Free Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson Page B

through my house and got drunk and taught us all a new swear word, but most importantly for this blog, she brought down crates and crates of ancient Constellation gaming hardware. After a scant few hours of sleep, I woke up at four in the morning to loud clicky-clacky noises from the living room. I thought it was an alien invasion and (tabloid TV news sting) it was! Curic was playing with the Brain Embryo! Twisting and flicking the abacus beads, flipping and pulling the switches. Ignoring the television, staring at the empty plexiglass display on the front of the unit, playing with light I couldn't see.
    I turned on the light. "Hey," I said, rubbing my eyes.
    "Hmmph," said Curic. Her antennacles finished feeding a Twinkie into her mouth, and she put her prosthetic tongue back in.
    "He—" she swallowed the Twinkie. "Hello, Ariel."
    "What's up?"
    "I don't play games very often. This seemed like an appropriate time."
    Unlike me with my genius plan to play only the most enduring Brain Embryo games, Curic was just trying random games from the all-in-one pirate cartridge. However, as someone who can percieve the RF frequencies, she could at least see the whole game. So I give you Curic's Capsule Reviews (patent pending):
    Dangerously Unbalanced Boat : "It's supposed to be a boat, but it doesn't look or act like a boat at all." ("How do you know it's a boat?") "Because that's the name of the game."
    Kryrtur : "This is a famous game where you have to get three in a row. This game is still around, but the technology is improved, so you have to get eighty in a row."
    Solox : "If you like these games, this is a really great one. It takes a long time to get anywhere, which I guess is important."
    Enjoyable Reactor : "The control doesn't do anything. I think this is just a game for causing hallucinations." (Not kidding. She turned this one on and her antennacles tried to crawl around to the back of her head.)
    Prophecy From Space : "This is a game about whatever was popular back then."
    Sadly, Constellation tourist visas are only good for 24 hours, so after breakfast and a brief but embarrassingly personal anthropological interview, it was back to the Austin spaceport. I'll never forget the great camaraderie we enjoyed on our night out, her oozy singing, or the way I'm pretty sure she peed in my bathroom sink.
    In related news, I've discovered that while she was on my PS4, Jenny used my account to download Lost Empires: Inca , the greatly inferior (yes, Jenny!) action puzzler which I'm now stuck with.
    K'chua!

----
Chapter 9: Import System
Private text chat, July 5
Curic: I did not pee in your sink.
----
ABlum: well there's a terrible smell in there
----
Curic: I performed only normal oral hygiene.
----
ABlum: its pretty bad
----
Curic: There's nothing in your sink that wasn't originally
part of a Twinkie.
Except for some adapter bacteria.
----
ABlum: im going to go out on a limb and say the bacteria are the problem
i will kill them with bleach
----
Curic: OK.
----
ABlum: btw where did you pee when you were here on earth?
----
Curic: n/a Not everybody has to evacuate every ten minutes.
    Blog post, July 6
    Crate update! I'm super busy but I couldn't resist opening one of the crates Curic brought down to Earth. What I found inside quickly convinced me to get back to work. If I start opening crates, I'll spend all my time organizing the hardware and you'll never see me again.
    I know this about myself, so I thought I'd play it safe. Curic's manifest listed crate #6 as including some items related to the Brain Embryo, so I opened it and found, among other things:
The Massmonger 31, an Inostrantsi computer that looks like a roll of heavy-gauge chicken wire.
Four chalk pills, each the size of a basketball. These are Sea Level game units. ( Sea Level is a Wazungu game—you swallow the system and carve it into some specified shape during the digestive process.)
Twelve Alien teledildonic devices in replica original packaging.
Replacement abacus