carl@fire

This is like some kinda alternate dimension version of Rebecca. Carl squinted—and he was already pretty tired of squinting after having gotten used to not squinting, both in real life and then also in-game after wearing his awesome daughter-crafted sunglasses for a while—at his annoying sister-in-law, who had just appeared out of the ground next to him and then offered to work at patching up their weird relationship with such an air of sincerity and earnestness surrounding her that he'd felt bad thinking about saying no, especially after she'd said she was doing the same with Annie, and actually the whole thing made a lot of sense considering how much less annoying Rebecca had been yesterday. Still weird that she wants to hang out in the game like this—And how did she even find me?—but I guess there's not really a lot of opportunities for us to bond otherwise. I'm sure Annie'll be happy to hear that she's not being as annoying. Or at least that she's trying, maybe.

What a bizarre day. Just when I think it can't get weirder… "I'm supposed to meet up with my friend at…" he began, but then he stopped as he thought of yet another inconsistency. Where were we gonna meet again, anyway? His eyes slid to his friend list, which, he noted, was devoid of an entry for said friend, owing, he recalled, to Vol's "not needing to make things official", which was sort of an attitude he could respect—given that they were most certainly friends regardless of an entry on some game's friend list—but also made things pretty tough at times like this since he couldn't just call her up and ask where they were supposed to be meeting. "Dismiss," he muttered at last, getting rid of his friend list window that he wasn't going to use for anything right now.

"Where was that?" Rebecca asked, seeming to have gained a tolerance for the heat of the sun-scorched ground, which was probably about as hot as it could possibly be without actually being outright painful—or maybe it was and dev mode was preventing it, but he didn't really care either way given how annoying things had been since he'd logged in and how fried he was starting to feel today.

"Not exactly sure," Carl said. He crossed his arms while he thought back to the conversation in the car that morning. Not finding anything of note in that part of his memories, he worked back further, eventually coming to the last part of his in-game time on Wednesday, which did feel like sort of a match, but the memory was really wedged deep between the metaphysical cushions of his mind's couch, and, whereas in real life he could ask one of the girls to reach in and grab it—he'd switched to talking about an object stuck between the cushions of a physical, extant couch now, of course—since they had smaller hands, it was a different sort of situation now, and he was stuck doing the mental finger-tweezers move, hoping that his metaphysical fingers wouldn't get a cramp.

"Think it was a tower of some kind," he said after wrangling the brief, distant memory as best he could. "Gold Tower? Grand Tower? Something with a G. We were driving there, so I guess it's probably kinda nearby?"

"A G," Rebecca said, her expression turning thoughtful, which wasn't really something he was accustomed to seeing since being annoying never seemed to require much effort from her.

"I think it's a G," Carl said, feeling pretty sure that the name of the tower had started with that letter, even to the point that—

"Was it O-cexius Tower?" she asked, drawing out the vowel sound just enough to be annoying, though if he was honest with himself, he might not have believed she was really Rebecca if she wasn't still at least a little bit annoying.

"Yup, that was it," Carl said. The name was unusual enough that he'd recognized it immediately upon hearing it again. She must play a lot more than I'd expect if she knows the names of places. I've been playing… Well, I've been playing a lot more than I'd expect lately, and I still don't know what the heck anything is. Not that I'm trying to, obviously, since I'm definitely not interested in getting that deep into anything going on here, especially with how freaking annoying the game's being today. "Console activate," he called out with confidence.

"Developer console activated," said the game's usual voice.

Rebecca whirled around, her head swiveling back and forth as she looked for the source of the voice, and he chuckled.

"Uh, gimme your hand for a sec," he said, holding his hand out towards her.

"What… What's going on?" she asked with widened eyes.

"Just the dev console." He rolled his eyes and reached his hand out a little farther, snatching up one of hers that she was holding out in front of herself. "Console, set location: Ocexius Tower," he said. Hope I pronounced that right? Will it still work even if—

Their surroundings blurred, and they were now standing in front of a pair of massive, gleaming doors atop a stone platform under a giant arch. The air was substantially cooler here, which was definitely a nice change, but he got distracted before he could look around more.

Rebecca yanked her hand back, looking around with wild eyes. "What's going on? Where the fuck are we?"

"Uh, I just warped us to Ocexius Tower to meet up with my friend. Like I was saying," Carl said with a frown and a tilt of his head at her kind of extreme reaction to doing what he'd said he was going to do. "Console deactivate," he muttered.

"Developer console deactivated," said the game's voice.

"Warped us? You're capable of that?" Rebecca asked in an incredulous tone.

"Yeah, probably it's not gonna be a big deal as long as it's a one-time thing, so don't tell anyone." Pretty sure this must be the place. We agreed to meet here, and I was gonna go fishing, right?

"Yes…" she said slowly, giving him a funny look. "So who's this friend you're meeting?"

"She was just… Oh, right, you were gone yesterday when she dropped by," Carl said. How would they get along anyway? He tried to imagine it, but all he could come up with was an image of Vol grimacing at him the same way he thought about grimacing—but didn't, obviously, because that would be rude—any time he was forced to spend time with Annie's bratty younger sister.

"Dropped by? As in, came to your house?" Rebecca asked, sounding even more incredulous.

"Yup. C'mon, let's see what's inside," Carl said, feeling like he had to break out of this chain of questioning before they got stuck out here all day. He was already getting a tiny bit of that sense he used to get way back when he actually played games—since, again, he was absolutely not playing a game now, instead merely using his time here to facilitate meetings and dad-bombs like a responsible adult—of the wonder of exploring a new place, which he now only got once in a while when he had to dig through some legacy part of a network stack that had been unmaintained for years and was designed using some crazy structuring methodology that was both intriguing and awful at the same time, though it wasn't like he'd done that at any point in the past few weeks and was still bitter about it, obviously, and even if that were the case, it wasn't like he'd just be dwelling on it randomly like this or anything, since he had so, so many other things on his mind at the moment that it would be a grave misuse of his thinking capacity to be even considering such a thing, but also he was really annoyed that he'd remembered it at this exact moment.

"And, speaking about your house, you wouldn't happen to have some sort of warping defense set up there to guard against intruders, would you?" Rebecca asked in a more normal tone as he pressed his hands against the left of the giant, heavy-looking doors and shoved.

The door flew open with incredible speed, spinning around to slam against the wall inside the building with a deafening boom that left his ears ringing and nearly knocked him off his feet. Oops.

Rebecca gave him another genuinely amazed look, which was the kind of thing he'd expect upon displaying his ten million Strength. "Wow!"

Despite the comment coming from someone Carl typically associated only with being annoying, he still felt pretty good at having finally received some sort of recognition for what absolutely had to be an amazing amount of Strength to a number of people. "Well, since we're doing this team-building, trust-building kinda thing," he said, leaning in a little closer and speaking more quietly, "I've got ten million Strength."

It was ultimately a harmless little boast. He knew that Roger was aware of it based on the older man's mention of database access a couple days ago, and, being that the other department head was the only person likely to be doing that sort of deep dive into things since it was the jurisdiction of IT to be making and enacting the policies regarding un…authorized…

While he'd been thinking about that, Rebecca had felt at the door on the right, and, with a casual press of her hand and a feigned look of surprise on her face, had sent the door swinging inwards at a good clip, which meant that her previous exclamation had probably just been sarcastic.

Starting to think this was a bad idea. Carl not-scowled as he trudged inside without another word. Maybe this is just another joke so she can annoy me. I don't even remember when this whole thing started. I remember she was a cute kid the first few times we met. It's like she never grew up. Or maybe it's just an extension of how dysfunctional she is with Annie.

"I'm sorry, I didn't…" Rebecca was hustling to keep up with his longer stride. "I just wanted to see how heavy the door was, and—"

"It's cool. Probably wasn't that heavy," Carl said, resolving to be the adult here for as long as he had to be until he could get her to leave or until he finished what he'd come here to do and could log out, which he was looking forward to more with every second that passed.

"Welcome, travelers," called a man with a dark mustache seated at a desk next to a smaller door at the end of the massive, empty, white marble antechamber they were walking through. "Are you here to visit a resident, or have you come to enroll?"