dollpocalypse: (tech: computer)
So far, Topher was enjoying his summer.

For one thing, he was being challenged intellectually, which was basically paradise, and he got to enjoy said paradise in a lab coat, which made it even better than it already was. His colleagues thought he was brilliant, if rude, which was true, so Topher didn't mind. And even though his supervisor had rejected his request for a mini-fridge full of Yoo-Hoo and which would only open to his own thumbprint, the lab setup wasn't bad: it was very far underground, which was awesome, and the air-conditioning was always cranked to a temperature very close to freezing, which was even better.

Though there were some awkward things that had happened, like when Topher had been fined a few hundred dollars for sending Warren that companion cube. And for some reason, at the last board meeting, the rest of the R&D team had vetoed Topher's suggestion for turrets that could verbally insult the test subjects on the grounds of that being "excessively abusive."

Pfft. Amateurs.

All in all, though, Topher kind of felt like a king at this place. A very low-ranking king who wasn't being paid, mind. But still. It was nice.

[[open for calls and stuff!]]
dollpocalypse: (neg: dumbest thing i've ever heard)
In preparation for his portal tomorrow morning, Topher was cleaning his room -- no. Topher was organizing his room, and it was turning out to be a surprisingly horrifying process.

The thing was that he was, on the surface, a very neat person. His clean clothes were always folded because that's how the dry-cleaners left them and there was rarely visible stuff on the floor of his side of the room besides wires. However, that was only because all of the stuff that was on the floor inevitably got shoved under his desk or bed or into his closet so he wouldn't have to see it all the time. Having a mess was fine, but having to look at it was quite another. No, thank you.

Unfortunately, packing for the summer meant that he finally did have to deal with this mess, which led to situations like, for instance, Topher crouching beside his bed, squinting at the mess underneath it, and asking aloud, "Is that a shirt or a possum?"

He wasn't a hundred percent sure, and it was a rather alarming concern to have, so to avoid having to go near the maybe-possum, Topher decided to abandon his half-packed bags for right now and perch himself on top of his desk with his laptop in his lap, where he began modifying Broca II's code so that he could go check it out. Robot dogs were useful that way.

[[open door, open post! probably his last on-island dorm post until fall.]]
dollpocalypse: (fact: sleeping)
"Nnnnnn," Topher mumbled into his pillow.

Ow, his head. Seriously, ow. Not cool, hangover. Topher pulled his blanket back over his head and hid from the sunlight peeking in through the window.

Thirty minutes later, he managed another noise, this one even containing a vowel. "Ugh," he groaned. Then, after a long enough pause for him to actually have some coherent thoughts, he followed that up with a miserable, "Appletinis are evil."

As much as he would have preferred to hide out in his blankets for another ten days, he knew that the next thing he had to do was check his phone, so he stuck out an arm from his blanket cave and retrieved it from the side table, expecting the worst.

...

Scroll. Scroll. Scroll.

"Man, why am I like this?"

[[door shut, post open!]]
dollpocalypse: (fact: getting into bed)
Topher woke up today with a two-minute coughing fit, which, as far as weird weekend mornings-after went, wasn't as bad as some that he'd experienced over the past few years. It wasn't an epic headache or a still-painful bruise, but it was annoying, as was the lingering smell of weed in the room.

A mental review of the weekend's events revealed that he'd missed work -- possibly his last day of work for this school year, depending on whether he felt like going this week -- but that wasn't a huge problem; on top of that, Topher supposed that if he was ever going to smoke pot, doing it while he was temporarly not asthmatic was probably the way to go, so the only real surprise came when he checked the date on his digital watch and paused.

"Oh, hey," he said aloud, blinking. "I'm seventeen."

Had been for a few days now, actually. Huh. Fancy that.

To celebrate, he got up, cracked the door open to air out the weed smell, and flopped in his desk chair with some celebratory Ding-Dongs. He would have put a candle in one of them, but he only had so much energy for this.

[[door open, post open!]]
dollpocalypse: (citw: puzzled)
Marty was very concerned about this new place. He knew that the government sometimes kidnapped people for testing, and this room was certainly full of enough wires to be a testing center, but there were also posters of Space Battles movies and a robot dog - which seemed out of place in any kidnappee's designated sleeping quarters.

After picking up the robot dog to inspect and checking the rest of the room for hidden cameras, and, of course, furtively peeking into the hallway for passing lab technicians (none, but there was a suspiciously hot person with wind-swept hair that had to have been tampered with somehow), Marty decided that the best way to get answers about where he was would be to do the thing he knew he was most likely being studied for: he took out his prize possession and lit it. Any government facility worth its salt had to have smoke detectors, right? Plus in the meantime, he got to get high. It was a perfect solution.

[[topher is, of course, marty mikalski from the cabin in the woods. link is to drug paraphernalia (of course). i'm leaving for c2e2 in two hours, but i was planning not to play until tomorrow and then i realized i'm up early enough that i still can! just, y'know, expect SP. door is shut, ofc, but post is open.]]
dollpocalypse: (fact: sleeping)
Okay, fine, the subject heading was a lie. It was pretty much afternoon by the time Topher opened his eyes, blinked rapidly, stared at the ceiling, and pulled his blankets tight around him.

"I'm never getting up," he announced in a barely-coherent mumble, and then he rolled onto his side and dozed off again.

For the record, he kept his word for an hour and forty-five minutes. Then he got out of bed for long enough to stand up, open the door as if considering going into the hall, and then return to sit on his bed with the door cracked open. Baby steps.

[[door cracked, post open!]]
dollpocalypse: (obnox: chill)
Well, last night having been the exciting adventure that it was, it was with quite a smug expression on his face that Topher returned to his room toward early afternoon - though the smugness was slightly dialed back now that he was on the lookout for fake kids again.

All in all, he'd enjoyed himself. Part of that was probably because of Fandom's weirdness, but he doubted that that was a particularly large percentage of it -- the other part was probably just that Billy was awesome and sex was pretty cool. And not at all scary, either. Who would've guessed?

He swung the door open cheerfully, whistling the Ratman theme all the while, and flopped down on his bed and pulled his laptop into his lap. Definitely not to send a braggy email to anyone. Noooo. That would just be crazy.

[[mainly for a tot and a co-parent, but open!]]
dollpocalypse: (fact: gopher)
All in all, it was a good thing that Alec didn't seem to be around this week, because it allowed for Topher the gopher to sit on his bed, contentedly destroying his pillowcase.

Wait, maybe that meant that it wasn't such a good thing. But Topher appreciated it, at least. He had paws and claws and was appreciating the chance to get to use them before they went away. In fact, he was working kind of hard on using his claws to scratch up Alec's pillow in the shape of the helmet from the bad guy from Space Battles. Once he thought he had it for the most part, he squeaked for Victor's attention to show off his handiwork, tilting his little gopher head as if to ask Nice, right?

Still. He was becoming pretty bored with being a gopher. Was this going to be over soon?

[[for guess-who!]]
dollpocalypse: (tech: computer)
Topher had just discovered something surprising. Apparently, there was a school trip in a few days.

He'd been kind of planning on hacking into the database of eligible students for a science fair in Baltimore whose competition was next week, but now he had to choose between science and travel. That was ordinarily an easy decision. Science won out.

'Science' was pretty much the direction he was unequivocally leaning now, in fact, but then he actually started working on that hacking project and was surprised at how difficult it was. "Science fair in Baltimore has more security than the space army," he muttered to himself, annoyedly typing away. If this took more than another half hour, he might just sign up for the trip already and save his ego this unnecessary trauma.

[[open door and post!]]
dollpocalypse: (tech: computer)
Lately, Topher's parents had been sending him a lot of emails about signing up for the SAT and coming up with a list of colleges to apply to. For the most part, Topher's response had been to delete said emails and eat chips. Unfortunately, today he ran out of chips and didn't want to go outside to get more. It was pretty unfortunate.

Rather than walk all the way to the common room in search of chips, he tried to come up with another task he needed to do, and sure enough, the only one he could think of was finally answering his parents' dumb emails. So this afternoon he could be found laying on the near his bed with his laptop open in front of him as he flipped through some book called The 377 Best Colleges his mom had sent him and drew pictures in the margins of the schools he thought looked lame. It was a really constructive use of time.

[[open door and post!]]
dollpocalypse: (genius: fixing tech)
There was something going on with Broca. Specifically, something involving the sound chip, which resulted in a cacophony of ceaseless barking noises while Topher attempted to sort it out.

Unfortunately, Topher being Topher, he kept getting distracted by other areas of Broca's programming that needed improvements too, so it wasn't getting resolved as quickly as it could be. Thirty minutes in, he was working carefully on Broca's motion sensors, deaf to the barking noises by now and entirely focused on what he was actually doing. Sorry, third floor.

[[Door and post open, as Topher is not very considerate.]]
dollpocalypse: (conv: talkin' over shoulder)
Some boarding school students might have gone home for Christmas. Topher, whose family was not in the slightest bit religious, had spared everyone the need to observe the holiday by waiting a few days to go home, and he brought a guest. The result of this, especially after years of not hearing about Topher's friends at all, was that his highly polite and welcoming parents had been practically bouncing by the time Topher and Billy's portal arrived, and after a few minutes of gushing over both of them, took the boys' things to put upstairs while Topher gave Billy the tour.

"And this is my room," Topher concluded as they reached the top floor of the townhouse. The rest of the house was almost intimidatingly nice, decoration-wise: framed paintings hung on the wall and every inch of floor was covered either in soft carpeting or in marble tiles. As Topher swung his bedroom door open, it became apparent that his room was not quite up to the standard the rest of the house had set, an image best conveyed by the fact that although his room was certainly big enough for a normal, human-sized bed, he'd insisted on twin-size bunk beds, the bottom bunk of which had no mattress and instead contained a TV and some X-Box controllers.

He surveyed the room through the critical lens one tends to develop when examining one's living space with company present. "...There's an air mattress we can bring in, probably."

Probably.

[[for the boyfriend, mostly! phone calls are also okay!]]
dollpocalypse: (meh: HUH.)
All things considered, there had been worse weeks on this island than just being monochromatic and really really boring. However, most of the other weeks hadn't involved being so mean to Billy (and Topher did realize that he'd been mean to Billy, whether it'd been intentional on other!him's part or not), so this one pretty much ranked as an awkward one.

Plus he was pretty damn sore from all the jogging other!him had been doing, so. There was that as well.

He mulled it over for a moment or two, decided that it was almost definitely excusable in the long run, then settled on his bed with Broca II in his lap and put on a movie on one of his laptops. Meanwhile, he took out his iPad and idly coded while the movie was playing. He wasn't sure what he was doing yet, but so far it had 'this island is batshit' written in binary, so that was a good start.

[[open!]]
dollpocalypse: (conv: double check your plan for a sec?)
Topher hadn't really had any plans for the weekend, like usual. He'd figured he'd do some light napping, maybe fix up his laptop screen, fun stuff like that. But the principle of having no plans was a sacred one. It wasn't to be tampered with -- or in this case, completely disregarded and overturned.

And yet. He made a face at his phone, via which his mom was currently telling him all about the weekend's planned visit to his aunt or his grandmother or someone else old and female that he was going to have to go see. He wasn't clear on why this was necessary, since he wasn't even half-listening, but apparently it was unavoidable.

Sigh. Maybe Portalocity would screw up his itinerary and get him stuck in an Apple store somewhere. He could only hope.

((open!))
dollpocalypse: (neg: so so sad)
Today, incidentally, was not proving to be much better than yesterday or Monday had been. Not even GLaDOS' class had cheered Topher up, which was really saying something, because... GLaDOS. But Topher had had two crappy conversations today and he was still in a bad mood about the whole kid-weekend thing, so even fun experimental science could only do so much.

Now, since brooding on the roof sucked and it wasn't his day at Stark's, Topher was pretty much just hanging out in his room with Broca II under a tent of Space Battles blankets. Not a fort. Just blankets on his bed that also happened to be over his head. There was a difference.

If, from the hallway, people could hear noises that sounded like tires screeching, it was possible that Topher was watching a car chase movie without the aid of headphones. Whoops.

[[door shut, post open!]]
dollpocalypse: (fact: drawer of inappropriate starches)
Well, it had been a pretty slow week for Topher so far, leaving out the safari with Billy and Ace and that weird conversation with Natalie the other day, and maybe a tiny part of him was scandalized and appalled by the fact that some kid he didn't know on the radio had accused him of not being a partier. He was totally capable of partying, okay? Just with people he liked. That was critical.

So what was his solution? That's right. A movie night with some bros.

Well, two bros and a boyfriend. Whatever.

So the beds got pushed together, a thoroughly unreasonable amount of room service was ordered even considering they were four teenage boys, and a really bad movie was on. There were dinosaurs in it, and the dinosaurs had laser guns. That probably said it all.

"I'm sending a copy of this to Ben for whenever he gets to be a person again," Topher declared, leaning forward to grab another handful of Cheetos. "This is gold."

[[for the bros!]]
dollpocalypse: (wheatley)
Months. It had been months. Stuck out in space with no company other than that bloody Space Core - Wheatley was aware they were in space - he had, perhaps, started to go a bit mad. But madness was the father of invention, wasn't it? Or... was it the mother? Actually, if madness was one parent of invention, then who was the other one? Science? No, no, science is what happened after invention--

"INSPACE."

"Yes, I know, buddy, can we just..." Not? Could they not? "Not," he settled on, quite powerfully if you asked him. "Look, I have this idea to get us out of space--"

"Space!"

"Get us out of it, yes," Wheatley said. "We should... start orbiting one another, build up some centrifugal--"

That was about as far as he got.

"Did you feel that?" he asked. "It's this strange... feeling. I don't know how to describe it-- a tugging sensation! Yes, I'm feeling a strange tugging sensation in my... well, my everywhere. Can you feel that? Or is it just me? No, I'm definitely not imagining it. It's this strange, tugging, pulling... burning feeling... a rushing in my... sensors, I'm--"

Beat.

''I'm falling and on fire, aren't I?'' )

[[wheatley brought to you by the disturbingly hilarious [livejournal.com profile] endsthegame!]]
dollpocalypse: (tech: screen)
So Topher's room was what one might call 'aggressively unclean' at this point, and the extremely hyper and curious robot puppy running around was probably not helping matters. However, Topher had a very good cleaning strategy to prepare for coding funtimes with Victor: kicking the majority of his stuff under his desk, into the closet, or over towards the other side of the room. It was such a great strategy, he couldn't believe no one had ever thought of it before!

Once that was taken care of, he removed his drawer of inappropriate starches from his closet and placed it beside his desk for optimal snacking, set Broca II the robot puppy on his bed to "nap," and then settled at his desk and began looking up ELIZA applications to play with. Whee, coding!

[[open, expecting one!]]
dollpocalypse: (genius: fixing tech)
Okay, first things first: after a ninety-minute shower this morning, Topher was very, very glad to be back in his normal, male body again, and had celebrated with a long day of uninterrupted gaming time. You know, as one did after recovering from trauma as extensive as that.

Now that that was taken care of, he was immersed in a project almost as important as all that meta for Skyrim: fiddling with the wiring on the TV in his room so it would quit emitting sparks all the time. Because that was getting old and also a bit dangerous, so, best to put a stop to that.

"Ow!"

It was... taking a bit of effort.

[[door and post open! and loud, probably.]]
dollpocalypse: (eating: froyo)
So, artificial cheese flavoring. That was interesting.

It took a while for Topher to be sure that this was just Fandom being strange and not a case of him falling asleep with Dorito crumbs on his mouth or something, but after that, yeah. Artificial cheese flavoring.

Well then.

He'd just be spending the day with Easy Mac and coding. It seemed appropriate.

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