Question: Do You Want to Live?

[They were Roommates]

Living with your friends is cool enough, being the leader of one of the top teams is pretty cool as well, but living with your top team friends is... not ideal. Don't get anything wrong, they are fine enough, nice enough, functional enough, and mature enough, but something felt wrong leaving his childhood best friends for the first time.

Mask piled some more boxes in the new room that would become his in Inkopolis Square. Moving away from the Plaza was a move that he knew he would have to commit to if he wanted to continue being a competitive face in the rosters. It took a lot of time, a lot of money, but here he was, putting box after box into the corner of a room which had a generic bed parked in its corner. This was his new room in the shared home of The S4.

Leaving his original home was so hard, leaving his parents to live with his friends, because while he really, really wanted to live with Designer and Luna, it felt so hard to leave familiarity. The oddest thing? Once he was with them, he eventually got very comfortable, and then leaving there felt even worse. Mask never liked change, yet here he was uprooting yet another home to go chase his dreams. They lived an hour away now, and his closest friends had pushed him to go move along, to find his passion with his other friends. What kind of friends even do that? Ones that really care about him.

"Mask, I mixed up one of your boxes for mine, so mind taking it? I don't want to know what's inside," Aloha, his voice graining as ever, called to him in a sing-song tone. The perk of humour in his tone was only a shield for his constant passive aggressiveness, that even after Team Blue had taught him the power of friendship, remained a constant barrier between him and the entire S4 team. Aloha was spinning a generic cardboard box in his hands as if it were light as a feather which... for the most part, it was. Mask groaned and grasped the box out of the shorter one's hands.

"There's figures in there, be gentle with them," Mask scoffed, grabbing the cardboard and yanking it lightly from the other's palm. Aloha crossed his arms after there was nothing to hold anymore and smirked, sticking his tongue out. Mask, unphased, would keep his tired but frustrated eyes focussed on Aloha, adjusting his medical mask further up his face as he smothered a sneeze.

"Pssh, sorry~! Anywho, Army's busy in the kitchen making more Curry, so you best get in there and get a bite before Skull does," Aloha would turn on his heel and happily bounce away, leaving with him an empty room and a seething Mask. He'd set down the box by the other smaller ones onto the bed in the corner, then sneeze into his arm and soil his medical mask. He groaned. Something about Aloha's constant perfume smell irritated his nose in a way that allergies never could compare. Asshole.

Upon gently making sure that all figures inside of the box were not broken, and making sure to orderly adjust where they were in the box before he closed it, Mask would sigh. Pulling on some sliders over his socks, he moved along to go into the kitchen, grasping on tight to the handrail as his tall but severely slender body made its way down the steps, each step taking a great amount of effort. They never had steps in his old home. They had one step to get into the kitchen, and one step down into the front door. Never actual stairs. If he really wanted to have stairs in a house, he would've asked the richer Army for a tour of his stupid parents' mansion back in Takoya Townie. Not that he should rip on Army for any of that, it just pissed him off as a lower class kid.

Once Mask had settled at the bottom of the stairs, he wandered into the kitchen with a couple more steps and found the burning scent of spice. Eugh. Aloha was already sitting down at their new table, reading a magazine about cars. Aloha of course was using a fold out chair, and Skull was personally unfolding another one for Mask.

"Sit down, it's almost done," Skull's constantly blunt tone was something Mask still had yet to get used to as actual kindness instead of an aggressive order. Mask quietly obeyed with a struggle to get himself situated, arms trembling as he held on the table to lower himself into the seat. Skull nodded with some sort of acceptance of this action, then turned around to start loading dishes into cupboards. Mask shivered with some sort of relief, though he couldn't place it.