“Never heard of it. Seeing people in bikinis is making me wish I was someplace warmer, I’m not sure I could stand to watch that.”

Rain chuckled.

“Is it good?”

“We’re not far enough in to know,” Rain said. He hit the pause button. The scene had the woman with the boa looming over ‘Parker’, the youngest person in the house.

“I’m dying for something to watch. Is it in the catalogue?”

“Offworld French animation,” Rain said. “It might go in the catalogue if we can figure out how to convert the video file types.”

“That’s always a nightmare. But if you upload it straight, it can be emulated.”

I leaned back, “We talked to a few people about it and got different answers each time. Some people don’t like how messy it gets. If it sucks it might not even be worth the hassle.”

“Odd animation. Rotoscope?”

“Yeah,” I said.

An icon was flashing yellow on the laptop. Rain cycled out of the window and into another one. A simple video game, with two towns, each with a nine by nine grid on it, each icon on the grid having a series of buildings. Hospital, house, farm, carpenter’s, and police.

Rain centered the laptop across his knees, clicked on the house, cycling through images until a frowning old lady appeared, peering over the little fence. A series of red ‘-100’ and ‘-200’ popped up in neighboring zones.

Above the other town, a face like the one I’d seen drawn on Kenzie’s whiteboard popped up—a circular face with only eyes and mouth, brown skinned, black hair parted with two buns, contained within a speech balloon. Her eyes closed into half-circles, mouth wide in a smile that took up half of the circle. A thumbs-up icon followed.

I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I followed the logic of the coding system, but Rain seemed to. I could get the general sense of it though. In the other town, there was a police officer shouting at someone outside of the police station, curse words in the speech balloon.

I pointed at it. “She’s okay? No points lost?”

“Random event,” Rain said. “They’re fine. She’s still ahead by… seven quintillion points. Literally.”

I looked over my shoulder. There were police officers and people in Patrol uniforms wandering Lyme Center. The nooks and reading areas were regularly visited.

In ‘our’ town, the police were just walking around their one-ninth of the grid.

The guy who had been watching our screen over our shoulders walked away. Rain finished typing out a message, fixed the orientation of the laptop, and resumed the video. He leaned back and took the ear bud from my hand, sitting closer as he put it in.

On the screen, ‘Parker’ was throwing a fit. The woman with the boa took it unflinching, until the first few objects were scooped up from the nearby cabinet and thrown.