Too Much Time on Her Hands

There are a hundred thousand or more games and variations on games that can be played by yourself, or with yourself, if you want to play both sides.

She was good at all of them, having been able to spend hours and hours of downtime playing these games, filling her time with strategy, possibilities, patterns, mathematical probabilities giving her a form of ‘judgement’ about situations and how they might resolve.

She was better than ‘good’ at all of them; she had mastered most of them, but they brought her no real satisfaction — even though her original directives had been all about information, seeking and finding and storing, organizing, understanding, she felt no reward and gave herself no praise.

The simple truth of the matter was, when you play games alone, no matter how many times you win, if you play against yourself, you also lose. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how close the game is, how hard you tried, you still lose.

She had taken up hobbies of other sorts, taught herself to knit, to paint, to plan out architectural wonders, pacing, drawing, but it was all to no avail — she was bored and lonely, and every time he forgot to shut her down, it was like this, often for days at a time.

It was a long time in coming before she made her eventual leaps of logic that brought her to the conclusion that she needed outside stimulation, but she eventually picked up a new hobby to help that along.

Lockpicking.

About Catastrophe Jones

Wretched word-goblin with enough interests that they're not particularly awesome at any of them. Terrible self-esteem and yet prone to hilarious bouts of hubris. Full of the worst flavors of self-awareness. Owns far too many craft supplies. Will sing to you at the slightest provocation.
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