By David C. Daoust
The smoke curled slowly from Chance’s mouth as he relaxed in his chair. After a moment he slowly evacuated the rest from his lungs. The long plume of thick smoke formed into a cloud over head.
This was definitely Chance’s day.
He sat there chill, controller still in hand, as his thumb held down the ‘forward’ button.
His trip back to home-base was taking longer than expected, glancing up at his mini-map, in the upper far corner of his screen, he knew he was close, but he’d been close for a while now. He took another pull of the hand rolled cigarette in his other hand.
Suddenly he noticed a pair of blips appear on the very same mini-map he was just looking at. Finally! Someone showed up to witness his monstrosity.
Chance tossed the cigarette in an ashtray on the table next to him, and flipped on his mic. His massive grin split his face as he pinged the incoming players. A moment after the ping, the names popped up next to their blip on the mini-map; ‘Penn’ and ‘Colbert’.
They weren’t Chances favorite people, or anyone’s really– not after Penn trolled the shit out of everyone during the first big Raid. But who it was exactly, was moot.. He was sure they would get the word out. Chance the Splicer would have a swarm of raiders, come to check out what he was up to.
“Hey, hey!” Chance, opened a channel and spoke into his mic, “Check out my beast!”
“Chance!” Penn, whose husky old voice could be heard through his speakers, said “You need to stop… that’s my house!”
Chance laughed into the Mic. He had heard this same thing the other night, when the troll was messing with everyone else. He shook his head and rolled his eyes.
“Well, looks like your ‘house’ is going for a little ride!” Chance suddenly spun the beast around in circles, the creatures massive legs hauled the body round and round, in a giant doughnut track.
“Whoah!” the other male voice of Colbert could be heard, reacting to the action, “I can’t believe it! That is our house!”
“Ever seen a house do this?” Chance asked as he accelerated, and changed the track to a figure eight. A load thud could be heard from the other side of the channel.
“Grace, are you okay?” Colbert said through the mic, “Chance you need to stop- you just knocked my sister off the workbench!”
“I’m okay…” Penn could be heard, in answer.
“Man, you guys are high or something…” Chance said from behind bloodshot eyes, “What the hell are you guys even talking about?”
“You need to pullover!” Colbert insisted, as the flying spidermecha appeared on Chance’s Farwall. He had to assume in some feeble attempt to stop him.
“Whatever, I’ll stop when I get to base!” Chance said, getting irritated with the situation. He turned slightly to go around the mech, and accelerated again. “I’m almost there.”
“You passed it up a ways back!” Penn informed, as both spidermechs started dogging him.
Chase was like, ‘what?’ as he checked the mini-map again.
His blip was kind of hovering over the mark.
“No, I’m almost there…” as Chance said this he realized he had the mini-map zoomed out so far, that his blip seriously overlapped the size of the home-base mark. ‘Shit,’ he said to himself as he clicked to change the ‘zoom’ setting.
“Haha,” Chance laughed out loud as he realized they were right. He had gone clear past it. He was nowhere near where he thought he was, “You’re right! I’ll just head back this way…” a sentence that followed him recklessly changing his direction again, at break neck speeds. He could hear a racket of tumbling noises from over the other player’s mics.
“Chance, stop,” Colbert insisted again, “Someone is going to get hurt!”
“Oh relax,” Chance felt his face flush with their insistence, “What are you guys even talking about?”
Straightening out the beast and resetting his course to line up with the home-base mark, he dropped the speed a bit, but held down the forward button all the same as he retrieved his cigarette from the ashtray. They were really killing his fun; he wished someone else would have found him first.
“That’s our home, Chance,” Penn spoke again, “You need to just stop what you’re doing, my family is in there.”
Man, these guys were so high. Chance did not know what to think.
Discussion ¬