

She reached for the teapot.

"Tea?"

[thishouseishaunted]

"No thanks," Mae said. She wasn't a big tea drinker. "People who think their lives are really like this are lying to themselves. Just . . . pasting a happy picture over whatever fucked up crap is really happening."

Admittedly, Mae was from a small, economically depressed town that routinely pasted happy pictures over fucked up crap. Both literally and figuratively.

Still, she felt she had a point.

[justice_undone]

"Some people really are happy," Breq said. "Or at least content with their life and thinking their goals are within their reach. That doesn't mean you don't get a lot of people faking it too."

[thishouseishaunted]

"You sound like my therapist," Mae said.

It wasn't a compliment.

[justice_undone]

"Maybe your therapist has a point." Breq looked up, making sure to smile.

[thishouseishaunted]

The trouble with not having native, instinctual expressions was that sometimes the ones you made sure to use came off . . . not in the way intended.

Mae, for instance, felt very patronized by that smile.

"Whatever," she said, focusing back on her bag and the portrait of her friend Gregg she was carefully painting on it in whiteout. "It's a stupid show."

[justice_undone]

Oh well. Breq poured hot water into the pot.

"I'm not questioning that. Although you should see the ones with spaceships."

She secretly watched scifi shows with spaceships when no one was watching and gloated over how bad they were.

[thishouseishaunted]

"You don't like spaceships?" Mae asked. Man, what a tea-drinking, therapist-like downer.

[justice_undone]

"I do like spaceships," Breq said. "If they're accurately portrayed."

She obviously wasn't inclined to laughing.

[hashtag_chocobro]

Did Prompto live on this floor? Nope!

Did he have a reason to be on this floor? Not really.

Did it have something to do with Cup Noodle?

...probably.

"Oh, hey," he greeted on his way straight over to the cabinets. "You're in my fashion class!" She had a cat-head, the class was small, and it had only been a few hours ago; it was pretty easy to remember. "...Mae, right?"

Again, it was pretty easy to remember because...CAT-HEAD. Which was not as weird as it could have been, but probably still weirder for him than it should have been by now.

[thishouseishaunted]

"Yup. And you're . . ." Mae was exceptionally terrible at this sort of thing. He had a weird name, she remembered, like his parents wanted him to be well-behaved. "Polite-o?"

That was terrible. She should be ashamed.

[hashtag_chocobro]

Well, that was a new one. "Prompto," he corrected with a faint laugh. "Man, I can't even imagine what it would be like going through school as a Polite-o."

Somehow worse than it had originally been for him? That was difficult to even think about, really, but there it was. He shook his head slightly, after peering into one cabinet and moving onto the next.

"Watching anything good over there?"

[thishouseishaunted]

"Nope," Mae said, sighing at the TV. "But it is brightly colored!"

[hashtag_chocobro]

Prompto grinned a little at the response, closing the second cabinet, going in to check a third. "At least there's that!" he said. "Settling in okay? Sick and tired of people asking if you've settled in okay yet?"

[thishouseishaunted]

"You're actually the first," Mae said. "Mostly people just tell me that I have to be a new student. As though I didn't already know that."

[hashtag_chocobro]

"Okay, then," said Prompto, finding nothing in cabinet number three and moving smoothly to check number four. "Since I'm the first to ask and all...how are you settling in?"

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae shrugged. "Can't argue with the schedule. And town's fun enough to run around in." She thought of the abandoned shop she'd found and smiled. "And I found the coolest old arcade in existence."

[hashtag_chocobro]

And that was a word to catch Prompto's attention enough to halt the search through the cabinets for a moment. "What, you mean Fast Eddie's? With the bowling alley? I mean, they've got some pretty cool retro stuff, but, I don't know." He shrugged a little, leaning back on the counter as he talked to Mae, trying to keep pretty casual about it, because he knew how he could get when he talked about games, and Mae was new and didn't need to necessarily be clued into how big of a nerd he was quite yet if he could help it. "Never got into the arcade stuff as much; more of a console/computer guy myself."

[thishouseishaunted]

"No, the abandoned one," Mae said. What, Prompto, you didn't just wander into abandoned buildings for funsies? "It doesn't even look like anything on the outside but inside there are these rooms that, like, put you into the video game. Like -- virtual reality on steroids."

[hashtag_chocobro]

It took Prompto about two weeks before he was even comfortable going out in the dark around here, so, yeah, definitely a no on the wandering around abandoned buildings for funsies bit.

But he clearly needed to be paying a little more attention to the shops around the island when he was doing his jogging.

"...what, you mean like the Danger Shop, but it's in town? And abandoned?"

Don't tell him these things, Mae. It was rare enough he was even out of his room away from his regular video games; this had the air of no one ever seeing this boy again to it.

[thishouseishaunted]

"Yes?" Mae said. Then: "I don't know what that is."

She'd been here a week, Prompto. And her two classes hadn't made use of the Danger Shop yet.