Chapter Text
Hello? Hello? Is anybody there?
I can see now.
Rin? Hello?
It burns.
I'm so sorry, I broke everything.
Come home and let me out.
Please, Rin...
Rin?
Rin?
Rin?
Rin?
R
R
R
“Ugh, sorry I couldn’t game with you guys last night. My computer’s been being a bitch lately.” Rin placed her lunch tray down and slid into her seat across from Flower, shoving her backpack under the table and kicking it a bit so it’d get out of her way. She and her friends always sat together, in this same formation, every day, without fail. Len, who was following close behind her, sat across the table.
Fukase laughed and sat down beside her. “Yeah, maybe because you punch it every time you lose a game!”
“Shut up, as if it’s even possible for me to lose when I’m playing against you-”
Flower softly nudged Rin under the table. “You two are so loud, can y’all eat without arguing today?”
“Fine!” Fukase dramatically raised his hands in the air. “Who wants this? I don’t.” He pushed his half-empty bottle of lemonade out into the middle of the table, making a comedically disgusted face.
“Ew, you totally got your spit in it, that’s gay.” Len pushed it back to him.
“Yeah, and? I thought that was like, your whole thing-”
Rin and Flower ignored them and made small talk about their respective days, chatting about some new games they’d been playing. Flower was always into niche and obscure things that Rin hadn’t ever heard of, so they were usually the one Rin would come to for recommendations or interesting topics of discussion. Len and Fukase playfully argued and took turns slapping each others hands away until Piko came and sat between them. Flower nodded at him and he nodded back.
“You’re super late, what’s up?” Rin asked, dropping a stiff, individually packaged cookie onto his tray like she usually would. He made no mention of this, as it had been established as something they simply did. Piko rested his head in his hands casually.
“I had to stay after class.”
Len and Fukase ‘ooh’ as if he’d just admitted to a crime. Piko, Flower, and Rin rolled their eyes, ignoring them and going back to their conversation, filling Piko in on their previous small talk and discussing their shared classes. Flower jokes about how Piko is failing one of them, ignoring that she’s failing multiple.
A loud ringing sound interrupts them just as Piko takes the first couple of bites of his food, and he disappointedly holds the cookie in his mouth as he stands. Flower begins to pick up random trash left on the table and pile it onto their tray. Len and Fukase are preoccupied.
“You guys wanna play again tonight?” Rin said, talking through a mouthful of food she was trying to speed-eat before she had to leave.
“I thought your computer was fucked up.”
“It might be okay now, I dunno.”
‘I’m down.”
“I might have to leave early, but I can join.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“That settles it then!” Rin dramatically taps her tray on the table as she stood up. “Call at, like, 6?”
The rest of the table nods or gives her a thumbs up, and Rin mirrors them, slinging her backpack over her shoulder and sweeping crumbs off the spot at the table she was sitting at earlier and speedwalking away.
Rin continues with her last few classes, trying to make Len laugh and get into trouble by making stupid faces from across the classroom or throwing erasers at Fukase while taking minimal to no notes. She lets the day pass by quickly, eager to get home, just like she is every day. Rin never puts much effort into her academics, passing pretty easily without trying too hard. Surely this wouldn’t come back to bite her in the ass in the next few years of her life.
When Rin gets home, she consistently goes straight to her room, while Len rolls onto the couch and pulls out his phone. She immediately sits down at her computer, logging on, and checking all of her notifications, flicking through her social media, and leaving DMs unanswered. Checking her friend requests from every game she had and accepting them from complete strangers. She checked her system notifications, scrolling through and skimming for any virus protection notices.
She leaned back in her chair, pulling out her phone to mindlessly scroll until either her friends talked to her or it became too late to do her homework. She pulls her headphones off her head, gently tossing them onto her desk.
Today, she pauses, noticing a dinging noise in the background and checks her PC to see if it was from one of her classmates. She squints at the bright screen, mumbling to herself, opening the notification and reading it over and over, struggling to register the uncanny surprise, which to her concern, was not from any messaging app she had downloaded, but from the computer system itself;
Hi :)
Rin reeled a bit at the strange message, obviously not used to seeing casual text language in the standard system alerts. A new one comes in with another ding, startling Rin out of her stupor;
Are you there?
Rin?