Only a Game (Olympus Drive Chronicles)

Chapter 39: Side-stream smoke

Teddy

The afternoon passes in a haze of blue smoke. I get told not to touch anything. I am overly tempted to touch things. I get reminded not at all gently not to touch things. I don't touch things. Metion works swiftly on whatever it is Ariadne brought him that he needed to finish his jet packs. Ariadne and Viktor are not allowed to help, but they don't care about that, while I was actually hurt. I wanted to see what he was doing but I got ordered across the room like a naughty puppy.

I am, however, thoroughly entertained by Viktor. Viktor is exactly as clever as you would expect a fourteen year old who was solely raised by a Mensa-candidate drill sergeant to be. Which is to say, very. He can rattle off equations without looking paper, solving them in the air with his fingers, mean-while rapidly correcting his father's under the breath mumblings, all with a cheeky smile. The boy talks so fast he runs out of oxygen, and he's so attentive he can not only make comments about what his father is doing and muttering across the room through the haze of smoke, but can also carry on two different conversations with Ariadne and I. His energy borders on exhausting, but he clearly has no other entertainment so Ariadne and I cannot help but to humor his every question.

He bounces about, fixing us lunch then later dinner, eating none of it himself but forcing his father to eat, bringing him soup, and hard bread as a matter of form, though letting none of it pass his own lips, instead begging for another cigarette. He doesn't get one, and I don't see why he would need one when the air is so filled with smoke I feel myself developing lung cancer.

Ariadne does cough, but not as badly as I do. To give you a general idea how badly I'm reacting to this amount smoke in an unventilated room, Metion actually suggests that I have whooping cough and shouldn't be around his precious nicotine-addicted prodigy child.

And Viktor is clearly precious to him. The only time Metion hazards to crack the slightest of smiles is for his boy, and they are nearly of one mind, bickering and completing the others sentences so smoothly Ariadne and I struggle to follow. They act entirely alike, with Viktor copying his father's mannerisms and accent, having no other influence I imagine. His mother has been gone for a long time for him to adopt his father's accent so perfectly, and by their difference in appearance I would assume that his mother had altogether different accent and at the very least mannerisms.  

    They look nothing at all alike physically, to the extent that I wonder if they are biologically related. The tall Dane (I do remember Metion was born in Denmark), is fair with distinguished silver hair, thick arms with that haunting tattoo on the left, and light blue eyes that flit over me judgmentally. Viktor is small, brown, and lean, almost painfully so, though his muscles are thick like rocks. The Eaton rowing team would envy those biceps. His mother has not come up, though I assume she was African? His eyes and hair are darker than mine and I'm 15% Ethiopian or something like that (I did a DNA test once).

Viktor is entirely delighted to have us as guests and immediately starts quizzing us on how we liked Dancing Ground and all of Naughty Bull's other games. This takes ten times longer than it should because Metion frequently interjects with differing opinions on what puzzles we ought to have and ought not have found challenging. He also dismisses Ariadne's opinion as biased since she knows them both, and he also quickly finds a way to dismiss mine as well when he discovers the parts I found trickier were not the parts he intended to be tricky.

He's also not over me not finding whatever cutscene he'd put in. Apparently (I get this out of them after thirty minutes of back and forth bickering), there was a hidden scene after one of the challenges in which Metion revealed where they were and that they were being held as prisoners. That explains why the game got recalled a day after I finished it. I, for one, didn't find it and that has yet to stop irritating Metion. The fact that I just thought he was being held prisoner anyway based off the various tonal shifts of the games as well as the format, does not comfort him. The entire debate amuses Viktor to no end.