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Mercenaries

Indigo Zap slowly opened her eyes. She looked at Lemon Zest, lit up by the glow of her monitor and not much else. Then she looked around the largely dark room. Then she turned slightly back and stretched out an arm, grabbed hold of her phone on the narrow strip of wood bridging the gap between her bed and the wall, and turned the screen towards her face while turning it on. "What are you doing up so early?" she groggily asked, setting the phone down to look at Lemon again.

"New game came out," said Lemon, leaning to her laptop's side to smile at the other girl. "I wanted to give it a try. It's been fun so far."

Indigo shifted slightly beneath her covers. "The actual kind of fun or the rush of excitement for something new kind of fun?"

"Does it matter?" Lemon shrugged her shoulders and focused on her PC again. "I feel like I'm having fun right now, which is literally exactly the same as having fun. If I stop feeling that, I'll quit. I've learned to manage sunken cost fallacies."

"How, exactly?" asked Indigo before a yawn, her eyes drifting half closed.

"Limited money and time, and one too many bad decisions," Lemon replied.

Indigo wanted to reply to that. It came out as a nod instead of words. She didn't feel like trying again though. "Wasn't the world ending or something?" she asked, her eyes closed and her head on the pillow.

"Well, yeah," said Lemon. "But when you think about it, the world is always ending, we're always dying from the moment we're born and every single second that passes is a second closer to the last. Is there a point worrying about an inevitable yet unspecified catastrophe we don't know the when of, when it's not much different from the constantly undeniable fact that death could come at any moment? We could die before it happens. We could not. But worrying about it won't do anything, and it is not something we can change or affect anyway. Is the best choice not to simply enjoy the time we have, and not waste it by caring for things we can't prevent?" She shrugged again. "Or something like that. I cheated on the philosophy tests anyway."

Indigo nodded again, not sure she'd heard everything and not really gifted with enough mental clarity to care at that moment. "Make sure you at least make breakfast before you pass out," she said while in the process of doing the latter herself, only because she'd already decided to before closing her eyes and her brain had finally gotten around to it.

"Will do!" said Lemon, cheerfully and with a salute, fully aware that she would not, in fact, make breakfast. For the sake of Indigo's stomach and potentially the building as a whole, given the state she planned to be in when she finally let sleep overtake her. She did not trust herself not to render milk flammable after four in the morning.

Indigo did not answer, unless light snoring could be counted as one. Lemon smiled at hearing that, and threw another look at the girl peacefully sleeping on the upper bed. Then she focused back on the game, suppressing a yawn that had chosen to be there ahead of time. She still had a few hours of questionable personal time management to burn through.

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