"Sara, I am an esper.  I have any game available on this console that is playable with a controller."  Weird way to say 'merci'.  Is Tim feeling confident enough to stick his tongue out at Sara playfully?  Signs indicate the answer is 'yes, very briefly'.  "But of the games I like to play..."  Tim offers up a pretty wide variety.  Cute find-the-camouflaged-cat genre games feature prominently.  There are roughly a dozen horror games that were played recently.  A handful of tactics games, but these are largely single-player and Tim hasn't played them that much.  There are quite a number of two-player co-op games that haven't been played in a month, akin to Overcooked, It Takes Two, and a modern homage to Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes*.

*no relation to the thread of the same name.

She stops herself from covering her smile, and looks at the games on offer. 

"Can I try one of the cat games? Those look safe enough for reminding me how to use controllers." It's been a little while since she used a console rather than a computer. 

"Of course!"  She always said they were good for learning to pick out details against a confusing backdrop just stop.  Enjoy the moment.  Play a game.  The game has a cooperative and a competitive mode, but Tim is going to select the 'co-op campaign' option unless Sara wants to engage in a high-stakes battle of who can find cute cats faster?

They should at least start with co-op, though she probably won't change it later. She doesn't really care to compete with other people. 

Tim's mostly a co-op guy himself, he gets his competitive jollies on the training mats.  You move the cursor like so and mark a cat as found like this, and sometimes cats are hidden behind environmental objects, see how there's hint of a tail sticking out behind this leaf?

So cute... 

Oddly, she's better at spotting the little signs of a hidden cat than the ones that are camouflaged in plain sight. 

Well, Tim is gentleman enough to try and leave Sara a reasonable number of hidden cats to find.  It would be silly to expect a rank amateur cat-finder to stack up against a six-game veteran of the genre.  Tim will aim to let Sara find at least two-tenths of the cats, unless she notices he's sandbagging.

She notices but she doesn't mind! It's sweet of him if, again, a little silly. 

"If I played this single-player I bet you'd be vibrating in place over all the cats I miss," she giggles. 

oh no.  she knows.  "Ummmmmm.  I would...try...not to....."

She giggles a little harder, "Maybe I should get this at home and then I can come back more seasoned, hm?" 

Tim chortles.  Just absolutely read to filth.  "If you want to!  I like them, they're pretty relaxing but they're not just junk food games, either."

"Mhm! Do you know if there's dog ones? I like both, but cats used to give me the sniffles, so it's, you know. Habit, to like dogs more?" 

"There must be somewhere, I think they do cats because a dog will run home to you as soon as you walk home.  A cat is more likely to fall asleep under the sewing machine or in a pantry somewhere.  I'm glad you don't need to avoid kitties anymore."

"Me too! I still think I'm going to get a puppy at some point, not a kitten. Maybe after the Confluence? I can't now, not when I'll be so busy, but after there should be plenty of time..." 

"That would be cute."  Good for someone else, but not for me.  "Puppies are very cute, but they're a lot of work, no?  Training and shots and not letting them eat things they shouldn't?"

... oh.

Tim stills again.  Takes a deep breath.  Lets it out.

Not anymore.

"Yes, I want to be there for all the training and silly cute things they do. If I got one now, I would miss it all. It wouldn't be right to put all that work on someone else, and I think we wouldn't bond as well?" 

...more mysterious Tim reactions? Sara is going to... Ignore this, for now. 

"Yeah.  You would bond.  Over the training."  Oh my god are you for serious why do you have a lump in your throat are a fucking adult or not.

Well there's clearly a problem here! How about instead of continuing down this track they try one of those horror games? It's late enough to be thematic. 

Sure.  A horror game.  That's good.

Wait.  You have a checklist for this.

"In case I get jumpscared, I'm gonna give you some reinforcement.  It uh, it should be fine for this, but can we move your personal effects to one of the cubbies?"

"Oh," she nods, "Okay, just the ones up there...?"

Untangling and hauling herself out of the pillow is a bit of a process. She sets her bag in a cubby and returns to flompf back down with much greater ease. 

Tim of course helps Sara get re-cozied with her Pillow Pile and will respectfully twine his legs with hers.

"The big danger here is to the controller.  If it breaks, that is fine.  We have dozens, just put the broken one in the pile.  I have a local repair guy who 3D-prints replacement cases for these.  If you smash the electronics, that's still fine, we'll set them aside for spare parts.  I got tired of buying thirty of these a month, it's down to five these days.  If you tear the cushion, that's not a big deal, we have dozens more."

That having been said: Game!  There are jumpscares!  There are monsters!  There is teamwork required!  Some of the monsters are killable, if one person can stun it with an environmental weapon and the second can pile on afterwards!  There are environmental hazards that require teamwork to cross!

If Sara is a big gamer, she will notice that this game is designed to be played with two people.  One person cannot win it solo, it's literally impossible.

She does, in fact, wreck... A couple... Controllers. Not to the point the electronics are ruined, but the cases will definitely need replacing. She is very unused to this sort of experience, and it's been almost two years since she last saw a horror movie. The jumpscares jumpscare her. 

"Maybe we should test how much of your strength I can endure with my durability on," she says after the second one, sheepish. 

She doesn't just want to stop playing once she notices the two-player mechanics. And, separate from that, the hazards are also interesting, like a kind of puzzle! 

"Um.  If you're sure?  The usual way I test is I pinch your little fingertip, and you tell me when it hurts?  I've broken about sixty of these, you really don't need to feel bad, Sara."  I'm pretty close to done, I think.

"We should test it at some point, why not now?" 

She ticks her endurance on as strong as it can go. A small trickle of backlash is immediately apparent to both of them. 

"If you hurt me you can heal it afterwards, right? It would be a very recent injury." 

Hmmm.  Okay.  He...sees the logic.  He doesn't like the logic, but he sees it.  Okay.  Deeeeep breath.  Let it out.  "Okay.  Let me know when it hurts."

Timothy will use the following list, stopping the first time Sara indicates discomfort or if he scares himself he's commited to a plan, and he'll follow it out, and if something happens, they have a recovery path available.

The amount of strength necessary to squish a bug.
The amount of strength needed to bruise a normal person.
The amount of strength needed to drive a nail into a two-by-four.
The amount of strength needed to deform a piece of copper the size of Sara's wrist.
The amount of strength needed to deform a piece of steel the size of Sara's wrist.