Lucy 2: Lucy shows a new side after her doubles roll doesn’t land where she wants

Lucy announced, “Five!” Her dice showed a one and a four, and both Lucy and Faith were quickly disappointed by this. Faith for obvious reasons, but Lucy was disappointed, not for the short distance, but for where she was landing. Lucy’s pizza box slid forward and stopped on a red punishment space.

Lucy’s brow was furrowed, arms were crossed, and she was grinding her teeth. She grumbled to herself as the board did its thing.

P’TIING!

Sophie jumped in surprise sideways on the ottoman, and the sardine couch trio jumped in unison. The tops of three punishment cards stuck out of the board.

After everyone landed back down on Earth and got their bearings, Faith said, “Dang Luce, them’s the beats, eh?”

“The dice giveth and the dice taketh away,” said Sophie.

A moment of silence followed so Mia chimed in as well. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” she said with a sarcastic tone.

Mia’s sarcasm and everyone else’s moral support weren’t helping her demeanor. Lucy was a gamer through and through, so she didn’t handle her rage well, especially when it comes to things outside of her control.

Lucy just said, “Excuse me for a second,” and then zipped into her room and closed the door. The three other girls were treated to a muffled curse-filled rant. They couldn’t make out most of it, but could make out a sentence here or there like: ‘Who the hell designed this stupid-ass RNG-ass bullshit-ass game?’ Half a minute of gamer rage later, and Lucy returned to the room completely calm.

Lucy believed they hadn’t heard anything. She figured they probably just thought she needed to sneeze or fart or something, so she returned to the couch as if everything was totally normal. Sitting down with a fake smile, Lucy calmly said, “So, what’re my options?”

Mia asked, “What’s a meta-****?”

Lucy realized that they heard everything she just said. She honestly couldn’t remember using the term because she had just Rap God-ed off a million topics, but her face turned red in embarrassment at the girls hearing her a moment ago while her face was turning red in anger.

Sophie just laughed and told Mia, “You need to get out more. Err… In more? You need to get with the times! That’s what I meant. It’s a gaming thing, right Lucy?” Sophie didn’t truly know, since most of the gaming in her life had been of the tabletop variety, but she had heard the term before in the context of try-hard optimized character builds for some D&D-style RPGs that she perused on some internet forums. She couldn’t get her two besties within a mile of a Tabletop RPG table, no matter how much she tried to sell them on it, so all of her knowledge of the genre was purely internet-based theory.

“Uhhh… yeah. Sorry about that,” said Lucy, “Just needed to let off some steam. Didn’t want to have a heated gamer moment. I’m clearly not a big fan of RNG… So, let’s see here…” Lucy tried to change the subject back to the cards so they could move on from her rage-filled crash out.

But Faith had to give her two cents. She patted Lucy on the back and said, “Our little cutie patootie here is secretly vicious. Remind me not to get on her bad side.” Faith put her arm around Lucy and scooted her back into sardine position, locking the redhead’s legs together again.

Lucy accepted her new sardine position, but otherwise ignored Faith and the others. She leaned forward and read her options aloud.

The three punishment cards were titled ‘Fabric Furlough’, ‘Undo Unto Others’, and ‘Wind Advisory’.