Life Hacks/Just shut up and eat your sandwich
With all the emotion floating around, you feel it would be best to let things settle and sink in . . . let the dust settle.
"Well I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm famished," you finally say, taking the sandwich and making your way to the kitchen table.
"Hold on," says Brittany, "there's soup too." She opens the microwave, and you instantly smell it, tomato soup made with milk instead of water . . . so cream of tomato soup. You'd always just thought of it as tomato soup growing up, but now you automatically make the distinction between how you were raised and how the rest of the world would perceive it.
Brittany proceeds to put bowls at everyone's place setting, and dole out the soup. Putting a sandwich next to each one. "Xander, can you get the milk?"
"I'm on it," you reply, jumping up to get everyone a glass of 2% milk.
"Bastian, can you go tell Angel that lunch is ready?"
"Aww man," he says shuffling his feet, "but I -"
"Now please," says Brittany firmly.
"Fine!" he exhales, then quickly runs upstairs.
Roni quickly takes her seat as you finish laying out the glasses and start pouring the milk. Charity quietly takes her seat, the conflicting emotions that she is experiencing clearly displayed on her face. Bastian and Angel soon arrive. As Angel enters the room your sense of smell picks up a faint scent, metallic and primal . . . blood? Definitely blood . . . but different. Menstrual blood? Her dress is clean and fresh, and there is no outward sign that she is menstruating, but you smell it all the same. Great, things just keep getting weirder. Now you can smell when a woman is on the rag. Everyone finally takes their seats, and you begin eating in relative quiet. Not too surprising given the recent highly emotional experience. You are taking a bite of your sandwich when suddenly everything stops. Time itself seems frozen. You lower your sandwich and start to look around when you see Loki wallk through the wall into your kitchen.
"Alright," he says, "I'm back. What did I miss?"
"You've only been gone for, like, four hours or so," you say.
"Well, it's only been a few minutes for me," he says casually as he pulls a chair out of nowhere and sits next to you at the table. "I had to use the can."
"Dude," you say, "I'm trying to eat here!"
"What," he says, "I wasn't graphic about it. So what have you been up to? Hold on, let me just take a look . . . " He pulls a rubber duck from nowhere and starts looking through the menu. He selects a mod called Statistics Mod from the Life Controller menu, then motions towards you without actually touching you. You are suddenly outlined in the same manner as when you selected yourself earlier, but the glow is red instead of a yellow-gold. Loki flips through several screens relaying various information about you, your family, and your environment. "MmHmm," he says. "Okaay. Yeah. Alriight." From his expression, you can tell he is somehow dissatisfied. "Well," he finally says while he closes out the interface, "playing it safe or something?"
"What do you mean?"
"You've barely touched your Lifie Mod from the look of it."
"It's only been four hours," you reply defensively, "and using the thing isn't exactly inconspicuous."
"Well," says Loki, "I can see that being a problem. Hmmm . . . I guess I can try to work on a way to enable you to engage Privacy Mode. It might take a while though. If I go that route, I should probably do it in here; otherwise it would be years of your time before you had it."
"What's privacy mode?" you ask.
"Oh, it's kind of like . . . how to explain this. It's sort of like being invisible when you take certain types of actions, but having an AI hologram of yourself acting normally for everyone else to see."
"That's great and all, but maybe you could just let me stop time, like you did here?"
"I'm not sure you're ready for another module quite yet," he says as he rubs his chin, "then again, that would stop me from being tied to the game for an annoyingly vague period of time while I worked on your code. And it would be an immediate solution. Then again, if you aren't careful it could gather a lot of unwanted attention . . . decisions, decisions."
He seems to be genuinely conflicted over what to do. There seems to be an opportunity for you to influence his decision . . . but in what direction?
So what will it be?
