LO-LIFE: A DateQuest

[X] "Yes." Despite your profession and lifestyle, you're actually pretty ATHLETIC. (Acquire new Reference Pool.)



"Yes," you slide him your member card. What kind of loser goes to a gym they're not a member at, just to pick up girls? Not you, obviously. You've been a member for several months now and while you're taking a bit of a risk by coming out to meet someone, you do hope to use familiar territory to your advantage.

The attendant looks over your card with a frown, bringing it closer to his eyes. "Sorry sir, your card bar code and name are worn out. The text looks melted somehow…?"

"Oh, that, yeah. Spilled turpentine all over it. Accident, of course." You rub the back of your neck and glance over to the exercise area. "Normally the door guy just waves me in… did something change?"

"No sir. But I have to issue you a new card. Name?"

"Sorry?" You glance back to him, distracted.

"Your name. So I can print you a new card."

"Oh, right..."

[ ] Mathias Yang, implied: Franco-Chinese
[ ] Sameer Gagne, implied: Franco-Algerian
[ ] Nicodemo Michelakis, implied: Greco-Spanish
[ ] Leonard Komarudin, implied: Dutch-Indonesian

You provide your name, address and some basic personal information. After an initial awkwardness resolving the details, your new card is printed out and given to you. You swipe in in the first time in ages, into the crisp air mired in a battle between the environmental scent the owners prefer and that which working bodies necessarily impart on it.

You take a quick trip into the locker rooms to offload your change of clothes and take care of other essentials, returning to the central space. The totality of the gym's actual workout spaces are on the first floor: above those are private rooms for things like martial arts and yoga which you aren't currently taking part of. Standing in the middle and looking around for girls working out feels a little indecent somehow, but you swallow your lingering reservations when you remember the loneliness of the last few months holed up in your apartment and scrambling to finish freelance work.

Thinking about this, there are a couple of approaches you could take. You work could out really hard at something you're good at and impress somebody- but knowing your luck you could just as easily wind up with a gym bro wandering over and commenting on your form. You could pick a spot that's in talking distance to one of the relatively attractive girls you've spotted and make small talk while you do your routine. Last you could just do your routine properly and hang around the juice bar to make smalltalk with anyone who comes by.

What do you do?
[ ] Impress.
[ ] Try to charm someone mid-exercise.
[ ] Just wait until after your routine.

And what's your routine like anyway?
[ ] Excuse me while I go in the back and flip some tractor tires, do a hundred suicides and crawl under barbed wire.
[ ] High reps on a low-intensity machine, free weights and light aerobic exercises. I'm gonna make it.
[ ] Just weight training on machines and free weights. Nothing special.
[ ] Mostly cardio and endurance training. I run and bike a lot.
[ ] I have a routine from the internet. Gotta stay thin and look cute.

[x] Nicodemo Michelakis, implied: Greco-Spanish
[x] Just wait until after your routine.
[x] Mostly cardio and endurance training. I run and bike a lot.



After getting this worked up over the prospect of even trying to hit on a girl here at the gym, you decide the best course of action is probably to get through your workout first. Your frayed nerves will be smoothed over by the exercise and you'll be too tired to fret and overfocus on every single little thing. You clip your phone to the little forearm strap you keep on so you can use podcasts to down out and slide your earbuds in, and then make your way to the treadmills to start.

You can do an impressive speed and incline on it, if you say so yourself- your legs are shredded even if the rest of you is a little average in comparison. Although given that you have goals besides self-improvement today, you keep it to a reasonable tempo and resistance and just stick to what you're comfortable with. You don't even feel time pass, entering a state of flow as you run through the various steps in your routine.

"...!" You hear something and feel an arm press on your shoulder, but only hear a voice after you dial your music down. "Assbutt, over here."

You've migrated over to the free weights and started doing curls when an unpleasant presence disturbs you from your revelry.

"Oh hey." You turn to respond to it. To him.

Stephen looms over you with the telltale aroma of bad bodyspray on his skin and cheap detergent on his too-small clothes, clinging to an impressively tan, muscular figure. He's one of your classmates from university and one of the few people you regularly still contact even though you wouldn't actually consider him a friend. He works in Ginto Gym as a trainer, but you count yourself lucky for having never had him.

He rubs the bridge of his nose, scratching at a curly black beard. "Hey yourself, you listening to the news?"

"Uh…" You shake your head. "No, actually. What's going on?"

He whips out his phone and pulls up a Le Monde article, and then flips to a video from Liveleak. "They caught another boat of British wireheads trying to get into the city. Fucking refugees am I right?"

A grainy video shows a rubber raft carrying a half-dozen people flip over in the tumultuous North Sea moments before being rescued by a Neue Palas police boat. The video helpfully highlights that the number of people taken aboard is smaller than the estimated number on the raft.

"Damn," you frown. You tend to not watch the news, but the horror stories about immigrants always get you.

"You're Greek, right? Must be deja vu all over again." Stephen ribs you and inches into your personal space, forcing you to set the weights down and actually engage with him.

"Half and… no. I was like three and in a different country when that was happening." You shrug. Maybe if you start giving lame answers I'll leave you alone. "Can't really blame people when they have have good reasons to leave though."

He snorts. "Figures you'd side with augs. I figure it's a fair trade… you want an immortal brain that doesn't get Alzheimer's and learns with the press of a button, you pay it off by letting everyone peek inside your head."

"Words of a man who's content with being average." You laugh, wondering if that'll provoke a reaction.

"In all ways but social, mental... physical." He preens a bit, not even letting it register. "And my Lil Stevie, of course."

"So it's not physical?"

"Haha, you cheeky cunt. You're up on it today, for once." The looks you over again, looking curious. "But seriously, I only ever see you in the AM. Special occasion or something?"

"Nothing really." You shrug. "Figured I'd change up my routine."

"No good, my dude. Routine good, disruption bad." He chides, somehow shifting gears and sounding concerned and reasonable all of a sudden. You're not really sure how or why he gets like this, but it almost makes likeable. "You're going to sleep like shit if you're not used to working out this close to your bedtime."

You go to put the weights back and start stretching as part of your cool-down. "I think I'll feel fine. I went easy anyway, I don't want to smell."

"Fair enough, man." He starts helping you with stretches, pulling on your limbs and pressing on your back to get you to the positions that you normally couldn't get to all by your lonesome. His eyes blink in recognition as you wrap up, looking at you all shocked. "Oh shit, you have a date or something? Is she here? Point her out."

You sputter and then shake your head. "What? No. Why would you ever assume…"

Stephen shakes his head and shrugs. "Alright dude my bad, low blow. But seriously, we have clean showers and you live like, two blocks down. What are you worried about smelling about?"

"Yeah… I g-get it…" You nod hastily, clearly this is all a misunderstanding.

"And deodorant man! Deodorant! You are an adult."

"Y-yeah yeah…" He leaves quickly enough after you make more small talk.

You migrate to the showers to rinse off, but you're still left with the lingering concerns about how you'll make your approach. The idea strikes you on your way out, passing the juice bar. It's fairly late so there aren't a great deal of people around except for the usual late-working salaried types who don't have time in the morning or afternoon, but of those present you can spot three women who seem good-looking enough:

Hanging directly by the juice bar counter, a young woman in yoga pants and a cutoff tee is trying samplers of the fruit-flavored vitamin waters that were brought in. She's a thin Nordic blonde with hazel eyes, with a pretty heart-shaped face and thin lips accentuated with high-end makeup. She's carrying a rolled-up mat in her bag.

Another woman is sitting by herself at one of the dock-facing windows, nursing a large fruit smoothie and contemplating something. She's an attractive, smoothly dark-skinned woman with narrow dark brown eyes and strong cheekbones. Her dark frizzy hair goes to her neck in a voluminous bloom, the tips bleached to a light brown. She's in shorts and a tank top, and is wearing a lifting belt. She's quite muscular, so probably a seasoned lifter.

The last is a curvy young South Asian woman in a faux-vintage anime t-shirt and baggy grey sweatpants, both somewhat sweat-stained. Her face is cutely round, framed by dark hair that runs past her shoulders. She's reclining by a table with a green smoothie, taking sips in between giggling at videos on her phone.

Which one do you approach? Pick ONE.

[ ] The slim girl by the counter.
[ ] The strong woman by the window.
[ ] The curvy girl watching videos.

And how do you do it? Pick up to TWO, unless you want to leave.

[ ] Tell her she looks pretty!
[ ] Ask her about what she's doing.
[ ] Ask her about what she's drinking.
[ ] Ask if she comes here often.
[ ] Talk about current events.
[ ] Make a comment about how you see her all the time but never talk. This is a lie.
[ ] Make a woke comment about corporate presence in the gym.
[ ] Actually, this is a bad idea. (LEAVE)