if i think i can figure things out, is that curiosity or arrogance?

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.]]

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!]]

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!]]

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!]]

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!]]

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!]]

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!))

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!]]

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!]]

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.