baby, you're a rich man

[zuckered]

Likability. I should have known that everything would come down to that. Years have passed since I last even set foot in Kirkland House, since those days when I shuffled from class to class as that nameless nobody who managed to ace CS problem sets or even gave a crap about getting punched by the Phoenix or the Porcellian- with the money I've made

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[pointzerothree]

Eduardo doesn't know how long it's been. The thing about the island is that there are no real obligations, no meetings or anywhere to be, and so it's easy to lose track of time, to let days slide into weeks. He still isn't quite so accustomed to Tabula Rasa's idle lifestyle (truth be told, he wouldn't want to be), but he's much better about it than he used to be these days, and the fact of the matter is, when he has few ways of filling his time, there isn't any reason to sit and count the hours. He has a girlfriend he's crazy about and a handful of classes, and that's been all he needs.

Despite the fact that it's never bothered him, when he catches sight of an all too familiar face in the rec room - one that doesn't belong to some doppelganger named after a city, he knows instantly - the first thing he does is try to calculate how much time has passed since he last laid eyes on his former best friend, since he stormed out of the Facebook office after having been stabbed in the fucking back or since the two days he spent thinking he

[zuckered]

Everything has an explanation. It's the reason why, several minutes later, Mark Zuckerberg is still seated calmly in the room, trusty laptop in hand (and Erica Albright's page open in a tab of Firefox, if minimized to the start bar), even though the chain of events he's just gone through make absolutely no sense to him. How he came to arrive, in the blink of an eye, inside a rather dilapidated building with a strange smell and a steady drip in the background is unclear. Mark doesn't suspect foul play, even though there's plenty of reason for him to always suspect foul play, having as much money as he does in the bank, having made as many enemies as he has, including the man everyone's come to know as his best friend.

Former, rather. It takes two to keep a bridge intact, and from what Mark's seen in the past few days, Eduardo's probably been ready to burn his end of it for a while now, a connection quickly severed and only distanced over the years. The speed of dissolution has always been fascinating to Mark. The way market trends can

[pointzerothree]

If the use of the familiar nickname grates, Eduardo barely lets on as much, eyes closing in a momentary cringe before he pulls himself together. That one small thing is inconsequential, after all, compared to the fact that Mark is actually here. For about a fraction of a second, it had been almost nice to see him, but that passed quickly, leaving him nothing but frustrated, too exhausted to want to deal with this, with him. It's always been a little difficult, the way Mark says things seemingly out of nowhere, related only to what's going on in his own mind, but Eduardo could manage when they were friends, shrugged it off easily; now, it's downright infuriating, less because Mark is so indecipherable than because he can't decipher it. Not much of a distinction, maybe, but an important one all the same

[zuckered]

This place, wherever it is, doesn't offer that many answers. Glimpses Mark's had of the outer setting hint that he might be somewhere in the tropics, with balmy weather and appropriate flora, the lack of strong humidity suggesting that there's some kind of coast nearby. But that doesn't tell him much. Narrows him down to an entire band of the Earth, and one that Mark doesn't really have any attachment to, although the arrival of Eduardo in specific makes Mark wonder if he's somehow made his way over to Brazil. He doesn't know the difference between it or any other tropical place well enough to know better, and at least this is a guess with some reasoning behind it. But why the corner of his lip quirks up for a moment isn't because he may be in Eduardo's home turf or that the pickings in clothing must be thin at best (unless there is in fact, some sort of themed party going on nearby, but if he can't hear the music from here then it's a poor party even by Harvard's standards, and that's saying something; he's been to BU's equivalent