s p a c e || open
Riley didn’t like arcades. She hadn’t stepped foot in the place until she’d been given a reason to.
There were only a few things within the facility that could offhandedly be described as “out of order,” as her clue had read – toilets, vending machines, and arcade games. Toilets were connected to individual bedrooms and would have been a terrible choice to hide something that was meant to be found. She couldn’t recall ever seeing a vending machine during her time here, so the only choice left had been the arcade.
The brief satisfaction of being the first to solve a riddle had been quickly washed away by the fact that the key and accompanying note had been completely and utterly useless. She could barely even manage to be annoyed at Leroy for the waste of time, at this point; it had been something to break the monotony, after all. If anything, it had ended too quickly – once again, they were all left with nothing to do. She was bored. As bored as she could be with the history and ongoing threat of death hanging over the facility and the new feathers that kept showing up every day as a reminder that neither she nor anyone else here was truly human. Whoopee.
So despite the dissonant cacophony of sound and the obnoxious carpeting that she found personally offensive, she returned to the arcade shortly after it became apparent that she had nothing more to gain from the riddle hunt, picked a machine at random, and was fully engrossed in a game of Galaga by the time someone else entered the room.
She still looked up from the game to watch them approach, because regardless of whether she was planning to lose herself in mindless video games until she was tired enough to sleep and think about things tomorrow, she did not intend to let her guard down – and she frowned as the machine beeped out a sound effect indicating that the distraction had sent her spaceship right into one of the alien bug bullet… things.
“I’m tired,” she said flatly, without taking her eyes off of them. “If you have something to say, just say it.”