“Die alien scum!” Theodore shouted out at the TV screen in mock anger as the crowd cheered him on. “Your mother put up more of a fight than this last night!” His friends roared with laughter as he reached for his half empty bottle of Mountain Dew, his only sustaining life force.

It was a day like any other on campus. Theodore Lucas Fisher spent hours in the student lounge playing video games with his fellow nerds and social outcasts. Though he rarely attended the few classes he had registered for, Theodore spent most of his time here at his community college, for he had nowhere else to be (and even if he did, he couldn’t get there, for he still didn’t have his driver’s license, despite the fact that he was 19). He also didn’t have a job or a girlfriend, and he still lived with his parents, though from time to time he would stay with his older brother Joseph for the night or the weekend. Aside from the people he played video games with at the college, Joseph was really Theodore’s only friend.

From the outside looking in on this group, you’d think that they were the closest of friends; they laughed together, spent hours a day together playing video game, and all seemed almost the same in personality and demeanor, but Theodore rarely conversed with these people outside the student lounge in the context of first-person shooters and RPGs. Though he has been out of high school for a year now, Theodore still had not picked up the finer points of social interaction and for the most part, his socializing consisted of nothing more than a regressed form of parallel play with nothing but a television screen and a few game controllers holding the closest things he had to interpersonal relationships together.