"CASS, I SWEAR ON MY FUCKING LIFE–" Another smack rang through the building, quickly followed by Myra's infuriated scream and Cass's hysterical laughter as she was chased thorugh the house. Wren could only roll her eyes, used to their antics by now, Lyyrah was probably going to strike pretty soon too, if she hadn't already.

...That made it sound a lot more ominous than it actually was. Okay, backing up, starting over–

Wren Answick was a whole of thirteen years old and currently living in a big house in space with her four best friends. Her four only friends at this point, actually, due to the fact that she was in space. Sort of by her own bad choices, but it wasn't like she could be blamed for it. It seemed like a good idea at the time and she didn't know that all of this would happen after the group started up the game– but, whatever. She was living in a video game now. Pretty cool, honestly, and admittedly a dream she'd had for a while–

Smack.

"LYYRAH, FOR THE LOVE OF–"

"NIIIIIIIIIIIICE!!!" Cass's grin was evident in her voice and Lyyrah's laughter joined hers as the chase through the halls continued. Wren but her lip, doing her best to focus on what she was doing in the kitchen. It was partially concerning and partially entertaining to hear the chaos break out like this every week, bu Wren know that she'd be fixing things that were kicked over and handing out band aids later. A small price to pay for this type of entertainment for the day.

There was another battle cry from Myra and Wren looked up just in time to see Lyyrah and Cass charging past the kitchen, slipping and sliding on the floor in their socks and with Myra hot on their heels, frothing at the mouth. Wren had to clap a hand over her mouth to muffle her laughter at the scene. Of course. Those two would never learn not to mess with Myra, which was... well, it was their loss and Wren's sort-of gain.

Suni came down the hallway, yawning and evidently just having awoken from her morning nap. She slipped into the kitchen and silently took a mug from the shelf, turning the kettle on to boil and regarding the situation tiredly. Wren quickly began cracking some eggs to make breakfast for the girl, knowing that she'd been working all night on something or the other and was probably hungry. As the eggs slowly began to cook, the two stood silently in the kitchen and watched Myra chase Cass and Lyyrah around the living room, chaos reigning above all else. Suni sighed.

"It's Slap-Ass Friday, isn't it?" Wren nodded.

"It's definitely Slap-Ass Friday."

Slap-Ass Friday, as it was called, was something that Wren had unintentionally released upon the little group, and she wasn't entirely sure how to feel about it. It was when the group had first gotten their house in order, and the first day that they hadn't needed to deal with a major crisis or boss fight within the game of Sburb. Lyyrah had only recently joined their little group at that point, mostly talking to Wren and avoiding the rest of the group out of suspicion, not unlike a wolf warily eyeing up a group of intruders to its territory. Really, Wren was just happy enough that Lyyrah trusted her enough to be so friendly and open with her, and even if it was awkward at first– Lyyrah was an alien, a literal grey-skinned, horned, six-foot-something alien creature who had very little immediately in common with this rag-tag group of humans– the two talked. Slowly, Wren began to find more and more shared interests between the group, and slowly, Lyyrah began to relax. It was one of those conversations, talking about school with the other three humans splayed in various positions around the living room with them, that the topic came up.

"Yeah, my school had this thing with Slap-Ass Friday. Was pretty fun to watch and sometimes I even got to join in." Lyyrah had nodded along, but the other three just blinked at her in confusion.

"...what's Slap-Ass Friday?" Suni asked. Myra and Cass made agreeing noises.

"Yeah, never had anything like that in my school." Cass said. Lyyrah looked at her questioningly.

"Aren't You Fairly Young, Though?" Wren smiled at how incredibly articulated each and every word was and how much of an effort Lyyrah made to speak comprehensible English as she learned. Cass shrugged.

"I mean... I'm thirteen in human years. I'll be fourteen in December, but I have no clue when December is at this point."

"Space time passes weird." Wren agreed. There were hums from all around.

"I mean, it has to have been at least a couple of months since we fucked everything up back on Earth." Myra spoke for the first time in the conversation and Lyyrah's expression soured ever-so-slightly. Myra and Lyyrah had entered into this thing that Lyyrah called "blackrom" or "pitch," which seemed to be the equivalent of being madly in love but having all the love replaced with hatred and annoyance. Loving to hate the person, Wren supposed, but... not entirely maliciously. When she'd asked Lyyrah about it, the alien girl ("troll," she called herself) had explained that blackrom was watching the other person succeed and provoking them to do so. It was the "everything you can do" mentality, and each failure was more motivation to grow and succeed.

Lyyrah did say that Myra was obnoxious, impulsive, and wholly unpleasant most days, but Wren wasn't going to start a debate on that.

"I've been keeping a track of the days since we got here, actually." Suni piped up. "Granted, they're the days that we experience on this planet, but I timed them and they're all roughly twenty-four hours long."

"Suni, my honey, you're a god amongst us all." Cass grinned at her. The strange light from the planet's sun caught on her sunglasses and made the heart-shaped lenses glow eerily. Suni blushed and waved the compliment down with a hand. "So, how much time has passed according to our resident genius?"

"I don't know, ask Suni." Myra smirked. Half a second later, a pillow had been thrown at her head and she squawked as she fell over. Cass was snickering, high-fiving Lyyrah after a second of hesitation and pointedly ignoring the yowling mess of chaos that was Myra on the floor. Wren groaned.

"You people, I swear. Anyways, Suni, as you were saying?" Cass pouted dramatically at her before signalling Suni to go on. The girl nodded with a smile.

"Yeah!! So, according to my calculations–" She pushed her glasses up her nose and Lyyrah scoffed out a laugh at how nerdy it looked. "–we've been in the game for... Well, for just over three months."

The room fell silent.

"...three months." Myra was quiet, her voice almost hollow. Wren's heart broke at the sound and how pitiful it sounded. Wren was, by far, the quietest member of the group and probably the most forgettable. Everyone else was bright and energetic and full of life, and Wren was clueless about what was going on in this game and what she had to do for everything to go right and not break the game. To hear an entire room go silent like that when she normally had to search for peace and quiet like buried treasure was... unsettling, to say the least.

It made her realize just how big the house was.

"...y'know, I kinda like this Slap-Ass Friday idea." Cass eventually broke the silence. Her voice sounded a little strained, but everyone knew she was trying to be chipper. "What was it like?" Wren paused for a second.

"Uh... well, it was like a game we played. Not only on Fridays either, but that doesn't matter a lot. The point of the game was to somehow sneak, dash, or wind your way through the halls, slap someone's butt, and then slip away. If you got your butt smacked, you'd have to try and find the person who did it and smack them back, and everywhere but the bathrooms was fair game." The room hummed and nodded, and Wren was horrified to see the slowly growing smile on Cass's face. Internally, she groaned. This would not end well.

True to form, it didn't.

From that day onwards, Slap-Ass Friday had become a staple in the house. Lyyrah and Cass were the worst offenders (as expected from the two of them), always sniping the others and each other when least expected. Suni would join in too sometimes, either by slapping back or by forceful use of a WiiMote specibus, and Myra was mainly focused on revenge slaps or murder (it depended on the day). Games ran for multiple days at a time continuously, but if you asked Wren, it was all just one neverending game that sometimes had quiet periods. It was played casually–– Cass on the couch, explaining Sburb to Wren and smacking Lyyrah's ass as she walked by, not even slowing in her explanation and shooting finger guns at Lyyrah with a grin; and played seriously–– Myra, rigging elaborate traps and setups to finally get Suni back–– all the same. Wren found it kind of cool and really funny watching her friends grin like idiots as they played. But... she still had questions about it. More like one question, really.

"...hey, Suni." The girl hummed as she sipped the tea now in her mug, leaning with one hip against the counter. "Do you... do you know why they never go after me?" Suni paused.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, y'know. Cass and Lyyrah always go after everyone, and you play along a lot, and even Myra doesn't hate it as much as she says she does and gets super into it, y'know? And nobody has ever tried to slap me."

"You don't try and slap anyone else." Suni responded like it was the simplest thing in the world. Wren could smell the chamomile scent drifting from the mug in her hands even from her place by the stove. It calmed her down enough to hum somewhat steadily.

"Is that it?" Suni nodded with a shrug.

"You never smack anyone, so we all just assume you don't wanna get smacked either. Besides, I'm pretty sure that Cass has told Lyyrah and Myra that they'll get Dawnbringer at their necks and your eyes burning into their souls, and they're still trying to decide which one of them will be the one to test that hypothesis. I'm not too hyped to mess with you either." Wren hummed again, chewing at her lip in thought. Suni immediately tutted, turning towards her and grabbing her hand. "Hey, hey. Don't chew at your lips like that, it'll hurt a lot later. C'mon, let's make you some hot chocolate."

"No, no, I'm fine. Trust me, it's alright." Suni regarded her with skepticism.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. I'm fine." Suni huffed, shaking her head.

"Well, I'm making you hot chocolate and you can't do anything about it." Wren spluttered.

"You don't–"

"Don't have to, but I'm gonna." Suni grinned at her for a minute as she stuttered before Wren finally nodded with a sigh.

"Fiiiiiine, alright."

"Oh, you agreed so easily!! That's new, you never ever do that." Suni started the kettle again, spinning around to look at Wren as it boiled. The chaos outside had moved to a different part of the house by that point, leaving Wren and Suni with the kettle boiling in the kitchen.

Just Wren and Suni, and the crushing weight of Wren's thoughts on her shoulders.

"...I know you're not really fine." Suni eventually said. Her voice was quiet, but it still felt far too loud. "We're not excluding you on purpose, you know. It's just... we don't want to upset you or make you uncomfortable by accident. You're always so quiet, and we're worried that you won't tell us if something is bothering you." Wren nodded, looking down hollowly at the eggs she's been making throughout the conversation.

"The thing is... I don't know if I want to get slapped? I mean, I want to be included in the game, but it's all just so... chaotic, and loud, and messy, and I don't know."

Her face was getting hot, like it often did when she was about to start crying. Wren wanted to go back to bed and forget this whole thing ever happened.

"Well... what if you smack first?" Wren blinked.

"What?"

"Well, none of us are gonna smack your ass unless you say it's okay, right? So, you can just make the first move when you're finally comfortable enough to do it, and it'll all be good!!"

"But... would that work?"

"Well, are you blonde?" Suni shot back. Wren paused for a half-second to absorb the question.

"I mean, yeah, why–"

"Then it'll work. It'll work as sure as you're blonde, trust me." The kettle finally boiled and Suni made a little sound of surprise as she straightened up. Wren watched as the redhead made what was possibly the fastest cup of hot chocolate ever made and slid it down the counter before either of them could think better. It came to a stop right in front of Wren, liquid sloshing around dangerously inside, and it was only by virtue of Wren's split-second thinking that she managed to pick it up and hold it over the sink before the countertops were wrecked by chocolatey goodness. She hissed as some of the liquid hit her skin and Suni was immediately apologizing, sheepishly smiling. Wren could only wave her off as she set the blue ceramic down in a safe place and quickly returned to working on the eggs. The two interacted softly for a while after that, all smiles and conversation and exchanging of puns and sunny-side-up eggs, and it was only when Suni stood up to put her dishes in the sink that Wren found it in her to take a breath.

"I... I think I'm going to take your advice. For the game." Suni blinked for a moment before beaming.

"Take your time, Wren. We got you."

Wren, for the first time that day, beamed right back.