carl@fire

Carl finished the last sip of his coffee, feeling like he was completely ready to get started on his day as he headed towards the door to the garage. A sense of confusion was lingering, however.

The night prior had been oddly exhausting. As they drove home, Annie's yawns had become contagious, and he'd felt himself starting to drift off, which made him glad that he had a self-driving car where being sleepy wasn't risky—the sort of risky thing that Carl "Low-Risk" Weathers would never be involved in. It was nearly ten by the time they'd gotten back, and, despite their previous agreement to have a Talk, the question of whether he'd planned to go to another world again soon had come up—which was a phrase he still wasn't comfortable using to refer to logging into a freaking game that his company made, but he wasn't going to nitpick since it wasn't that big of a deal—and upon hearing that he wasn't intending to go fishing again until such time that a Talk had occurred, Annie had given him a sweet, sleepy kiss and asked if they could push it back to tomorrow night when she was more awake, which obviously they could, since it was just talking about some game stuff, which wasn't of critical importance.

More important, of course, was eventually getting around to talking about what was going to happen with Mina, since they hadn't actually said anything concrete about trying to adopt her or even asked what she wanted—or maybe Annie had at some point, which was entirely possible given her attention to detail about things like this and his own decision to let his wife take the lead like she seemed to be intent on doing.

There was not going to be any Talking, and Annie had gone straight to bed, leaving him with the sense that probably he should do the same since he'd been up pretty late last night, though that was kinda mitigated by having effectively awoken at noon earlier in the day, now that he thought of it.

Game-time was confusing like that, which had reminded him that he'd never gotten around to reading Roger's mail in full. He'd decided to check it, but then Bobby had come down from her room at that moment and approached with the look she got when she wanted to talk to him about something private.

"You know Vol has superpowers, right?" she asked quietly and with a wide-eyed look.

Carl had chuckled inwardly, unable to keep a small grin off his face. It was all too easy to imagine how a girl of her age could've gotten that sort of impression about his friend, who had obviously focused on developing herself in very specific ways to display staggering prowess in, coincidentally, the exact activities she'd engaged in that evening while they'd been hanging out. In the fields of video games and basketball, it seemed like she really did have superpowers, but, as was necessitated by being a dad, he'd leaned in close and whispered that it was a secret, which provoked an incredibly cute reaction of amazement on his youngest daughter's face—the sort that he seldom was able to see anymore after she'd realized that he hadn't actually gone to college with Santa and had grown skeptical of everything he said.

She'd continued to stand there, stunned, for a few seconds before racing back upstairs, probably to go delving deep into the internet for info on real people with superpowers or whatever else her almost-fourteen-year-old mind could come up with.

Shortly thereafter, when he'd been trying to figure out what he was doing, he'd remembered that he'd meant to start looking into some architecture terminology and basics, just to get a feel for what kind of time investment he was going to be looking at in order to be able to hold a conversation with his newest daughter, following which he'd gone up to check on the girls—Mina was watching a video about the history of automobile racing on her tablet and had seemed ecstatic when he'd casually rattled off a couple obscure facts about the Sears Tower; Bobby's light was off, which meant she was probably playing New Era again even though she wasn't supposed to be; Sammy was still basking in the afterglow of what she'd termed "the best game ever", having befriended the other team's captain and gotten an invite for a pickup game over the weekend, and was doing her best to complete her Driver's Ed program—and then gone to bed, falling asleep as soon as his head had landed on his pillow.

He'd gotten up a little later than usual after deciding to take the advice of both Gab and Charles and maybe not get in an hour or two before everyone else despite the continued nagging in the back of his mind about what might happen if the company couldn't find someone who could resolve the whole Gary insanity before it went off again next Thursday—which seemed more impossible every time he thought of it and necessitated that he stop thinking about it.

Bobby, Sammy, and Annie were already gone when he reached the kitchen to begin his morning puttering, Mina was still fast asleep, and so was Rebecca based on her lack of presence and the closed door of the room she was staying in. There was, however, a new bag of coffee next to the coffee maker, which was what he'd brewed.

It was great coffee. Rebecca was a lot of things—most of them annoying—but she was really delivering in coffee on this visit, which was something he could appreciate. He imagined that if she wasn't so annoying, she might even be someone whose visits he could look forward to just based on the coffee alone—but she was annoying, so he continued to grudgingly endure them for Annie's benefit.

Armed with coffee, he'd finally remembered again that he had something he'd been meaning to do, and he checked out Roger's mail.

It was a good mail.

Roger had been enjoying his time off, claiming that the mail from Carl was the only one he'd opened that day and that he wasn't planning to check any others until after the weekend. He'd accepted the praise graciously, the criticisms about the auto-translation with the standard Known Bug response, and then there were the parts about the time scaling.

New Era, according to its Director of Engineering, didn't have time scaling, and, while it was something that was starting to be researched, it was a long ways off.

In fact, Roger had advised him that time disorientation was one of the uncommon side effects of the brain link system, and he should consult his doctor if he was feeling lasting effects.

It was with this thought in the forefront of his mind that Carl opened the door to the garage minutes later and stepped out of the house, work bag in hand. He walked over to his car with a deepening frown on his face as he pored over the things he knew. With a tug of the handle, he opened the driver's side door—though that term was vestigial at this point since there was no way to manually steer the vehicle at all in order to prevent people from interfering with the almost flawless driving programming, which was much less likely to get into an accident than a person was—and got into the car, going through the facts.

The facts were, as he thought of them, that he'd logged in last Friday and been in the game for at least ten hours, but only three minutes had passed in real life. He'd logged in again on Tuesday for probably about the same amount of time, but again only three minutes had passed. On Wednesday, he'd logged in for two freaking weeks, and, while something like fifteen minutes had passed, it seemed like time only passed when he logged out, and each time he did so, it was three minutes later.

It wasn't like he'd imagined those things either, he considered as he pushed the button to start the car, which also opened the garage door. No, he had absolute proof that he hadn't, namely Mina, who was now living with them after spending so much time with him in the game. Also, Vol had showed up yesterday, and he'd only met her in the game before that.

The car began to back out of the garage.

He briefly considered stopping and going back in to wake Mina up and ask her about it, but she had enough stuff to deal with, and he was sure he could get to the bottom of this once he got to the office without interrupting his daughter's sleep.

Also, as a dad, he wasn't about to involve any of his kids in his own problems.

Full stop.

That was the last thought he had before the passenger side door—though again, this term was also misleading since all doors on self-driving cars were passenger side doors—opened briefly and Vol climbed in.

"Hey," she said. Her jeans and shirt from yesterday had been replaced by a pair of track pants and a looser, stretchier shirt, but she looked otherwise the same.

Carl blinked at the sudden intrusion. "Wha…" This was definitely a weird situation. If it had happened in-game, he'd have chalked it up to another instance of Vol being Vol, but this wasn't New Era. This was real life. In real life, people didn't just randomly climb into each others' cars while they were backing out of their driveway, and they especially didn't do it unexpectedly in the mornings during a work commute.

"Was thinking about it overnight, and you're doing that Carl thing again," she said with furrowed brows. "Worrying about something too fucking much. Being boring. What is it?"

"Why are you here?" he asked, starting to wonder if maybe Vol being Vol was actually someone who wasn't entirely there upstairs. Was this… They were friends, sure, but this was a really, really weird thing to do.

"I just said I'm here to fix whatever you're worrying about so things can go back to normal," she said, giving him a look like he was the maybe-crazy one.

It was a totally bizarre thing to say.

"Yesterday was a little interesting, and I needed to relax, so that was great," Vol elaborated, nodding along while the car drove along his street. "But nothing really interesting happened like it always used to, and then I started wondering why. The only other time it got boring like that was when you were getting worried about Mina. You're worrying too much about something, and I'm gonna fix it for you." She looked exceptionally proud of herself at the pronouncement.

His mind drew a total blank at how unbelievably weird everything was getting. "Can you, uh, put on a seatbelt so we don't get pulled over?" he said, having fully shifted over to Auto-Carl for the time being while he tried to adjust to whatever was going on, which wasn't easy to even figure—Was this like… He'd thought they were friends, but she'd showed up at his house unexpectedly and without any real explanation of how she'd even known where he lived.

Was this what it was like having a stalker?

He felt a little bad thinking about things this way given how close he'd thought they'd gotten, but it was clearly different with her showing up like this than it would've been if, for example, Tim had randomly showed up or gotten in the car.

Tim was a known quantity. Very known. They'd done practically everything together over the years.

Vol was… Well, she was also sort of a known quantity in a certain sense? He frowned as he worked the thoughts over in his mind, deciding to chance invoking his Galaxy Thunk skill for the first time in a while since he really needed the extra thinking power, and he needed to think quickly before things got awkward.

Instantly, his thoughts grew clearer, forming neat, easy-to-follow pathways between conjectures and conclusions and elucidating ideas that he'd previously overlooked.

He was getting weirded out because his friend from a game had just appeared during his commute after having done something similar the previous day. But he did sort of know her pretty well already at this point, didn't he? Maybe not in terms of personal details or anything like that, but when he drilled down to the deepest part of the matter, were those details really important?

Obviously they couldn't be that important. If they were, he reasoned, then there was no way Mina would be living with them now since he still didn't know that much about her other than knowing her.

It was the same for Vol. Sure, he might not know much about her besides her god tier gamer skills, low tolerance for anything that wasted her time, and great taste in food, but he'd spent more than a full week with her. Actually, the more he thought about it, they'd been together practically twenty fou—thirty two hours a day from morning to night, which ended up being a lot of time to spend hanging out with someone and the most time he'd spent hanging out with someone who wasn't Annie in longer than he could recall.

And it was Vol who had been the one to solve his coffee crisis, he had to point out, which was obviously a big deal to him, even if it might have seemed like a trivial thing to other people.

Furthermore, she'd really taken charge that day Mina's car had exploded, and he wasn't sure what would've happened if she hadn't been there to shake him out of things and get him back to being a good dad like he should've been able to do even without her help.

Then also she'd gotten Mina into that race towards the end, which was the thing that had motivated the girl to overcome her fear of her sister—the thought of that too-perfect, syrupy smile bringing with it a deep sense of anger.

Plus, this was Vol he was thinking about. He couldn't really imagine her having any malicious intent. She wasn't exactly the secretive type either, he knew from the comically poor way she'd hidden her Lightning Scorpion fame, so probably if she said she was here to help, she was just trying to be helpful.

Maybe that's where the problem was. While he had close friends—though maybe they hadn't been that close lately—who he could imagine helping him with problems, he couldn't really imagine any of them just coming over like this on a hunch that something was up and then driving with him to work. They were all busy with their lives, and it was a considerable amount of time to gamble in a number of ways.

As he considered further, he felt that he was absolutely on to something with this particular line of thinking. Vol was definitely his friend, he judged based on the previous points he'd come up with, which meant that it was just her random arrival now that was making him suspicious. But she'd come all this way to help him fix something—or so she said, which he was likely to believe—and, while he didn't really know how far she'd traveled to get here, he was starting to feel more than a little bad that he was doubting the efforts of someone who'd never shown him anything but goodwill, even if she sometimes went about it in an exceptionally Vol way.

He deactivated his thinking still, closing his eyes for a moment as he slowly returned to a more sustainable rate of cogitating.

"You done?" Vol asked. "Been sitting there Carling at me for…" She looked at the clock on the dashboard. "Fifteen fucking minutes."

"Uh, yeah, sorry," he said. He glanced at the clock. It had actually been closer to twenty minutes, which was a lot longer than he'd expected to be thinking, but it was also another point in Vol's favor since she'd apparently just sat there and let him think without disrupting him, which was not very Vol-like at all now that he considered it.

"So what's the problem?" she prompted.

"Problem?" he repeated while he readjusted himself to his previous thoughts.

"Urgh, Carl, are you doing this on purpose?" Vol grumbled. "The fucking thing that you were worried about yesterday. What is it? Tell me, and I'll fix it."

"Er, it's…" When he realized that she was referring to the Gary thing that he'd been worrying about for most of the day—continuing on into today if he was being honest with himself—he began to backpedal. "Well, no offense, Vol, but I don't think it's really something you're gonna be able to help with, and I can't really talk about it anyway."

She frowned. "Carl, I'm the main character, remember? Obviously I'm gonna be able to fix whatever problems a side character's gonna have."

He chuckled at the callback, but his mind was set. "Yeah, probably not this time, but I appreciate the thought. Uh, do you want me to drop you off somew—"

"Carl, I'm being really fucking serious right now," Vol said, shifting in her seat and changing something about her manner that made her feel, for lack of a better phrase, like a spring under tension. "Is someone threatening you? Do I need to talk to some idiots?"

"What? Nah, it's not anything like that," he said with an amused shake of his head at the idea. "Just…you know, work stuff."

"What kind of work stuff?"

"It's, uh, you know, a tech thing. Not gonna talk about it."

"So it's gonna solve itself?"

"Well, no, but we're gonna get people to handle—"

"And how do you know I can't handle it?"

"I, uh… I guess that's a kinda valid point? Why? You in tech?"

"What?"

"Tech. You know, computer stuff."

"Ohh. Computer. Hold on, let me… Okay, computer knowledge. What sort of… What the fuck's a compiler? Urgh, this is more of that fucking smart people shit. Okay, okay. Computers." She stopped rubbing her forehead and looked up at him again. "This a hard drive type thing?"

"Kinda more network-y than—"

"Oh, you mean…packets?"

"Yeah, kinda."

"Carl, I know everything about packets. TCP, UDP, sockets, man-in-the-middle attacks, endianness—that's a weird one—all that shit. Just tell me what the fucking problem is already."

Carl sighed. It was pretty unlikely that he'd happen to make an in-game friend who could fix this type of truly insane problem, but then again, if it turned out that she could help and he overlooked that option, he wasn't really doing his best as the department head who was nominally in charge of this screw-up.

Also, he reluctantly admitted, he still felt a strong sense of responsibility for the whole thing, and he'd been hoping that he'd stumble across some way of solving it.

"Alright," he said with a sigh. "Do you actually know all this stuff? Because this is pretty serious."

"Carl, nobody's got more computer knowledge than me," she said with very Vol-like confidence.

He stared her down, but she didn't react like she usually did when she was making a poor attempt to lie, which meant…

"This is all super secret," he began while he organized his thoughts in a way that he could explain things without giving out many concrete details.

"Okay." Vol nodded.

"So there was this guy who worked at the company before me, and he left this machine in the building's basement that's doing something to all the other machines in the building. I don't exactly know what, but I know it's not good."

She waited for him to continue. "That's really fucking vague," she said when he didn't.

"It's, uh, doing some kinda giant network transmission once a week that I think is somehow syncing the other systems. Probably like a countdown timer? And it's all over the network, but also it's somehow hardwired into some servers that aren't on the network at all, which is really, really bad. And then beyond that, I don't really even know the full extent? Could be—"

"Carl, I'm gonna need more details before I can put computer knowledge to use."

"Like what?"

"Uh… Actually, I think I just need to know the IP—internet protocol—address?"

"Now I know you're messing with me."

"Nah, I'm sort of getting it now. It's all electricity. Just need to move more points around."

"What?"

"What's the IP?"

"10.10.100.137."

"That's…IPv4…"

"Yup."

"Wasn't that…phased out?"

"Well, it's just the internal network, and I didn't wanna rock the boat too much while I was basically still onboarding."

"Urgh, my head…"

"Oh, also we can't power anything off in the course of fixing this or disconnect network connections from any of the servers, which is the really tricky part."

"Okay, that seems…" Vol continued to rub her forehead with a grimace. "Yeah, I can fix that. Prob… Yeah." She started nodding. "Yeah, this is some real smart people shit."

Carl stared at the other occupant of his car as they pulled in the driveway of the campus. "You're…serious?"

Vol's grimace grimaced. "Yeah, I'm gonna need a drink after—some of that dwarf shit—but I said I'd fix it, so I'll fix it. That's what friends do, right?"

Carl was, at that moment, caught on the edge between feeling some hope that maybe she could resolve the problem somehow and feeling skepticism just based on how she was acting.

"Let's make it interesting though," she said, some of her usual grin flashing through her continued grimace. "This is the building, right?" She pointed to the headquarters of Fire Entertainment with its distinctive logo above the doors.

"Yup."

"I'm gonna head back after I do this. Drinking's always better with a dwarf, and I know just the guy. If I can fix all this computer shit within…" She tipped her head to one side before holding up a bronze-hued finger. "One minute. If I fix everything within one minute, you have to promise to come hang out with me again today."

Carl stared at the extended digit, then sighed with a newly-depressed chuckle. "You really had me," he said, feeling his earlier, growing hope dissipate.

"Fine, half a minute," Vol said.

He frowned, and the car pulled up in front of the entrance. "Not funny, Vol," he said as he grabbed his bag and stepped out.

"I'm not fucking joking," she said from the other side of the car. "Not sure I wanna spend that much time on it though, so thirty seconds is as low as I'm gonna go."

Carl shut the door and started around the rear of the car while it drove off to park itself. "Look, if you just wanted to—"

"Carl, do you remember the first day we hanged out?" she asked, forcing him to stop and consider it when he reached the sidewalk. "I remember it really well, and my memory's really fucked lately. We went to the challenge that day, and you didn't trust me, did you. You thought it was all some fucking joke, and you got upset. Then I showed you how stupid your stats were, and you ended up being really happy that we went. Can we just skip the part where you get upset and go back to being friends?" She crossed her arms and frowned up at him. "Do you trust me, Carl?"

It was a big ask. There was a pretty huge difference between in-game stuff and things that would actually affect his real life.

"How are you gonna fix everything in thirty freaking seconds?" he asked with reluctance. They'd come this far, so he supposed he'd at least hear her out.

"We're gonna walk in those doors," she said, pointing to the main entrance, "and you're gonna start counting as soon as I step inside. Thirty seconds later, everything's gonna be fixed, and I'm gonna go get drunk with Valgud."

"But how?"

She sighed. "Carl, I'm bad at explaining shit. You know that. Starting to feel like you don't actually trust me though, and—"

"Fine, thirty seconds," he said with resignation, feeling like it wasn't a ton of time to waste on whatever this was. He didn't even really know what was going on at this point, now that he thought about it, but there was no policy against bringing a guest into the lobby, and he could always say no once they were inside if things got out of control.

"Let's fucking go then!" Vol said with a more normal grin as she started towards the door.