Hunted

Act 2; His Circumstances

Another sunrise, another day, but he was never asleep to begin with so there was no point in saying he woke up.

Even after a thirty-six hour gaming marathon and only his usual Gatorade energy drink to live off of and a few snacks here and there, he thought there was no more possibility that he might be able to keep up with the rest of the world. The sunrise was a nuisance though. Even his tinted window was no match for it. He knew it was there, reminding him to stop already and get some fresh air.

Well, screw the sun! He only had another twelve hours before school starts and he'd need to recharge for it, so there was no way he was backing out now!

In that strange school where kids were divided into cliques yet encouraged to overcome such differenced and be friends with everybody, no one cared if he spent the entire weekend playing Pokémon and a couple MMORPGs on his desktop computers. He was a dorm student, so no one would come looking for him anyway.

One would think that after spending the entirety of summer traveling all over North and South America training new doctors and building up hospitals and assisting refugees from one disaster after another, his parents would come back to their own hometown and relax a little, maybe even catch up on some of his schooling, talk to his teachers about how good his grades were. But that wasn't his case. It's already been two years since the last time they set foot on that city, especially that school, but he guessed he didn't mind too much. So long as his report cards kept saying his true grades, he had all the gaming equipment he could ever dream of, and that was a pretty sweet deal by itself.

Though, if he ever ended up calling the shots, would it kill them to bring him along once in a while? Maybe not a summer vacation's worth, but a weekend getaway would be nice enough... Unfortunately, he wasn't calling the shots . And he guessed the current way of things weren't so bad, anyway. It was his fault for telling them he was fine either way, and they never bothered him too badly. Maybe they thought it'd get in the way of his studies?

He sighed, saving his game after finally capturing his thirteenth legendary Pokémon. The series was really getting away from him, and he hoped they'd add a way for players to finally able to sit on the darn benches someday. If the game evolved as fast as a favorite Pokémon though, then it would have solved that problem ages ago.

His eyes drifted to the notification that started blinking at the edge of his screen. It was a game notification reminding him of a scheduled raid. He saved his game again just for the heck of it, then opened the other game that's been sweeping the masses lately.

He watched the loading screen as the sunrise peaked through the single hole scraped on his tinted window, a single, golden ray penetrating the darkness in which he resided in, dust turning visible in the short moment it danced by. His room turned into a dump of game disks and junk food wrappers as soon as he started gaming, and he should probably clean it up soon.

The smell of cold air-conditioning was stagnant in the air. The four walls were the Sports Department's standard red, now defaced by a multitude of gaming posters he got himself to get hyped up with each new release date. The floor was a pastel yellow, cluttered by his junk, and the ceiling a dark gray, almost black. Every dormitory had a uniform amount of furniture lest the students wanted to add or subtract anything. One wardrobe closet was in the corner, next to his bed with the Assassin Creed blanket. His desk was farthest from the only window. He didn't mind any of it, so he kept what he had, only adding his video game consoles on the display and two of his computers on the desk. He did all of his homework in the classroom.

He had spent more time in that dorm room than anywhere else in his entire life. A summer spent in training camp was no contest. Even if his batch mates told him to consider it a vacation, he just couldn't see it. Sometimes they'd play games, and that got his hype up, but in the end, he decided that playing in virtual reality was always way better. Less strenuous too.