Clad in his finest suit, Topher was halfway through a Mountain Dew and trying to decide whether or not he knew the way out of the park when his phone rang.

"Go for Brink." The person on the other end of the line sounded urgent, so Topher took a sip of soda. No, more like a slurp. "No, I'm not at my -- I'm not at my desk, Boyd." He waved a hand, ( Read more... )

In preparation for his portal tomorrow morning, Topher was cleaning his room -- no. Topher was organizing his room, and it was turning out to be a surprisingly horrifying process.

The thing was that he was, on the surface, a very neat person. His clean clothes were always folded because that's how the dry-cleaners left them and there was rarely ( Read more... )

"Nnnnnn," Topher mumbled into his pillow ( Read more... )

Okay, fine, the subject heading was a lie. It was pretty much afternoon by the time Topher opened his eyes, blinked rapidly, stared at the ceiling, and pulled his blankets tight around him ( Read more... )

When Topher had snapped back to reality yesterday, he'd been in a closet up at the school, and after a few hours had finally managed to get up to trudge back to his room. There, he'd proceeded to gather up the Space Battles sheets from his bed and drag them into his own closet, and... well, hide.

That was where he woke up this morning (not that he'd ( Read more... )

So for Topher, today had been noteworthy due to a variety of circumstances, the most obvious of which being ( Read more... )

The hallway was pretty quiet this early in the morning, but not deserted. There were two teenagers in their pajamas standing outside a friend's door, bearing gifts.

They were givers like that. Just exemplary human beings.

No, really.

"Do you think he even does Christmas?" Topher wondered, moving to the side to let Kenzi knock.

( The fact that they might be waking him up had nothing to do with anything. Nope. )

Upon finally returning to his room after a five-day vacation, item one on Topher's agenda was to stand on the inside of the door and just have a moment of dorkish glee. He'd been on a whole other planet! And it was awesome! And he'd gotten bitten by a weird giant bug thing and seen mostly-naked girls and half-naked Ben and Ender and almost crashed ( Read more... )

Okay. The world was maybe almost over. Topher was more than a little freaked.

So out came the dice and the cape, and after making a quick annoucement, he set up at a toadstool with some character sheets for some pre-apocalyptic Dungeons and Dragons.

Kid had priorities.

[[OCD is up! Yep, idea stolen from Buffy 7x22, "Chosen." Anyone can play, and if ( Read more... )

Fact: Research sucked.

But here Topher was, doing it anyway. Because Peter had told him to, and that was enough, most of the time, to get him to do things. Sad but true.

And... maybe Topher was a little bit more inclined to do as Peter said this week in particular for another reason too. Which would be the need to appease him in light of the ( Read more... )