"My dude, why are you reading like that?" Malcolm held his school reading book upside down; hair hung down like vines from a tree. The boy's arms dropped to the floor. His focus moved to his older brother.
"Because I can, don't judge," Malcolm responded in a playful tone.
"Aren't you gonna get a headache from it???"
"Don't you have some connection thing to deal with?" Ryan shook his head and smirked. His hand swung over and grabbed the remote from the floor, flipping through some channels until boredom struck and encouraged him to turn off the TV. It took a minute of restless movement before he decided to leave. His body transitioned from resting to sitting. Wrinkled hands rubbed the man's face, with the face's gaze striking Malcolm.
"Whatever, man, have fun doing the work you were supposed to be doing in class." He got up from the couch and left for his room; then finished what was left of the chapter, bookmarked it, and slid down the armchair. Malcolm's legs stopped near the scattered worksheet pages that covered the living room's carpet. The boy tossed his book to the side and organized the pages. He recovered the book from the floor and laid both items on the coffee table. Swiping the shortened no. 2 pencil, the boy attempted to spin it between the index and middle finger yet the attempt was unsuccessful. He grasped at memories that related to the worksheet, then answered the questions to the best of his ability.
Ryan sifted through the bedroom closet. Mainly through the closet's top shelf. After a while of moving around old and dusty boxes, he found a mask. The mask the mind searched for. It was mostly just a normal, plastic mask. It wore a large smile on its face and had tears that were molded into it. The color was mostly orange, outside of the sky blue tears. Observing further, the mask appeared dusty and blew off the dust that covered its inside. A good bit of it flew into his face and into his air passages and forced him to clear his throat. He carried it over to his computer over in the corner and sat down.
"It's been a while since I've been connected, huh," he whispered to himself. The computer hadn't been used in a couple of weeks, but it had been months since the computer had been used for video chat. A bit of a chuckle left the lips, then the enthusiastic teen slid on the mask. He powered up his computer and waited patiently as the device produced ear bleedingly loud noises. Winces were given in return to the painful sounds, though they weren't too hard on the ears for him. While waiting for infinity, he looked over his quaint room. It was quite barren. Most of the things he had were bought from his dad years ago. The last thing he got was this computer and a couple of games for it. Outside of that, there weren't any posters or any kind of merchandise, just a bed, a desk, a closet with a little wooden clothes basket, and his trusty PC. That was all that was needed though. He didn't ask for much which gave his mother one of the few advantages in her life.
As he examined the small square room, the computer completed its boot up. He plugged in one of the many microphones that rusted away in his desk and loaded up 'QChat.' Once the program was running, he was inside the application's main hub. A couple of icons surrounded the logo on top of a spacey background. The icons represented the different parts and features of QChat; such as the chatrooms icon, the settings icon, the friends icon, the news icon, etc. He clicked on the chatroom icon and scrolled through the list. There were many chatrooms, hundreds, maybe even around the thousand mark. Some were for roleplaying, some were for discussing games, and some were for just chatting. After spending a bit of time scrolling he opened up a chat that had 3 other users in it.
A small clown danced in place of a loading screen. The clown danced around until three people in masks were visible. The resolution of each person's camera was extremely low; it was only 240p at best though it was still clear on what was being presented to each user. One wore the mask of a furious penguin. Another wore the mask of a sad tree. The last wore a mask that resembled some video game mascot; maybe it was some sly, lizard that was used as the protagonist of one of those 64 bit games? He wasn't too sure especially since he hadn't touched a console in a while. It seemed like they were having a conversation earlier, yet stopped the second Ryan entered the room.
