Crawling in My Skin

 “What's that?” asks one of Fernando's regular customers as he peers over the counter and into the office, the one whose input and ideas are always taken with utmost gravity.

“Dungeon Crawl:Stone Soup,” replies Fernando, turning towards his keyboard and monitor for a brief moment before swiveling his gaze back to the customer.

“It looks kind of like Diablo,” the customer says.

“You're...not wrong.” Fernando is rather surprised by this insight. “They're kind of similar genres, though this one is way harder.”

“It doesn't look hard. It's not even moving.”

“It's turn-based. Things don't happen until I move or otherwise choose for them to happen. And I've played this thing off-and-on for, like, six years now. Never beaten it.”

“Maybe you're just not good enough at it.”

“There is an argument to be made on that front, absolutely. It takes a lot of skill to beat one of these. At least it's somewhat fair in that it doesn't obfuscate information from the player like similar games.” COUGH Nethack.

“Hey, Fern, do you know if you have The Croods?”

“I do indeed.” Fernando rises from his chair and crossed to the shelves on which the movies sleep to pick out a copy.

“Oh, I don't want to rent it. I was just wondering.” He turns and leaves.

Huh.