Fraternising with the Locals

"You refuse to play Crucible?  I don't date cowards."
- Lord Aaron D

So part of destiny is that it is a Social Game.  You'll always see other players roaming about, farming materials, shooting enemies of the Traveller, or just dancing on Venus to the Guardians of the Galaxy Soundtrack.

Occasionally, you'll join a fireteam, whether through matchmaking or just someone randomly inviting you at the tower, and, just as meeting them in the bar, they'll always be a character.

One time during a Strike mission, I was matched up with these two guys and we took down a Fallen Devil Walker, a massive spider tank that I'm a bit of a fan of.

Then I got a message in Xbox live.

"Asshole".

Well fuck you too buddy, I first thought.  Nobody should just be called an asshole from nowhere.  I've had strangers in cars drive by and call me a racist cunt before, and I just let them drive on and wish them a fiery and gruesome car crash for wasting two seconds of my time.

But this cropped out of nowhere.  I didn't do anything against him, we were all in this together.  We were fighting the good fight.  Brothers in arms.  So I just sent him the most complicated question in the world. "Why?"

"He needed to kill that Walker."

Fair cop.  I thought kills of this nature were shared between the team,  it apparently is not.  That is the surprise of Destiny.  I apologised and said that he can find the same Walker in Patrol missions, but that just wasn't enough apparently.  But we finished the mission, and parted ways, but it stuck with me.

Like a guy I met the other day.  We began talking, I told him my history and he was like "Yeah... We have a lot of blacks."

My face scrunched up, much to his obliviousness, and said the only thing I could scrounge up. "Okaaaaayyyyy..."

"Yeah, there's a few good ones, like they're smart and stuff, but... They're mostly pretty dumb."

"... Right."

I just couldn't believe this topic just cropped up, literally out of nothing. I did my best and turned it back to killing shit in Destiny, but it continued to niggle in my mind that this random guy just immediately began ragging on the local African American Community for no apparent reason.  It just threw me off the bus and made me walk the rest of the way to school.

I haven't spoken to him since, but he'll still be in the back of my mind when I get a fireteam request, because there's always a chance someone will just be weirdly offensive.