Logs:Geoguesstimate

Geoguesstimate
Dramatis Personae Roscoe, Sriyani
In Absentia	2024-07-01 "Way better than math, right?"
Location <XAV> Dallen, Roscoe, Spencer, and Sriyani's Dorm - XS Second Floor / <???> Vaadhoo, Maldives
What was once a generously-sized double-occupancy room (or a reasonably-sized triple room) is now a terribly cramped quadruple room, furniture arranged somewhat bizarrely to provide each of the residents a bed, a desk with a hutch, a dresser, and some closet space. It's not intuitive which desk goes with which dresser goes with which bed -- maybe even less so when taking into account the hodgepodge of decorations -- but with only Roscoe in residence over the summer the room is much tidier than usual, Roscoe's own belongings very meticulously stored away even if his commitment to cleaning up his roommates' things has only gone so far as clearing the floor entirely, mostly by stacking things onto their offenders' unused beds or dressers or desks. The effect is oddly Spartan, or it would be with a little less nerdery. The spidery robot that usually roams the floor is conspicuously absent -- probably Roscoe has put it in a closet somewhere, out of sight out of mind. It is a warm summery day even with plenty of cloud cover, not really the kind of day that encourages dutiful indoor studying, and though Roscoe is making a valiant attempt to dutifully study indoors anyway, his attention keeps being pulled out of the mansion entirely -- right now he's staring very forlornly off at, seemingly, one of his roommates' dressers, slack-jawed with his head in his hand, slouched cross-legged in his desk chair, his other hand still poised for work even though his pencil has sort of fallen out of the grip onto his math. The door to the hallway is propped open, perhaps in some hopeful bid for company even if Roscoe did sequester himself alone in his room to study. He is dressed very boring -- white shirt, black joggers, socks but no shoes; his hair is an ill-advised orange-blond, combed neatly into what is, sadly, really beginning to resemble a bowl cut. The closet door opens, though there's no closet behind it -- it's spilling in salty tropical air from a dark stretch of white-sand beach. "Rosco-o-o-oh," Sriyani's chipper greeting is drawn a bit longer than intended when they catch sight of his hair. They are dressed for the beach -- bright orange flower-dyed sarong, flip-flops, a gauzy white wrap top over a purple tank. "Wow your hair! Did you..." They bite at their lip as they peer a little harder at him, "do that yourself? Did the bleach melt your brain you look a little zombified." Just at the sound of a door Roscoe is suddenly much more alert, scrabbling to pick his pencil up again, but it takes barely a second to clock who his visitor is and he abandons the effort to feign productivity really before it has gotten anywhere. "-- shoot, the robot --" too late, already Jerusalem is free from its closet prison, and Roscoe does not seem too bothered by this anyway. As he twists in his chair, though, he is visibly a little grudging about putting his feet on the floor. "Where you at, wow," he says, staring wide-eyed, at first just at Sriyani before he cranes his neck, to make a production of looking at the beach. "My sister helped," he says. "Brains all still here for now but I think math is gonna zombify me soon." "Oof," Sriyani says with a wince that is hopefully at math-brains and not at the dye job. "That sucks, I don't get why teachers are so addicted to school anyway, don't they also want summer. Summer vacation for life seems like the number one reason to become a teacher, honestly. -- oh!! Screw math come here I wanted to show you the coolest --" They're straightening, gesturing eagerly for Roscoe to follow through their door but then squinting off in the distance down the beach and reconsidering. "Actually hold on I got a better --" They duck back through the door and close it, but keep their hand on the doorknob. "Okay now screw math we're going to the coolest beach." "Right?" says Roscoe, though he's only cheerfully aggrieved; he gets up gamely and makes it one step into the beach before Sriyani is ushering them back in, probably he was going to come back anyway because he is not currently dressed for the beach. "What was wrong with the last beach? The last beach looked fine. Better than math. Beachy. -- where's the new one?" As he's speaking he hops on one foot, then the other, to peel his socks off (one of them is now, alas, half-covered in sand.) He might already be peeking behind the door; he's giving it a tilted, owllike stare. "Same beach I'm just picking a different angle cuz it's really hard to stop you from cheating," Sriyani explains cheerfully as Roscoe tilts his head. "I was gonna be like "look how cool this is" but you would've already spun your head around like an owl and seen it all." Sriyani is demonstrating this interpretation of Roscoe's vision via opening their eyes Very Wide and spinning in a circle, since their neck (unlike Roscoe's obv.) only turns so far. They finish their twirl with hand on the door again, and this time: "okay okay look how cool this is --" and once again behind the door the world is unfurling into beach, just a second before Sriyani pulls the door open. It's nighttime, wherever they are, a spread of sandy white that seems for a moment to run straight down into the night sky -- at least, the ocean is glowing, lit up by infinite tiny pinpoints of blue light that shimmer brighter where the water froths up on the sand. "Way better than math, right? I bet I could open a million doors and not run out of weird stuff the world has." "I'm not cheating I'll close my eyes --" would this actually stop him, no, but Roscoe closes his eyes anyway, though then he leaves them closed even as he laughs at Sriyani's owl impression, which really doesn't sell his promise not to cheat. He does open them to step out into the beach, squinting up at the night sky and then out at the ocean -- "Man," he says. "How do you find these places anyway -- I bet you've opened a million doors by now anyway but they can't all be this nice." He does, after a moment, think to peer back over his shoulder at what the door leads to -- "Like real life Geoguesser," he says. "Got a secret teleporter text loop so we know when awesome things are happening in the world." The door they just came from leads to what looks like a tiny beachside cafe, the sign advertising breakfast and coffee in both English and Divehi. It is closed for the night; there are very few people on this stretch of beach at all. There's a scattering of trees behind, and in the distance lights that suggest there is civilization not far away despite the immediate quiet here. "I lose Geoguesser every time," they admit freely, "and most doors are not this full of magic." They're kicking off their sandles, wading ankle-deep into the gentle surf; around their legs the glow coalesces still further. "But a lot of them are. Oh! Do you have guesses?" "That scans." Roscoe has to bunch his joggers up around his knees to wade in after Sriyani, widening his eyes down at the glow; he stoops down to cup a little water in his hand, to look at it closer, then evidently can't resist the temptation to just throw it at Sriyani in a teeny tiny splash. "I used to play it a lot," he says, though when he glances back over his shoulder at the little cafe, he furrows his brow in a way that does not suggest he's very good at it. His eyes flick rapidly past it to the distant lights -- is this cheating again? -- then after a moment he says very decisively, "Island." Sriyani puts their arm up reflexively against the splash, though they're laughing. They drop a hand to bap light at the water, a small sploosh speckled with its own tiny "stars" splishing back at Roscoe. "I play it sometimes but the problem is if the picture's got a door I just go there and then my time runs out. It is a fun way to discover new places though." They snort at his answer, tipping their head back -- the sky overhead is also dotted with a whole lot more stars than the New York nighttime. "Wellll you aren't wrong. Okay I'll give you a hint, if we went like --" They're turning one way, then the other, squinting up at the sky and then around before they pick a direction and stick their arm out, "-- seven hundred-ish miles that way we'd run into my gran and like five hundred aunties who would all try to stuff you so full of fish curry and you don't even speak Sinhala so they'd pretend they don't know English when you say you're full." Roscoe twists his whole body away from the retaliatory splash -- "Oh so you can cheat with your power," he says. It's not clear how much the hint is helping -- Roscoe is squinting off into the distance like he's trying to find whatever is seven hundred-ish miles away. "-- nope, I give up. Indian Ocean, somewhere? Maybe?" He glances back down at the water, back up at Sriyani, back out at -- he almost definitely has not actually located Sri Lanka from here. "Fish curry sounds good, though. Do you speak Sinhala?" "I can totally cheat but I still lose, exploring new places for real is way more fun than doing it on the map. Fish curry's so good I'd take you right now but it's like, the middle of the night here and my family will disown me if I keep forgetting time zones and jamming up their sleep." Sriyani makes a triumphant fistpump when Roscoe guesses, as if "Indian Ocean" is accurate enough to award this round. "The Maldives. I speak enough Sinhala to know when they're really disappointed I don't speak more Sinhala." Sriyani trails a leg through the water, pushing a very small glowing wave in Roscoe's directions. "Like they think it's great we're being American but not, y'know, so American-ly." Their smile is a little crooked. "How's your Vietnamese?" "Disowning you seems kinda harsh, who's gonna stuff you with fish curry if you're disowned? Did they think about that?" Roscoe probably misses the fistpump, stooping to trail his fingers through the shimmery swell. His eyes only lift a moment later, to grin at Sriyani, and he shrugs one shoulder. "I think about as good as your Sinhala. I know when I'm being talked about, don't know what they're saying." He straightens up again, wipes his hand on his shirt; his tone, though it hadn't quite sobered up, comes back to normal. "I'm doing it way more American-ly than you, at least you travel." "I'm screwing it up for you!" Sriyani sounds bright and fully unapologetic. "You're here in the Indian Ocean, that's so far from Boston. -- oh! You want to go to the Roswell UFO festival next week? When will there be a better year than this. Plus, aliens or no aliens, it's still America." Roscoe tilts his head back up at the infinite-stars sky, grinning again -- "Oh man, do you think they had to rewrite all the UFO theories? I bet they're so mad -- yeah we should go. I want some alien merch. That," he kicks another little splash of water Sriyani's way, "would be super American."