Minor Hearing Loss

Nadine had minor hearing loss for many years, but first developed the signs when she was in her early teens. It didn’t help that she was also having to carry around a robotic arm and leg. But she never commented on it out of a sense of pride, and simply let Blanci think that she was ignoring her. But the issue grew gradually worse over the next nearly twenty years, until she eventually had to get ear drum replacements. She kept the old style of prosthetic arms and legs mostly as a form of nostalgia and retro fit, but for her hearing she wanted something as realistic as possible. But even today she would wonder what gaming would be like if she couldn’t hear, but even this would be nowhere near as bad as not being able to see. Even if they gradually improved prosthetic eyes.

She wondered about the idea of a game world, rogue like in design, geared toward those legally blind. How the procedurally generated dungeons of yore would be described in carefully worded language, lyrical echo location of a black and white grid chessboard. When she gamed, she decked out in black, whether in the mall or the run down shack. Gone were the days of robotic dogs on LCD screens, she preferred traveling worlds from here to France and areas in between. Her life an epitaph written in the form of an updated game of Ultimate Fantasy Tactics, becoming a ghost in her own wires. She fought empires, killed hordes of ape-goats and spider-pigs.

But it was never as satisfying as finding a playmate.

She never liked the idea of rescuing women from their own destruction, if one were at risk of possible execution, the least they could do was rescue themselves. Prove their own will to live. But what works on paper and philosophy doesn’t always work on turn based grid display of dots.

She imagined Millie beheaded.

Millie bled Polka dots.

Nadine was never one for the dance, despite imagining a French waltz played at Millie’s funeral. Her dance was a dance of pure imagination, like a nude body having melted dark chocolate poured on it. For Nadine, the chocolate flowing like the music of Andalusia, Spain. And the accordion of Paris. Yet behind the layers of this chosen reality, was a girl of skin and bones.

Compared to flower girls, princesses, and queens, her attraction was less in her desire to rule a capitalistic industry, but a certain degree of non femininity, her dance the funeral march to her dead father, whom had ruled the fairy kingdom. In capitalism, we treat fairies as chocolate treats for a desert at Christmas concerts. But in reality, they were closer to grim reapers. Victims of circumstance, the absence of Dantino was taken as a relief, that they could restore the kingdom to its formal former glory, flowing like out of tune accordions to the waltz of a skeleton aristocracy. Millie wanted to be the queen, but wore wooden clogs like other peasant girls.

She imagined courtiers with the musical accompaniment of Spanish and French violins playing flamenco to the contrast of the waltz. Millie woke up from her dream within a dream, and checked the door.

It was Nadine.

“I thought he died six years ago?” said Millie.

“I never actually saw what came of him, but now I know different.” Nadine said, taking a puff of her cigar, while sitting on the couch. “But I’m not entirely sure how much I trust this artificial intelligence anyway.” Nadine took the cigar out of her mouth, “Or what’s left of her anyway.”

“Every day that Dantino lives, it feels like there is no justice for my father.” Millie leaned onto Nadine stomach, yet did it mainly as an automatic reaction, expecting not comfort from the gamer, who had previously allowed for Millie’s head to get chopped off, and placed on a stick.

“I never got to have a rematch.” Nadine said.

“Is that all it is for you?” Millie resisted spitting on her face. “What about the fact that my father’s dead?” Millie said, then leaned in the opposite direction of Nadine, waited for her to unzip her pants, and rubbed her bare feet onto the bean that was inside of the gamer girl’s cargo pants.

“He’s just a game character, nothing more.” Nadine said this partially out of jest, despite knowing full well that the distinction between game character and human being was largely that of a semantic one. “As are you and Ellen, though I suppose it doesn’t make that much of a difference.”

“You don’t say!”