Chapter 33

The man stared at Jean, not answering her question.

"Wait... Are you the guy who was dressed in that coat?"

He was the only other person that Jean knew was in the apartment other than those two. Unless of course, while she was doing things in her apartment, another one of their friends came over.

"I am. Who are you?" the man asked him again. "You don't seem like a normal neighbor. How do you know Jackson."

"Uh... We went to school together?"

"Went?"

"Yes, went. It was a long time ago."

The man stared blankly at Jean for a few seconds before standing aside and letting her in.

"Thank you?" Jean thanked him. She didn't know why he let her in and what he was thinking, but he didn't feel that he is a bad person.

"Jackson is in the room at the end of the hall," he pointed out to her before going back to what he was doing. Jean watched him walk over to the broken machine she saw the other day and continued repairing it. It looked a lot better than she last saw it, but she still couldn't figure out what it was for based on its appearance.

The man caught her looking at him and with a confused expression, he calmly repeated to her, "Jackson's down the hall. Last room on the left."

"Oh, sorry." She heard it the first time but apologized to him anyway for disturbing his work.

Jean walked down the hall to the room that he specified and found both Jackson and Hans sitting on top of a bed with something in their hands. They were both staring at a television screen and were too distracted with what they were doing to notice that there was someone at the door.

"I got you now!"

"Like h*ll you do. Huh!? That's bullsh*t!"

"This is too easy."

"Easy my a*s, you're just getting lucky with your items! How'd you get that rocket three times in a row!?"

Jean tilted her head until she could see the screen and saw that they were playing a video game on it. There were two tiny characters fighting against each other and she quickly discerned which of them belonged to which player. The one dressed in blue was Hans' since it was constantly dying to the green one which was presumably Jackson's.

Jean's eyes followed the blue character on the screen and she watched as a missile flew into it and exploded, sending the character flying out of the arena and into a hole.

"Four!? Four!? Hellooo!? What the actual f*ck!?" Hans was getting more ballistic as he saw that Jackson somehow got a fourth rocket in a row and killed him with it. "What's the percentage of getting that thing!?" he angrily demanded.

"I think it's one in ten," Jackson responded.

The answer only seemed to make Hans even more pissed off. It was a one in ten chance and yet Jackson managed to get it four times in a row. What were the odds of that? Jean did a quick calculation. Ten to the power of four was a one was four zeros. That was one in ten thousand. The odds of that happening were very slim and she could kind of understand why Hans was upset about it. But then again, it was only just a game. Was it really something worth getting angry over?

Jean knocked on the door to get the two's attention but they didn't seem to notice as they were too caught up in playing their game. And here she thought that Jackson had been up to something important. From the tone of his voice earlier when he told her to leave, she really thought that the three of them were going to be doing something related to their work, such as planning their next move or the such.

Instead, they were here playing games. Jean knocked on the door again, but this time she was a bit annoyed and knocked louder and longer. The two guys still didn't hear it and she was starting to get a little mad too. "Jackson," she called out his name.

At that exact moment, Hans yelled out, "F*ck you!" and blocked out her voice with his.

"..."

"What are you doing?"

"Oh!" The man who opened the door for her appeared behind Jean and surprised. He looked at her then at the two boys who were too busy playing their game to realize the presence of the other two people at the door watching them.

"I was wondering why you were just standing outside the door looking in," the man whose name she still didn't know said.

Jean didn't know how to get their attention. Although she could always just walk in front of the screen, she had a feeling that doing so would be a bad idea.

"Hey, you lazy idiots, don't you see there's someone here!?" the man shouted at the two. Jean was taken aback by the sudden fierceness in his voice since he didn't look like the type of person who could be so aggressive.

Jackson and Hans were startled by his voice and almost dropped their controllers.

"Woah! Wayne, when did you get here? Jean?" Jackson's eyes shifted over to her. "When did you get here too?"

"I opened the door for her," the man whose name was apparently Wayne told Jackson. "She's been standing out here for around a minute now trying to get your attention."

"Wait, really?"

"Yes, so why don't you stop playing that game of yours and get your butts out of there?"

Wayne didn't sound particularly happy about the two of them messing around while he was outside working on fixing the machine that they broke.

"Not until I beat this monkey once," Hans told him.

"What's a monkey? Is that an animal or something?" Jackson asked.

"I'll tell you what a monkey is. You're both monkeys. While you're both goofing around, I have to take care of the mess you made," Wayne angrily said to the two.

The two were quiet for a bit after Wayne said that. "Sooo... Uh, what's a monkey?" Jackson asked, still unsure about what he was being called.

"Do you need me to repeat it for you? You're both monkeys." Wayne told him them again, not giving an actual answer.

Since it pretty clear that he wasn't going to get the answer he wanted from Wayne, Jackson took out his phone and searched it up for himself. "This? This is a monkey?" he turned the phone around and showed a picture of a monkey on a tree. "These things are extinct. What are you telling to tell me? Are you saying that I'm extinct too?"

"No you idiot, I saying that you're being like one."

"I'm being like one? Do you mean looks? I look nothing like that. I mean, I am short, but I'm not THAT short, nor am I that hairy. And hey, does it look like I have a tail?" he pointed at a long and curly thing on the screen.

"No, of course you don't look like one!" Wayne obviously pointed out. "I'm trying to say that you're acting like one!"

"Huh? Monkeys play video games?"

"..."

Wayne looked at Jean and asked her, "You said you went to school with this guy right? What are his grades like? Specifically in history, or whatever class it is that teaches this kind of stuff."

"I'm not sure..." Jean always thought that Jackson's grades were decently high because he always kept to himself, but that might not be the case. For one, he couldn't even spell monkey right. In the search bar, Jean could see that Jackson spelled monkey with a space between "mon" and "key" which was pretty amusing.

"To be fair, we only went to the same elementary grade school. I dropped out right after it ended so I didn't learn anything else that came after that."

"Ah, no wonder." It all made sense to Wayne now. No wonder he didn't know what a monkey is.

"What do you mean by, 'Ah, no wonder?' Are you trying to say that I'm stupid because I don't know what a monkey is?"

"You know what? Just forget what I said," Wayne sighed. "Just stop playing games and get back to work."

"What work?" Jackson asked. The reason why the two of them were in the bedroom goofing around was that they had nothing else to do.

"Then why don't you help me fix the machine that you-" Wayne stopped himself and shook his head. "Never mind." The two were the reason why the machine was in an even worse condition than before. They had tried fixing it on their own but failed terribly and made a bigger mess. "Just stop playing games and do something useful. For starters, there's someone that wants to see you," he told him, referring to Jean who had been quietly observing the three.

"Oh right!" Jackson threw his controller behind him onto one of the pillows and hopped off the bed.

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