[Adelie]

"Mirny? Yeah, that's him," Chi said, then paused to think about what she'd heard. "That's an awfully uncharitable way to describe it, though. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to and asking my peers for help when you need it, of course."

"Well, you do ask him for help a lot," Ven said, backtracking a bit. "And every time you tell me about him, it always ends with him complaining that he's too busy to answer your questions."

"But he always answers them anyways," Chi retorted. "Besides, if he's got the time to write me an essay, then he's got plenty of time to answer my questions."

"Maybe he's bored, too," Ven said. "I know I am."

"Yeah," Chi said, and sighed, loud enough that it could be heard clearly through the microphone. "God, this sucks."

[Adelie]

With that, their conversation once again faded into silence. That was the way things went, after all - you could bring up a topic, you could talk about it for a while, but eventually the conversation would turn back to the neverending ennui of being stuck inside with nothing to do and no desire to do any of it.

"Um," Ven said, breaking the silence - only to follow it up with a complete loss for words. Racking her brain for ideas, she finally came up with something. "You know, you talk about your senpai so often but I've never actually met him."

"Yeah, he doesn't live around here," Chi said. Then, as if an idea had just come to her, she added, "Actually, do you want to talk to him?"

"Huh? Uh, sure," Ven said. Actually, that had been her idea - if two people talking resulted in an awkward silence, then it only made sense that dragging another person into the call might lead to something more to talk about.

"Let me drag him into the call, then," Chi said. "I'm sure he's got nothing better to do."

[Adelie]

chi-korita added vennnn to the group.
chi-korita added debian to the group.
chi-korita started a call.
debian: wat

Truth be told, Mirny indeed had nothing better to do.

It wasn't that he had no work to do, not exactly - as someone who'd never held a nine-to-five job in his life and had no plans to ever do so, he knew full well the importance of self-discipline. If there was nothing to do, then it was his responsibility to go out and find something. But rather - it was that he didn't want to do anything.

When the shelter-in-place order had first been announced, he'd shrugged it off as another thing that wouldn't affect him. He'd never been one to socialize much, outside of the few parties his friends dragged him to; none of his work required anything more than his computer and an internet connection. But after only a week or so, he found himself itching desperately for something, something that would even give a semblance of not being cooped up at home.

In that, it seemed he was not alone.

[Adelie]

When he saw the notification that Chi was messaging him, he'd expected one of her incessant questions again - he'd already answered more than a few of them this week alone. Apparently, she was taking advantage of this downtime to work on some long-neglected website maintenance projects.

The problem with Chi's questions was that they were good. He received no end of questions to begin with, not just from her but from others - a good half of them were ridiculously nonsensical and the rest could be deflected with a link to LMGTFY. But Chi had this unfortunate knack for coming up with things that couldn't be answered by search engines and usually required at least a paragraph of explanation (and perhaps the occasional back-and-forth) to figure out.

So he'd already settled in to write out a long explanation - and then he looked at her screenshots and realized that whatever this question was supposed to be, it definitely didn't deserve an actual answer. But since he was already prepared, he might as well play her game...

[Adelie]

And so he'd ended up dredging up what little bits and pieces he still remembered from his college requirements and putting together a ridiculously over-complicated essay explaining the exact ways each of her screenshots exemplified yet another way she had failed the basic principles of user experience.

It was rather invigorating, to be honest. His work rarely touched the end user, so it forced himself into a different perspective; he rarely wrote anything longer than a pull request, so it practiced a skill he didn't often use.

...who was he kidding. This was just an advanced form of procrastination.

[Adelie]

A few finishing flourishes - a summary of the points he'd made, an extension of the conclusion to some greater theme - and his work was complete. Finding a more comfortable position on his bed, he admired the finished product - five neat paragraphs, spanning a full two pages. Briefly, he considered adding a properly formatted references page, but decided it wouldn't fit too well in message format.

Feeling rather satisfied with himself, he sent it over and waited for a response.

For a while, there was nothing. This was only to be expected, after all; even with Chi's impressive speed-reading skills, it would take her a few minutes to look through the wall of text he'd just pasted into the chatbox. Then, there was typing - and plenty of it.

He wondered what kind of literary criticism she was leveling at his essay, considering how long she'd been typing. Occasionally, the indicator would vanish for a moment, and he'd wait in anxious anticipation for her message to finally be sent, then it would appear again...

chi-korita: ...

[Adelie]

Without another word, she dragged him into a call - one not just with her, but with another user whose tag he didn't recognize.

He rather wanted to leave. He'd never been much of a people person - he could count his friends on his fingers - and he wasn't particularly inclined to add more at the moment. But it was Chi, after all; much as she got on his nerves every now and then, her antics always promised something interesting. And he didn't exactly have much of an excuse to leave, and he was pretty bored...

He picked up the call. "...what's going on?"

A quick moment of silence was broken by an unfamiliar voice. "Woah!" it said. "You sound nothing like what I expected."

[Adelie]

He didn't know exactly what to make of that, but luckily he didn't have to - the voice stopped, as if realizing how awkward that statement had been. "I mean, uh..." She trailed off, then recovered. "I mean, Chi talks about you a lot, so I sort of had this mental image of you as like... well, like an old sage wise man, that kind of thing..."

He laughed at that - he couldn't really help but laugh at that. "Chi, what have you been telling the kids?" he asked. "I'm only a year older. If I'm an old sage, then Chi's got to be an old hag."

"Hey!" Chi interrupted, coming to life for the first time since she'd started this call. "I leave you two alone for one minute and you're already talking trash about me. You two don't value my friendship at all, do you?"

"I do!" Ven protested.

"Not at all," Mirny said, at the same time.

[Adelie]

"Anyways," Chi said. "It sounds like you've already found common ground, but you two should probably introduce yourselves, either way."

Neither wanted to go first. "Well," Mirny said, breaking the silence. "I'm not really sure what Chi's told you about me already, but I'm Ian - well, most people call me by my last name anyways, so Mirny."

"There was another Ian in his class," Chi said, by way of explanation. "And that guy was really popular with the girls, so first-name privileges went to him by right."

"It's really nice to meet you properly!" Ven responded. She seemed to have recovered from her prior hesitation, and now she continued her own introduction brightly. "I'm Ven! Um, I remember Chi said you were her upperclassman when she was a student at Jawan. I'm a freshman there now, and that's how I know her."

"She's still a student," Mirny corrected, more out of reflex than any desire to be right. "So, a freshman? Is Chi your TA?"

[Adelie]

"No," Ven admitted, a little reluctant. "I'm not actually sure if I want to take college calculus yet, honestly. I'm not really a math person, you see. But I took the big seminar class for undeclared freshmen, and Chi was one of the presenters, and I thought she seemed cool..."

"Look at you, Chi," Mirny said. "The old hag has already learned how to seduce fresh meat."

"Hey!" Chi protested. Ven seemed about to say something as well - perhaps she'd taken his words seriously - but Chi's interjection interrupted whatever she had to say. "You're not supposed to bully those younger than you, old man," she said. "Anyways, that's not really the whole story."

"Oh?" he asked.

"She's actually a guildmate of mine," Chi explained. "In that game I play a lot, you know?"

[Adelie]

Yeah, he knew. He knew exactly what she was talking about - she'd gotten hooked on the MMORPG Elysium sometime in college, and it had been a constant companion of hers in the years since then. How she'd managed to balance hours of questing and raiding with her busy course schedule was honest testament to her genius.

"That game, yeah," he said. "If this is another ploy to get me to start playing with you, I'm not falling for it."

"Ha," Chi said. "No, thank you. Even if I got you to play, you'd probably spend all your time finding exploits and reporting them to the devs before I even get to play with them." Not entirely wrong. "Anyways, so it turned out we actually knew each other way before we met at that seminar," she continued. "But of course, we'd never seen each other in real life, so there was no way we'd recognize each other."

"But I had some questions I wanted to ask about the math department, so I stayed after the lecture to talk to Chi," Ven said, then added earnestly, "I really did think she was cool!"

[Adelie]

He could almost feel Chi's embarrassment at that. There was nothing wrong with what Ven had said, of course; she certainly wasn't the first one to have that impression, considering what a few of the other students he'd met had said about her. "Well," she continued. "When I was talking to her, I had this weird feeling that she sounded really, really familiar. Then I got home and logged on, and Ven was telling some of our other guildmates about the classes she was taking, and it all clicked for me."

"And that was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship, I see," he said.

"Well, uh, it was pretty awkward at first," Ven said. "Like, Chi figured it out, but I didn't. So she kept teasing me about it, but being really vague about it, and I didn't realize until like, two weeks later." She stopped for a moment, thinking. "Actually, it was Blaze who told me."

"Yeah, I think they all figured it out way before you did," Chi confirmed. "Well, Aster knew for sure, and those two never keep secrets from each other, so."

[Adelie]

"Guess I was just oblivious," Ven mused. She didn't seem too upset about that, at least. "I feel like we've just been talking about me this whole time, though! Tell me - how did you two meet?"

"Hmm," Mirny said, thinking about it. "I guess the story's actually kind of the same," he finally concluded. "We went to the same high school, but we never really talked until we met again in college."

Now that was a funny story - funny and a little sad, but there were no hard feelings now. "Man," he said, laughing. "Remember when you asked me for help, that first time?"

"Oh god, you're never going to let me down," Chi said.

"You mistook me for Fischer, and then you mistook me for Bell after that," he continued. "I think if I hadn't stopped you, you would've gone through my entire graduating class before you got to my name."

"Not my fault your name is boring," Chi grumbled. "Not my fault you're boring."

[Adelie]

"Anyways, she asked me for help, and now she won't stop asking," Mirny explained. "And that's just about the whole story, honestly."

Ven answered his rather evocative description of their friendship with a giggle. "That's a pretty funny way to put it! But I guess it's true, considering what Chi tells me about you." She thought for a moment, then added, "I mean, she's not saying anything bad about you! If anything, she makes you sound really cool. Like you're some badass hacker from the movies or something like that."

He really wanted to groan at that one - he got that a lot. Sure, he worked with open source software, and sure, he did a lot of security consulting for companies, but it was really much less glamorous - and his opinion, much less cringe - than what people usually thought of it. "No, I don't go around wearing trenchcoats and fingerless gloves and sneaking floppy drives into server racks, if that's what you're thinking of."

Remembering that he had one of those 'what I do vs. what my friends think I do' memes saved just for this occasion, he pulled that up and sent it into their groupchat. "Here, that's more like it."

[Adelie]

"I'm the one with the monkey on a typewriter," Chi said, referencing one of the panels. "Thank god this isn't my actual major or I'd be screwed. We need to go back to the Stone Age, when people did their math by moving rocks around and counting them."

"Computer chips are just fancy rocks, aren't they?" Ven pointed out - a little unfortunately, since he'd just been able to make that comment himself.

"Shh," Chi responded. "Let me dream for a little while longer." Pausing to do exactly that, she let the call descend into silence briefly before returning to the subject at hand. "My overwhelming hatred for programming aside, you can't really deny that you do do some cool stuff. I just might've, uh, embellished a bit when I was talking to Ven about it, since it's not like I really understand all of it, anyways."

"Once again, I have to wonder what you're telling the kids, Chi."