carl@fire

Carl let out an annoyed sigh as he set the headband back on Bobby's desk. Obviously he should've remembered there was an access control list for remote use of dev mode in the game prior to thinking he could just log in—which, again, was absolutely still how he was going to be thinking of it regardless of what anyone else said on the basis that the other term for it just seemed too grandiose—from home and pull out his dev mode keyboard.

Even worse, Vol had crashed the car while they were driving, and his meager stats and health pool hadn't been sufficient to save him from the too-realistic physics engine, resulting in him being sent in spirit form to the nearest graveyard, wherever the freaking thing even was. He was sure that his short-haired friend was going to be having a considerable number of laughs at his expense, especially given that neither she nor Ir'alith were probably noob enough to die from something so stupid. With no estimate or idea how long the runback would be—the only indication being an arrow that popped up to tell him which direction to move in—and seeing the notifications pop up almost immediately that everyone had gone offline—probably from laughing so hard that they short-circuited their brain link headbands—he'd logged out in disgust.

He had to admit it to himself fully.

He was a noob.

At the moment, however, this was something he only gave the briefest consideration to, as his focus was elsewhere.

"Well, that was a bust," he muttered as he erased the log file segment and logged out of his daughter's computer.

"You've, ah, completed it?" Mina asked from behind him.

He rotated the chair around, changing his expression to one more positive in the process as he faced his oldest daughter. "Yeah, not exactly. Forgot about some stupid company rule, so that's not gonna work."

"Oh." Mina's expression turned troubled. "Perhaps… Is it something with which I might assist you?"

Carl chuckled, and his lips quirked into a half-grin at how freaking cute she was. "Nah, don't worry about it."

A message indicator lit up on the AR display of his glasses. He activated the message with a gesture of his eyes, and its contents appeared. "Huh," he said as he scanned it.

Mina tilted her head in confusion.

"Just a message from my friend Tim," he said quickly, not wanting to worry her since he was sure she had more than enough worries of her own without adding him to the pile of things she worried about. "We were doing a message-thing while I was on, but it kinda cut out…" He processed the message again. "Apparently there was some kinda big wifi outage in his office building, and he got disconnected. Wants to try hanging out again Monday or sometime."

"I see," said the girl, her expression now changing into an adorable frown, obviously at how unlikely a wifi outage was these days in corporate environments, what with all the redundancies that were usually put in place now, which reminded him that he—

"You've not mentioned this Tim previously," she said.

"Oh, uh," Carl's mind pivoted back to being a dad again—not that it was a difficult or lengthy pivot, obviously, since he was always gonna be prepared to spring into dad-action at the drop of an anything—and he realized that there was going to be a lot of catching up for both her and the rest of the family as they got each other up to speed on things. "Yeah, he's… Well, he's been my best friend as long as I can remember, but we kinda fell out of touch for a while because we got busy with other stuff and only reconnected the other day. Great guy, though he's kinda a little too driven sometimes, if you know what I mean."

"I believe I've the general sense of it," Mina said, returning to the usual expression of happiness that she'd worn since last night. "I'd thought… Well, it's no matter." Her brows drew down an increasing amount as she continued to talk. "Um, perhaps… You'd seemed to be…" She glanced to the door and down to the tablet she'd been reading off. "I know you're engaged in some manner of task, and I've taken up quite enough of your time," she said more quietly, staring down at her lap, where her fingers pinched at the fabric of her pants.

Without even powering up to Dad Mode One, Carl took action. He stood up from the chair and moved to the bed, taking a seat and wrapping an arm around her shoulders, encouraging her to lean against him. "Hey, you're part of this family now, sweetie. There's no 'taking up time'. If you need me, or Annie, or Sammy, or Bobby, we'll be here for you."

They sat in silence for a moment until she spoke. "Thank you," she murmured. "I—" She cut off as her stomach gurgled noisily, her face flushing scarlet in reaction. "Um…"

"Didn't know you spoke Hungarian," Carl said.

"So the bread's here," Carl said, pointing to the pair of loaves as they stood in the walk-in pantry. "There's, uh, pasta sauce, and some chips, and some other snacks, and more stuff," he continued, pointing to each section in turn.

"You've a considerable measure of food stockpiled," Mina said while she looked around.

"Eh, a lot of it's stuff that's just been sitting in here for a while," he said, grabbing the loaf of multi-grain. "Some of those sauces gotta be like, a hundred years old."

"Ah, so they've become family heirlooms," his oldest daughter joked.

"Yeah, something like that." They backed out of the pantry and returned to the counter, where he'd set the container of leftover pesto chicken. "You're sure you're okay with leftovers?" he asked with a downwards glance at her. "I can make something if—"

"No, no, please, this is quite enough," she interrupted. "And if it's such a simple matter, then you needn't devote your own time to it. I'm capable of at least this much."

"Nah, just have a seat and let me do it," Carl said. Obviously it was gonna be a dad's job to make lunch at a time like this, though he definitely appreciated that she wanted to help. "You take some time and just relax, Mina. I know things have been tough for you lately, but you don't have anything to prove here, okay?"

Her anxious expression relaxed slightly, though she still seemed too upset for his comfort while she continued to stand there observing as he threw together a couple sandwiches—and despite the fact that it was a pretty simple lunch, he knew from experience that pesto chicken sandwiches were really freaking good, especially when paired with the remaining smashed potatoes that would be coming out of the toaster oven soon.

"How about you help Annie with dinner tonight?" he said in an attempted compromise. "We switch off every other night, and tonight's her night since I made dinner last night."

"Every other…" The blonde girl's expression changed to her adorable thinking frown as the toaster oven dinged. "Perhaps I might join in your rotation then? I'd feel much more at ease were I able to contribute to your household in—"

"Our household," Carl interrupted with an accompanying Dad's Serious Now while he retrieved the tray of potatoes.

"I've no desire to exist as some manner of parasite," she said, tilting her head down. "Please, allow me at least some method of contributing."

His Dad Sense practically exploded, causing him to almost drop the tray as he carried it to the table. "Uh, yeah," he said as he reconsidered his earlier tack of just sort of grouping Mina in with Bobby and Sammy, who were both much younger and, as he really dug deep into his thoughts, more sheltered and with an entirely different upbringing. While the younger two had their own chores around the house, they were chores, not tasks they'd intentionally taken on, as they were still kids who didn't have fully-developed senses of responsibility yet.

It was clear that this wasn't the case with Mina, he felt as his thoughts continued to progress at a blistering pace, which caused a great sense of pride to well up at the knowledge that she'd turned out to be such a great kid even despite everything with her family.

"Yeah, we'll talk about that when Annie gets back," he clarified, finally setting the tray down on the table's hot pad. "Sorry, Mina," he said as he walked back towards her, "I just didn't want you to feel like you had to do anything, okay?"

She looked up at him and nodded after a moment, her expression remaining earnest. "Please don't coddle me. I'd like to be someone worthy of becoming your daughter—both yours and Annie's—in this world."

It was then that Carl noticed something he hadn't previously.

Whereas in the game she'd spoken boisterously and with confidence, in the real world she tended to speak more quietly, barely moving her mouth while she talked.

He made an entry into his Dad Notes. Obviously something like this—maybe a lack of confidence—was something that he, a peak-level dad, would be able to get to the bottom of.

"Let's talk to Annie when she gets back, and we can see what's reasonable, okay?" he said.

She smiled, and a pleased look took over her face. "Thank you."

Carl wasn't exactly thrown off his game, but it was weirding him out a little for one of his kids to be asking for chores. That wasn't how kids were supposed to work. Even when he'd been a kid, he'd done all the usual things to get out of doing his own chores when feasible, going as far as to calculate the absolute maximum number of days could pass—given environmental conditions, obviously—between mows of his family's lawn, using a historical set of data he'd cultivated over several years once his dad had let a nine year-old him know that it'd be his responsibility as soon as he turned thirteen.

He was a dad among dads though, so he imagined he'd figure out how to deal with—

A thunderous series of knocks echoed from the front door, interrupting his thoughts. He frowned. He hadn't even imagined that his front door could produce knocks at that volume.

"We've a visitor?" Mina said, turning her head towards the front of the house.

"Maybe just a delivery," he said as he started off in that direction, knowing that the delivery drones never knocked since they weren't capable of that kind of motion.

"I'd been meaning to inquire about that," she said as she followed after him into the front hall. "Annie's said you simply obtain most goods through online purchasing, and they're subsequently…"

Carl had unlocked and pulled the door open while she talked, and they both stared.

"I fucking knew it. Great joke, Carl. Let's hang out," Vol said from the front step.