Dante had wanted to start earlier. Awake at 10 a.m., he inhaled a bowl of cold macaroni & cheese and a strip of beef jerky (great breakfast, huh?). Then he invited Kenta over. He called Saori's house, but she was still asleep. One hour passed, then two. Then five. Saori was still asleep.
"You might think she would make an exception. She did want to play this game," Kenta said.
"What, Saori get up in the daytime? Blasphemy!" Dante said, wagging his finger. "But I expect we'll see her in half an hour or so."
His prediction held true, and the three soon reconvened in the basement. They sat in the same places as the day before.
Kenta put the CD into the drive. Nothing happened.
"I'll do it, incompetent one," Saori said. She opened My Computer, found the CD drive, and double clicked on the Thief icon.
A message appeared: You have 0M of free disk space. Thief requires 35M. Thief cannot run.
"What the fudge?" Dante said.
"It would appear that we have not adequate disk space," Kenta said.
"Gee, thanks. I can read, you know. But why isn't it working today?"
"What did you do to it after we left?" Saori asked.
"Nothing!" His voice was high-pitched.
"You squeal like a little girl."
"That I do."
"Which can partially be explained by the presence of your hands around his neck," Kenta said.
"Oh mighty computer guru, I axed you a question," Dante said.
"I'll axe you if you keep acting like a moron," Saori said.
Kenta had been thinking about the problem. "Perhaps something was corrupted. We could try reinstalling it."
And they did. It seemed to work; the game started flawlessly.
"Aw, $@*#! We lost the saved game," Saori said.
"It is of no concern," Kenta said. "We had not made significant progress."
Which was true. But it wasn't such a good idea to remind the game-obsessed Saori of that fact. She vented her anger by flinging an abandoned coffee mug into a wall, shattering it into ceramic confetti.
"She must be in a good mood," Dante whispered to Kenta, "otherwise that would have been one of us."
"I heard that!"
"Heh heh. Nice Saori…"
"Play now!"
"Yes ma'am…um, sir?"
A rumbling growl came from Saori's throat.
"It is advisable that you desist this antagonistic course of action," Kenta said.
"Methinks you have a point."
They resumed playing in an unorganized fashion. Far from a coordinated team were our intrepid heroes. Saori was, as usual, at the forefront of the catastrophes that befell them. The instinct that served her well in her other games—slay everything that moved—was, to say the least, not so successful here. They had to restart the level on the easy setting to accommodate her death-fetish.
Death was what they got, all right. It was, alas, Garrett's death. Several times. Or maybe it was more like a dozen times. After one of these encounters, Dante said to Saori, "Just an idea, but this might be easier if you weren't trying to butcher five guards all at once. With the blackjack. With your eyes closed." He received a glare and a casual slap upside the head for his insubordination.
Kenta said, "If either of you possess any aspirations whatsoever of success concerning this leisurely activity, I counsel the immediate termination of this irrelevant feuding."
"Ah, the voice of wisdom," Dante said. "I humble myself before you, logic-master."
"Why can't you talk like a normal person?" Saori asked.
Kenta didn't answer; he had acquired a sudden fascination with his fingernails.
And that was just Saori's contribution to the madness. Dante and Kenta were far from experts in the learning-which-keys-do-what department. For example, Dante kept getting the arrows mixed up. They soon learned that water arrows, while blue and shiny, were far from lethal weapons. Instead of impaling, they would give guards a well-needed bath. Dante's reaction to such accidents was to say, "Mmm…shiny," with that dopey expression of his.
Kenta discovered that the enemy AI was unreliable at best. Jumping around the manor with a guard in hot pursuit (following one of the aforementioned water arrow incidents), he had accidentally fallen into the pool. The guard abruptly and completely lost sight of Garrett, eventually abandoning the chase. The same freak blindness occurred when he made Garrett jump onto a table. "Remarkable," he said, watching the guard look right at Garrett and fail to see him.
"Stupid AI," Saori said.
"My sentiments exactly," Dante said, amused. Only Saori could be upset by the artificial intelligence of a drunken guard in a bundled computer game.
"How dare you share my sentiments? Get your own freakin' sentiments!"
"Um…'kay."
And so on and so forth. Two hours after they began, they were almost halfway through the level. Still the first level, mind you.
The game raged on to midnight without a break. The torturous and zombie-riddled second level was at hand. The house was utterly silent, making the haunting music even more pervading. Their faces were bathed in the light from the monitor, giving their skin an unnatural white glow. The thin carpet could not keep their feet from numbing, yet they played on. They might not have had talent, but, gosh darn it, they had stamina.
Two of them did, anyway. Kenta was curled up into a ball on the sofa, fast asleep. It was just as well; he wasn't very partial to zombies. Saori had pounced on the opportunity to assume his maneuvering responsibilities.
"He looks like a big kitty when he's sleeping," Dante said. "Meow."
"You're sick," Saori said, dispatching a horde of the undead.
"It was just an observation."
"Why do you even think about things like that?"
"I get weird when it's past my bedtime."
"You still have a bedtime? How old are you now, five?"
"I actually like to sleep during the night, unlike some people I know. Not all of us can live on vampire time."
"Weakling. Get out the holy water."
"All out, boss."
Saori analyzed their position. Garrett was surrounded by an assortment of zombies and rabid spiders. They were out of arrows and, now, holy water. "Hmm. That's bad."
"Nomination for Understatement of the Year, anyone?"
"Shut up, I'm trying to think!"
"If we set our phasers to frag—"
"It's run like hell time!" she said, and proceeded to fling Garrett through the underground levels in a haphazard fashion, leaving the rotting corpses to their strip poker or whatever it was that zombies did in their spare time.
By the time they finished the level, Dante was struggling to keep his eyes open, and even Queen of the Night Saori felt the tug of fatigue. A slight tug. A tug with the strength of a dead chipmunk. The temperature had dropped sharply, their skin acquiring the chill only possible from hours in a basement or five minutes naked in the Arctic. Dante opened the big freezer to thaw himself out a bit. When his teeth stopped chattering he turned around to see Saori stretching out on one of the unoccupied couches. "Um, what are you doing?"
"If I sleep here it saves on travel time. I won't have to walk over here tomorrow."
"Yeah, you live all of a block away. Aren't you even going to turn the computer off?"
"You do it, slave."
"Okay, but only cuz you asked me nicely."
Saori was asleep by the time he collapsed on a polyester loveseat. A second later, so was he.
Author's Notes:
Many thanksies for the reviewsies, fellow manfools.
Chapter 4 may be slow in coming, because I have humor block. I'm writing about donuts, but they're not funny donuts, dang it. The story is spiraling into a pit of gravity (seriousness) by a force as inexorable as…um, gravity (force causing weight). See? That last sentence is exactly what I'm talking about. Pity the poor author (that's me, folks) and Sioned136 (the poor author's humor beta).
I'm a big Star Trek fan, in case you couldn't tell by all the allusions. Because I have nothing better to do, I will now identify who belongs to what species. Kenta is Vulcan, Saori may be a Klingon, and Dante is…uhhh, Ferengi. I don't know, leave me alone!
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