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Friday:
Tangy Learns a New Word
I now have a larger house and a flame-patterned umbrella. When I press the A button, the umbrella twirls. The twirl does not do anything. It’s foggy outside in Indianapolis, and it’s a sunny Friday afternoon in Naptown. I head to Tom Nook’s shop, and buy -- what’s this? -- a bug net with the money I should be using to pay back my 100,000B debt.
Out in front of the train station, I catch four dragonflies.
“I caught a red dragonfly,” Billy says. “I wonder if it can breathe fire?”
I wonder, too.
I go back to Tom’s shop to sell the dragonflies. Tom buys the lot for 320 Bells. What a joke. I go back outside, and catch a few locusts. I sell the migratory ones for 1,350 Bells each. That’s not a bad deal at all. I’m getting closer to my goal -- well, a tiny bit closer.
Back in front of the train station, the dragonflies are back. I scoff at them. I’m not going to waste my time. I walk up to the train platform, just as the clock strikes three. The monkey porter -- whose name is Porter, poor thing -- asks me, “Billy, are you thinking of going on a trip?”
I tell him, nah, man. I’m cool where I am.
And he says, “Don’t you have anyone you want to visit? Don’t you have anywhere else to go? That’s . . . sad, Billy.”
I do not need to be told off by some cartoon monkey.
I’m tapping that big A button mercilessly. This is what Shigeru Miyamoto designed this A button for -- so you can satisfyingly mash it, to make cartoon monkeys stop accusing you of having no friends.
I press the A button one too many times. As the dialogue window closes, Billy lashes out with his bug net.
Whack.
I’ve just hit the monkey in the head with my bug net!
He doesn’t seem to care. Oh, what fun, I think, to hit someone on the head without consequence.
So I run around town, stalking for a victim.
I catch a longheaded locust in the bushes outside Lobo’s house.
“I caught a longheaded locust! Why the long head? Uh, face, whatever.”
Billy is one clever little skull-wearing bastard.
“Oh, it’s you, Billy. How, uh, nice of you to drop by . . .”
Lobo, you punk. The same three options as always:
“Need any help?”
“Let’s talk!”
“Oh, sorry.”
I click on “Let’s talk!”
Lobo says, “Is that a longheaded locust? What do you say you give that to me for 1,000 Bells?”
Sure. So I take Lobo’s money. He’s being nice. I’m not going to hit him. Net in hand, I run off to Tangy’s house, and ask her what the hell is up.
“I’ve got something rare, reeOWR,” Tangy says. “Something priceless. I’ll sell it to you, for . . . how much money do you have, reeOWR?” I have around 20,000 Bells. “I’ll sell it to you for all the money you have. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, reeOWR!”
I choose: “No.”
Tangy claims to understand why I wouldn’t want to spend money on something I can’t see, reeOWR. When our dialogue ends, she turns her back, and starts to walk away.
I smack her in the back of the head with the bug net.
She turns around and looks at me. Her cartoon eyes are narrowed in anger. She’s really, seriously pissed-off. I talk to her.
“How could you do something like that, reeOWR?”
I talk to her again and again. Nothing dispels the purple clouds above her head and the violent popping sound in her speech. I talk to her again.
“You’re mean, reeOWR!”
I walk one screen north, and come back. She’s not angry anymore.
I talk to her.
“You’re up late, reeOWR.”
“Life sim” my ass.
“What’s up?” I ask her.
“Do you like the way I talk?” she asks me. “I’m the only person in town who says ‘reeOWR.’ Do you like ‘reeOWR’?”
I say, yeah. I humor her.
“I want to say something else,” she says. “Would you suggest something?”
“Sure,” I say.
And there’s that keyboard screen before my eyes. Tangy is trusting a guy with a triangular red nose -- a guy wearing a skull shirt and carrying a flame umbrella, a guy whose face is warped and dilapidated because he got stung by bees an hour ago after shaking the wrong tree -- to suggest a new vocabulary word.
She is SO asking for it.
So I suggest something.
. . .
“Wow, it sounds so cool, bitch! I’ll start using it right away, bitch! See you later, bitch!”
I talk to her again.
“You’re still up, bitch?”
“Let’s chat.”
“My dad got me this furniture for my birthday, and it’s not really my thing, bitch . . . would you mind trading it for that pine cricket you have?”
So she gives me a ping-pong table for free. I dig seven holes, push her into them, and wall her in. I stand there and look at her for a while.
I open the menu, grab a piece of stationery, and take a letter:
“Tangy, I hate you. Here is a present.”
I attach a “caveman tunic” that she’d given me the day before. I hike up to the post office, where the nightshift pelican is in. I mail the letter, and she tells me to close the door on my way out.
The nightshift pelican is rude. If only she had a skull shirt, too. I’d invite her over to my bedless place.
I put the ping-pong table in the middle of my room, right next to the urinating statue-fountain the sailor bird gave me when I found him on the shore yesterday. I tinker with the angle, and then turn the lights off when I’m satisfied. I head back to Tangy’s house. She’s standing in the middle of her little prison. Seeing her, I get tired. Billy could use some rest -- poor guy’s got a sagging, bee-stung face, for crying out loud. I head back to the house. Billy sleeps -- I know not where, for he has no bed -- and I sleep. We’re sleeping, in two different Naptowns, one with a train station with a monkey porter, one with more interstate highways crossing through its borders than any other city in this country.
In my Naptown, and in his, Tangy is marching in a prison of dug-out holes, punished for her bad language and her short temper.
[Next: Day 4; Valice Gets Treed]
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