Survival Of The Fittest

"Milena, get off that damn computer. It's not doing you any good."

(MINA SOTO, PREGAME START)

Mina could hear her mother's voice practically any time she sat down in front of a computer for anything other than homework. That included sitting in the computer lab, after school, headphones on, working on her projects.

She typically produced under the guise of homework. It wasn't as if she was forbidden from working on music, but she knew her mother would end up nagging her the more time she spent on it, so she opted to get some work done in the school's computer lab. It was in a fresh environment, anyway. She had everything prerecorded, so she only really needed to mix it.

In truth, she wasn't even working, not yet. She had an AO3 fanfiction of Brendon Urie and Ryan Ross pulled up. She didn't even listen to Panic! At The Disco, but she was locked in. The things she did for her friends.

But that was enough of tolerating the fanfiction. It was time to get down some actual work. She switched windows to GarageBand, clearly the most prestigious of applications. She pressed play on the project, just to take a listen with fresh ears before getting any of the real work done.

To her absolute horror, her headphones must have fallen out of the jack without her even knowing. The computer blasted—at full volume, no less—the song to anyone in the lab. Autotuned vocals, church organ synths, gritty 808s, even the spliced Cynthia Erivo vocals from that one Wicked song: all entirely on display.

She jammed the mute button as fast as she could, but she didn't account for the lagging delay she'd get from the sheer amount of tracks packed into that one file. Maximalist production, her downfall. It took a while five seconds to fully process the command, but the damage was already done as far as she was concerned.

Here was Mina, mortified. She didn't dare to turn around to see if anyone else had been there.

Cordelia's refusal to appease her father, in opposition to her sisters' empty praises, dissssdadsfvsbf ncbv

Buster jumped at the sudden loud noise from the computer beside him, causing his hand to mash against the keyboard in a moment of dumb panic. The explosion of sound, though brief, cut right to Buster's core. It was like a pop singer and the Devil himself both got dropped into a garbage disposal, and their screams mixed with the whirring of the blades as their bodies were minced together into a screeching goo.

If it was music, it was not Buster Johnson's preferred type of music.

Buster always liked to write his essays using the school's computer. He had access to his own computers, of course (he had both a desktop and a laptop, in fact) but the home environment provided too many distractions. He might decide to take a five minute break to check twitter and suddenly find himself at 10 PM with only three sentences typed. Using the computer labs helped deter him from distractions. Usually. It seemed like today was going to be different.

He turned to his left, two stations down the line, where the harshly goth girl was staring at her computer, a mortified expression on her face. Buster could have ignored her, but he habitually wanted to defuse the awkward situation. That was the type of person he was. And she was... Milena, yes? They'd shared a biology class back in the tenth grade. Buster always strove to remember as many of his peers names as he could, even the names of the people he didn't have reason to usually interact with. People tended to respond positively to people who remember their names. It was a little thing that Buster found went a long way. Buster smiled at Milena and chuckled.

"Oh! That caught me by surprise! It's a nice song, though!"

For a second, I thought a goddamn air raid siren was going off.