forum "You DO like me!" "I don't think 'like' is the right word." "You tolerate me." "Maybe." one on one

Started January 29, 2021 by @cryptic-glitch

tune

Orion smiled slightly. "I was just kidding, Munchkin."

"Oh… don't you want to get better at the video games, though?" Lin asked.

"I do. I just meant I was kidding about the training part."

"Oh…" Lin was quiet for a moment. "How do you get better without training?"

"Oh. I wouldn't exactly compare video games with training. That was the joke."

Lin paused before nodding, still a little confused. "Alright… sorry, then. I'm not good at jokes." He laughed softly.

"No, don't worry about it." Orion put a hand on Lin's shoulder gently.

Lin nodded again. "Right… what was the game that you wanted to try?"

"Tower of Tickets." She led Lin over to the machine and offered him a coin. "You wanna go first?"

"Uh… sure. How do I play this one, again?" He asked.

"Press the big red button when you think that sweeper arm will knock a roll of tickets off the ledge there."

"Okay…" Lin stuck the coin in the machine and watched closely, still pretty confused. After a few seconds, he pressed the button and watched to see if anything happened.

The sweeper arm inched a few stacks of tickets closer to the edge, but none of them fell off. "See, I told you it's hard."

"Mm… yeah. You should try! I'm sure you're better at it than me."

"Eh. I doubt that." Nonetheless, she gave it a shot, getting the same result as Lin. "The issue with this game is you just want to keep doing it until you win."

"Yeah, I guess so… we don't want to waste our money on something impossible, though."

"It isn't impossible. That's what's so addictive about it. My sister's won this game like eight times!"

"Well, feel free to keep going, then. I won't stop you." Lin shrugged a bit.

"I can't because then I'll waste all our tokens. And I probably won't win anything."

"Don't keep going, then. I really don't know what you want me to tell you here."

"I was just saying something. To jazz it up. I don't know. Let's do the claw now. You can win stuffed animals."

"Alright. Is there any in particular you're wanting to win?" He asked.

"Nah. Well, the frog in the corner is cute. But I don't know if I can get it. I mean I could hotwire the machine, but that seems a little bit rude."

"Yeah… how do you do it?" Lin asked, looking into the machine curiously.

"Right. Token goes in, you use this little joystick to position the claw, red button makes the claw go down and then it does the rest." She demonstrated with an attempt to get the frog and missed. "Well, shit."