She was proud of her ability to mimic flashing lights, Marco! It was downright rude to take that away from her. "I didn't say it was a video game," she said. "Hence dropping the video part of video game."

She didn't know. For one, this hadn't been anything close to what she expected a date to be like -- even if her idea was pretty much limited to walking and eating together at the restaurants they largely didn't have. More-over, she hadn't been exaggerating when she'd told Kang she found Marco annoying. He was annoying. He went out of his way to be annoying.

But saying yes to shut him up had been different than she'd even led Kang to believe. Sakura didn't like being forced into corners anymore than the next person, and damned if you do damned if you don't situations were particularly vexing.

Then there was the fact this had been more like an extended arguing session tied in with a little companionship than anything else. She doubted tossing in a competitive game would change that much. Did she want to make a bid for someone else's version of normalcy? That's all dates really were. On Earth, that apparently stood in as pre-arranged time to meet with a friend. That'd be fine, wouldn't it?

"What kind of video games are we talking about?" she said at last.