Myth Gods Tech 1 - Omnibus Edition

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

“You didn’t see anything?”

“Ohi, sorry, nothing,” Deppy replied and she was being honest.

I pulled my legs close to my body. We were at her house, after conjuring up girl-troubles at her dad. He didn’t bother us at all and he left us the living room, finding some daily chore to attend to. Deppy’s dad was a stay-at-home father, working from a fancy computer setup with three monitors and expensive hardware and 24/7 graphs ticking away. Deppy had explained many times to me what it is he actually did, but I zoned out every time after ten acronyms. The only word I remember (because her dad used it like 6.2 times in a sentence) was heuristics. Whatever that was.

Her parents had reversed their roles since Deppy was a baby, so he was the one that actually raised her. Her mother had a promising career and they had decided not to abandon it after Deppy was born. So her father gradually shifted his work and clients to a flexible schedule that he could attend to at home, and he was happy to do the house chores while the mother was out there in meetings and business suits. It was a complete reversal of Greek household values, where the mother was expected to stay at home and raise the kids, and it had attracted a lot of snide remarks from people addressing the father’s sexuality, or at the very least, the diameter of his balls.

All I knew was that, after my dad, Deppy’s dad was the awesomest dad in the world.

I welded my eyes to a painting across the living room, not daring to look my friend in the eye. The painting was from some fantasy RPG game, one that Deppy and her dad played together, and it depicted a busty woman with a big sword in an impossible pose. Seriously, her back would have to be liquid to perch her butt like that. Deppy had told me once that it was the original painting that was scanned for the game’s artwork, and was bought at an online auction. They loved geeky stuff like that.

“But you do believe me,” I asked her when she came back in the room with hot chocolate for me. I kept my gaze on the sword.

Deppy took a few seconds to reply. “I don’t think you are crazy, if that’s what you are asking…” she said, and grabbed my pink new phone. She had no boundaries at that sort of thing, and you just had to learn to accept it.

She sat at her father’s workstation and plugged in my phone. The computer setup was intimidating to most people, and seemed important. Deppy knew of course what to do so as not to disturb her father’s work, so she logged in to her accounts and seemed to take up only two of the monitors, while the third one was showing stats and data as usual.

She leaned back and the chair squealed audibly. “Okay, that’s actually something.” We were both looking at a zoomed image of my selfies, of the smudgy part that we had seen earlier and that I had printed back at home.

The smudge was kinda-sorta-maybe facelike.

Deppy started typing away and brought up the videos our stupid-a*s classmates had just uploaded. Deppy winced and sucked in air. “Sorry. Maybe you shouldn’t see those right now…”

“Ohi, it’s fine. Pull them up,” I said.

Due to the mobile ban at class, they weren’t as quick to draw as they would have in normal circumstances. The videos began after I had stormed out of the classroom, capturing a nice ear-piercing scream I’d let out. They had all managed to get my crouching in the corner in time, and in one Deppy was yelling at the boy and telling him to back off.

I hadn’t noticed that.

She had defended me.

Deppy downloaded them all and focused on a trigger-happy girl’s video, who had began recording a few seconds earlier than all the others.

As she was processing the video, I decided to block it all out for a while and focus on the sweet, warm chocolate. I closed my eyes and zoned out of the ambience of whirring computer fans and keyboard shortcuts.

Several minutes passed.

“W-T-F,” Deppy yelled in acronym and I jumped up startled and burned my finger.

“What?”

“This is trippy!”

I went over her shoulder and looked at the monitor. Deppy had stabilised and looped a few frames at the beginning of the video, that had barely managed to record me leaving the classroom. It showed my hand on the door frame as I was swivelling. My body was hidden from the wall. A dark form was after me, clearly moving towards me in the few frames. Purple sparks were touching my fingers.

My cup smashed on the floor and I made a mess.