Construction PDA

You laid in bed like the sole sardine in an empty tin, holding your phone in front of your face. Post after post scrolled past your dead fish eyes, barely any neurological activity occurring behind them. Even though you wanted to rest the whole week, now that it was here it was just… boring. You could go out and have fun, maybe hit the town and visit some bars, but that would require going out. Maybe get on the computer and play a video game? But what game would even be worth getting out of bed for.

Just as the thought slowly trudged through the graveyard inside your skull, a post caught your eye like a freshly cut nail catches on clothes. It was some post about a weapon idea for the game Team Fortress 2. You perfunctorily clicked on it and read through the laziest, dumbest, most imbalanced, poorly thought out weapon idea you had ever entered into your bio-computer. Ah yes, TF2. Mental manilla folders were starting to fly out of the dusty memory filing cabinet now. It was such a blast back in the day! Hopping onto a 24/7 2Fort server after school just to fuck around for hours! Blasting robots for australiums! And who could forget the hats! Oh and the halloween events too!

For a split second you had the energy and motivation to put the phone down, get out of bed, and boot the game back up, but before your neurons could even send the signals to the rest of your body the motivation disappeared. Those memories were just memories now, it wasn’t the same game anymore. The game changed, now full of bots and devoid of new content. The community changed too, it wasn’t the same that you played with for hours on end back then. Hell, you changed as well, could you really enjoy the game with the same pure enthusiasm that you had back then? No… it would just be… nostalgia… that’s all.

The dead fish eyes returned as you resigned yourself back to scrolling, but a red light began to glow behind your phone. You moved your hand to see the source of the surprise illumination and saw a flat red disk rotating on the top of your nightstand. You sat up as you looked at the strange anomaly, quickly switching to your camera app and taking a photo of the thing. It let off a soft warbling sound… a sound that you had heard before somewhere…

Before you could figure it out, something shot out of the portal, an unexpected ejaculation that made you yelp in surprise. The something landed next to you on the bed as you dove to the side to get away from it. It was some sort of gray brick or something. You looked back at the red portal to see it shrinking until it disappeared, leaving the nightstand untouched. Wait, your lamp and alarm clock were gone, what the hell?

Looking back at whatever landed on the bed, you take a closer look. It was rectangular and gray, about the size of a TI-84 Plus graphing calculator. You reach out with a curious hand, grabbing the thing that felt like plastic. Turning it over revealed a face full of big, blocky buttons with a small screen above. It looked old, like the kind of boomer tech that dinosaurs would have used decades ago or something. What the hell was- Suddenly the synapses connected in your head! It was the engineer’s construction PDA from TF2!

What the hell was it doing here? And hold on wait, it came through a portal? You open the top drawer in the nightstand just to make sure it wasn’t some elaborate magician fuckery, but yeah, looks like it was really a portal that teleported the PDA here. While you had a multitude of questions, reasonable questions, but questions with no answers, you also had a curiosity that needed to be satiated.

You looked at the PDA closely, trying to choose which unlabelled button to press. What if you pressed the wrong one? It could explode or some shit! Wait, maybe you shouldn’t be touching this at all. Maybe you should put it in a plastic bag and give it to a scientist or something. No wait, that would be boring. Enough useless thinking, time for doing! Slamming a finger onto the center button, the PDA awoke and shot blue light out of its front, projecting a holographic 3D model onto your bedroom floor (that could probably use a good vacuum cleaning).

It was an outline of the sentry gun! This really was supposed to be the TF2 engineer’s PDA, cool! Pressing the button to the right of center, you found the hologram cycling to the dispenser and teleporters too. On the PDA’s little built-in display, you could see the number 200, probably the amount of “metal” if you had to guess. With some tinkering, you found the buttons for cycling back the other way, as well as rotating the projection. This thing was cool AF, was it some sort of toy or something? Maybe a fanmade knick-knack? Wait but THE PORTAL. This thing came through a goddamn defiance of physics or something! Maybe… it was real?

Okay, well, let’s assume that this is the real thing for a second. Not a reasonable or logical assumption, but the portal threw reason and logic out the window already. But if it was the real deal, then the question befell you. What did you want to build?