All-Night Gaming
She sent the reply and booted up Marblecraft.
When the loading screen cleared, the familiar plaza was waiting. Only a few days ago the main building had been nothing but a bare floor laid out on the ground; now it had already climbed three stories. The problem was what stood in front of it.
Dead center in front of the main building stood a stone pillar of no identifiable kind. The lumpy column bore the marks of someone who had, in their own way, tried to express something. She stared and stared, and still couldn't tell what it was supposed to be.
"What on earth were they trying to make……."
A moment later Limit leapt off the roof of the main building.
Of course.
She picked up a pickaxe and walked up to the pillar.
She broke the first block.
The second. The third. Limit swung fists from right beside her, but she ignored them and demolished the ugly pillar down to nothing.
"Did their sense of beauty just completely shatter……."
She walked farther into the main building and found Mumyeong and CheongramEagles in there as well.
Peaceful.
She took stone from a chest, and she and Limit raised the outer walls together. They hadn't really assigned roles. She built one side; Limit built the other. When the blocks ran out, whoever noticed first made the trip to storage. Now and then the heights wouldn't match, and each of them insisted the other was wrong. Most of the time, Limit was the one who was wrong. At least, that was what she thought.
She checked the blueprint.
……Her side was one block higher.
Without a word, she broke the blocks one by one.
When she had first joined the server, Limit had been nothing more than someone who helped her now and then—killing monsters, splitting iron, occasionally mining in the same spot. After several days of playing, though, the two of them had started sticking together whenever they were both online. She couldn't even remember who had spoken first. If she logged in, Limit was there. If Limit logged in, she was there.
She stepped away briefly to eat dinner, but the game kept going after she came back. When dawn arrived, Mumyeong logged off first.
A little later CheongramEagles left too. Even ChemBio, who had been wiring an automation circuit underground, vanished after leaving nothing but a note that the whole thing was ruined.
She opened the player list.
There wasn't much left to do, but neither of them was actually building the main hall properly. They went down into a nearby mine and argued over who had spotted diamonds first, then killed time sticking pointless blocks onto each other's houses.
"Nnngh……."
She leaned back in the chair and stretched. She closed Marblecraft, but neither of them turned Discord off.
They were still trying to decide what to do when Limit sent a link to a game.
It was a co-op game they had bought ages ago and almost never touched.
She checked the price. On sale, five dollars. For that much, she might as well just buy it.
While she waited for the download, she opened the Cheongram Gallery. Even at this hour, new posts kept going up. Limit must have been on the gallery too, because a link arrived out of nowhere. She opened it and found a post from about two months ago. The moment she saw the title, she remembered.
……This was something I wrote.
It was an easy problem, and I got it wrong.
I got 22 and 28 right, but I missed something ridiculous.
The comments still held the wreckage of her from two months ago, going at it with the anons. It was a calculation mistake. That is the skill. It was a calculation mistake. That is the skill.
"It is true, though……."
While they were going back and forth, the download finished.
They didn't join a voice channel. Limit had never used a mic, and neither had she, and it wasn't especially inconvenient. The game had chat, and if something was urgent, moving your character was enough to get the point across. When Limit spun in circles in front of a door, it meant follow me. When she stood still, Limit waited too, apparently aware that she was typing.
It was a new game for both of them, and they got lost in exactly the same ways. After clearing the first stage they couldn't find the portal to the next one. They combed the entire map, and the way forward still refused to show itself.
In the end, neither of them searched. After a long, stupid wander they stumbled onto the answer by accident, then immediately fought over who had found it first. Time slipped past. If she hadn't checked partway through, she wouldn't have known how many hours had gone by.
Then Limit suddenly announced that they were hungry.
That was the end of the detour, and they went back to the game. They cleared the second stage, then the third, and were nearly through the whole thing.
How much time had passed? The window seemed a little brighter. She looked through the gap in the curtains.
……She wasn't imagining it.
"It's already morning?"
For a moment there was no reply.
She had nothing to say. It was true.
She closed the game and checked Discord, but the general channel was quiet. Everyone else on the server seemed to be asleep; almost no one still showed as online.
A short laugh slipped out of her.
She sent that last message and shut the computer off. She brushed her teeth, finished getting ready for bed, and went to lie down.
When she checked her phone, a DM from ☆ was waiting—one that had arrived three hours ago, which she hadn't seen.
She looked at the message for a moment, but she didn't feel like answering. Not now. She set the phone on her stomach and closed her eyes.