Eric fired up his laptop at the kitchen table and checked his school e-mail while drinking coffee. He could see that he'd gotten a few study guides, as well as reminders about project submission deadlines and online final exam schedules over the last couple of days as it looked like his professors were slowly coming back online. The college had sent out a text a few days back advising a 'transition' week after Thanksgiving break to allow for any difficulties students might have in establishing online learning from home while also allowing teaching professors to create an online workspace from home for lectures, etc.
There wouldn't be any online classes, lectures or new assignments during the transition week, but deadlines hadn't changed for final projects and exams, so Eric was starting to feel a little anxious that he hadn't really done anything for school since they'd left campus.
When Cassie came down for breakfast and coffee she could see that Eric was pretty wrapped up in his work and so she too grabbed her laptop and sat across from him to get caught up on her end-of-term projects.
All lab work and research had been formally suspended during the shutdown at Cassie's university, but there was still an opportunity to work with available online data sets for the projects where results and data for lab or field work had already been uploaded to the university servers.
Cassie had been checking in more regularly over the break than Eric and Ellie, and opened some replies from her professors, as well as her thesis advisor, that she had sent emails to over the past week, in order to make sure that she wasn't letting any of her coursework suffer. If anything, it sounded like she was ahead of where most of the professors and study group members were based on what still needed to get done for the end of the Fall term.
The university was still hoping to reopen campus after Christmas, but she saw an update from her advisor that she should work out a plan to complete her thesis online. The department head had advised the teaching staff that they should prepare for an extended closure, based in turn on what she had been told from the administration.
When Ellie shuffled in an hour or so later, she drank some coffee and asked Eric about what was going on with his classes. She had read the text from college to mean she could take another week off, but watching the two of them work, Ellie reluctantly booted up her own laptop and joined them, with a little grumbling accentuating her review of e-mails and calendar items. From time to time she would shoot glances over at Eric, who was sitting diagonally from her across the table and seemed to be working pretty intently. As much as she wanted to just lay around, or see if Eric wanted to go out to the lagoon, she eventually resigned herself to the idea that the other two would be working for a while and came to terms with the fact that she really did need to play a little catch up heading into finals too. Still, it frustrated her that Eric was giving so much attention to his screen and hadn't caught her eye yet, even once.
Eric had made pretty good progress on a paper he was writing and updated a saved draft online to request that his instructor review and comment on the rough draft before he completed the paper. His instructors weren't holding office hours that week, even online, but students could still request feedback and help during the week by saving projects to their online class folder and e-mailing their professor.
One of his study groups for engineering had gotten a few responses from his shout out to anyone who wanted to prep together before finals. He was surprised that a red-haired girl named Lisa had replied right away, very enthusiastically, about the possibility of setting up a study discussion if he wanted to meet that week. They really hadn't interacted much all semester and she rarely contributed to in-class discussion, but maybe she really needed to pull her grade up with her final. Eric always tried to chime in when he could for class discussion, as it was listed as part of the grading criteria and the instructor for that class had gotten some online ratings that indicated he tended to grade pretty generously to students who attended each class and spoke up during discussion. Eric sent an invitation to the group with a proposed meeting time and dug into downloading and saving the study materials into a folder on his laptop to review.
Lisa followed up about twenty minutes later with a pm asking how his holidays were going. She complained a little about being stuck at home, with her parents and younger siblings, and hoped he was having a better time. Eric replied and she'd made an effort to keep the chat going, even if Eric had taken a while to respond each time while he worked on reviewing and organizing his class notes. Taking a break for a minute, Eric looked up her social media profiles, scanned her posts and looked at a few pictures. She wasn't ugly by any standard, just sort of plain and maybe a little nerdy. He did see some gaming references that caused him to pause, as he didn't know many girls that gamed, and she seemed to be into some pretty solid titles.
Eric replied to her pm, making a reference to spending too much time online in his current favorite open-world game over the holidays and how much he needed to get caught up on work for school. Lisa instantly shot back a reply, confessing the same problem and peppering him with questions about his player character and where he currently was spending time in the game. Eric found himself getting caught up in the chat and a little surprised that a girl would find the game as interesting as he did. Lisa eventually broke off the chat, needing to go help her mother, but told him her user name and asked him to shoot her an 'ally' request the next time he logged on.
Eric looked up to see Ellie glance over at him, looking bored and a little annoyed, as she rested her cheek on one fist with her elbow propping it up from the table. He switched over to a program designed for drafting engineering projects and completed a series of exercises from his study guide in that class. He was working through a particularly confusing exercise, which kept failing each time he'd test the solution, when Cassie interrupted him to see if he wanted to take a lunch break with them. He'd gotten so engrossed in the problem that he'd lost track of time and suddenly realized that he had gotten both hungry, and pretty stiff, from staring at his screen for as long as he had.
They made some sandwiches together and the girls went off to watch some TV while they ate, but Eric went to the den, to log into his gaming system, and look up Lisa's profile out of curiosity. Pulling up her user to send her an 'ally' request, he was a little shocked to find that her character was significantly more advanced than his, and rather than something plain or mousy, she had taken on one of the toughest and most demanding character roles the game offered. It offered a high opportunity for reward and advancement, but had a correspondingly higher risk of dying and almost no ability at concealment. It was the last character you'd choose if you wanted to blend in or avoid conflict. Based on her level, she had to be very, very good, and equally matched in lethality to almost any other player in the game.
The outfit and player features she had selected for current use in the game were likewise chosen to get maximum attention, rather than facilitate concealment. She had chosen a combination of bright armor, a deep red cloak and what had to be the brightest shade of red hair available in the game. Her character was sexy, deadly and designed almost intentionally to taunt other players into targeting her, as she would stand out in almost every situation. However plain Lisa might have seemed in the real world, her gaming personality was basically a rock star, samurai, bad-ass with an amazing set of tits. Eric hit send and saw a confirmation pop up that his ally request had gone through.
"Who's your new girlfriend?" Ellie asked as she walked up to lean on the back of the sofa next to Eric's head.
"Oh, hey!" he looked over. "Just some girl from one of my study groups. We've never actually even met in person." He backed out of Lisa's profile and returned to the main menu. "We were just chatting on-line today and she asked me to send her a friend request in the game."
"Well I'm pretty sure her tits are fake," Ellie quipped sarcastically.
