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Faith introduces Angel to video games, complete with a PS4 Pro and the massive 4k TV Colt bought them a long time ago.
4/2/2017, 2:00 PM
Hyperion Hotel San Francisco
The Hyperion Hotel[]
The lights are on, illuminating the area.
The California-Spanish building known as the Hyperion Hotel was built in the 20s. Through the cast iron gates from the sidewalk is a small front courtyard with a rectangular fountain and a mythological figure holding a bowl from which water flows. Greenery frames the walls and a large set of glass double doors open into a high ceilinged lobby. Dark red carpet descends the four steps to the lobby floor and climb the two sets of stairways that lead to the second floor. The green marble floors are accented with wavy red inserts, as are the walls have a complimentary red border running their length. A set of doors identical to those of the entrance lead to a small enclosed garden.
Cream-colored pillars line two sides of the room, holding up the second-floor balconies that look out onto the lobby and creating arches. Underneath one of them is a large plate glass window that looks into the hotel office - now used as the office and nerve center of Angel Investigations. Nearby, there's a wraparound counter with dark wood paneling and a top the same color as the floor. Behind it are filing cabinets and a pair of desks pushed together. A navy blue circular couch harkening back to a 50s design sits near the back of the lobby. A large wooden, glass-doored cabinet pushed up against the wall holds a large assortment of weapons.
Outside, it's raining hard and the winds are strong.
Faith, hooking up her console to the big TV. "Give it a try...it helps reflexes and timing." Slayer, thinking video games help. Well, maybe they do. Of course...can vampires actually improve their reflexes? Would seem hard to do for the undead.
Angel picks up a controller, having never done this before..."Ummm..." Clearly not quite sure what to do with this game, or even the controller. Too many buttons on thing. What do they all DO anyway?
Faith finishes hooking up. "Okay...you're probably going to need the tutorial." She picks up the other controller. "Hold it like this." Oh, he's going to die a few times before getting the hang of it, but everyone does.
Angel goes through the tutorial, but he's even worse off than most first time gamers, being not at all familiar with the controller or even games in general. He's too busy killing monsters in real life.
"Don't death grip the controller," Faith says. "And don't worry. Everyone dies a few times to start with...it's a learning curve."
"At least they aren't real people dying." Like they would be when he goes out every night. That's the upside. Nobody gets actually hurt playing these things. You just restart and everything's fine.
"Well, yes." Faith glances at Angel. "I'm putting us into coop mode." Because she doesn't actually want to 'kill' Angel.
"Alright, sounds good." At least that means Faith can protect him while he figures controls out. ...Huh. Protecting him. One of these days, he's going to get used to the idea of people looking out for him too.
One of these days. "And I'll put us on easy setting." Which is still going to be tough for a clueless first timer, but he's got a chance of survival with her protecting him.
"Sounds like a plan." Meanwhile, Angel's trying to figure out which button does what, which leads to many hilarious things like jumping when he intends to shoot, or crouching when he's supposed to jump.
Faith Lehane is not laughing. Out loud. She takes out a couple of bad guys while he's getting into so much trouble. "Other button," she says. "Left side."
Angel manages to hit the wrong button, which accidentally throws a grenade at a too close wall, which bounces back and kills him. "...That didn't end well."
"I've done that. Let's try this again." It does get easier, and she shoots Angel a "trust me" look.
Angel grimly presses on. Nobody's ever accused him of being a quitter. Which developer thought it was a brilliant idea to put a cliff so close to the start of the game, however, turned out to be a bad plan. Because upon accidentally hitting the 'run' command, he manages to run right off a cliff to his death. "...Okay." Yeaaaah. Not ending well at all.
Faith did try to warn him on that one. "That cliff gets the newbies every time. Probably why it's there."
And these are supposed to be professional soldiers, blowing themselves up with grenades and running off cliffs. "...I've killed me more than the bad guys have." Which is to be expected on Easy mode. The biggest danger on easy mode is the player's own idiocy.
"That's how it is to start with. Once you get it down, though..." Faith suspects Angel will be kicking her butt in short order.
The only thing in Angel's favor at the moment is that he never kills himself in quite the same way twice. Instead, he finds exciting new ways for this poor Call of Duty soldier to end his apparently miserable existence.
Faith Lehane is trying not to laugh. "Well, you aren't making the same mistakes twice." And this is still easy mode.
Angel halfsmiles. "Still have a good memory. It's all I've got, at the moment." Maybe he could've been a game tester in another life, because he falls off most every new cliff as it comes along.
"Like I said, you'll...watch out for that..." And she frees one hand from the controller to facepalm.
Angel of the Military watch out for that...cliff. Or grenade. "...I thought the grenade would go over the fence." It didn't. It blew up at his feet. And then blew him up too.
"Yeah, the fence is probably coded to be a wall. Let me see next time. If it's a 'proper' fence we can go over it." She stretches a bit and starts back at the last save point.
Turns out, it is a proper fence, Angel is just that terrible at his grenade throwing. For now, anyway. Got too close, didn't aim high enough. "...Huh."
"Higher, then," Faith says, before firing off a snap shot...and apparently being very distracted by Angel. She misses, the NPC doesn't. Her turn to die.
"...Oh. That's new." He never expected to see Faith died. Good thing it's only a video game. The real event is a frightening thought. "We'll get through this." Eventually.
"My fault, I was talking to you, not watching my own back." She starts it up again, paying more attention this time.
Angel's getting better. He's even shooting the occasional bad thing. Mostly because he has things memorized now, and there's starting to be shadows of the player he could be, given practice.
"You're going to be good at this," Faith notes. "Really good." Which means she might actually have a play partner...the junior slayers are almost too good, but she's way ahead of anyone without enhanced reflexes.
Angel's starting to get better...pattern recognition is starting to tell him which buttons to push when...and his play is getting better. As long as he's not going anywhere new. But if he sorts the controls out...
Eidetic memory doesn't, apparently, always make it easier to learn a game controller. Faith is just shielding him while he works the rest of it out.
"It's what I keep telling our newbies. Control yourself, then control your fight." But now he's the newbie, learning to control a character on screen. But his movements are getting notably smoother. Though advanced concepts like quickscoping still elude him.
"Exactly. It's exactly the same thing, just that you're using a slightly different set of reflexes. Still...timing." Timing is *everything* in a game like this.
"Are there really people who spend hundreds of hours doing this kind of thing?" Because...this is fun, and a distraction...but it IS a distraction, and there's so much more out there. Even for people who don't fight monsters all the time.
"Yeah. Well, some people, it's really the thing they're best at and they can even make money at it." Faith shrugs. "I don't get the appeal to that degree, but..."
"...and then those people get blown out of the water by our junior slayers who spend too much time doing this and not enough time patrolling." Because even the best normal player is going to be that little bit slower than the slayers are.
"I've told them to let the normals have their fun, but..." Faith shrugs a bit. "They don't always."
"It's probably something we should put our feet down on a little more firmly. Using their advantages in this game is only slightly less obvious then using them in a game of basketball. We don't want them getting the idea it's okay to use their powers for advantage over normal people." Down that path lies badness. Lots of badness.
"Right, that's what I said. I told them to play strategy games instead." Faith grins. "Just as useful, but our physical advantages don't come into play."
"Well, at least they're not playing football or hockey. They'd probably start accidentally hurting people then." Speaking of which, Angel's slowly starting to memorize maps and enemy locations. He still gets surprised and dies a lot, but...
But...well, he's learning the map. Which doesn't surprise Faith - she's entirely familiar with her friend's memory. "At least."
AI has its limits, and if Angel just had the controls down a little better, he could be exploiting them ruthlessly. But he's still just that little bit awkward on controls. "Eva used to track. She wasn't happy she had to give that up..."
"None of them are." Faith considers. "I wonder how many of us would really choose this, if we had the choice."
"Buffy made a speech about that didn't she? Are you ready to be strong, she asked. Maybe not everyone is. But whether they're ready or not, the spell Willow cast made them strong. And they all react to that strength in different ways." It's an interesting thought, but what's done is done.
"Everyone does," Faith notes. "Everyone reacts to whatever is strong about them differently." Which...can vary. Slayer strength is only one kind, after all.
"And the spell just picked potentials. All of them. It didn't check for their character, or who there were inside, or what they might do with the power. It was just, anyone with the potential for the power now has it. There will be more responsible women who didn't have the potential. And there's going to be some we regret activating. But for all, the world's still better off." His gameplaying, less so, cause he managed to get killed again in a new area.
"Well, what decides who has the potential?" Faith muses. "Or who. We don't really know, do we."
Angel shrugs, "Always figured it was genetic. Some kind of legacy passed down by Sineya. But we don't really know how or why a girl is selected to be a Slayer. We should look into that someday." It's not a high priority, but...it'd be interesting.
"It might be...yeah. Interesting." She shrugs a bit. "I mean, me and Buffy are *very* different people."
Angel nods, "Yeah. And neither of you much resemble Eva either. She was planning on a music career till Willow's spell found her. Hopefully we can find Colt at some point to hook her up with an actual record label. Harper's got some similarities to you, though. Except for the part she hates her calling."
"I wasn't exactly happy about it right at the star. Just got over it faster than she has." Faith shrugs. "I understand how she feels."
"Buffy hated it too, to start. She wouldn't have it any other way now, but...all she wanted was a normal life once, back when she was in High School. But the more she grew and the more she changed the world, the more she started to accept what she was Called to be." It's very different for Angel...he wasn't Called to this life, he chose it after Whistler showed him Buffy.
"Well, it does rather put a damper on everything you have planned," Faith frowns a little.
"Faith, I've lived 289 years and the only time anything went as planned was last January." When Buffy said yes. "And that moment took a ritual that involved fighting off demon hordes from Hell and then being Knighted by a Fae Court, so I can't even say I planned it."
Faith Lehane laughs a bit. "Life never goes as planned, but teenagers often think it will."
Angel nods, once. "Yeah, well. It won't, but that's what we're here for. Sure, we train them to fight...but we're also what they lean on when things go wrong and nothing seems to make it right."
"And when nothing goes right for us, we lean on each other, right?" Faith quips.
Angel halfsmiles at her. "Yeah. We'll always have that too. Even if everything else goes wrong...we'll always have that."