Stella marched down the hallway of the apartment building with a foul mood boiling behind her eyeballs. It had been a VERY long day, and she was more than ready to lock herself up in her apartment and cast foul glances out the window like an angry god hurling comedy anvils from on high.
In her current state, every part of her being was a conduit for her foul temper. Her large round glasses, rather than an intellectual frame to her face, gave her the furious and glassy glare of an oncoming car. Her thick boots, rather than offering fashionable contrast for her slim build, made every step thump like a rolled up mafia carpet hitting the ground. Even her twin afro puffs, so lovingly pulled back so as to make her look cute and nerdy, now felt like the ornamental jewelry of an empress on the warpath.
Thumping herself upstairs, through the narrow halls and over the thin red carpet and it’s numerous suspect patches, she quickly pulled herself into her apartment and breathed a sigh of relief.
Well, okay, it was less of a sigh and more of a “GRAAAAGHHHHHNESRRRRSHHHKKKJJJK!!”, but it was certainly relieving.
“Wow babe, day that bad?”
From the cramped apartments comfortable sofa came the lazy Cheshire-cat grin of Stella’s friend and roommate, Lindsay. The half-korean girl was spread out across the couch, brown hair only half contained in a sloppy bun, and ears not even a slightly in her headphones, who’s droning ambiance was just audible enough to Stella to lend the room a certain ‘video game home base’ vibe.
“How do people end up so stupid!?” Stella undid her work apron, the bookstore logo crumpling symbolically in her hands as she wadded it up and tossed it into the corner.
“What kind of stupid are we talking here cause that’s a loaded question.” Lindsay snickered.
Stella inhaled deeply, fury now beginning to subside. “5 minutes to closing, some lunatic shows up insisting I sell him a complete set of ‘hairdo’s of the 20th century’. I tell him we ain’t got it. He goes to pieces and says it’s a matter of life and death. I tell him we ain’t got it. He insists he had a *dream* it was here! I tell him-“
Stella’s rant was broken by Lindsay’s snickering progressing to full laughter. The sort that’s just a little too loopy…
Stella groaned, the rancor of her story deflating. “How high are you right now?”
Lindsay snickered sheepishly. “Like… three?”
“Three what?”
“Three.”
“That’s not an answer I can accept, Lindsay.”
As Lindsay collapsed into giggles at the inane exchange, Stella was unable to fight off a smile as she stepped into the apartments kitchen space.
The place was clean enough, but she wasn’t in any condition to cook, and Lindsay was clearly somewhere around the orbit of Europa right now.
Stella exhaled as she considered her options.
She wished she had the energy to make dinner. Hell, she wished she had a job that kept her out of contact with the doofuses of the world. She wished Twitter’s algorithm would stop burying her short stories. She wished she didn’t have to live in such a cramped apartment. She wished the Chinese place would deliver instead of only offering pickup! She wished-
Her phone vibrated.
Broken from her reverie of internal complaint, Stella pulled out her cellphone, expecting to see a message from an online friend (or maybe that cute girl from the coffee shop the other day). Instead, what she found was… an app?
“Oh come on, what the hell is auto-installing itself?” She hissed to herself, staring at the dark purple and black icon, adorned with a white serif “O”.
Unsure wether to trust the mysteriously arrived “Oneword”, Stella hesitated… and then gambled, opening it. Worst case, it would… well, worst case it would brick her phone and convert her credit card into EVE online spaceships.
Or, it could display a map. A simple map. Black, with white detail, and… blue dots?
Unsure as to what exactly she was looking at, Stella zoomed in. It… kind of looked like the floor plan to the apartment building. And if it was, then that would mean the dots were… people?
Raising her eyebrows silently, Stella tapped on one of the two in what she guessed was her own apartment, and was startled to see it open a text parser:
“LINDSAY GWON IS RELAXING WITH A BOWL IN HER SMALL APARTMENT.”
Stella, obviously, went through a range of emotions, such as confusion, paranoia, fear, bafflement, and all of the other things one would expect when seeing a phone app provide a map of one’s home and information on one’s roommate’s current body chemistry. But I’m not going to bother writing all of that out, because why bother?
Stella, at the apps instruction, warily tapped the text and rewrote the first thing that came to her mind…