AN: Beta-read by
Carbohydratos,
Did I?,
Gaia,
Linedoffice,
Zephyrosis, and
Mizu.
Chapter 126: Work as a Form of Play
Max and I didn't speak until we reached the lounge.
"Well," he said, "you were right."
"About what?"
"They called my bluff."
"Oh."
Max settled onto a couch with a sigh. "So, were you looking for me, or just finding trouble?"
Oh, right. "Looking for you, actually. I was thinking I might move out of the hotel."
He perked up and smiled, seemingly happy for the distraction. "Ah, right. Sure thing. You know what you want your new place to look like?"
"Not… really?" I ventured, feeling more than a little silly for not having an answer ready to go.
"Well, that's the first step," Max said. "Sketch up a floorplan—there are computers in the Workshop with CAD software if you don't want to do it by hand—and I'll get it set up. And don't worry about size or cost or Euclidean geometry when you're planning because none of that matters in here."
I hadn't expected any of those things to matter, but the carefree way he dismissed Euclidean geometry was still a little surreal.
"So there's no 'standard' apartment or anything like that?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I mean, if you just want an apartment, I can make you an apartment, but why stop there? You can have
anything."
"That's kind of the problem."
"Ah," Max said, a look of understanding on his face. "Choice paralysis?"
"To put it lightly."
"If you want my advice, figure out what you want to do with the place and work backwards from there."
"What I want to do, huh?"
Now that I thought about it, I wasn't really sure why I'd wanted an apartment at all. I wasn't particularly fond of cooking, and baking had been a social activity more than my own hobby. I could set up a computer or start a personal book collection, but all
that would do is remove reasons to spend time anywhere else.
For all I knew, that was why there were so many people on the 'chain I'd never met—they were all burrowed away in their own spaces ninety percent of the time.
"I think the hotel is good enough, actually," I decided.
Max frowned, looking almost disappointed. "I didn't mean to talk you out of it. You want me to set something up as a starter? I could give you a typical one-person apartment and let you add to it whenever you think of something…"
"No, I want to think on it some more. I'll let you know."
"Sure thing."
I said goodbye, offered a little wave, and headed back out into the courtyard.
"Shoulder sprites?" I asked. "Any help here?"
Sure enough, a spirit popped into being in front of my face wearing the same clothes I had on at the moment. "You're lucky you're so introspective," she said. "We're supposed to be used for decision-making, not self-reflection."
"So can you help or not?"
"I'll do my best, but I'm a figment of your imagination, so you're still just talking to yourself. Let's start with the obvious: do you have any complaints about the hotel room itself?"
I gave it a moment's thought as I wandered around the fountain. "I don't think so," I decided. "It's basically perfect, except just barely not perfect enough to become
too perfect."
"Do you have any negative associations with anything about the room?"
"I don't think so. It reminds me of vacations as a kid—and I don't think I have any negative associations there."
"But it reminds you of being a kid," the sprite pointed out. "Is that a problem?"
"I don't think so. Gah, I'm saying that a lot. No, it's not a problem."
"It's not a problem
in itself. There are a lot of problems with being a kid, aren't there?"
I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, of course there are. Family vacations were the parts where I got to avoid most of them. I could relax all day, didn't have to do chores or homework, had unlimited access to great food…"
"Sounds like an inter-Jump break."
"I don't think that's a coincidence. The Warehouse takes the shape of a luxury hotel for a reason, right?"
"Sure," she agreed. "Let's look at it from the other direction, then. If being a kid on vacation isn't
bad, then what's good about being an adult?"
I sat down on the rim of the fountain to consider the question.
"Self-sufficiency, I guess," I replied. "The whole magic room-keeping thing is… it's kinda infantilizing, isn't it? Having magic take care of everything for me is a little like being a kid who can't do that stuff for herself. But 'magic housekeeping' might not be specific to the hotel room, and if it were, I'd just set up my own magic housekeeping anyway because it's not like I want to do that stuff myself. I think I've had my fill of mundane inconveniences for a while."
"So the reason you're confused about wanting to move out of the hotel is because of the contradiction where the things you 'value' about having kept an apartment are also things you don't actually
like."
I rocked my head back and forth as I went over her statement.
"Yeah, that sounds right," I concluded. "What am I supposed to do about it?"
The sprite shrugged. "Hey, I did my job. Good luck with that."
———X==X==X———
"You ever feel weird about having everything done for you?" I asked Karl half an hour later as I watched him and Bob face off over
Warhammer yet again.
"You mean in the Warehouse?" he asked.
"Yeah."
He shrugged. "Not really. Bob?"
"It's better than the maids back home," Bob said. "'Course, it doesn't offer the full 'range of service'."
I didn't want to touch that comment with a ten foot pole, so I was relieved Karl objected for me. "Civilized cultures have rules against that shit, you know."
"Ah, fuck off. It was a joke!"
Karl rolled his eyes before returning them to me. "Well, there you have it. Then again, I was retired
before I joined, so a world of leisure and hobbies wasn't exactly an outside context problem."
"Yeah, that makes sense," I said. "I think the 'weird feeling' is because I was such a wreck before I joined that being able to keep a house well enough that chores weren't constantly growing into capital-P Problems before I got around to them was a power fantasy for me?"
"Could be." He reached over and smacked Bob upside the head before the latter could make another tasteless joke. "Nothing wrong with that. For some people, just being healthy and pain-free is a fantasy."
"War wounds," Bob said, rubbing his own 'wounded' head.
"Among other things." Karl turned back to me as he continued, "Don't worry about it. You'll have a new set of 'capital-P Problems' next time you import, so take a load off and enjoy the vacation."
That sounded like good advice to me.
The game continued for several minutes as Karl's Astartes began an orderly withdrawal in the face of Bob's usual Eldar army—at least until one of the advancing squads got a little too aggressive, at which point the marines about-faced and began lobbing what were very clearly Holy Hand Grenades into the enemy ranks.
"Hey, here's a random question," I said. "What happens if you bring a mythical object like the Holy Grail into a setting that has its own rules for that artifact?"
"You get a two-fer," Bob said, frowning as he reorganized the center of his advance.
"To be
precise," Karl continued, "the thing has whatever properties it normally had in its original world, and whatever properties the thing should have wherever it is."
"S'what I said."
"It might be what you
meant, but what you
said was, 'You get a two-fer.'"
"So the artifact temporarily gains the local rules for whatever it is?" I clarified.
"Yup," Karl confirmed. "Assuming it's actually supposed to be the same object and not just something someone named after it."
"Applies to materials, too," Bob added. "Dragon blood and stuff like that."
"Mythical creature materials," Karl clarified. "Fantastic metals and whatnot tend not to for some reason."
"Because of the name versus object thing?" I asked.
"Who knows? Ah, Bobby, you crafty bastard! That was bait!"
"Gotcha!" Bob crowed, grinning as his scout bikes cut off the sallying marines. "Looks like you need another lesson on cavalry, old man!"
Karl managed to rescue his stranded marines after another two turns of fighting, but the disruption in his line gave Bob the chance to advance deep into the city before he could regroup. The game remained close all the way to the end, but the Eldar won the day.
———X==X==X———
The LARP group met in the lounge that evening. After a bit of furniture rearranging so we could all sit around a single table, Erin stood and got us started.
"So," she said, "we took a blind vote on whether to continue last break's campaign this morning, and the results are: two 'for' to twelve 'against'. And yes, I voted, so my thanks to whoever else actually had fun last time."
Oh, dear. That would be
me.
"Ah, don't be like that," Sirius told her. "Just cause people want variety doesn't mean they didn't have fun."
"Yeah, but this was practically unanimous."
"Too many fiddly bits," Bob complained.
Kara sent a glare his way. "You didn't even play."
"'Cause there were too many fiddly bits!"
Erin cleared her throat. "In any event, Joe's volunteered to be this month's DM. Joe?"
Joe stood up as she sat down. "Right. Another quick vote—no need to hide it, simple preference:
Shadowrun or
Cyberpunk? Hands for
Shadowrun? Right, that's well over half, motion carries. Hands for
Cyberpunk, just to check—
Sirius, don't vote twice!"
With our course set for
Shadowrun, we split up for a half-hour character-making jam, scattering across the lounge with a dozen copies of the sourcebooks—all bearing an identical set of sharpie-scrawled adjustments, clarifications, and house rules, some of which continued onto entire notepad pages stuffed into the spine—and then reconvened for a trip to what I'd previously dubbed the 'prop cupboard' for costumes. I ignored the clothes entirely and retrieved a wheelchair instead.
"Why would you LARP a paraplegic decker, anyway?" Kara asked me while I tried to get used to wheeling myself around. "I don't care if it's an 'archetype' or whatever; it ruins the 'live-action' part."
I used my 'hologram illusion' spell to create a life-sized video-game-style avatar of myself. "'Cause I can do this."
"New trick?"
"Yeah. Still getting a hang of working in third person. Should be fun."
The avatar stuck her tongue out at Kara, who responded by kicking the wheelchair out from under me and sending me crashing to the floor with a cry of, "Fuck's sake, Thrace!"
———X==X==X———
We wrapped up our first session only a couple hours later, having divided into teams that would last the first couple 'runs'. Under Joe's guidance, we'd split sixteen people into two groups of five and a group of six. The last time we'd done a more 'traditional' adventuring party-based game, there had been a single party that people rotated into as PCs died, with everyone else filling in NPCs as directed. Joe had something different in mind for this campaign: one group would get to be 'in focus' each session, and everyone else would play OpFor for that run. I was in Kara's group and wasn't sure how I felt about that.
Well, all three groups were running different jobs in the same city, so we were expected to shuffle around a bit over the campaign. Come to think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if Joe ended up having two groups 'collide' during a run. Something to watch out for—in character, even, because the groups had been formed in character over a message board, so we were all aware of each other to some extent.
I left the set—still halfway in transition between 'palace' and 'corporate skyscraper'—stored the wheelchair without incident, and had just stepped into the street when someone called my name. (Well, sort of.)
"Doc!"
"Thrace." I turned around and folded my arms, wondering what Kara was on about
now.
"Doc," she repeated, "you know I'm not pushing you around to bully you, right?"
An apology? From Kara? Will wonders never cease.
"What brought this on?" I asked.
"Jenn keeps glaring daggers at me every time I get near you. The frak you tell her, anyway?"
"Nothing."
Her eyes narrowed. "Really."
"You did kick my wheelchair out from under me in full view of everyone."
"You don't frakkin' need it!"
I looked Kara up and down, tapping my foot against the ground as I did.
She raised an eyebrow.
"I don't have a good read on you," I told her. "Half the time you act like I annoy you, half the time you ignore me, and at the rounding error at the edges it seems like you're hanging out with me on purpose."
"Is that a problem?"
"It's
confusing is what it is."
Kara huffed and rolled her eyes. "You're a nugget, Doc."
It took me a moment to remember 'nugget' was slang for 'rookie'.
"And?"
"And nothing. Sometimes nuggets are annoying. Sometimes they're just in the way. And sometimes it's nice to have someone who remembers you're hot shit and they're not."
That explained quite a bit, actually: sometimes, Kara wanted to have someone around to be impressed with her, and I best fit the bill. In other words, I'd gotten my response completely wrong: I'd tried to stay out of her way whenever she was hanging around, but what she
wanted was my attention. Or admiration, whatever.
Sometimes, anyway.
"I guess," I said, for lack of a better response. "You know, I may be a nugget, but you're not my flight instructor, so maybe lay off a little?"
"Want me to be?"
"Hell yes." My brain caught up a second later. "I mean—"
Kara's slasher smile silenced me. "Too late, nugget! You're mine now!"
———X==X==X———
"Navcom?"
"Set."
"Sensors?"
"Live."
"Lights?"
"On."
"Suit?"
"Pressure okay."
"O2?"
"Nominal."
"Fuel?"
"Full."
"Straps?"
"Secure."
"Canopy?"
"Closed."
"Right. Spool up the reactor."
Less than an hour after my thoughtless response, Lt. Thrace had me in a simulator cockpit, a cheat-sheet for the main console taped to my flight suit's left arm. This first lesson felt eerily like every flight-sim tutorial I'd ever played, though with the caveat that there were enough buttons, controls, and hardware that I'd have been crazy to skip it. There was a reason I had a cheat sheet, though Kara—sorry,
Lt. Thrace—had made it clear I wouldn't have it next time.
I'd known we had a 'Simulator Room', but I'd never gotten around to asking anyone where it was or what it looked like. It was part of the gym, as it happened: a large, ineffably 'gym-like' room full of bulky, unlabeled pods of all shapes and sizes. Four doors in the wall near the entrance were currently roped off with tape reading 'UNDER CONSTRUCTION', though for all I knew that was part of the scenery.
Reactor control is… there. I flipped the switch from 'STNB' (standby) to 'ON', then pulled the lever to the tick mark for launch power. The room outside disappeared, replaced with a Battlestar's launch tube.
"Easy there, nugget. In a real bird, you gotta warm it up slowly if it's been idle for too long."
"How long is too long?"
"Depends on how well the techs are doing their frakkin' job. If you have the time, assume it's been too long, or the ride'll get bumpy."
I raised an eyebrow, though no one could see my face to notice. "Is that a euphemism for 'you'll explode'?"
"You think anyone would fly the frakkin' things if they exploded like that?" Thrace snapped. "Things get
bumpy. Thruster output's uneven if the reactor's cold." She didn't stop transmitting, so I could clearly hear her whine 'Is it gonna explode?' to herself in an unflattering (and inexplicably British-accented) imitation of my question.
"…Noted."
"Good. Start up the thrusters."
Flick. Flick. Flick. "Thrusters hot."
"Engage RCS."
"RCS enabled, all ports green."
"Control surface check."
"Hydraulic pressure nominal."
"Good. Now, I'm'a go easy on you, take you through a maintenance Flight Control check before I dump you out in space." The launch tube around me vanished, replaced by the interior of a hangar. "Main stick back to pitch up."
We went through pitch, yaw, roll, and combinations thereof; main thruster control and RCS strafing; DRADIS, IFF, Comms, and Nav. Then the view of the hangar through the simulator canopy changed to a star-field, and we went through it all over again, this time with the simulator squishing, spinning, and shaking me about as though I were actually maneuvering. Then came the practice courses, which were more of the same but with a lot less help provided.
I spent the odd moment between courses wondering if Colonial sims had inertics or if the feature had been added later before it occurred to me that
Galactica had artificial gravity; it'd be weird if the same technology wasn't applicable for sims like this.
"Well, credit where credit's due, Doc," Lt. Thrace told me as I climbed out of the cockpit after about an hour of obstacle-course flying. "You don't even look green."
I tapped my hand to my helmet in salute, grinning inside and out at the praise. "I've flown a lot more nauseating routes than that."
"Oh?"
"
Worm."
Thrace snorted. "Well, that's too bad for you, then."
Uh oh. "Why?"
"Because you're going back in the sim 'til we top that. Get in and bring her up to combat power."
I climbed back into the simulator, confirmed all the systems were as I'd left them, then eased the lever forward until it hit the plastic guard near the end of its travel. Enough force would bend the plastic out of the way—and in doing so, inform the maintenance team on a real fighter that the reactor needed a full tear-down after someone had red-lined it like an idiot.
"Faster than
that, nugget!" Lt. Thrace barked.
"Yes, sir!"
"Now hit the rings, combat speed, and get used to the warning tone because the missiles aren't going to stop until you clear the course.
Go!"
———X==X==X———
In hindsight, Thrace must've skipped twenty or thirty levels on the difficulty slider. Miss a single ring? Mission failed, start over. Go too slow? Missile hits you, start over. Go too fast? G-forces ruin your day, wake up and start over.
The most god-awfully frustrating part came twenty-eight seconds into the course, when I hit a straight shot through six perfectly aligned rings. I lost count of how many times a missile tagged me in that section before I slammed the reactor lever through the guard and punched it down the course to the next bend.
The good news? It worked.
The bad news? Lt. Thrace blew her lid.
"The
frak is going through your head, nugget?" she screamed, spittle forming spots on my faceplate. "You think you're flying a frakkin' hot rod?"
I remained at attention beside the simulator, staring straight past her ear as I belted out, "Sir, no, sir!"
"You know what happens to your bird when you break that guard?"
"Sir, yes, sir!"
"Then you are frakkin'
stupid, nugget, because you just wrecked sixty thousand tons of hardware because you can't frakking dodge!"
"Sir! Missiles would've wrecked the hardware harder, sir!"
Lt. Thrace's face turned even redder, and I figured I was well and truly 'frakked'.
Then she lost her composure and started laughing, and I just felt confused.
"Frak, Doc," Thrace muttered, shaking her head in exasperation. "Someone feed you that line?"
"No, sir." When she continued laughing, I risked asking, "Why?"
"Because that is the
exact same frakkin' thing I told my FI when he ran us through that course!"
Well, it is sort of the obvious response. Though that tidbit did justify one suspicion I'd had.
"There's no way to get through the course without slagging the reactor, is there, sir?"
"Not a frakkin' chance." Kara shook her head again. "Right, you say what I said, you get what I got. Six miles."
"In the flight suit?" The damn thing weighed fifty pounds.
"Yes, in the frakkin' flight suit, now move your ass! If you're not back here in an hour you go again!
Go!"
Thank god I'd turned my strength and fitness perks back on for the LARP, or I'd've washed out of whatever this was then and there.
———X==X==X———
"Six miles in a flight suit," Rita repeated.
"Yeah."
"And you still want to train?"
"I'm good for it."
The fact that she didn't argue with me further was either a show of trust or outright negligence.
We went through our warm-up exercises together, dynamic stretches and light cardio around the perimeter of the room, and then it was up to Rita to select our weapons for the evening. Now that my skill with the naginata was at a level Rita deemed 'likely to keep me alive', she'd hand me a sword or two every couple of days to mix it up. I was good with swords—though my polearm skills
were catching up—but I could always be better, and practice made combining my offensive and defensive perks feel more natural, too. Swordsmanship and not getting hit, two great skills that go great together. 'Embracing my inner Dex build,' Zero called it, and I couldn't disagree.
It was downright embarrassing how much I'd been resting on my laurels; doubly so because I'd gone out of my way to create a 'Generic Fantasy RPG' build that was more graceful than 'just poise through everything' before doing exactly that anyway. That was the peril of being handed an amazing defensive ability and equipment, it seemed: complacency. If I could fight myself from a couple Jumps ago, I'd trounce her lazy ass.
It was a nice fantasy to hold onto while Rita was trouncing
me. It would be inaccurate to say our spars were one-sided—I even won the occasional bout—but I had no illusions whatsoever that my victories only came because I exceeded whatever level Rita had held herself to that round. Having a sparring partner with a fine-tuned sense of her own difficulty slider was great and all, but it meant I always felt like she'd
let me win no matter how hard I worked for it.
I did not even come close to winning the night after my first lesson in the Viper sim. My poor showing could be blamed on my previous 'exercise', but even if that were the case, fighting tired was its own skill to practice. Rita had already demonstrated that she'd stop me if I was building the wrong habits, so at the very least fatigue hadn't reduced my ability to the point of blundering.
———X==X==X———
After the double-header of Kara and Rita's training regimens, I grabbed my requisite hour of sleep, ate breakfast, and wandered over to the Arcade. Grace and Tedd must've finished their initial exploration, because there was only one other person here.
"Hey, Cass!"
"Hey, Zero."
She was using one of the public consoles rather than ensconced away in the back rooms, which I took as an invitation to watch. "
Devil May Cry?"
"Nah,
Soulhunter, that dating game I told you about.
Devil May Cry looks totally different, how do you even get them confused?"
"I dunno."
Zero went back to focusing on the game for a few seconds as her combo counter climbed into the triple digits.
"I'm just styling on the game at this point," she told me. "I'm gonna hit like twenty times the cut-off for S-rank for this stage."
"You play this a lot?"
"Eh. Enough. One of these days we're gonna find a universe where they made a sequel. What're you here for?"
"Haven't decided yet."
"Then I know exactly what you're doing." Zero quit to menu without bothering to save and dropped the controller onto the floor. "Come on!"
"Do I get a say in this?" I asked as she dragged me away by the arm.
"Nope!"
She finally let go once we were in the PC area and quickly loaded up—
"Why," I said.
"Trust me."
"I don't like dating sims."
"Entertain me, then."
I sighed, sat down in front of the computer, and began to make my way, awkwardly, through
Doki Doki Literature Club. Obviously, I choose the girl who might as well have been specifically written to be my 'type'—which was a major source of my discomfort around dating sims in and of itself—and things continued well enough until…
"
Knives?" I exclaimed.
"Knives?" Zero repeated.
"Knives!"
"Knives?"
"
Knives!"
I pushed the keyboard out of the way so I could bring my head down onto the desk.
"You lost me, Cass," Zero said.
"She has a knife fetish."
"Yes…? Err, sort of… what's the problem?"
"Not a problem," I groaned. "Just the feeling of getting a joke far, far too late. This is a fucking horror game, isn't it?"
"Spoilers!"
"I'm going to take that as a yes." Her lack of commentary and jokes had already raised my suspicions to maximum, so it wasn't a hard guess.
Zero sighed. "Fine, if you're not gonna keep going: Yes, it's a fucking horror game. Sorta riffs on those old 'haunted game cartridge' urban legends. Now what was that joke you mentioned?"
"Remember Penny?"
"From
RWBY?"
"
No, not from
RWBY." I rolled my eyes as I straightened up and spun the chair around. "Penelope, the girl I dated last Jump."
"Oh. Hah, right, her! What about her?"
"We bonded over fantasy literature, and when I brought up also enjoying horror novels, she asked if I had a knife collection." I waved a hand in the vague direction of reality as I complained, "I didn't get the joke!"
"Oh, no! Did you say yes?"
"I have like two-dozen longswords in a box in my room!"
"Oh, Cass," Zero muttered, sounding every bit the long-suffering parent of a perpetually hapless and/or stupid child.
How the hell do you get into these situations? was left unsaid.
———X==X==X———
