fandomhighdorms | Second floor common room, Tuesday afternoon

Entry tags:

Second floor common room, Tuesday afternoon

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!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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.

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?"

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

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?"

"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."

"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?"

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."

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."

"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."

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.

"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.

Which was just a shame, really.

"Oh, man," Prompto shook his head at Mae's obvious misfortune. "It's great. It's just like you described, virtual reality on steroids. Some of the classes'll use it to let you do all sorts of things that might not be feasible otherwise. Like, one I've got this semester? Basically is a real-life video games, we all made up characters and stuff, and Mr. Fjord's going to put us in all sorts of situations, like today we had to figure out how to get out of jail. I mean, it'd be practically perfect if it wasn't school, but what you're saying is that one of these things exist outside of school? That's, like, totally epic, Mae!"

And as soon as he figured out which abandoned store this was, they were never seeing him agaaaaain.

Honestly, the only reason why Mae hadn't moved in there was that she already had a history of disappearing into video games and forgetting, you know, that people were people.

"They have a class here to teach you how to bust out of jail?!"

That was clearly the important take away here.

"They had a class last semester that made a whole week out of busting into teachers' offices," Prompto offered, since he figured that was a good way to show that this was part of a range of questionable high school experiences, grinning crookedly the whole time, before it went a little proud and maybe squishy. "I got to help with some of that. One of the teachers planned a different animal booby trap in his for each day.

"But the bust out of jail thing was just, like, a one shot. And it was, like, an old-timey medieval jail. Next week, we'll probably have to fight goblins or something."

"What, like those naked cat things?"

Mae had no idea how this comment would come off to people here, no.

"Naked cats things?"

Yeah, Prompto didn't even know how that comment would come off to him, especially not when it was coming from someone who looked like a cat.

"I mean, like, puppies and kittens and chickens."

Who were way less cute than chocobos, but, hey, he understood you had to work with what you had sometimes.

"Puppies and kittens and chickens aren't goblins."

This conversation was going so well.

"Ohhhh, you meant the potential fighty stuff," said Prompto, "not the cute animal booby trap stuff."

It was clear which one he preferred.

"But you're right. They're not."

And then he looked maybe a little awkward, because he still wanted clarification about the whole naked cat thing, but it seemed all sort of weird and wrong to ask when the person you were talking to looked like a cat.

"Sooooo...." He could totally steer far from that, right? They'd lost track of the important stuff, anyway. "About that abandoned store?"

Mae's eyes went wide with excitement. "I got to spend a whole day sports rioting and smashing cars!"

"...I have got to check this store out," Prompto concluded after a long, long moment of examining whether or not there was really anything else to say. And there wasn't. "Where did you say it was?"

"I miiiiiight tell you," Mae said, realizing she had something of actual value here. "I dunno. How do I know I can trust you?"

"I mean, come on," said Prompto, grinning and pointing at his smirk, which he felt surely could be best defined as 'charmingly cheesy', "just look at this face."

Plus, it was a small town and one of his best friends was a spy. He was going to find it, regardless of whether or not Mae told him anything.

"That is an aggressively standard face." Mae. Don't be mean. "What with the hair and the . . . stuff."

You know, like facial features and things.

And the freckles!

So many freckles!

And, really, Prompto would happily take 'aggressively standard' any day of the week, because that was far better than he could ever hope for, and was honestly just glad the hair got a mention. He didn't spend as much time on it as he did for it to just fade into the background to his average, unspectacular face.

"Exactly. See? Aggressively standard, perfectly trustworthy."

"Well, trustworthy people definitely always insist they're trustworthy all the time."

Second floor common room, Tuesday afternoon

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)