carl@fire

"No."

"Just this one time."

"No."

"It's gonna be so much fun!"

"Nope."

"Carl, stop fucking about and—"

"Nope, not happening."

"Urgh!"

Carl looked up from the AR display of his glasses, upon which was displayed some important stuff. Really important. Specifically, it was stuff related to Wasifah, his second expedited hire, who was starting the Wednesday after he came back from his first week off—something he was still trying to get used to the idea of, even if it wasn't technically even a full week off with the two days the company was already giving for Thanksgiving, but it was just so much time he wouldn't be doing his job that he didn't know what to do.

His first expedited hire, who had now been on the job—in a manner of speaking—for almost exactly three weeks—a period of time which, he now recalled by pure chance, was at one point going to be the length of his planned break from Not Playing A Game—after being retroactively hired, was noisily pulling out the chair directly across from him at his kitchen table, a look of resignation on her face that he didn't particularly enjoy but was unable to alleviate.

They sat together in silence for a minute while he finished his current Knowledge Transfer session, ensuring that when he switched back to this thought context in a little over a week, all the information would be up-to-date, comprehensive, and accurate.

"Look, we've been over this, Vol," said Carl, giving her a look.

"Yeah, but you said it was because it was too risky," she said with her hands up. "This isn't fucking risky! Not even a little!"

"Vol," he said with a sigh. He took his glasses off and rubbed them on his shirt, a mid-rank technique known as The Exasperated Manager that he imagined would be more successful than another round of Stare Chicken. "C'mon, just let it go."

"But it's so fucking boring without you," she whined. "Nothing interesting happens anymore. Even Ir'alith was commenting on how weirdly peaceful it's been."

The sound of the front door opening forced him to abort his special move and reequip his glasses sooner than he'd anticipated, reducing the move's effectiveness by fifty four percent and putting it on a long cooldown.

"I'm back," Bobby announced.

Carl gave Vol a warning look.

"I know, I know, not in front of the—Hey, kid," Vol said, cutting herself off midway through as Bobby walked in with her school bag, her clothes indicating that she'd just come from Badminton Club and reminding him that Sammy would probably be home really soon after her practice ended, possibly even putting her learner's permit to use under the supervision of one of her friends' parents, as had become the norm lately.

"Hey, Vol," Bobby said with a big grin. "How's work?"

"Boring," Vol said with an accompanying eye roll.

Bobby scrunched her face up cutely. "If it's always so boring, why'd you start working there? Couldn't you just be like, a pro gamer?"

"Nah, hanging out with Carl's more fun," Vol said, waving a hand dismissively. "Sometimes."

"It's a job, not a freaking party," Carl grumbled. Working with Vol—who was apparently some sort of deity whose power came from never losing at anything—had been weird—and that was sort of an understatement with how she tended to randomly pop in and out without going through security, leading to a number of questions which, thankfully, he didn't have to answer since he was outside of her reporting chain in order to avoid any semblance of impropriety—but it had also been so freaking awesome. She was officially a part-time consultant, and, on the occasions when she decided to come to the office, she'd sweep through and clear out every single ticket and issue within a matter of seconds, then spend the rest of the time demanding that they hang out, usually just sitting around drinking coffee and chatting.

Also she spent a lot of time Explaining things she'd done with the systems to Gab, which usually resulted in one or both of them coming to his office later on to ask if the other had lost her mind.

"Are you gonna come to my party?" Bobby asked, obviously referring to the planned party for her fourteenth birthday which would happen the Thursday after he returned to work—not that he tracked all dates based on their proximity to work things, but he was sort of already using his Day Of Returning as a marker for all other things that were happening around it, even if those things were obviously way more important, like his daughter's birthday party, which was currently the most important thi—

"I did it!" Mina shouted in her new accent at the same moment the door to the garage opened, grabbing his attention as she entered the house with an air of excitement about her.

"What'd you do?" Bobby asked, turning to the eldest daughter of the household.

"Oh, um, well, hi, Bobby. I was repairing this old bicycle of Annie's, naturally," Mina said as she shot him a panicked look, now clearly remembering the No Magic Stuff Near Sammy Or Bobby Or You're Grounded For A Very Long Time, Young Lady rule that had been put into place weeks earlier despite probably being super excited from finishing what she'd described as a project to rotate the bicycle's wheels using some kinda magic-y thing that he'd probably understand if he had his notes.

"Yeah, probably," Vol said after thinking about it for a little while. "Mm. Gonna have to bring a present." She tapped her chin. "Or maybe a presence…"

Carl immediately flagged the last, muttered statement as something to be discussed further on a later occasion, having learned his lesson previously when he'd come back to his office from a meeting and found a very large, very red, very toothy Jungrathol sitting behind his desk—on the ground, and fortunately his chair hadn't been harmed—wearing what had to be the most immaculately tailored four-armed suit in existence and executing what was most definitely a Seated Loom.

"Awesome!" Bobby said, turning back to the seated woman with a wide grin. She looked to Mina out of the corners of her eyes and raised her eyebrows. "Gonna go shower real quick. Play something after?"

Mina nodded with a matching smile on her face.

"'Kay, be right back," Bobby said as she turned and scampered towards the stairs.

The remaining three occupants of the kitchen waited in silence as the footsteps grew more distant. The sound of a door shutting upstairs echoed, and Mina's mouth opened. "I—"

"Mina, tell Carl to come back with me for a little while," Vol interrupted.

"Vol, don't drag the girls into this," Carl cut in, shooting his friend a Dad's Disappointed and scoring a critical hit.

"Urgh…"

"I've certainly no opinion to offer on the matter," Mina said. She chewed her lip a little, which was the sign that indicated she was worried about something, as Carl knew, and he obviously had to shut this whole thing down right now as a result.

"I've got responsibilities," he said, executing a quick Seated Loom plus Speaking Slowly For Effect combo. "Not gonna go running off to some other world just because you or anyone else is bored."

Vol rubbed her forehead. "But it was so interesting," she protested. "We had so much fun! Now the only fun we have is pranking the guys by switching their coffee."

Carl chuckled as he recalled the first time his team—also known collectively as "the guys" to Vol—had tried Super Coffee and barely survived the experience—not literally, of course, because Super Coffee was very safe to drink, he'd judged—not that he was an expert on whether Super Coffee posed any health risks, of course, because it wasn't as though he was any sort of medical expert, but he had a lot of knowledge about coffee, and that was gonna have to be enough.

"That's just life sometimes," he said when the memory and related thoughts of coffee had faded. "You have fun with stuff for a while, and then you realize other stuff that makes the stuff you were doing seem incredibly risky, and you're responsible, so you decide to stop doing it."

Vol grabbed a mug of something out of her inventory—which was a matter he'd long since given up trying to comprehend—and chugged the whole thing in one gulp. "Fine, fine," she said, sounding as resigned as she'd looked a couple minutes earlier. She tossed the mug aside, and it vanished. "Still friends though."

"Yup."

"Perhaps you… Would you care to see my invention?" Mina asked in a hopeful tone after a few seconds of silence.

"Of course, sweetie," Carl said as he gave his oldest daughter—whom he loved without question, even if she wasn't from this world—a big smile.

"Eh. Sure." Vol stood up first, though that was obviously just a product of her being a literal celestial being with superhuman speed and not anything related to their levels of interest in Mina's cool project—because of course he, as her dad, was gonna be the most interested about any cool project his daughter was working on. "We hanging out over the weekend?" she asked as they followed the girl towards the garage.

"Nah, probably not. Meeting up with my friends Tim and Max on a day trip tomorrow."

A day trip was, perhaps, not the most accurate description for it, given that a good chunk of the day would be spent by all of them traveling to the meeting point, but Carl was looking forward to that part of it as well, the time on the train providing some much-needed opportunities to catch up on a considerable amount of the detail-oriented reading that had been piling up in his backlog, least of which was about the electric motors and battery technology Mina had become obsessed with over the past several days.

"Oh. What about...Sanday?"

"Sunday, and Annie and I are hanging out with Rebecca when she gets in."

"Mm."

Carl hadn't been the most enthusiastic when Annie had pushed for her sister to return for the week of the holiday—it was an oddity among oddities for her to want to spend time with her sibling—but he did have to acknowledge that Annie's bratty half-sister had been much less bratty and more sister-y the tail end of the last time she'd been there, almost to the point of being someone who was pleasant to spend time with, though he wasn't prepared to go that far—but he was prepared to again recall how he'd met her lookalike in another world who had been "another deity" in some kinda bizarre, movie-sounding plot according to Vol's barely-coherent-at-best-and-that-was-maybe-still-giving-her-too-much-credit explanation when he'd tried to get some answers about it shortly after she'd surprised him by just freaking appearing in front of him at the office that day three weeks ago once he'd logged out—not that the time since then had just passed in the instant it might have seemed to those who didn't personally live through it, of course, because Carl had lived through that time, and it had been stressful, slow-going, tedious on occasion, and, obviously, three whole weeks of actual time that had taken their toll in various ways that he couldn't even be bothered to think about now that they were in the past.

The past was, of course, something that he inadvertently thought about with some regularity these days, specifically that unusual period of time—less than a week, really—when—unless he was counting it in absolute time, in which case it was more like three-ish weeks for him, assuming he was willing do some arithmetic to calculate out the time conversions, which he absolutely wasn't but had already done just in the course of briefly considering the matter—he'd had an unfortunate series of misunderstandings that had, fortunately, despite being the riskiest period of his entire life, not resulted in any harmful effects other than being extremely embarrassing to remember due to his—in retrospect—total obliviousness—the revelation of which had resulted in Annie's stunned silence followed by uncontrollable, nearly hysterical laughter when they'd resumed The Talk despite the matter not being at all funny, and he could imagine there would probably even be some people who would grow irate at hearing him explain his thought processes during some of those situations, but obviously his wife wasn't one of those people and was instead well aware that anyone and everyone could and did make mistakes sometimes—which he was a thousand percent sure had only been a possibility due to a combination of work stress and everything just happening to be totally plausible while he happened to be distracted and thinking about other stuff.

"Observe," Mina said, placing her hand on one of the upside-down electric bike's handlebars. The wheels of the bike began to slowly rotate, gaining speed over time.

"Wow, you got it working! That's really cool, Mina," Carl said with a firm nod of approval to her eager, slightly anxious expression, then adding a slight tousling of her hair on top. She was trying hard to keep busy and become more normal-y—not that he had anything against her being however she wanted to be, of course, because he was never going to try to tell his daughters how they should be, but at the same time, if she wanted to have a real life here, then probably she did need to kinda maybe make a couple small changes here and there—with the new dream of someday attending university for dual degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, assuming any of the paperwork for her identity could ever be figured out by the very expensive lawyers who were supposed to be doing just that, but who hadn't called or anything in over a freaking week, which meant that practically anything could be going on with the process—though likely none of it good—and he wasn't even sure wh—

"What're you doing with it?" Vol said.

"I believed it'd be cool if I could make magic work for some matter on a smaller scale," Mina said, still grinning. "I've begun by repairing the inert battery on this bike from the shed, attempting to learn more of the process by which I might be able to recycle it through similar, albeit non-magical means, as it seems there's dire need for such things in this place."

"Huh." Vol tapped her fingers against her chin. "Isn't it just electron shit?"

"Yes, well, as my current understanding allows…"

Initially, Carl had been worried about what might happen if someone noticed Mina using magic, to the extent that he'd awoken one night in a cold sweat. He'd considered an outright ban, but then Annie had rightly pointed out that a No Magic At All rule would effectively be telling Mina to be someone other than who she was, and that was… Well, it sure as heck wasn't a parenting methodology that he'd ever subscribe to, that was for sure. But then Vol had played the What The Fuck're You So Worried About, I'm A Fucking Deity card next time he'd seen her, and it was a card that was really hard to argue with in that context—not that he was ever going to lift the restrictions on Bobby or Sammy learning about any of this, of course, since they were just too young to be able to keep this kind of secret and also too young to hear about even half of the really depressing stuff that had led to Mina being here—though it wasn't a card that had won her anything when she tried to make the case for going back one more time to her world to have fun, or throw cars, or meet dwarves, or go adventuring, or get closure or whatever.

He was done with all that now.

No matter how much anyone tried to persuade him otherwise, there was absolutely no way he'd do something risky like going to another world ever again, no matter the circumstance, and there would be no circumstances which required it either—not that he had anything against people who did go to other worlds regardless of whether their circumstances required it, of course, because he was sure that there were plenty of people who felt that abandoning their families, their friends, their jobs, and all the hard work they'd put into their lives was totally fine and normal, maybe even to the extent that it was so commonplace as to not even need to be thought about more than a single time after such a person arrived on a strange, unfamiliar planet where probably the stats were gonna be really stupid with annoying status windows popping up constantly, and there would be things that stood out as being really disturbing when any amount of time at all was spent thinking about them, and then there were also gonna be things that didn't make even the tiniest bit of sense if any level of logic was applied to them, and obviously there would be the many, many random people they'd meet along the course of a journey that had started with a clear destination and ended somewhere entirely different without even really seeming to have any connection between the two points other than being part of the same journey in a certain sense.

No, that wasn't the sort of decision that he'd make.

He was Carl Theodore Weathers.

He had a great job as the Director of IT at Fire Entertainment.

He had some really awesome friends.

He had the most amazing, understanding, thoughtful, compassionate, beautiful wife in the universe.

And from start to finish, he was always gonna be the best freaking dad ever.