Short story: Aron and Claire Play

Here's a short story featuring two of my writing buddy's characters. Aron is a stuck-up rather racist prince in one book, and Claire is a lesbian heroine in another. Here they cross worlds to play a video game together and do a little math.

But first, on a completely different note, did I ever mention that I was in a house fire in April? Yeah, it was loads of fun. I wrote a story about it featuring Oroka, a Manga character who's afraid of being locked in the refrigerator. That's a stab at the assinine tendency of some authors to create a female and then kill her and lock her in a fridge as a cheap plot device. I want to sell the story before I post it, but here's an excerpt:

"Come on, Oroka" Nakama said consolingly. "Don’t be afraid. No one’s going to lock us in your refrigerator. I noticed it’s a Maytag," she said with false cheer. "Your kitchen is probably just on fire." 1.6 millions Maytag refrigerators were the subject of a recall due to fire hazard. Oroka relaxed a bit. "Maybe it’s even not that," Nakama continued. "Maybe it’s your Maytag dishwasher." 1.7 million Maytag dishwashers were subject to a separate recall, again due to their propensity to catch fire in the middle of the night. Oroka wavered.

Anyway, house fire. The smoke alarm never went off. It was pretty exciting. If my brother hadn't happened to be awake preparing for work when the fridge caught fire at 5 am, we'd probably all be dead. Thank you, Maytag. Thank you, whoever manufactured the smoke alarm. Here's an article on how to select a smoke detector that might possibly do its job: LINK

Oh yeah, later that month I walked into my kitchen to find my Maytag dishwasher had been stuck on the dry cycle for about six hours. Isn't that great? And now back to our regularly-scheduled post:

Aron and Claire Play

"Baser, I'm going to kick your--"

Aron squaled when Claire kicked his shin, then they both concentrated on the game, Aron smug that he could beat any Asian at a driving game, Claire focused on the task at hand.

Aron could have kicked himself when drove his souped-up cyber Civic into the grocery store. Claire crowed and won with a new high score.

"I can't believe it!" Aron screamed. "Here I am in my ninth year of live and I can't beat my inferiors!"

"I didn't know you were eight years old," Claire said.

"I'm nine, like you, stupid," Aron said.

Claire looked at him coldly. "When you were just born, were you starting your first year of life?"

"Of course, moron."

"And how old were you when you were just born?" Claire asked. Aron stared at her. "Zero. So, when had your first birthday, you were starting your second year of life. So after your eigth birthday, um, when you turned eight"-- she looked at him like he was a mentally deficient bug—"you were starting your ninth year. So if you're nine years old, you're working on your tenth year of complete stupidity. Congratulations."

She walked away. "Learn to count, then learn to drive," she said over her shoulder.



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