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“Oh my god, are you at Mama?”
“What? What the hell are you saying to me?”
Zoey giggles, motioning to Mira’s screen. “Uh, Mama, duh. Get with the program, babe. She’s literally called The Mother.”
Technically, Mama is getting fucking got by the fluid, but Mira’s basically there. She just has to get around this area, kill a few barnacle zombies, and she’ll be good to go. Zoey hasn’t watched her this whole playthrough, but she’s really impressed with how far she’s gotten, especially since she only started playing about...maybe a week ago? She took a bit of a break after she died at the worm—Face, Zoey gueses—and wouldn’t touch the game until Zoey begged and pleaded and told her that she’d like it.
Mira gives her an unimpressed look over her shoulder. It’s admittedly difficult to take her seriously when Zoey can see how stressed she is. She has a cute little crease right at her eyebrow, her glasses tipped halfway down her nose. Maybe it’s on her for not telling Mira about what White Knuckle actually entailed, but in her defense, she did say it was a horror game! Mira just didn’t listen to her! And now she’s about to enter literally the worst sequence in the entire game, and Zoey’s also not going to warn her about that, because it’ll be really funny to hear her screaming over it within the next, what, five minutes? Give or take?
After another second Mira huffs, turning back to face her monitor. “I guess, yeah,” she mumbles in agreement. “Do I give her my grubs after I save her? Right? Because the pact is totally about the grubs.”
Zoey nods rapidly. “Yeah, the pact’s totally about the grubs. Give her your grubs! How many did you get?” she asks, peering over Mira’s shoulder the best she can manage. Mira’s inventory management system absolutely leaves...so much to be desired, but whatever.
Zoey’s trying really hard to not backseat game ‘cause she knows Mira hates that more than just about anything else. In her defense also, Mira is just downright bad at most video games she plays, and it’s incredibly hard for Zoey to watch her be straight up ass when she knows she could solve all the problems Mira has. It’s kind of a miracle she knows that there’s even an inventory system to begin with. Baby steps, Zoey guesses.
Mira taps her fingers against her desk. “Three.”
“And you didn’t crush any?” Zoey asks. She tries very hard to keep her voice impassive, but judging by the way Mira snaps around to stare at her with wide eyes, she’s failed.
“What?” Mira demands. “No. Why? What would happen if I did? Does she kill me?”
Zoey bites her tongue and grins.
And so maybe Zoey introduces Rumi to the game after Mira gets brutally, brutally murdered by Mama. Really, it’s not on her for wanting to hear both of her girlfriends freak out over one of Zoey’s favourite games this month, and they’re definitely freaking out.
...Some more than others, admittedly.
Zoey still can’t get over how Mira screamed and shrieked through every single major boss chase. She was pretty insistent that she didn’t scream, and then she defensively muttered something about how ‘it helps’, which, okay, sure. Zoey’s not a judger, especially not when it comes to either Mira or Rumi, so she’ll let her have it. She’ll also just mock her for it relentlessly until they—all three of them—die at the exact same time, and Mira just has to live with that.
Rumi, on the other hand, is so unbelievably focused. She’s genuinely good at the game after dying to what Zoey would effectively call the tutorial levels maybe five or six times. After that, though, she gets a pretty good grasp on the game. Her playstyle is terrifying and awful to watch, though, as it is with every single game Zoey has ever introduced her to. Rumi loves to push her stamina to the absolute limit and she loves pulling off horrible, horrible lunges and jumps that she shouldn’t survive. Zoey genuinely does not understand how she’s managed to survive the pipeworks and the steam, because Rumi just stands right on top of the valves like it’s nothing.
“It makes my hands stronger,” Rumi had said with a dumb little grin. Which, that’s just not true. Like, at all. Like, literally not even remotely true, because the steam just outright kills you if you stay there for too long, but—well, what the hell is Zoey supposed to do or say? Tell her no? ‘Cause clearly it’s working out for her, somehow.
She guesses she shouldn’t be surprised. Everything in Rumi’s life tends to work out for her perfectly, no matter what it is she’s doing. Zoey has always been endlessly endeared to the way the universe simply bends and reshapes itself so Ryu Rumi can get whatever she wants.
Like roaches, right now.
Mira had completely avoided the roaches until Zoey told her to both pick them up and to hold onto them until she got to a vendor. Even then, Mira still didn’t go out of her way to get them—and she wondered why she was getting nowhere with no perks or upgrades—until Zoey practically pushed her out of her chair and hunted down as many roaches as she could to get Mira somewhat stockpiled, god forbid.
Rumi does not have those qualms whatsoever.
Zoey has largely been on her phone in Rumi’s bed. She glances up briefly just in time to watch Rumi leans closer to her monitor. Mira is on the ground, kneeling in front of her, arms wrapped around Rumi’s middle. Zoey can just barely make her out, feeling beyond fond at how Rumi is decidedly playing the game one-handedly, her other hand tangled in Mira’s hair. Mira was trying to attempt to get her attention, but Rumi is unfortunately beyond the point of return, so she’s settled for this. Zoey doesn’t even think Mira really cares; she knows how much Mira likes being where she’s at.
Rumi makes a noise. “Oh. Oh, what?”
“What?” Zoey asks, glancing up from her phone again. “What’s up, Ru?”
“There’s a perk that makes roaches love me,” Rumi says back. She sounds genuinely giddy at the prospect. “It’s either that or extra stamina. So...roach love, or extra stamina?”
Zoey opens her mouth to helpfully relay advice that she knows Rumi will like, but then she hears that fucking upgrade console noise go off, and before she can even ask or clarify or do anything at all, Rumi is saying, “Roach love.”
God. Zoey wants her so bad it makes her feel stupid.
Her being vaguely ignored is made up for immediately by how Mira bursts out laughing and slowly drawls, “You’re in love with the roaches?” in a raspy, tired voice. Rumi immediately huffs and puffs in protest, and Zoey can’t help but giggle when she watches Rumi tighten her grasp in Mira’s hair and jostle her around just enough to make a point.
Mira grumbles after that, but she notably makes no effort to move or change positions or do anything at all other than sit there and take it. Zoey grins, rolling her eyes. She loves them both so badly it aches. She can’t believe there was ever a time in her life where she didn’t have them. It’s so hard for her to remember that that’s true. It’s just as hard for her to remember that there was a point in time where they weren’t like this, either. If seventeen year old Mira could see where she’s at right now, Zoey genuinely thinks she might have ended up being the first hunter to willingly defect and go against the honmoon by slaughtering the other two hunters.
But that’s not something they have to worry about anymore! Thank god! Now Zoey can just appreciate the view from Rumi’s bed; she’s appreciating Rumi’s patterns just as much.
She thinks it must be about two minutes before Rumi lets out an agonised, downright anguished sounding noise and wails, “Fuck! No, no, no! My roaches! My roach love! No!”
Zoey bursts out laughing so hard she nearly launches herself off Rumi’s bed in the process. Rumi keeps up her miserable wailing until Mira starts to complain, and only then does she snap her jaw shut and quietly suffer. But Zoey can still see the pout on her face and the genuine, actual pain in her eyes.
It’s maybe just a little funny. Maybe.
Mira is about to knock on Zoey’s door before she hears—
“Oh my god, oh, it has me! It has me!”
“Ohh, it’s licking you. That’s okay! That’s—oh, that’s not okay, that’s not okay, that’s not okay. Rumi, get unlicked, Rumi stop letting it lick you, Rumi, Rumi, Rumi! Oh my god!”
“I don’t want it to lick me! Why do you think I want it to lick me? How do I make it stop licking me?”
“Explode it! You have a—a, one of those things!”
“What?”
“The fire stick things! Explode it!”
“That’s gonna kill me!”
“No, it won’t! Stop getting licked, Jesus Christ, Rumi!”
“Fuck! I got licked again!”
Mira screws up her face. That’s not her problem right now, she decides. Maybe she’ll come back and check on them in an hour.
Mira is going to kill her.
She hates this fucking game, she hates how good Rumi is at it especially, and she hates that she’s not. Mira literally doesn’t know what she’s doing wrong or how to get better. She’s convinced it’s not something she even can get better at, and that Rumi and Zoey are just freaks of nature. No one should be playing this game at all, ever, in any circumstance. She’s so mad that she let Zoey convince her into it, and she swears to god she’s never doing that again. She doesn’t even—out of the three of them, Mira is by far the least interested, but she at least has more general experience with video games than someone like Rumi, who obsessively plays sudoku for fun. The only apps on her phone are a stupid sudoku game and a colour sorting puzzle.
How the hell is that woman better at this game than her?
“If you touch me, I’ll kill you,” Mira promises, so sincerely. She will. She’ll leave her room and break down Rumi’s door and strangle her. She means it more than anything she’s ever said before. “Rumi, don’t you dare fucking touch me.”
“I’m just trying to help!” Rumi laughs back. Her character is insufferable looking. Mira knows she’s just mad because Rumi’s character is arguably really cute, but still. She hates how bright purple she is, hates her dumb, stupid grin that looks almost identical to the one she has in real life.
Mira practically snarls, “Rumi, I will kill you.”
Rumi’s little character just wiggles back and forth, reaching out her hand toward Mira. She immediately feels nothing but pure hatred and rage, and turns on her heel as she starts sprinting toward the first map. Zoey said it was a ‘bad Shore’, whatever the fuck that means, because they’re all bad. All of them have been bad. Mira doesn’t think she’s successfully managed to get past the first map without Rumi or Zoey pretty much dragging her the whole time, and she absolutely is not letting that happen again.
She hears Zoey’s gasp from a little further off. “Oh! Oh my god!” Zoey calls out. Her voice momentarily gets closer, and then she’s right next to Mira in a flash. Mira rolls her eyes at the little shimmy her character does before Zoey says, “Guess what, babe? I found a rescue claw! We’re gonna get you out of here alive!”
Mira bristles. She thinks about breaking down Zoey’s door, too. Maybe she should. She doesn’t even know why she agreed to any of this in the first place. she hates this game so bad, how did they make her play again? Mira just ignores her and ignores the following bright laughter Zoey lets out. It’s admittedly hard to do when all she wants to do is listen to her, but Mira still has both her morals and her pride, and she’s not going to give either of those things up.
She storms away from the two of them, though she can always hear them faintly, somewhere off to her left. Rumi and Zoey make no attempt to even hide the fact that they’re talking about her, casually going back and forth as they talk about scout amulets and duplication and whatever the hell else bullshit this game has. Zoey wanted them all to play again because there was apparently an update. The update didn’t just permanently uninstall the game from every player’s PC, so Mira isn’t interested in learning anything about it.
She guesses it’s not going to be her choice.
Mira makes it halfway up Shore by herself for the first time in ten billion play sessions, and then she slips on an urchin and goes flying off the mountain. She screams so loud that she’s very sure Rumi and Zoey know exactly what’s happened to her. She stares at her limp body, buries her face into her hands, and screams for a second time. She’s half-tempted to just kill herself and get it over with, but she knows Rumi and Zoey will bring her back, because they hate her, and she’s not allowed to have anything in this fucked up, awful life.
And, right on time, Mira sees her body flying through the sky as Zoey rescue claws her back up. She’s instantly put on Rumi’s back, and off they go. Mira miserably watches, listening to them both assure her that ‘we’re gonna get you fixed babe don’t you worry!’ and ‘there’s totally gonna be a medkit nearby!’ as if any of that makes her feel better in any capacity. They know it doesn’t. They have to know that. It makes her feel a million times worse, actually, but whatever.
She slouches back in her chair. Mira feels like an idiot for how hard she ends up smiling as she listens to them talk back and forth, then address her directly wherever they apparently feel like they’ve left her out of the conversation for too long. It’s not like she can say anything back that they’ll hear; if she was a ghost, she could talk to them, but since she’s still technically alive, she’s been forced into silence for the time being.
As much as she hates this nightmare game from hell, Mira does think it’s...a little sweet how Zoey and Rumi always make it their mission to make sure she pulls through. Mira knows she doesn’t make it easy for them. She’s seen them both throw otherwise very close runs just to save her, and it’s...
She can’t believe they both make her feel special through a stupid video game about climbing. She guesses she shouldn’t be surprised. Rumi and Zoey have always been very, very good at doing that.
She immediately stops feeling sappy once Rumi and Zoey bring her back to life and she accidentally flings herself off of the top of the map and dies on impact in Roots.
Rumi loves Mira more than anything, really, but there is nothing she wouldn’t do to intentionally screw with her when it comes to Peak specifically.
It’s not her fault Mira is bad at the game! And it’s totally okay that she is, because she doesn’t have to be good at video games for Rumi to still be entirely and completely smitten with her, but it is a fact of life that Mira is generally bad at most games. Peak is a special case where she’s both bad at the game and also furious about it, which activates something deep inside Rumi’s brain to just...mess with her. Maybe. Just a little.
Mira just makes it so easy when she starts screaming and flailing and freaking out whenever Rumi so much as approaches her with her hand outstretched. There’s nothing Mira hates more in Peak than being helped or assisted in any way—other than when she’s dying, but she still spams the button to make herself die faster; Rumi and Zoey have just adapted to locking in on her instantly once they hear her furious scream cut off—and Rumi is determined to never let her outright die. And if Mira does outright die, then Rumi makes it her life mission to bring her back.
Zoey was super excited for the new Peak update; not more than Rumi, who promised not to play without them, but she did extensively read the wiki, and she felt her eyes practically dilating more and more the longer she read. She hasn’t mentioned any of that to them. She’s not concerned about Zoey—she knows she’ll be just fine as she always is, and she’ll probably really, really love Citadel.
Mira is going to hate Gloom.
Rumi has been giddy this entire time. She’s been almost foaming at the mouth as soon as Mira nearly died in Shore. She’s been trying so hard not to give anything away, but it’s been hard, especially when Zoey picked up that ritual dagger a while back and slowly turned to look at her, then to Mira. Rumi had to bite down on her lip to keep herself from bursting out laughing, frantically shaking her head back and forth to signal ‘no, oh my god, no’. Mira would genuinely kill them in real life if they did that to her. Admittedly, Rumi had been tempted, but she knows better. She can control herself.
They’ve just gotten past Alpine now. Mira passed out in the first winter storm they got, but Rumi found an ancient luggage and managed to snag a cure-all to bring her back faster. And then Mira got blinded by a flash bulb and fell all the way back down to the base of the mountain. Zoey was on it in an instant, before Rumi could even think. She’s been getting an almost absurd amount of use out of the glider she found back in Roots. Maybe it says something about her that, the whole time she watched Zoey painstakingly scale back up the mountain, all she could think about was how badly she wanted Zoey in every conceivable way possible.
Zoey got Mira back up to the top, and now they’re at the campfire leading into Gloom. Rumi is outright buzzing with excitement when she sees the purple sleepy water, the Citadel in the distance.
Mira screams, “They fucking took Caldera from me?!” so loudly that Rumi hears her echoing from her room. She throws her head and laughs so hard she nearly falls out of her own chair, grabbing at her chest in an attempt to calm herself down. She can barely breathe, and she only laughs harder when she watches Mira try to go back the way they came.
Zoey breaks out into laughter alongside her, physically blocking Mira from going anywhere. “This is so cool! It’s so pretty, Mira, look at it! It’s all purple like Rumi! And we love Rumi, right?”
“No!” Mira snarls. Rumi collapses onto her desk, giggling so hard she feels sick to her stomach. “I’m killing myself.”
“Don’t do that!” Zoey squawks. “C’mon, it’ll be fun! We’re gonna have so much fun! It can’t be worse than Caldera, right?”
“Caldera was the only one I was good at!” Mira whines. She still has a quite frankly unreal level of vitriol in her voice. “I hate this stupid game, I hate everything about this stupid game, I’m going to die, I’m—”
“Nuh-huh,” Rumi says. She dives off the side of the mountain, grabbing the edge before she lowers herself into the water. As soon as she gets to the island closest to them, she forcibly rescue claws Mira down. It should be impossible to see the seething, genuine rage on Mira’s character’s face, but Rumi definitely can tell. “Hi, pretty girl.”
Mira makes a deeply, deeply infuriated noise from the back of her throat. “Never speak to me.”
Rumi throws her head back when she laughs. She nearly topples off her chair for a second time, but she manages to get control over herself again. She wiggles at Zoey when she finally hops down to join them, and starts detailing what she knows about the Gloom. She’s about halfway through explaining the mechanic of the water before she hears Mira scream.
As soon as she turns to the side, she sees the frog that’s grabbed Mira, and then hears her scream again, because—
Oh. The Big Ghost is here now.
Rumi giggles as she backs away, slowly scaling up to the campfire again. Zoey wordlessly follows, and they both sit up top and watch as Mira frantically starts screaming and cursing at the Big Ghost in increasingly creative ways before it explodes and sends her body ragdolling upward. Rumi watches her plunge back down into the water, and she can almost perfectly hear the damage noise go off in her head.
“So...” Rumi starts, grinning so hard her face hurts. “Do you wanna go and get her with me?”
Zoey bursts out laughing and dives back off the side of the mountain. “Oh my god, you know I do. Did you know that was going to—?”
“Not this soon!” Rumi laughs back. “I mean, I figured she’d probably get, um, frogged at some point, but I didn’t think the Big Ghost even could get her yet! I thought you had to spend...” Rumi trails off, screwing up her face for a second. Well, she guesses they did stand on the starting island for a bit, and Mira was in the water for a bit. Oh, actually, she probably got pulled into a venus fly trap, if Rumi had to guess. That would make sense on why the Big Ghost spawned.
“I’m going to do horrible things to you,” Mira suddenly says. Her voice is distant and muffled, and Rumi lets out a genuinely miserable noise when she turns to see Mira’s ghost hovering around her. “Fuck you specifically, Ryu Rumi.”
“I didn’t even do anything!” Rumi protests. She’s smiling so hard it’s almost impossible for her to get the words out. “We were gonna go and save you!”
“Yeah!” Zoey agrees. “We were gonna find your body and bring you with us! ‘Cause I know you love it when we do that. It’s okay, it’s okay,” Zoey suddenly decides. “We’re gonna bring you back in the next area, don’t you worry, baby. We got this. We got this so covered. We’re gonna bring you back to life, okay?”
“Don’t you dare,” Mira furiously warns. “Choi Zoey, I’ll kill you. Do not bring me back to life.”
They’re totally bringing her back to life.
And they do!
Though it isn’t like it matters all that much; Mira instantly gets taken out by an arrow trap, falls all the way back down, gets bounced off a spike trap, gets slammed into a wall by one of the moving spike balls, and then falls onto a catwalk where she reports that there’s a luggage. And then she gets eaten by a mimic, and that’s what finally kills her in the end.
It’s really no big deal, Rumi thinks. They’ve still got Nadir to go, and she already knows Mira is...really going to love that.
(She does not, in fact, really love Nadir.)
“Zoey! Zoey!” Mira starts frantically hissing out. “You—you left me with the hoglins, Zoey! You can’t be fucking serious, are you kidding me? Dude. There’s no way. There’s no way! I came out here with you to get your stupid warped wood, and you’re—?”
“I’ll come back for you!” Zoey promises. “Just, just give me a sec, okay?”
Rumi knows very well that Zoey is not going to come back for her.
They’ve done this about a thousand times by now. Mira so rarely leaves their house, or the general area around their house, because she has horrible luck when it comes to creepers specifically. Rumi still isn’t quite sure how Mira manages to get creeper-bombed in the middle of the day when no creepers should be spawning at all, let alone where they are, but she’s...definitely managing.
She’s not even a bad player! That’s the other thing that has Rumi so confused about the whole situation; Mira is genuinely so good at the game, especially more niche aspects of it, that it just doesn’t make sense for her to die as often as she’s dying. Even with fully enchanted netherite armour, she’s still struggling. That’s why it’s something of a miracle that Zoey has even convinced her to go to the nether, because creepers still follow her through the portal, and then it’s even more of a hassle to get her stuff, and...yeah.
Mira grumbles all miserably after that. Rumi can’t help the way she smiles, beyond fond. She loves both of them so much more than she could ever say, even if Zoey is currently abandoning their girlfriend with the full intent to let her die in the nether.
“Can you give me your coords?” Rumi asks, already making her way to their portal. “I’ll come and get you, pretty girl.”
“Wow, how chivalrous,” Mira drawls back, but Rumi can hear the smile in her voice. She really wishes she could see her. She knows she could just...leave her room and go to Mira’s, it would take her all of thirty seconds, but—
Well, actually, why isn’t she doing that?
Rumi gets up and pushes away from her chair, practically racing out of her room to push into Mira’s. She grins when Mira’s eyes flit up to meet hers, struck with another wave of love and adoration when Mira’s smile gets a little bigger. Rumi leans over her chair to kiss her, taking one of Mira’s hands off her keyboard so she can intertwine their fingers together for a second.
She still hasn’t fully wrapped her mind around this. She knows they’ve been dating for close to six years now, but...still. It just never fails to stun her that she’s so lucky, that she gets to have both of them, that Mira and Zoey are hers and hers alone. Rumi still can’t believe she gets to kiss and touch them whenever she wants, however she wants. She swears she’s the luckiest person alive. She’ll stand by that until the day she dies.
Mira laughs against her lips, hooking both arms over her shoulders before she pulls back just enough to murmur, “Hi, Ru. What was that for?”
“I just wanted to kiss you,” Rumi says back. “I missed you.”
“We live in the same house and we’ve been hanging out all day,” Mira shoots back, laughing again. “Why would you miss me? I’m right here.”
“I always miss you,” Rumi mumbles. “I love you. Oh, you’re kind of in a bad situation. Jesus, Zoey, you left her like this?” Rumi demands, squinting at Mira’s screen. She keeps the brightness so low that it’s hard to fully make out, but Mira is pillared up about twenty blocks, and, true to her claim, she’s totally surrounded by hoglins. She has nothing else in her inventory other than her pickaxe, and that’s it.
“What?” Zoey sputters. “I said I was gonna come back for her!”
Rumi rolls her eyes at the exact same time Mira scoffs, “Yeah, okay.”
“I was!” Zoey protests. “But you know what? No. I don’t think I will. Clearly you guys have got it, since you’re just in there kissing each other without me. But that’s fine! Totally cool! Whatever, I don’t care. Kiss each other as much as you want, sure, that’s fine. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. I don’t care. Whatever.”
“Oh my god, Zoey,” Rumi laughs. She kisses Mira’s cheek before she pulls away, waving at her before she leaves Mira’s room and enters Zoey’s. She yelps when she’s instantly pressed to the door because—okay, apparently Zoey was waiting for her, which, maybe she should have realised that was going to be the outcome of this, but she hadn’t quite expected it, but she’s definitely not complaining, and...
Zoey kisses her way harder than she kissed Mira, tangling her hands in her shirt for a few seconds. By the time she pulls back, Rumi’s chest is heaving and she’s near-breathless. She can barely think.
“Kissed you stupid, huh?” Zoey teases in a low voice.
“Yeah,” Rumi dumbly agrees. “Yeah. I love you.”
“I love you too,” Zoey giggles. Rumi leans forward to capture another kiss from her, this one far softer than their first. She smiles against Zoey’s lips, mourning how they felt against her own when Zoey pulls back. “I’m gonna go get Mira now. You can go and save her. I love you so much, Ru.”
Rumi lets out a content sigh, twisting her head just enough so that she can press one last peck to Zoey’s cheek, same as what she did for Mira. “I love you so much, Zo. Kiss her for me, too. Please?”
Zoey snorts, but she hums her agreement. “You got it, babe. Don’t have to ask me twice.”
There’s half a second where Rumi considers following her back to Mira’s room to watch, but Rumi decides against it. She’s sure she’ll have more than enough opportunities to watch them make out with each other, and she knows if she goes in that room, they’re going to stop playing, and she does genuinely have stuff she wants to get done in their world.
So Rumi relents and makes her way back to her own room, looking in chat for the coordinates Mira sent her. She makes sure to stock up on everything they could feasibly need on the return trip back, and sets out to save her girlfriend.
Hearing them make out through their voice call is super fucked up, but Rumi perseveres. She has a job to do, and god knows she’s going to do it well.
Rumi and Mira die instantly in the nether.
Zoey is actually kind of impressed with how they managed to fuck up so bad, because it’s not like she left Mira in a bad spot! Well, okay, other than the hoglins. But in her defense, she didn’t think Mira was gonna let herself get swarmed by twenty fucking hoglins! She’s a grown woman, she should know how to play Minecraft by this point, and getting swarmed by twenty fucking hoglins is, like, twelve year old behaviour. Sue her for expecting better plays from her girlfriend, whatever.
Rumi successfully manages to get to Mira in the nether, she even manages to draw the hoglins away from her, and then they both miss a crazy easy jump and die in the lava. Like amateurs. Zoey has to give up her passion project—the world’s worst villager breeder in all of existence—to go on a rescue mission to save their netherite stuff. Which she’s successful in, and she happily ignores Mira and Rumi’s joint complaints of ‘why couldn’t you do this in the first place?’ which is actually super messed up to ask her, thank you very much.
Can’t a girl just want to spend a few hours creating horrors never seen before? Why does she have to be the one rescuing them all the time? Rumi did a perfectly good job until she died! Which, okay, maybe that was a bit of an issue, but whatever, it’s not like Zoey made her go and save Mira, or anything. Mira totally could have just jumped down and ran and she would’ve been okay, but Zoey knows how much she loves pretending to be a princess in desperate need of saving, so she’s hardly surprised with how all of this has played out.
Zoey deposits their stuff in their respective chests and goes back to making her villager breeder. It’s admittedly a little difficult to focus on the task at hand when she can still feel her lips buzzing from kissing Rumi and Mira earlier. She manages to get back on track well enough, finding it infinitely more entertaining to build when she gets to listen to Mira irritatedly complaining about getting creeper-bombed again—Zoey saw that one in the chat—while Rumi mumbles out numbers as she presumably runs through a trial chamber.
Zoey grins the entire time, resting her knuckles to her cheek as she fondly listens to both of them go about their own separate little tasks. They eventually reunite and start talking about their plan to expand the base, and Zoey commits every single second to memory.
“Mira, can you man up and accept my friend request?”
Mira grins, not bothering to look up at her phone. She already knows exactly how Rumi is looking at her, she doesn’t need to see her doing it. “I dunno,” she says back. “Are we friends?”
Rumi sputters incredulously for a second or two before she starts to huff, and that’s all the warning Mira gets before she’s being grabbed by the jaw. She lets out a soft noise of surprise, though Rumi quickly swallows it, kissing her so hard she can hardly breathe or think or do anything other than let Rumi do it.
When she pulls back, Mira is dizzy and panting, staring up at her with wide eyes. Rumi just grins down at her, cocking her head to the side in a way that is so close to being infuriating. She asks, “So...are we friends, or...?”
“Shut,” Mira tries, her voice giving out. She clears her throat. “Shut up. I’ll open...I’ll open the game. Um. I guess.”
Rumi giggles and kisses her again before she pulls away and flops down beside her. Mira can’t find it in her to care about being jostled in the slightest, especially not when Rumi squirms under her arms to rest her chin on Mira’s chest as she messes with her phone. It’s such a stupid position, one that cannot be comfortable for Rumi at all, but it leaves her feeling warm and wanted regardless.
It’s a mistake adding Rumi. Instantly, as soon as Mira gives her verbal confirmation that she finally accepted her friend request, Rumi challenges her to a battle. And Rumi sucks at battling so badly that it’s not even funny, Mira already knows she’s going to obliterate whatever team she sends out, and then Rumi is going to complain about it for the entire rest of the day, and...
Whatever. Mira sends out her Celebi and Serperior deck that she knows Rumi is going to hate more than anything, and waits for her to realise just how fucked she is.
It doesn’t take her very long. As soon as she notices what Mira’s strategy is, Rumi starts thrashing around and crying out for Zoey’s help. Mira just laughs and wraps her legs around Rumi’s hips, keeping her snuggly there. Rumi begs to just concede the stupid match, but Mira insists that they finish it. She has absolutely no reason to make Rumi keep playing with her, they both know Rumi is going to lose, but it’s more or less a point of pride. And also Mira thinks it’s really funny to listen to her begging as Mira steadily kills the entirety of her team.
God forbid she has a little fun.
God forbid indeed, because Mira immediately gets her punishment in the form of Zoey, who has never lost a battle in her entire life. Ever. Literally ever. Mira doesn’t understand how she does it; she’s intently watched Zoey for hours, carefully trying to see if she could spot anything that Zoey is doing that she’s not, but she’s come up empty-handed., Zoey is just better than her, plain and simple. Mira guesses it’s pure skill at this point, maybe a bit of luck.
Regardless, Zoey beats her five times over until Mira is genuinely frustrated, which is as good an act of punishment as any. Rumi sits on the coffee table in front of both of them, watching with rapt, excited eyes as Mira loses over and over and over again. She doesn’t outright mock her taunt her, but Mira can see how her grin gets a little bigger with each lose Mira tucks under her belt.
Whatever.
In the end, Mira is the real winner out of all of them, because Zoey kisses her about fifty times to make up for it, and Rumi happily slots herself between Mira’s legs, head resting against her thigh, as she offers a distraction for the five losses with five of something else, and, well.
Who is Mira to say no?
Rumi doesn’t get Mira’s visceral hatred for the Grey Labyrinth even a little. It’s such a beautiful place and the Prismacore is outright gorgeous. Mira has insisted that it’s hard to navigate and downright impossible to complete, which literally isn’t even true, because they long since installed a multiplayer mod, and that cuts down on the grinding almost completely. Rumi is still the one who spends most of her time running through the Grey Labyrinth, hunting down shadow slimes and waiting for prisma distortions so she can farm plorts.
She’s doing that right now, actually, situated in her little room as her disruption detector starts to scream at full volume. She only half-pays attention to what she’s doing, more focused on listening to Mira and Zoey talk back and forth about their theories and how the first Slime Rancher is connected to the second. Mira watched Zoey play through the whole game years ago, back when they were still teenagers, and they’ve both been wildly into it ever since. Rumi only recently has started to play, and she thinks she likes the second game way more than the first; Mira wholeheartedly disagrees with her, but Zoey has agreed that there are a lot of better mechanics in Slime Rancher 2 as opposed to the first game.
Regardless.
“Did you ever combine the flutters with anything?” Zoey asks. If she’s still doing what she said she was going to do five minutes ago, Zoey should be joining her briefly to take a few sloomber slimes off of Rumi’s hands. Rumi isn’t that bothered, though. She has enough inventory space to comfortably hold onto them for a while longer if need be.
“Yeah, with the cotton slimes,” Mira agrees; she’s busy collecting resources off the entire map, and she was in Ember Valley last time Rumi checked in with her. “I mean, we had a crazy amount of water cabbage, so. Might as well.”
“Water lettuce,” Zoey idly corrects. “How’s your distortion going, Ru?”
Rumi smiles, focusing back to what she’s doing. “Good,” she reports. All of her vegetables and fruits and chickens have turned unstable. “It just started.”
She’s done this a thousand times. Rumi goes back to listening to Zoey and Mira talk to each other as she collects and deposits prisma plorts until her distortion is over. She snickers under her breath when Mira starts to complain about not being able to find any of the resources they need, grinning when Zoey immediately tells her to just ‘use the literal resource map I sent you’ while Mira protests that that’s ‘the coward’s way of doing it and I’m not a fucking pussy, Zoey’. They start fighting after that, so Rumi goes back to the Observatory and does chores around there for a bit.
It’s nice. This is by far the most relaxing game they’ve played since their hiatus started, and Rumi can’t wait to finally finish it.
Her plans to grind out the rest of Slime Rancher 2 are immediately dashed when both Mira and Zoey break into her room and drag her near-kicking and screaming out to the living room to watch a god awful reality TV show that she knows she’s going to hate. Rumi groans and grumbles the whole time, though she’s admittedly pacified by Zoey’s hands in her hair, Mira’s nails scratching along her back.
They’re halfway through the first episode when Zoey suddenly makes a quiet noise and then hums, asking, “Hey. Uh. Hypothetically, maybe, if I found a new game for us to play. Would you play it with me?”
Rumi perks up, doing her best to catch Zoey’s gaze. It’s admittedly sort of difficult with the positioning that she’s in, but she thinks she makes it work well enough. “What game?” she asks.
“It’s a cute little mobile game,” Zoey starts, slowly. “I just think Mira might get addicted to it, is all.”
“What?” Mira asks. She scoffs, twisting her whole face up. “I will not. Tell me what it’s called.”
Zoey grins and waves her off, saying, “Arrows and Cats,” before she flips her phone and lets Rumi see what she’s talking about. “Use my referral code and not hers, okay?”
That immediately gets both of them to start arguing—which is ridiculous, Mira doesn’t even have the game installed—but Rumi just grins and pulls her own phone out to do what she’s told. Even if she doesn’t play it, she might as well let Zoey get some reward out of this.
Rumi installs the game, puts in Zoey’s UID, and goes back to laying face-down in her lap.
She smiles to herself. She listens to Zoey and Mira’s bickering fizzle out into normal conversation. By the time Mira manages to get the game downloaded, Rumi is long gone; she’ll actually play tomorrow, or in a few hours. Just not now, when she’s half-asleep and warm and comfortable.
They’re on an indefinite hiatus, after all. They’ve got all the time in the world.