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

Topher should have been packing, but instead he was doing something much less productive: watching and rewatching the Manticore Era III game trailer and writing an email to his graduating class.

Thanks to a series of events that he would prefer not to recount, thank you very much, Topher now had a slight pea soup problem on his Stanford hoodie, and his generally bad clothes-washing practices meant that he was just going to order a new one online and keep wearing this one until the new one arrived.

He was going to do so well in college.

In the meantime, he was filling out a roommate questionnaire online with the door and window open and his pop music playlist playing just a touch too loudly. Honestly, he was feeling pretty good today, pea soup be damned.

There was one thing that no one had warned Topher about before he left for his college interview on the mainland, and that was the matter of what to wear. So out of a desire to avoid being judged childish by the alumni interviewer, he had gone all out and put on a suit. After lint-rolling away the glitter still lingering on the shoulders from the last school dance, of course.

Other than the awkward moment when the interviewer asked why he was so dressed up ("Uh... church," Topher replied after a long enough pause to make the lie obvious), the interview had gone well, he thought. Sure, he could have made the answer to the question about his biggest weakness sound less obviously rehearsed, but he got in the right amount of self-promoting and even got a grin or two out of the interviewer when he answered a question about his inspirations with a Space Battles quote.

So he was feeling pretty good about it when he got back to his dorm room and tossed his suit jacket to the floor before flopping on his bed. Now there were only two more weeks to go before he found out Stanford's decision, and then he could stop feeling all twitchy and nervous and start feeling twitchy and excited instead.

[[door and post open!]]

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!]]

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!]]

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.]]

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!))

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!]]