roisa meets animal crossing pt. 3
“So can I see your island yet?”
Rose’s eyes widened, and she quickly pressed the power button on her rosy pink Switch before pressing it against her chest and hiding the screen as though it wasn’t already black. “No. It’s not done yet.” She looked down at her console, which was currently playing just about anything other than Animal Crossing. Primarily Pokemon. She’d gotten more than a little bit addicted. Luisa might not have told her about competitive play, but once she learned about it, she’d gone all in. She was certain Lu was regretting buying it for her at all.
“Oh.” Luisa scrunched down on the couch next to her. “Do you want to come over and see mine?”
Rose pressed her lips together. “Uh, I’d love to, Lu, but, uh, I can’t fly to your island right now. I don’t have enough Nook Miles to buy one of those tickets.”
“You don’t need those to come visit my island. We’re already friends and everything, so we just do it that way. It’s an entirely different thing, and my island – Its terraforming is pretty amazing.” Luisa’s eyes lit up. “I really want you to see it.”
The worst part about not playing the game was knowing that Luisa wanted her to play the game. Rose sighed. “Maybe later?” She watched as Luisa’s face fell – not the first time where this game was concerned – and cupped her cheek with one hand. “Why don’t you just show it to me on yours? Wouldn’t that be easier?”
Luisa’s brow furrowed, and she stared unhappily at Rose. “If you have time to look at it on my Switch, then you have time to fly over and explore yourself. And I can give you all sorts of things if you’re looking for different recipes or flowers or clothes or furniture or anything. All you have to do is fly over.”
Rose frowned and stared down at her Switch. “I can’t.”
“You just don’t want to,” Luisa said with a pout.
“No,” Rose said, sighing again, “I really can’t. Tom Nook won’t let me fly anywhere right now.”
Luisa stared at her a little longer, her frown deepening. “He should. Is there a bug in your game? Should we call tech support, because—”
“No.” Although Rose would have had fun calling tech support and trying to get them to fix a problem that wasn’t really a problem or just calling them to cause havoc (she didn’t get to cause near enough havoc anymore, and Pokemon didn’t really help with that), she felt like Luisa would be more upset with her for that than she would for actually being honest. Besides, she knew just how important honesty was to her wife, and this wasn’t that big of a thing. It wasn’t. Really, it wasn’t. “I haven’t gotten to the point where he’ll let me fly anywhere.”
“But you’ve had the game for over a month, Rose, why haven’t you—” Luisa stopped, her eyes widening. “Oh.”
Point in her favor, Rose did not flinch.
“You haven’t been playing it.”
“I got bored, Lu. There’s no killing anything. No fighting. Just the little animals who want my help doing things and you know how much I hate helping people.” Rose tried to meet Luisa’s eyes, but Luisa turned away from her. “It’s not that I don’t want to play the game with you, I just—”
“Only care about blood and fighting and all of that. I got it. Sin Rostro.” Luisa propped herself up off of the couch with one hand. “I got…I got these games for us to play and have fun together, not so you can just…I mean…I guess it’s your Switch, so you can do what you want with it, but I thought it’d be nice for us to have our own villages and our own villagers and meet and collect different things and see how we each make our islands look—”
“Luisa, you’ve already seen what I would do with an island if I had an island.”
“It’s not the same thing!” Luisa took a deep breath and let it out, rubbing her forehead with one hand. “You can’t terraform a real island. Maybe you can because you have that much money, but you can’t suddenly make all natural mountains. You didn’t have a museum. You—”
“I wouldn’t have wanted a museum.”
“—didn’t have an aquarium,” Luisa continued as though Rose hadn’t said anything at all, her eyes narrowing. “And don’t try and tell me you wouldn’t have wanted an aquarium because—”
“Luisa, I know how you feel about aquariums, but I also wouldn’t have wanted to trigger an episode around your birthday because we had an aquarium—”
“That’s not how that works.” Luisa’s voice was soft. Very soft. She kept looking away, unable to meet Rose’s eyes. “I would have wanted an aquarium. A good one. I know we had a beach and the ocean and all the fish we could ask for, but there’s something so nice about an aquarium – and you wouldn’t have gotten sunburned in an aquarium—”
“I was getting good at not getting sunburned on the beach, too, I’ll have you know—”
“Rose.” Luisa took a deep breath and stared at her. Her lips rolled together, and she bit the lower one. “You don’t want to play the game. It’s okay. It’s okay that you don’t want to play the game. I mind, but I’m not going to make you play it. You don’t like it. You barely played it a day—”
“How do you know how long I played it?”
“That’s how long it takes to be able to fly over and visit me.” Luisa’s voice was still soft, and she shook her head once. “It’s fine. You’re fine. Just…you won’t get to see my island. At all. Until you can fly over and see it.” She looked up and met Rose’s eyes with a little smile. “You just have to get back on and do a little more playing, and then you can come right on over, okay? Just fly over. Let me know when you can.”
“Luisa—”
But Luisa turned away from her, waving one hand to signal that she couldn’t have the conversation right now.
Rose sighed. She looked down at her console. Fine. Fine. She would play the stupid game. She could do that.