No life, full consequences [Mia]

[Tate Desmarais]

After finally having a conversation with one of her housemates, she felt like she was obligated to start doing things out where there were actually people. Mother and Father would want her to be out socializing, and her friends would want to hear about her newer friends. Wouldn't they? She felt anxious, knowing she'd probably been replaced already. Having never been one of those people that others oriented around, she knew it couldn't possibly take too long to replace a single antisocial student council member. Maybe she should send them an email? But no, if they wanted to talk to her they'd message her first. Obviously. And she was doing so good with the socializing thing anyway. She'd even sat in the library and read for a good twenty minutes yesterday, which was as much of an invitation as she knew how to give. It worked at home in the Carolinas, why wouldn't it work here?

Okay, maybe that was a stupid question. But in the hopes of actually encountering another human being who wasn't incredibly peppy (not that she'd even talked to any but she'd seen them) she'd hauled her laptop out of its little nest of iPod wires and coolant pads to the Student Lounge. She wedged it onto a table, plugged in the little wireless mouse and her headphones, and flipped the lid open. It'd only been in sleep mode, since it didn't make sense to shut it down and waste battery time any more than she was already going to.

Playing Half-Life (the original, not the sequel) in the student lounge in the hope of attracting the attention of other video game players was definitely a waste of time. Compared to writing the papers she should have been working on, anyway--but if she remembered, she could spit them out pretty fast. It would be okay to spend sometime playing a game.

Her battery ought to last at least two hours, and that was plenty of time, she figured. She could pass that with just about anything, if she really wanted to. Reading webcomics, or the newest installment of Magical Girl Hunters--but no. You couldn't identify a story from a wall of Courier New, so… Half-Life it was.

Tate ran a hand over her head as she selected her save file, more to get her bangs out of her eyes than anything. She'd forgotten to wear gloves again--which meant no handshakes, but that was okay. Her sleeves went to the wrist, and risk of contact was minimal. It'd be okay. Really. She settled her chin on her knuckles and stared intently at the screen; she didn't quite remember where she left off, except headcrabs were raining from the ceiling. Hopefully it wouldn't take too long for her to remember… provided she wasn't distracted, anyway.

[Mia Keystone]

Mia was trying to beat her top score on pac-man. It was no easy task; last time, she'd pulled most of her tricks and now was stuck seeing how to boost the capacity past 9,999,999. It required convincing the game that there WAS room for another digit in there, and it was getting very very tricky to do when there was some pretty damn sub par graphics niggling in the corner of her vision.

Pac Man died with the usual wibble wibble sound and the technopath slapped the machine hard.

"You realise that game came out in 1998, right?" Mia finally snapped, turning around and glaring at the offending computer, and the guy... girl..... person attached to it. "Those graphics actively cause me pain. You could at least be playing the second one..."

Actually, now she thought on it, Mia couldn't remember being confused about a fellow student's gender for a while. Which meant..... new student! "Who're you," she asked suddenly, "You're new or I would have told you to get up to date on your Valve games ages ago. Oh, also, around that corner there's three head crabs, one jumps out of the bin. Heads up on that."

[Tate Desmarais]

She'd been having a bit of a time with head crabs--between her own piss-poor hand-eye coordination and general social anxiety, she often was caught staring off at someone else or else couldn't make the mouse point where she wanted it to go fast enough to prevent Dr. Gordon from taking damage. Still, Tate was holding her own ground against the ravening hordes, and she'd made it down some kind of… elevator lift thing into the bowels of Black Mesa. She felt a healthy disdain for it, remembering her time invested in Portal. Still, in this case she was on Black Mesa's side, and that was important. Right? Right.

Tate rolled her shoulders underneath the hideous blue-and-purple argyle sweater, brown hair slipping into her eyes from the motion. She stooped in front of the computer again, trying to angle a shot with her crowbar just right when a voice interrupted. The blow angled wide off a metal barrel, and with full intention of bitching someone out she wheeled around in her seat. It was a short girl in front of one of the arcade games, looking more than a little bit antagonistic. What in the world was she--

Ugh, really? She scowled, the black expression half-hidden behind auburn bangs. "Yes, I'm well aware." As if the graphics didn't bother her, too! She'd just come from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and the Shin Megami Tensei series of games; compared to those, Half-Life was ages behind. So she couldn't exactly argue about graphics actively causing pain, and wouldn't; except for the fact that she hadn't yet beaten this game. If she didn't finish the first game, she could not play the second. It was a rule, and she refused to hesitate in informing the stranger of that fact.

"Tate," she said, the single syllable of her preferred name bitten off sharply between straight white teeth. Her expression decidedly scornful, she didn't pause for breath before continuing: "I've played and beaten Portal and Portal 2, and I would have beaten this one except I got caught up in Bioshock, which has infinite replay value compared to some of Valve's work, thank you very much. Making a strategic choice to switch to a different game and platform is not being 'out of date' by any terms."

She turned back to her game, fighting off the three headcrabs of which she had been warned. The stranger's only thanks for that was another bitten-off sentence fragment, consisting of: "And you are?"

[Mia Keystone]

Oh no she didn't. Mia's eyes sparked with indignation, as did the lighting fixture directly overhead. Turns out her control has gotten a bit sloppy with her three months of power suppression. "How do you consider three endings, two with the exact same cut scene and voice over better replay value? she demanded. "And if you're so worried about playing games in order, which I kind of get, how the hell did it take you so long to play Half Life if you've already gone ahead with Portal? It was released with add ons for Half Life two! Massive flaw in logic there."

Seriously though, the game was bugging her out, as well as bugging, and without asking Mia touched the laptop and concentrated. By god, the graphic sequence was so out of whack.... and while she couldn't exactly bring it up to a Portal level she could at least sharpen the textures, not to mention smoothing down Gordon's angular head. It reminded her of the android in Red Dwarf and not in a good way.

The game paused for a moment as she quickly sorted through and changed the code, then stuttered back into existence. "And sure, the three endings is more than Valve did, but once you either chose to eat the little sisters or not, the game plays exactly the same!"

Mia loved Bioshock. It was a terrific game, but that was not the point here, was it. "I'm Mia," she said just as shortly. "And you're new, and you somehow managed to get through the late nineties without playing Half-Life which is frankly not a good thing."