John's phone buzzed with a text from Linda as he made his way up the front steps to her family's house.
Door is open.
Curious, and more than a bit nervous, he stepped into the house without knocking. He got along well with his girlfriend's family, but her little brothers had a tendency to ambush him whenever he came by. He had learned – through painful experience – not to trust anything to be entirely innocuous in that house.
Just inside the door he found a folding table with a selection of Nerf guns on it. Beside the guns was a piece of paper which bore the message, Choose carefully - winner picks the movie.
John deliberated his options. He had been trying to get Linda to watch The Edge of Tomorrow with him for a while now. His choice of weaponry would be crucial to his chances of survival. Furthermore, he didn't know if he could take another nature documentary, and that was all Linda ever seemed to pick.
Finally he picked up the gun he'd nicknamed "Old Faithful" – a Maverick Rev-6. It was smaller than most of the others, but he considered himself a crack shot with it. It didn't hurt that the six-chamber revolver also allowed him to shoot faster than many of the bigger guns, either.
Cautiously, John began picking his way through the house. Linda's brothers should be at football practice this time of night, so odds were decent that he was safe from them. He couldn't always count her parents out of the game, but the chances of that were a lot lower.
That meant that he should only be dealing with Linda - and that was dangerous enough. She was more than deadly with any of the guns at her disposal. He meticulously searched the kitchen first - once she had gotten him by hiding inside the kitchen cupboard and shooting him in the back as he walked back out.
John went about the first two floors, carefully scanning through every possible spot she could be hiding. He skipped Linda's bedroom. That room was very off-limits - he'd found that out the hard way. He was just getting ready to start down the stairs to the basement when he paused.
He'd heard something.
Casually, he turned back toward the living room. As he left the kitchen, he scanned the direction the noise came from in his peripheries.
The pantry door was ajar.
He crept back toward the pantry as silently as possible, keeping his blaster trained on the slightly opened door. By some stroke of luck, he made it all the way across the floor without making a sound. He whipped the door open with a flourish and fired three darts into the pantry without even aiming.
When he flicked the light switch, he found the small room empty.
John's stomach dropped. He spun around, planning to dive behind the island in the center of the kitchen for cover. Then he heard the tell-tale thwang of a Nerf sniper's spring releasing its payload.
A moment later, he felt the suction end of a dart affix itself to his forehead.
John sighed tiredly and dropped his blaster onto the kitchen counter as Linda bounded up from the darkness shrouding the basement steps, a wide smile plastered to her face.
"I have Planet Earth loaded up on the TV downstairs," she said, first pulling on the dart until it separated from his forehead with a pop, then pressing a soft kiss to his cheek. "Heat up some popcorn for us and meet me down there."
He considered being annoyed that she had outsmarted him - again. But as he watched Linda rest her LongStrike sniper on her shoulder and happily bounce her way back downstairs he realized that it was no use. With a grin and a shake of his head, he reached for the microwaveable popcorn and resigned himself to another evening playing third wheel to his girlfriend and Sir David Attenborough.