TUTORIAL TO BECOME A GREEN FLAG (BUGGED)

Chapter 2: The Jacket Incident

The air conditioning in the library archive was not designed for human comfort; it was calibrated strictly for the preservation of century-old parchment and decaying ink. For Aris, who had spent the better part of three hours buried in the dim, climate-controlled basement, the chill had become a dull, background hum. For Tia, however, the environment was a localized arctic tundra.

Tia sat three desks away, her shoulders hunched as she typed rhythmically into her terminal. She was efficient, precise, and completely oblivious to the physiological toll the room was taking on her.

Deep within the peripheral nodes of the building’s infrastructure, the environmental monitoring system—a temperamental AI integrated into the library’s mainframe—flickered to life. It registered a sudden, sharp dip in Tia’s peripheral body temperature. Her skin surface was cooling at a rate that signaled the onset of shivering, a precursor to cognitive decline.

ALERT: BIOLOGICAL UNIT 742 (TIA) DETECTING THERMAL DEFICIT, the system chimed silently in Aris’s internal interface. RECOMMENDATION: SUPPLEMENTAL INSULATION REQUIRED.

Aris blinked, the holographic notification overlaying his vision like a translucent yellow smear. He glanced up from his research, focusing on Tia. She looked pale, her fingers stiffening as they tapped against the mechanical keys.

He felt a spike of urgency. Aris was, by nature, a man of profound social ineptitude, but he possessed a rigid, almost mechanical sense of altruism. If the system said she was cold, she was cold. And if she was cold, his primary objective shifted from historical data mining to thermal mitigation.

He stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the polished concrete floor, echoing through the hollow silence of the archives. Tia didn’t look up.

Aris reached for his jacket—a heavy, oversized utility piece he’d bought for its abundance of pockets rather than its style. He yanked it off the back of his chair, his movements jerky. He was already planning the maneuver: he would approach, maintain a respectful distance, and offer the garment with a polite, albeit stuttered, explanation.

Execute Social Protocol: Warmth, he thought, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.

Then, the glitch happened.

Aris didn't realize the library’s synchronization server was currently undergoing a latency spike. As he reached for his jacket, a notification box surged in his field of vision, its red border pulsing with aggressive, erratic energy.

CRITICAL TIMER OVERRIDE: THERMAL DISSIPATION LIMIT REACHED. ACTION REQUIRED WITHIN 0.5 SECONDS TO PREVENT HYPOTHERMIC RESPONSE.

The system didn’t just suggest he move; it hijacked his motor functions, perceiving the delay as a threat to Tia’s health. The red timer counted down with brutal, blinding speed: 0.4… 0.3… 0.2…

Panic, sharp and cold, flooded Aris’s brain. His body interpreted the flickering red countdown as a countdown to a catastrophe. His muscles seized, his adrenaline spiked to combat-ready levels, and his depth perception warped. He felt as if he were hurling a projectile meant to save a life, not offering a simple piece of clothing.

He took two long, lunging strides toward Tia. He didn't slow down. He didn't offer the jacket folded neatly over his arm.

Instead, fueled by the system’s terrifying, artificial urgency, Aris propelled his arm forward with the force of a professional athlete.

"Tia!" he barked, his voice cracking from the strain of his own panic.

The heavy, metallic-buckled jacket left his hand like a dark, airborne predator. It didn't drift through the air; it sliced through it. The sleeves flailed like the tentacles of a giant, woolen squid.

Tia looked up just in time to see a mass of synthetic fabric blotting out the flickering fluorescent light.

THWAP.

The jacket hit her squarely in the face with the wet, heavy impact of a wet towel thrown by a professional wrestler. The thick collar slammed into her nose, the heavy, weighted zippers clattered against her cheekbones, and the sleeves wrapped around the back of her head, completely blinding her.

She let out a muffled, high-pitched squeak, her chair spinning backward from the sheer kinetic energy of the impact. The heavy weight of the garment pinned her against the backrest, forcing her to scramble blindly, her hands clawing at the dark, suffocating wool.

"I—I—" Aris froze, his arm still outstretched, his fingers trembling in the wake of the throw.

He watched in frozen horror as Tia tumbled, her chair legs skidding on the smooth floor. She hit the ground with a thud, the jacket still draped over her like a shroud, her muffled grunts of confusion and irritation muffled by the thick insulation.

"The system—it said—" Aris began, his voice failing him. He looked at the red timer, which had vanished, replaced by a calm, glowing green checkmark: THERMAL MITIGATION DELIVERED.

"Aris?" Tia’s voice emerged from beneath the jacket, muffled and vibrating with suppressed fury. She managed to shove the collar away from her face, exposing one furious, narrowed eye.

The scene was absurd. The library archive was silent, save for the hum of the cooling system. Tia sat on the floor, tangled in a pile of oversized, utilitarian fabric that smelled vaguely of engine oil and old books. Aris stood above her, frozen in a statuesque pose of utter confusion, his face drained of color, his hands still shaped like he was holding the jacket.

"You threw it," she said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, low pitch. She pushed the jacket off her head, her hair a chaotic mess of static electricity. "You just… you just launched it at my face."

"The timer," Aris whispered, his eyes darting to the empty air where the system alerts usually lived. "The, uh, the heat dissipation protocols were... they were critical. The latency, Tia. The latency was at three hundred milliseconds."

Tia stood up, clutching the jacket in her hand, her knuckles white. She looked at the garment, then back at Aris, who was currently contemplating whether it would be more socially acceptable to faint or to simply walk out of the library and never return to this dimension.

"You thought the way to solve my being cold," she said, her voice trembling—not from the temperature, but from sheer disbelief, "was to blindside me with a projectile at terminal velocity?"

"I was trying to optimize your comfort," he offered lamely, his internal system now helpfully suggesting: SUGGESTION: APOLOGIZE. PROBABILITY OF FORGIVENESS: 12%.

"Optimize my—" Tia took a step toward him, brandishing the jacket like a weapon. Aris recoiled, his back hitting the cold, stone bookshelf behind him. "Aris, you idiot! I wasn't even that cold! I just needed a sweater, not a blunt-force trauma incident!"

She shoved the jacket back into his chest. It hit him with significantly less force than he had used on her, but it felt like a mountain of lead.

"I'm sorry," he managed to say, his gaze fixed on a crack in the floor tiles. "My system interface… it glitched. I panicked."

Tia sighed, a long, weary sound that echoed through the archives. She brushed the lint from her shirt, her face still flushed, though it was now from embarrassment and lingering adrenaline rather than the library’s artificial chill. She looked at Aris—at his frantic, wide eyes and the way he was currently struggling to breathe—and her anger deflated, replaced by the familiar, weary pity she always felt when dealing with him.

"Next time," she muttered, grabbing her bag from the desk and turning toward the exit, "just tell me. Use your words, Aris. Not your throwing arm."

Aris remained pinned against the bookshelf as she walked away. His system chimed once, a soft, polite sound that felt like a mockery of the chaos he had just unleashed.

SOCIAL INTERACTION COMPLETE. OUTCOME: SUB-OPTIMAL.

He looked down at the jacket in his hands, then at Tia’s retreating back. He didn't move. He simply stood there in the freezing archive, perfectly, agonizingly still, wondering at what point his life had transitioned from a standard human existence into a series of catastrophic, system-assisted failures.

He shivered. For the first time all day, he was actually, truly cold. But he didn't dare put the jacket back on. He was terrified that if he tried to pull it over his head, the system would detect a tremor, register a critical failure, and force him to hurl it across the room again—perhaps this time into the face of the Head Librarian.

He decided to hold it, very carefully, and go home.