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“The most obsessive time suck of a game outside of The Sims franchise,” she replied without missing a beat.
“Is that what you were yelling at when I came in?”
“Um.” She coughed, before quickly dropping her left hand back to the keyboard, focusing it on the W-A-S-D keys. “Yes. There’s a festival each spring that represents Easter with an egg hunt, and if you win, you get a straw hat.”
“Right,” I said slowly. “But it sounds like you lost.”
“There’s no need to rub it in. I’m a bit salty about it. I got stuck behind a bush and Abigail beat me, the bitch.”
“You do realise you’re angry at a pixelated person, don’t you?”
She hit a button, bringing up a menu, and turned her face back to look at me. “If you think this is bad, you’ve clearly never seen Harvey playing Call of Duty.”
Actually, I had. He’d tried to get me into it during our university years, but… “That’s an excellent point. At the very least, I suppose you aren’t here swearing at real people.”
“Exactly.” She whipped her head back around and backed out of the menu, opening up her farm again. “No, come here, you stupid chicken. Let me love you.”
“This is fascinating,” I said as a little heart popped up above a white pixel chicken’s head.
“What is?”
“I never took you for a gamer.”
“I’m a hardcore gamer. If by hardcore you mean I raise pixel animals, plant pixel vegetables, and mod out all the things that piss me off, like the combat and fishing minigame.” She sighed. “That fishing minigame was made by Satan himself.”
I had absolutely no idea what she was on about. “Why would there be combat in a farming game? This looks peaceful.”
She patted the space on the sofa next to her. “I see you aren’t going to leave me alone, so I might as well adjust my mod settings and show you.”
“Show me the Satanic fishing game, too.” I walked around the sofa and sat next to her while she fiddled with a menu.
“To the mines, then,” she grumbled. “I can’t believe I’m wasting precious inventory space with food because of you.”
I fought back a smile. Of all the things I expected Chloe to do in her spare time, it wasn’t casual gaming. Honestly, sometimes I thought she might just spend her free time thinking up ways of torturing me for all the work I made her do, so this was a welcome nugget of information.
“Bubble spot!” she said excitedly, then quickly dropped her smile. “Oh. I have to do it properly.”
“Just once. I have to see that you’re bad at something to believe it.”
“I think there was a compliment in there somewhere, wasn’t there?” She laughed and equipped her pixel person’s fishing rod. The game made a little beeping noise, and she squeaked, frantically clicking her mouse as a bar popped up with a fish moving on it. “Shit, shit, shit, shi—you little bastard.”
“Did you catch it?” I asked.
“What part of all that swearing made you think I caught it?” She shot me a look that asked if I was stupid.
I knew because I’d seen it a thousand times—usually directed at stupid people, though. Being on the end of it was a new one for me.
“What do you have to do to catch it?”
“You have to keep it in the little blue bar that moves up and down. It’s almost impossible for me. I’ve tried with a trackpad, my mouse, a controller, and I even downloaded the game on my Switch just to see if it was possible, but it wasn’t.”
She had a Nintendo Switch?
I was really learning all kinds of things about her tonight.
“Can I try?”
She turned to look at me, raising her eyebrows. “You want to try?”
