Hey people! This is another stupid one shot. Totally pointless and without plot. I just couldn't help myself though! I had to post it, I was in such a weird mood. Anyways, sorry about the total randomness and slight out-of-character... ness that pervades this story. Hope you guys enjoy it anyways.
Disclaimer: I do not own the Cal Leandros series, it is property of Rob Thurman
Disclaimer 2: The author is not responsible for dropping IQ points as a result of reading this story... you've been warned ;)
GAMER:
Cal POV
I grumbled as I was attempting to clean the tub. Nik and I had just gotten off a job and the tub was full of goop. Seriously, goop. There was no better word for it. I was never going to eat Jell-O again, swear.
"Damn it Nik, this stuff is never going to go down the drain!" I whined again.
"Then you'll just have to unstop the drain. Again. Maybe next time you'll be more careful." He called back with absolutely no sympathy for my predicament. He was getting revenge on me for absolutely nothing. Okay, so I may have gated right into the middle of a battle and I might have gone forward without group consensus, but seriously what was the big deal? We had to act at some point. Or so went the theory at least. I sent the wall another vicious glare hoping he could feel it through the plaster as the disgusting, black, viscous Jell-O like innards once again got stuck in the drain.
This was going to be a long day. Absolutely not how I was planning on spending my day off. I grumbled as I tried to force the last bit of the strange gelatin like substance down the drain. I had about as much success as I had been having for the past half hour.
"Nik, do people ever tell you that you are one evil son of a bitch!" I yelled across the apartment. Which really wasn't that much of a challenge seeing he couldn't really get too far from me with the square footage (and by that I mean square foot, singular) that composed our apartment.
"If by people you mean you, then yes. Quite frequently." He called back calmly, but I detected a bit of amusement in his voice. Bastard.
Another half hour later I was debating shooting a hole in the tub to see if I could get the goop down faster with an extra hole. I was weighing the pros and cons: get out of cleaning early versus drenching the people below us in black goop and Nik making me run until my feet were rubbed off. Hmmm… choices, choices. I had been kneeling here so damn long that I was starting to see the merits of the idea.
Then the apartment door banged open.
That would be Goodfellow, who my brother, despite usually having excellent judgment, had given a key. I groaned again.
"Hello kiddies your favorite uncle Robin is here!" He called in much too good a mood in my opinion. The cheerfulness put him on my shit list right off the bat. That and the fact that he was Goodfellow. Did I need another excuse?
"Great!" I called back. "I have a job for you." I saw a dim ray of hope in the form of Goodfellow getting shunted into doing my work.
"Sorry, I have urgent business to attend to. Come and look at what I confiscated at work today." Hope, who needed it? Despite being a grumpy bastard I was curious enough to pull off the gloves Nik had made me wear (to avoid getting burns from the goop) and approached Goodfellow cautiously. I say cautiously because you never want to trust anything Goodfellow brings you, I learned that the hard way with a certain "birthday present" he had given me before. I suppressed a shudder and pushed the memory away. If only I could block it out as thoroughly as I blocked out my two year vacation to Tumulus, I was sure that both cases were at least equally traumatic.
Nik had walked over too and peered into the box that Goodfellow had wrapped carefully in one arm.
"What is it?" He asked an eyebrow shifting in curiosity. I shit you not, an eyebrow moved. Alert the presses ladies and gentlemen. Goodfellow, clearly loving the suspense, backed away and made sure he had both of our full attention.
"Gentlemen and not so gentle other things-" Here he was cut off with a pillow to the face. He turned to glare at me and I gave him a jaunty little wave. What did he expect? After that introduction I had to live up to my hype right?
Nik's elbow buried in my side suggested differently and I glared at him with the injustice of it all. I felt much better a second later when he proceeded to throw his pillow at Goodfellow with much more force than I had and sent him a steely glare. Niko, the only guy ever to kill someone during a pillow fight. I'd totally believe it. He did not appreciate references to my not-so-human nature, even now. I on the other hand didn't really mind a little prodding from Goodfellow, there's only so long you can get offended by the truth before you just have to accept it. I glanced at Nik's face again, well… maybe not.
"Well, if this is the welcome I get-" Goodfellow said indignantly puffing up like a peacock.
"Oh get on with it you wind bag I don't have a lifetime to waste here." I interrupted what was sure to be another of Goodfellow's 'I'm underappreciated boo hoo speeches'.
He sent me a scathing look and I briefly wondered if pucks could read minds and thought as strongly as I could 'Robin Goodfellow has a tiny prick'. He wasn't looking at me and squawking in outrage so I trashed the idea. Halle-fucking-lujah, it would be a tragedy if a manipulative son of a bitch like him could read minds. I suppressed another shudder.
"Anyways, what I have here is the triumph of human kind. This is the item that I have been waiting millennia to be invented. It's been said that this object, this glorious tool, is the crowning achievement of humanity and worth all the stink they create. It has been said-"
"What the hell is it already." I growled already sick of Goodfellow. I contemplated going back to clean the bathroom from the 'evil black goop from hell' (yes, that is a technical term) but ended up picking the, slightly, lesser of two evils… very, very, slightly lesser.
Goodfellow then reached into the brown box he was holding and pulled out a shinning white box.
"So you mean to tell me, in that box was another box?" I said incredulously.
"Rectangular prism." Niko corrected, probably just to annoy me. I rolled my eyes and turned my attention back to Goodfellow.
"So you mean to tell me in that box was a rectangular prism?" I repeated dully mostly because I liked to sass Nik.
"Heathens! Philistines!" Goodfellow said in a loud exasperated voice. "What you see here is a gift to the world, common people know it as the Wii gaming system." He said, clearly upset that neither Nik nor I were really much impressed with his rectangular prism.
"Ohhh." I said sarcastically. "If it's all the same to you I hear some black goop calling my name." I got up but paused momentarily at the thought that it didn't seem too unlikely for that mysterious black Jell-O to start calling my name.
"Oh so you're scared then." Goodfellow challenged with one of his forever moving eyebrows winged up and a smirk on his face.
"You wouldn't say that if you saw what was waiting for me in there." I said jerking a thumb in the direction of the bathroom slightly offended by the idea that I was anything less than a brave warrior for continuing to wage war on the black goop. Seriously, that was some scary shit.
"Are you actually volunteering to clean?" Nik asked, so surprised that you could actually almost tell.
"You're right. What the hell was I thinking?" I said snapping out of it and shaking my head. "So you want play Goodfellow? Bring it on old man." I beckoned him matrix style by curling my fingers towards me.
"And there he is, to think I was almost worried." Nik said sarcastically.
Goodfellow, clearly affronted at being called an old man. Glared once again at me before setting down the game system and hooking it up to our dinosaur of a television.
"So when I confiscated the system, for the good of the company of course, it already had a game in it. It's called Super Smash Bros." He said popping in the disk.
"That sounds like foreshadowing to me. Scared Nik?" I tried to elbow him but he caught it and pinched the nerve. I yelped at rubbed the abused spot.
"Yes, it rather does sound like foreshadowing, but you are reading the signs wrong grasshopper, if you think it means you are going to win." He smirked at me before reaching for one of the controllers that Goodfellow so kindly confiscated for the good of his used car lot. What a guy. Oh well, I sure as hell wasn't going to complain.
"Okay, I was examining this at the office, to ensure that it wasn't a potential terrorist threat," I snorted loudly. "-and figured out how to start the game. Let's see…" He trailed off his head tilted in concentration as he clicked the appropriate buttons first on the rectangular prism known as a Wii and then on his controller.
"Ah, here we go." The game fired up and the intro credits soared across the screen along with a bit of over dramatic music. Awesome. I had never played on a game system before, neither had Nik. We both lived most of our lives in the boonies so far away from real civilization we were lucky to even get electricity. Plus Sophia was so cheap we were lucky if our trailer had anything other than booze and broken dishware in it.
Ah, good old Sophia.
Robin, after much cussing (that would have done said mother proud) and aggravated clicking, managed to select what 'items' we were going to use and how many lives we all got. Then the character screen popped up.
"I totally call being the elf." I laughed and attempted to maneuver my little white hand thing-y over to the character with the pointy ears and hat. Unfortunately, this was easier said than done. I frowned down at the weird joy/pogo stick thing.
"No way. The one with the long blonde hair and sword is me." Nik said as he too tried to control his little digital hand, at the moment he wasn't having a better time of it than I was.
"Yeah, long blonde hair, I would have thought you would have picked Peach." I grinned over at him triumphantly as I managed to select the elf, whose name I noticed was Link.
"Besides, you gotta admit, I have prior claim in all things elf." I said with what I thought was inescapable logic.
"You tried that with the Keebler fudge cookies too, remember where that got you?" He said cocking a blond eyebrow while a smile tugged at the corner of his lips. I winced as I remembered.
"That was one time!" I growled back as Niko searched for another character. He settled on another sword wielder named Roy.
"It would have been perfect if you had been Marth, Cal. I mean look at that emo black hair. It's an exact fit." I kicked Goodfellow's foot and nodded towards the screen.
"Pick a damn character already, I'm not getting any younger." Goodfellow's white digital hand moved across the screen and selected a character.
"It would be impossible for you to get any younger you fetus. Now my character is completely appropriate." He said with a wicked grin. I glanced up and noticed that he had selected a character that looked like a fox. I glanced down at its name to see that it was, extremely cleverly, named fox. I snorted. Damn that really was a perfect fit.
"A perfect fit." Niko said with a slight smile in his voice. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and once again wondered if we had some type of weird psychic connection.
"Quit looking at me like that. We do not have a psychic connection, as I have told you a million times before." Niko said knowing I was looking at him without even glancing at me. Man, that was fucking weird. I shuddered and then turned back to the game. Goodfellow had selected a big temple level. It looked like we were fighting on a big crumbling castle in the sky. The game began counting down and I gripped my controller tightly. I was determined to kick their asses, at this point even doing it in this weird video game virtual reality would be satisfying.
"Are you ready lose?" Goodfellow nudged me with his shoulder.
"In your dreams." I snorted, "Elves are kick ass-" I would know "-and there is no way Link is going to be beaten by a fox." I jiggled my controller and found out how to walk. Now I needed to figure out how to fight. I commenced my clicking of random buttons in hope that something would work out, much like my real life fighting style.
"Please, I can kick your ass in real life and I can kick it in a game too. Just you wait." He said confidently, then again he did everything confidently. Pompous bastard.
"If you're so confident, how about a bet. Whoever loses has to finish cleaning the goop out of the bathtub." I said slyly. After all, it was a great deal for me, I would have to clean it anyways.
"You're on." Goodfellow gave me a vicious grin. Stupid bastard. I turned back to the screen.
"Hey!"
While I had been arguing with Goodfellow, Niko had already mastered the controls and was hitting my elf guy across the screen. I pressed more buttons wildly and managed to kick the sword wielding ginger back before promptly walking off the edge.
"Damn it!" I yelled scowling at the game. My character appeared back on the top with another life. I gave a loud humph. It this were a real elf he could have just gated back to the level. Then again if this were a real elf it wouldn't be wearing tights and a pointy hat… or be named Link.
I finally managed to get the hang of the game and the battle waged on for a while with Goodfellow and I shouting obscenities and Niko just smirking at the TV screen, calm as you please. The bastard. At some point he hit me with a giant hammer that blew me off the level, playing cheerful music all the while. How annoying was that? I laughed as Goodfellow's fox character walked over a land mine and flew off the screen.
"Na, na, na, na. Na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey goodbye." I sung cheerfully as he glared hatefully in my direction.
"Hey don't hate the player hate the game." I said grinning at him, thoroughly enjoying throwing one of the ridiculous phrases he told us back in his face. Ah, justice, she was beautiful if it wasn't you getting smacked by the mallet of judgment. I grinned at the screen, just beautiful.
Eventually I died off first and then it was just Goodfellow versus Niko.
"Bring it on pup." Goodfellow called enthusiastically. Then, sword drawn, Niko's crazy ginger jumped over to Goodfellow's fox and they dueled. Goodfellow ended up losing terribly and the screen went black before another screen popped up proclaiming Niko the winner while my character, the loser, sulked in the background.
"Wow, just like real life." Goodfellow proclaimed, enjoying the fact that he had at least beaten me. I scowled back at him and opened my mouth- no doubt to say something both stupid and inflammatory- when Niko cut me off.
"Not even in virtual reality little brother." Niko reached over and messed my hair over my face while I debated the pros and cons of biting his hand. In the end I chose life.
Worst decision ever.
I turned my scowl on him and pushed his hand off my head.
"Well, I've got some poisonous goop to clean, so if you all don't mind." I drawled sarcastically as I walked back over to the bathroom. I groaned loudly when I saw that not only had the mess not gone down the drain, but it appeared to have multiplied while I wasn't looking. I snapped the gloves back on my hands and knelt beside the tub.
Man, I was never going to be able to beat Nik at anything. I scowled at the black Jell-O. Well, at least I didn't actually have to wear pointed hats and tights. I sighed, yeah just call me mister bright side.
I went back to my scrubbing and plunging and decided that I hated days off... and rectangular prisms.
Quite possibly the dumbest thing you have ever read right?
Well, If it is possible, uncross your eyes and click on the little button to tell me what you think. Hope you guys liked it despite the flaming stupidity and utter pointlessness of it. My muse is out of control... do they make a pill for that?
Until next time!
-Traveler