Nico Summerby (high_jinks) wrote in theprofslounge, @ 2009-05-24 23:43:00 |
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"The thing about fortune cookies, though," Nico was saying as he fumbled the plastic wrapper in his hands to sort out where it would open from without it stretching and remaining decidedly intact as plastic wrappers were keen on doing. Devious sort of creatures they were, he never quite got the trick to opening them up fuss-free. "I really don't like them. I just deal with them." He squinted his eyes, holding the wrapper away from his person, and pulling away at the seam, where trial and error supported as the best place to tear. Usually Charity snagged it away from him before he took someone's eye out, but the idea of the evening was that it was Emily in his company, and he sorely wanted to prove himself man enough to open his own cookie up. "You know," Nico continued, "because someone decided to stick a fortune inside, and there's a cookie in the way before you can get to it, and -- Ha!" The noise was a small pop, but at least there were no casualties aside from the cookie itself being split into two on the fold. Extracting slip of paper inside, he looked up to Emily briefly, rolling his shoulders and getting into the right state of mind and pose that reading one's fortune might require. "'This is really a lovely day. Congratulations!'" he read. Nico pulled a frown. "...All right, how's that even a fortune?" Emily's nose wrinkled like a puzzled bunny. "Maybe it's talking about some future day?" she suggested, but promptly shook her head. "No, that's nonsense. I'm sorry. Your fortune is ridiculous." She'd gotten the plastic off of her cookie with considerably less fuss than Nico had gone through. She wouldn't get into the process of shredding the plastic into tiny strips and slivers until after she'd eaten the cookie. She took some care to break the cookie precisely in the middle, and ate a bite before having a look at the fortune. Hers wasn't much better. "You will get some new clothes," she read aloud, then passed it over to Nico to prove that it was indeed what the slip of paper said. "I suppose I will one day, and therefore it's accurate, but that's a bit like predicting that I'm going to breathe air and eat breakfast in the future." Reaching over to grab the slip, Nico took a moment to verify, nodding as it seemed like a good thing to be doing that precise moment. "True, and at least it predicted something. Mine's stuck on present tense," he replied, holding up his own fortune to scrutinise once more, and flipping it over to see if there was any more wisdom that mass produced Chinese cookies could offer. "Oh, hey. Not a complete loss. Huang gua means 'cucumber'. Aaaand..." Turning over Emily's fortune revealed a second tidbit. "Waw xung dee means 'my brother'. Well, I feel smarter for knowing it. Might come into use one day," Nico finished as he placed both scraps on the table. "And I don't want to even think how that sort of conversation would be going if I ever had to use both," he added as an afterthought. "You can have my cookie if you want. I'm sorta only in it for the fortunes." "Excellent," Emily declared, snapping up the cookie. "As I actually like them. You know, I've always thought it would be fun to make misfortune cookies," she went on after taking a bite. "Write lots of really awful fortunes to put in them, like 'Your wife is cheating on you with your best mate" or "you will go completely to pieces any day now." It'd be hilarious." No one had ever accused Emily Simon of having a conventional sense of humor. She was doing away with the cookies very efficiently, snapping bits off at the folds and then biting. That made an excellent stalling tactic to prevent her from beginning to shred the plastic. Nico raised a brow as he plonked both elbows on the table and propped his head up on the makeshift platform of his hands. Sure, his mother had yelled at him a million times for doing that, but he had tried a whole two hours to break the habit and never did. That had to count for something. "Flip it over and learn a new way to swear at other people in Chinese, huh?" he added. "Could work. I want in if you go to market, by the way. I've been trying to find a way to quit my job and get to play video games all day without going broke, and so far I only got as far as winning the lottery. Which I don't even play. Flawed idea, I grant you. I'm working out the kinks, though." "It is difficult to win a lottery you don't play," Emily admitted thoughtfully. "Someone would have to be sneakily buying tickets for you - someone who is so good-natured that he or she would actually give you the money if you won on the ticket he or she bought for you." Abruptly she wrinkled her nose. "Does it ever bother you that we don't have a third-person singular pronoun that's gender-inclusive rather than gender-neutral?" she asked, brightly curious. "See, I just went through all that he-or-she nonsense because my feminist sensibilities object to simply using "he" for the third person singular, but every time I try to just be like everyone else and use "they" I suddenly have a miniature version of my mother shouting about pronoun-antecedent agreement. And "it" is right out because it always makes it sound like I'm talking about a chair or a piggy-bank or something." "I --" Huh. Did it bother him? He never really sat down, thought it out, and came away from the whole situation feeling bothered. Then again, he never really sat down in the first place, and without passing that first step, of course he couldn't be bothered. So, now that he was sitting down and thinking about it... "Well, no. It doesn't really get to me. I mean -- I'm good with 'they'." Nico shrugged, which was actually somewhat difficult given that his upper body was already most of the way there. "But I'm good at blocking out miniature visions of shouting mothers, anyway. There's one probably yelling at me about elbows on the table, but I've built up a resistance to it. Besides, I've got a sister that replaces my mother, and she's usually actually with me. And she punches me in the arm. Hard to ignore that. She hits hard." "Must be an older sister," Emily laughed. "I do that same sort of thing to my younger sister, and I get the same from my older brother. It's like there's a chain of who you get to lord it over. How much of an age difference is there between you?" It was funny how they'd bounced easily back and forth between ordinary conversation and the usual getting-to-know-you topics. Emily had found the transitions unusually comfortable. While she was in the habit of shifting conversations without a clutch, most people weren't. Nico, however, seemed to roll right along without a bit of trouble. There hadn't been any strange looks or awkward silences...really, she was beginning to have faith that there would be a Date 3. "Oh, and she swings and misses!" Edging himself back into his seat and straightening up, Nico crossed his arms. The expression he fixed Emily with was best classified as mock-serious, though a grin was nudging it more into whatever category one might fall in if someone had just dumped a handful of ice down one's shirt -- minus the squirming that usually followed that, of course. He'd been finding it awfully hard to play the straight man in Emily's company, anyway. It was hard to pin why, but maybe there was something about the way she'd blurt out any idea that came to her mind without any apparent concern that he'd squint one eye at her and look generally lost about what turn the conversation had taken. She didn't seem to want to talk about her collection of shoes, either. God knew Nico Summerby was not a man to talk about shoes. And, sure, back around to the point at hand: maybe by rights Nico didn't have any real advantage over his twin sister because he'd been born first, but fact was that he had been born first. It was something he often reminded Charity of, very much like how she was also shorter than him. Brothers were obligated to point out obvious things like that, after all. "Bad luck, Emily. She's younger by six whole minutes." "Twins!" Emily sighed dramatically. "It didn't even occur to me to guess that. As a middle child, I tend to assume everyone must be older or younger and therefore defined by it. Do you argue more or less by virtue of being the exact same age?" "I argue by virtue of being six minutes older." Nico splayed his hands out in front of him, the international signal for something profound about to be said, or else mildly amusing if it missed the intended target. "See -- because in those six minutes I could've done something really impressive, right? Advancement in quantum physics, uhm... win a Nobel Peace Prize. Set a world record for something that only takes six minutes. I don't know anything off the top of my head." Just to be certain of that, he waited a few ticks before shrugging. It was a good try. "Nope. Anyway, I haven't, but. I could've. I say six minutes definitely counts." Point made, he retracted his hands and busied them with folding the paper fortunes up into smaller squares. It wasn't nerves, merely a habit of fidgeting. "Middle child?" Emily nodded. "Perfect older brother Timothy serves to make me look bad, while wild younger sister Caroline makes me look boring," she cheerfully replied. She'd begun shredding the plastic wrap from the cookies now, carefully tearing from the top seam and trying to keep her line of severance parallel to the straight edge of the wrapper. That required too much attention, though, so instead she just started merrily tearing with no thought to geometry. She was a fidgeter as well, a fact she'd long ago made peace with. She simply had too much energy for sitting still. "Really, I can't win either way...that, or I always win, depending on how you look at it," she went on. "Sometimes it means I get away with murder because no one's expecting me to do anything especially awful or brilliant." "Lucky you. Best my sis and I could do was try to confuse our parents until they gave up." He chewed the inside of his lip as he ran through a few memories. "It mostly worked, too. Well. Until we both got sent to our rooms," he amended after a pause. "I'm just hung up on one thing: must've been hell figuring out who got the second controller before Nintendo 64 came out," Nico replied, with what might've been some tone of concern. No one liked to be the third person in a two-controller party, not that it was the worst of childhood fears, but it definitely spanked of No Fun. "Alas, Caroline has absolutely no interest whatsoever in video games of any kind," Emily explained. "About the time she got lost in the original Zelda's endless forest and couldn't beat Level 7 on Mario 3, she gave up for good. She just doesn't have the attention span for most games. The best we can get out of her is an occasional round of Smash Brothers. The arguments usually erupted because we wanted to play games and Caroline wanted to feed her television addiction. We only had one telly when we were kids," she explained, because she'd found that was slightly unusual. "Oh, wait -- wait, wait, wait. Don't tell me. It's... east, north, west, south, and then..." Nico furrowed his brows, digging deep into his memory banks for the section devoted to the Zelda series. He snapped the moment it clicked into place. "West again for the Lost Woods. Takes you right out." After some consideration that the average sort of person wouldn't know that sequence by writ, he quickly added, "Which I know only because I was playing just the other day. Couldn't part ways with my Nintendo even after the next generation of consoles came out." It wasn't a full lie. Maybe a partial, but not -- Nico cleared his throat. "Smash Bros. Melee?" he asked brightly. "Or Brawl?" "Depends on where we are," Emily answered, still grinning at his recitation of the path out of the Lost Woods. That was right up there with being able to reel off the old Up Down Up Down Left Right Left Right A B Select Start. "Here we play Brawl, because I have a Wii," she went on. "At Tim's we play Melee, because he still hasn't upgraded from the GameCube yet. Tim plays Ganondorf, I take Star Fox or Captain Falcon, and Caroline is always Kirby because he's hard to knock off the stage." It didn't take Nico a second thought to know he ought to be getting on his feet. "Say no more. You are on," he told her, offering a hand if only because it would hurry things along from the table to wherever she kept her telly. "Long as I get Samus, naturally." Emily took his hand, fairly beaming as she hopped up out of her seat. Cleaning up the Chinese takeaway could wait - Super Smash Brothers was obviously more important at the moment. "Samus is all yours," she graciously allowed. "Except that at some point we really have to test our skill with random stage, random character. And just so you know, house rules state that the hammer is cheap so we don't use it." "Agreed," Nico returned, turning their clasped fingers into a quick handshake. "Not that I need the hammer to take you down," he added with a wry grin. "Lead on to the Wii, MacDuff." "Oooooo, talking shite already, are we?" Emily's eyebrows arched in a show of being impressed by this bold move. She wasn't really, but she was certainly amused. She definitely was not offended; smack-talking was an essential component of playing Super Smash Brothers and indeed playing any player versus player game. It didn't really even matter who won in the end, or if you thought you had a prayer of really winning. Elaborate posturing was just part of the fun. "It's really going to be terribly sad when I'm forced to destroy you," she sighed. "I should warn you, my brother used to trot out my skills at this game for his friends strictly to boggle their minds. If you wanted to win, you should've suggested Soul Calibur." Oh, it was always that much better when the opposing party joined in the ceremonial pre-game trash talk. That sort of thing never went well when it was one person mouthing off, or more than two, for that matter. Here, though, conditions were right and no one had yet resorted to 'your mother'. It showed real promise. "Wait, wait." Nico stopped short, one hand out and an ear turned down as if listening intently to something. "D'you hear that? Sounds like the House of Simon already starting to crumble. No one'll blame you if you want to back out, you know." "Hah!" Emily scoffed. "I never back down from a challenge, mister. You'll have to work a lot harder than that to scare me off. Especially on Smash Brothers. I will mop the floor using your defeated tears as cleanser." They'd reached the living room by then, and Emily pushed a series of buttons to turn the television and the Wii on. A neatly arranged shelf above the TV also held an X-Box, GameCube, and PS3 along with an ancient 8-bit Nintendo. Below the TV were the considerably less neatly arranged controllers, their wires wrapped up like spaghetti. Wireless controllers were the best thing that had happened to video games in years, as far as Emily was concerned. Fifteen rounds later there weren't tears, as it went. Rather, there was Nico numbly holding his controller and staring at the screen. After a depressing first three losses, he'd called for a best of six. Then ten, at which point he'd secured a solitary victory before carrying on to lose impressively in the following few rounds. Then... well, the pattern was pretty clear by then. He looked over at Emily. "For the record... I think the buttons were jamming on my remote," he attempted, waving it in front of him as if that would prove a thing. Emily just smiled. "I tried to warn you," she reminded him. "I'm really, really good at Smash Brothers. If it helps, though, you can get your own back on racing games!" The offer was made cheerfully; while Emily could trash-talk with the best of them, she didn't have a truly competitive spirit. She liked to play, and she liked being good, but she never managed to really take victory or defeat personally. So just to make sure there were no hard feelings (not just because she wanted to, no, of course not) she leaned over to give him a conciliatory kiss on the cheek. Usually he'd have a quip at the ready, but there was a sort of bungled-up effect that small kiss had brought upon Nico's brain that for a few seconds the most he could offer was a daft grin in return. "It helps," he eventually got around to saying when he realised that he ought to get around to saying something. "Next time, then?" For without doubt there had to be a Next Time now. "I uh... hate to break it to you, but my self-imposed curfew is just about now and..." He gave her a hapless shrug, followed by a sloppy salute. "After being completely mauled for the past hour, I think I need to go patch up my pride." "But...there actually will be a next time, yeah?" She was smiling, but she was a little worried. Nico hadn't struck her as the sort of man who'd be scared off by a woman beating him (repeatedly) at a video game, but lots of guys were weird about that. Of course, if he turned out to be that type, good riddance to him...but Emily would be very disappointed if it turned out that way. "'Course there will," Nico returned with a light laugh, after placing the controller back where (memory served to remind him) it had come from. "Unless you plan on moving really far away anytime soon, or something like." He paused momentarily, arm still extended as the controller had just passed from his grip. "You're... not, are you?" Couldn't hurt to be sure because -- God -- how much would that suck to have gotten this far only for some really shoddy luck like that to upend on him now. "No!" She blinked at him, shocked that he'd think anything like that, and then laughed. "No, I'm not going anywhere. I just...I mean, you sounded like..." Emily stopped herself, her nose wrinkling with distaste. "Bah. Nevermind. I was being silly. So...yes!" She brightened up there and smiled at him again. "Any time you'd like to get together again, just give me a call. I'd love to see you again." "Oh, good." Nico fancied he was an easy sort to please like that, and whatever misunderstanding there might've been sailed a clear path out his other ear. "Next time, then. Which will actually happen because I'll call you, and..." He looked around, trying to sort out what was missing before the good night portion of the date was set into motion and there was that chance of walking out the door and promptly face-palming. "And there is a mess in the kitchen still, isn't there?" "Only a little one," Emily replied, surprised that he would be considerate enough to think of it. She had mostly forgotten about it herself. "It's mostly just a matter of putting a few boxes in the icebox. I can get it. But thank you!" She stepped toward him, though she was beginning to feel that early dating awkwardness again. Was it permissible to kiss him at this point? Was he going to kiss her? Did they have to go through an awkward hug period first? Relationships were so blasted confusing in those first few dates, before you found a rhythm to fall into. Nico nodded. It sounded like a done deal, then, and that left one last bit of business. She'd stepped toward him, and presented with the same set of questions that Emily was currently mulling over, he found himself much more at ease about pulling an oh-why-the-hell-not. Besides, it didn't seem to him like she'd take offense if he stepped the rest of the way in... "Yeah, well... thank you, too," he returned, leaning in and waiting those few heartbeats it took to find out if anything was going to come of this, or if it was going to be time to inch awkwardly backward and bolt as casually and coolly as was possible out the door. Oh good, something in Emily's brain declared happily. She mirrored his movement, leaning in and up just a little as her eyes closed. Sometime very soon after her eyes closed, she felt her lips meet his and she realized that it had worked: she was kissing him. That realization made her smile, though, which sort of ruined her ability to kiss effectively. She noticed then that her arms had looped around his neck, and that made her smile turn into a grin as she looked up at him. "I'll see you soon, then," she said, almost looking a little surprised with herself. "Count on it," Nico replied, fairly beaming back about how well that had just gone. There had been just as much receiving as there was giving in those previous few seconds unless he'd imagined it, and he rather fancied that he hadn't. All the was left, now, was to collect himself up and shove off -- except for one snag keeping him from doing so. "I... uh... I'm going to need my neck back." "Oh!" Emily blushed bright pink as she quickly took her hands from him and stepped back. "Sorry," she abashedly replied. "Got a bit carried away. Have a good night, eh?" "S'all right! You won't hear me complain about it." All the grinning, smiling, and beaming business that had been going on was making it it difficult to ignore the sting in his cheek muscles, but that was hardly worth bemoaning, either. At this rate, though, he recognised that he'd never leave unless something final-sounding -- at least for the night -- was said. "Be seeing you, then." about covered it, and damn if he couldn't help the last bit that slipped from his mouth before he did finally pry away with a loose salute (as the more common wave wasn't his style): "Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel." |