“Ugh, I wish they’d stop already…” Tahvra tutted as he handed the controller to Teekay. “They’ve been at it for hours.”
Teekay and Tahnahos both peered over the back of the sofa, looking for what Tahvra was referring to. Behind them, Relkir and Phovos were sparring, while Akah was acting as a referee. But really, it wasn’t so much sparring, the whole fight was mostly Phovos flinging Relkir around. Despite Relkir being more heavily built than she was.
“Why don’t you like them sparring?” Tahnahos asked as he turned back to Tahvra. “They’re bored and trying to entertain themselves. We just happen to be sharing a video game together, rather than throwing each other around like primitive brutes.”
Tahvra tutted some more. “Not only is it really annoying, but I’m worried they’ll break the floor! There’s nothing beneath us and they might shatter the crystal floor and fall out of the universe!”
“This stuff is strong enough to hold up a giant dragon though.”
“The place where the giant dragon lives, sure, but we don’t know about this stuff! I’d rather not hear a massive smash and find out that they’ve fallen through the floor!”
Teekay grunted, still holding the controller, not having started his turn on the video game they were playing. “You know, there’s a really easy way to fix this.”
“There is?”
“Yeah.”
Teekay turned back to where Phovos and Relkir were still wrestling, then cleared his throat.
“Hey, guys, do you mind not doing that? Tahvra is worried that you’ll smash through the floor and break this place, which we don’t own.”
Phovos kicked Relkir over, then put her hands on her hips. “You want us to stop?”
“Teekay has a point…” Relkir muttered as he picked himself up and dusted himself down. “We are in rented accommodation. It would be unwise to piss off our hosts.”
“Our hosts don’t give a crap about us!” Phovos snarled. “We’ve been sitting around, bored out of our minds, for over a week now! If I’d known we’d be stuck here, I’d have found a way to do, well, anything but this waiting around crap!”
“We are not supposed to be waiting around though…” Relkir replied. “Our job is to protect this edge of the universe.”
“Yeah, the boring part of the universe! Any of you guys want to fight, I’m bored of fighting Relkir. Really bored in general.”
Teekay shrugged, then went back to playing the video game. He, Tahnahos and Tahvra were taking it in turns playing some sort of building puzzle game. Whenever one of them died, they’d pass the controller on to the next player.
“You could play video games with us?” Tahnahos suggested, visibly clenching as Teekay very narrowly avoided an instant-kill mine. “There’s a co-op mode.”
Relkir blinked. “If there is co-op mode, why are the three of you sharing one controller?”
“We have six controllers but most of these games here are 4-player only. So we’re just taking it in turns…” Teekay explained, before rudely and abruptly cursing. “That fucking death pit!”
Tahnahos took the controller from Teekay, smiling briefly as he restarted from the checkpoint. “Yeah, unfortunately, no 6-player games. But we’re lazy and sharing right now… Oh piss…”
Relkir blinked again, making his way over to the sofa. Out of curiosity, Akah joined them too. “Did you fall in the death pit?”
“Yeah…” Tahnahos nodded. “We’ve been kinda stuck on this level for a while now.”
“Can I give it a go?” Akah asked. “I haven’t played a video game in years.”
The three Guardians on the sofa all glanced at each other, then shrugged. Tahnahos handed the controller to Akah. “Sure! Good luck with the jump.”
Akah examined the buttons on the controller, pressing each one in turn to see what they did. He then proceeded to flawlessly jump over the gap that had been giving the smaller Guardians trouble.
“This is fun!” Akah’s eyes lit up with glee as he continued playing. “I forgot how fun these things were!”