"Why don't we go with traditional?" Eugene suggested. Truth be told, he didn't want to go with sports at all. When he was a kid, he had been big in swimming, but he had gotten away with that. Plus, he never watched sports at all, and the only sports he had taken in high school was the haly year PE requirement in his junior year, which had been a struggle for him. But the group had chosen Sports (or more specifically, Pete had chosen Sports, and the girls had acquiesced), so Eugene wasn't going to fight it, Pete probably wouldn't play if the group picked another category. Plus, if Pete liked the game in sports mode, he might be inclined it later in its other modes.
"Yeah, I'm up for a little Sports Trivia," Pete said, smiling. He wiped the smile off his face when he caught Judy glaring at him. She was still a little pissed off at the way he had just made the decision for all of them.
The girls just nodded in agreement, Lindsey looking interested but Judy still irritated at Pete. Eugene typed in the word Traditional, and in response, a small drawer opened, containing four hard plastic tokens in four different shapes and colors.
"Choose your tokens, then input your choices," the game intoned
"Ha! Easy one," Pete said, reaching into the small drawer and grabbing the dark brown token shaped like a football.
"If nobody minds?" Lindsey said, reaching for the white token that looked like a pair of pom poms. Lindsey had always been a tech geek, even in high school, but she had also been a cheerleader The contradiction in her two inherent social crowds bothered a lot of people, but Lindsey seemed the thrive on it. When no one objected, Lindsey happily took the pom poms token.
With only two tokens left, Judy picked one up the yellow one that looked like a canoe paddle. A little smile lit on her face. In recent years, she had been butting heads with her conservative parents over her appearance choices. In a lot of ways, Judy was almost as conservative as her parents, But she wanted the opportunity to experiment a little. Nothing drastic. No major lifestyle changes, really. And Judy was definitely avoiding drugs and alcohol. But she didn't want to get pigeonholed either.
But no matter their arguments, the family always had its summer float trips, And for those three weeks, all familial arguments were put on hold. In Judy's eyes, those three weeks were the most wonderful time of the year.
That left Eugene with a blue marker that was shaped like the top half of a swimmer doing the American Crawl.
When Eugene was twelve, he had really been into youth competitive swimming. He had been good. He had been really good. As in, even at that age, his coaches were talking about him being in the Olympics in a few years, when he got to college.
But then disaster had struck Eugene's homelife, and he and his mother had to move out of the gated community there were living in, including the swimming league that Eugene had been in. By the time Eugene was eighteen, he was still able to go to college through a combination of scholarship, grant and savings, but his dreams of being an Olympic swimmer had disappeared years ago.
Still, Eugene secretly kept up with the sport, though he told no one that he did.
Eugene typed in everyone's names and token choices, and the game instructed, "Choose Era." The game didn't list any dates, though, but instead listed five places. The group perused the list and chose: