RAIN IN THE ARENA ✦ darren

Tired of his shitty room, Darren decided to take his shitposting to the commons. Armed with a two years old middle-end laptop and his somewhat recent, somewhat shitty phone, he took it to the area with the TVs and the big couches.

When he got there, there was some chick playing Fortnite on the common room flat screen. Whatever. Shit game. He crashed on the couch behind her and she didn’t even fucking notice. He opened his laptop, opened his meme folder, various spicy internet chatrooms and meme pages and began shitposting everywhere. He was on about everything, skeleton memes, deep fried memes, Spongebob memes, even some normie anime memes. Darren liked pretty much everything that was dumb enough to get a chuckle out of him.

It all began with him being bored in school on a lazy late autumn day. One of those days where you feel like doing fuck-all, but you still have to do shit because you're at school. Even if you were actively lazy -- yes, Darren can be actively lazy, it's his hidden second quirk, he says -- like he was, you were still stuck doing nothing, which also sucked. He spied some nerdy kid on his phone and looked over his shoulder with little to no sense of privacy. The kid was on a meme page, currently looking at the following meme:



Darren laughed his ass off. Something in his deranged half-psychopathic fun-loving brain found this funny. His subconscious laughed his ass off too. Soon the meme was passed all over Darren’s mind -- which we shall remind new readers is a strange place. He asked the kid where did he find this shit. He timidly said "A-A meme page," and Darren asked him to show him more. Soon enough, Darren was following his own curated selection of shitposting content on the reg.

That nerdy kid was never bullied again, and from now on received, and still receives to this day a constant stream of memes, as Darren posted a new one from his dorm in UA. They had a running in-joke about skeleton memes, so he decided to send him a spicy new one.



Eventually, the delinquent got bored of shitposting -- it was fun when you were bored, but that was it -- and apparently, the girl got bored of playing a third-rate game with fourth-rate gameplay. Looking for something fun to do, he hollered at her.

“Got any real fuckin’ games?”

Clearly, that gamer chick wasn’t happy at her comment, and she made it know from the way she twisted her face. It looked both forced and genuine. Darren grinned his idiotic grin back. He chuckled at that comment on garbage games and raised his chin.

“Shit, with what you were playing earlier, I don’t trust your taste. Pull up in the arena.” He grabbed the controller, scrolled through the girl’s library -- which was indeed impressive -- to the letter R. Instead of the fighting game she might have expected from ‘arena’, it had something to do with cars and soccer.

“Bet you can’t take me on Mannfield,” he taunted, loading up a 1v1 game on the stormy version of the map.

It was a green soccer field, the kind you might find in the suburbs with small bleachers on either side. The player cars were encased in a semi-opaque cage, with extrusions at both ends for goals. It was raining and thundering on Mannfield, and despite the cage, there was somehow rain in the arena.

The objective was simple: put the ball through your opponent’s goal with your car and don’t let him do it to you. Perhaps it should be explained that said cars can also jump, flip and fly using a rocket engine and by making tender love of the laws of gravity, to stay polite.

As soon as the countdown reached kickoff, Darren pressed the boost button and accelerator trigger at the same time, heading at full speed towards the ball in his buggy car. It took the shortest route towards the ball. He stopped using his boost early, conserving a bit for a last spurt of thrust, and front-flipped towards the sci-fi-looking big-ass soccer ball to compensate. He had a cocky smile on his face and his thumbs moved fluidly on the controller.

“Don’t you bloody regret it now, vidya chick,” he said.

“Fuck adventure,” he said, “I’m all about dunking on noobs.”

He made good on his promise, too, or at least tried. Despite looking like she had never played rocket-powered car soccer -- who hasn’t? -- she was shrewd enough to realize she couldn’t contest the ball, and instead turned around to defend her goal.

Seeing this, the Darren slowed his car, gently tapped the ball, popping it up, and drove under it. The ball naturally slid on his roof. He kept it balanced, carefully putting inputs left and right, fingering the throttle trigger like he was trying to get it off. However the throttle felt about this abuse, Darren, his car and the ball on top of it were closing on the goal.

This is where Darren deployed his skills, earned through hours of wasting his evenings in training mode when he was grounded. As rebellious as he was, Mama Daimon was impassible, and when he came home with a scratch too many, she locked him in his room. One might think an evening of playing video games wasn’t much in the way of punishment, but to the fight nut that he was, the adrenaline just didn’t compare.

Just before he reached his opponent’s six meters, he pressed the jump button. He waited for half a second for the ball to position itself perfectly, and pressed jump again. This time, he was pushing the left stick all the way forward, so instead of a measly jump, his car front-flipped forward. The car looked like a seventies muscle car, which was the sole reason he picked it.

It flicked the ball, changing its trajectory again. Darren was lucky; it was almost a perfect shot, slicing through the air at a medium speed, on a direct trajectory towards the top-left corner of the goal. There was definitely enough time for the girl to meet the ball if she knew about the delicate art of flying a rocket-powered car, but the delinquent was confident in his shot. He said nothing, just looking at the screen with a sly smile. Let’s see her catch that, he thought.