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of Whatever is better than the Sword of Thingamy.”
“I think you’ll find—” Kit gave him an arch look “—that what we’ll be doing is engaging with complex moral questions through an interactive medium which will aid us in our task by helpfully highlighting all of the evil options in red.”
Drew laughed. “Bring it on.”
Kit fired up Steam, and scanned down his library. “The problem is a lot of these are a bit too action-heavy. Weirdly, we might be better off with something turn-based.”
“Wait. I draw the line at musicals and JRPGs.”
“How do you feel about retro?”
“Isometric retro or ASCII retro?”
“Black Isle retro.”
“You mean the guys who turned into the company who are legendarily incapable of finishing games?”
Kit closed down Steam, and opened the GoG launcher. “Jacob’s got me hooked on Good Old Games. Um, the site, but also games that are old, and also good. He’s kind of convinced that PC games are dwindling into the west like Galadriel, and every game worth playing was made in the late nineties.”
“Back when everything came on twenty CDs?”
“Pretty much, but now you can just download them for about five dollars.” He double-clicked on a picture of an angry-looking blue man with dodgy dreads, and a tiny little cinematic popped up of an island and a storm. “This is one of his favourites, but I haven’t actually got round to trying it yet. It’s called Planescape Torment. It’s about this guy who—”
“Kit, I’ve heard of Planescape Torment. It’s like the Breaking Bad of RPGs. People who’ve played it won’t shut up until you do.”
“We can try something else?”
“No, it’s cool. It’s like a gamer rite of passage, and I’ve been meaning to look at it for years.”
On the screen, a slightly blurry zombie was pushing a slab with a grey dude on it slowly through some kind of dungeon.
“Wait,” said Drew. “Do we start off dead?”
“Only mostly.”
“Hang on, what’s the pillar. Why are there skulls? Who’s that chick, and why is she on fire? Is the guy in the mirror us? Why are we a zombie? Is that the same chick and is she dead now? Is she the ghost as well? Hey, stop laughing.”
“Sorry.” It wasn’t a very convincing apology, especially because Kit was still smiling. “I’d say it was an old-games thing, but to be honest I think it’s just a Black Isle/BioWare/Obsidian thing. You just kind of have to go with it.”
When Drew next checked his phone, five hours had passed. “Shit, it’s nearly two. I’d better be getting back.”
Kit pushed his laptop out of the way. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I lost track of time.”
“It’s that game, man. It sucks you in and it makes no sense, and the journal system is borked. And where the heck are we supposed to find someone to grow this black barbed seed for us? I mean we took it to the people in the market who specialise in growing weird plants, and they were like, no, sorry, not our bag.”
“Yeah, I’m beginning to think the humble quest marker gets a really bad rap.”
“I’m never complaining about having to kill fifty harpies again.”
Kit laughed, and crawled off the bed. “It’s really late, do you want me to walk you home?”
“Dude, if you do that, I’ll have to walk you back again, and we’ll get stuck in an infinite loop.”
“And then we’ll have to hard reset the evening.”
Drew felt a bit goofy, but he went with it anyway. “I wouldn’t mind.”
“Neither would I.”
They smiled and stared at each other.
“Look, I could . . .” Drew began, at the same time Kit said, “Do you want to . . .” and just in case that turned into an infinite loop as well, Drew jumped straight to, “Yes.”
He’d shared beds with people before for various reasons, but this was different. They dithered for a while about what exactly was appropriate to keep on and what wasn’t, and finally settled on boxers and T-shirts as a safe middle ground. And then Drew hopped into bed, pulled Kit’s duvet right up to his chin, and tried not to look like a complete dork.
Kit was equipping a slightly worn blue T-shirt, which meant Drew—who wasn’t watching, honestly—got to see the curve of his spine, the shift and drag of muscles under his skin, the freckles on his shoulders. Then Kit flicked off the light and slipped into bed.
It was a single, so there wasn’t much room to be coy. Too many limbs to sort out. Soon, they were