Carl stood up and took a deep breath, then grabbed Mina's body and the axe. He turned to the small, black marble sitting on the floor. "Core, I'm gonna miss you. Stay safe, okay?"

"I-I'll miss you too, Carl," the core said, sounding suddenly sad. "Just you wait. I'll learn to make stronger walls too!"

"I know you will," Carl said with a grin. The axe vibrated in his hand. "Oh, I think Seth'tith is saying goodbye."

"Farewell, Seth'tith," the core called. "I'll welcome you in our dungeon, but if you come looking for our treasure, I'll have to kill you!"

Carl chuckled and turned to start walking up the sloped part of the room that led to the surface.

Then he thought about it.

Well, no sense in walking all the way… "Inventory." He tapped the car icon. "Withdraw. Dismiss."

Mina's car appeared next to him, its front left wheel on top of his bare foot.

Carl rolled his eyes, then gently lifted the car up and moved his foot. I guess it's kind of a tight fit…

"What's that?" the core asked.

"This," Carl said, dumping Mina's body into the passenger seat, "is a magic-and-steam powered car." He set the axe… He held onto the axe. "It, uh, combines magic and thermodynamics to make a car that's probably way better than you could make normally."

"Combines…" the core muttered. "Better…"

"Anyway, I'm gonna leave you to it," Carl called.

"Combining…" the core muttered, seeming deep in thought.

Carl settled into the driver's seat, holding the giant axe upright over his right shoulder and Mina's body to his side. He took one last look at the core, which was still just sitting there even though it had claimed to be doing stuff—not that he was thinking the core was being lazy, but he'd figured it would be at least a little bit more proactive. Then he pressed his bare foot down on the steam pedal, and the car lurched into motion.

Gotta find a good spot to log out to leave Mina in case she logs in and has to do the run back. A dungeon would probably be pretty scary since she's never been out of the town before and the core can be a bit… The car zipped out over the top of the dungeon and onto solid ground. Huh, guess we really weren't that far away. This looks like where we were before. Except I can't see the road. Can't see much of anything, actually.

He scanned the horizon, but there were no living creatures in sight. At most, there were some boulders and bushes scattered about. Hm. Maybe this is a good enough place? He turned the wheel and headed for the largest of the boulders, driving at a very reasonable speed since he was currently hunched over in a very unsafe driving posture. This car needs a trunk. And a backseat to put stuff in. And some doors.

And a windshield.

Carl squinted, wishing he still had Ir'alith's windshield spell. I wonder if I should let her know I'm logging out. He pulled the car up to a stop in the shadow of the boulder, which ended up being a lot bigger than he thought and was more like a tiny mountain. She seemed like she wanted some alone time, and I don't wanna bother her… Didn't get a notice about her going offline, so she's definitely still on. She's a real power-gamer herself, huh.

Yet another incredibly brilliant idea came to Carl just then, though it wasn't quite as smart as his idea to delegate creating the dungeon he'd wanted to show his daughter but that he didn't really feel like putting in the time to make personally.

Carl set the axe on the ground and made eye contact. "Seth'tith, does Ir'alith know where you are?"

The eye nodded.

Nailed it. Soulbound. Gotta have some extra features with that stat nowadays. He'll probably just log out anyway. He propped the axe up on the side of the car, then got out and stretched. Still can't get over how great everything in-game smells and feels. This sandy dirt feels so real! I should mention it to Roger. He could probably use a little pick-me-up with how worn out he was looking from working over the weekend. Always nice to get a compliment from a coworker.

His eyes turned again to the passenger seat which contained the headless eighteen year-old girl's body that he'd been lugging around for what felt like forever. Still feels like I should've done more for her. We bought that sex doll to piss people off, and she got to see her car drive fast—even though she didn't actually drive it—and then she got owned the second we actually got out of the city.

He considered it. Okay, just this once. Gab's probably gonna put her foot down on this kinda thing for the beta server as soon as I log out anyway, so I might as well. And with what Mina's been through, removing a little hassle from her life is a lot less than I wish I could do.

"Keyboard." He adjusted the keyboard's height. Hm. I've never done anything exactly like this before, but it seems like I'd just do the same as…

Carl's fingers began to press keys. His first task was to open up a read-only database connection and query his own location, piping the coordinates to a file for later use. Next, he located the base info table for the right Isemeine Charus, struggling to figure out the spelling of her surprisingly hard-to-spell first name before remembering he could just open his friend list.

With her character's unique identifier string at hand, he examined the transaction log for related transactions where a certain flag had been set to true. Then he went further back, finding some amazement at how detailed and easy to read the transaction log was in the current year. Choosing a transaction id somewhat at random, he then set about obtaining the timestamp at which that transaction had occurred.

Carl was now prepared to undertake the more difficult and time-consuming of the tasks.

Due to the cumbersome nature of the relational database management system that the company utilized—though Carl still didn't know why they didn't go with something more lightweight or modern—there was no simple way to make the change that he wanted. No, this would take considerably more work and be a total PITA.

That was fine though.

He opened a new shell, then entered his sixty four character password to open a database prompt with privileges for the special dbadmin account which permitted write access.

In this prompt, he set about restoring a base backup of the database to a local file in his home directory.

Carl's fingers flew over the keyboard, not pressing a single key as he waited for the operation to complete. Seconds later, the command returned success.

It was amazing how fast computers had gotten.

He began restoring the differential backups on top of the base until he reached the one that he knew would contain the timestamp that he'd previously set aside. Using that timestamp as his mark to stop at, he restored the final differential backup.

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Now came the grueling part.

Carl began pruning the database backup.

Why did he still have to do this sort of thing in the current year? Shouldn't technology have advanced beyond the need for manual, involved database management by now?

Carl wondered about these things as he began to remove all the table entries which had no relation to Mina's character ID. It felt tedious even thinking about how many commands he was entering at this point.

However.

He was only working on a backup database which could be easily restored again this time, so he invoked a forbidden technique.

Carl didn't bother to triple, double, or even single check the commands that he entered.

Seriously, though, it was a lot of commands, and he had the whole schema practically memorized, and he wasn't about to—oops, he pressed backspace once—make any mistakes other than that one time he fat-fingered an additional key and immediately caught it, the whole incident having been caused by a lack of focus while he justified to himself the need to skip checking over the commands he was entering.

Command after command was successfully executed without any errors whatsoever, stripping away the unneeded parts of the database backup which would cause problems if they weren't removed, until at last, this part of his task was complete—and sure, he could've done it in a single, lengthy command, but he hadn't on this occasion. He then referenced some data he'd previously stored away and executed an update to the backup database before selecting the remaining table data and triple-checking that he hadn't missed anything.

Carl keyed in another command to switch back to the master database.

He triple-checked it.

He executed the command, and it returned the code for success.

Carl prepared himself.

He typed out one final command.

He triple-checked it.

Somehow, this command felt weightier than the others.

It had a sense of gravitas.

Carl's finger hovered over the Enter key, and he imagined that he felt some brief resistance prior to pressing it.

The command executed successfully.

A bolt of lightning randomly split the sky, which was pretty weird since he couldn't see a single cloud.

Carl chucked his keyboard away just in time to catch Mina's whole, not-chewed-on body as it fell into his arms. Just as before, she was clad in a pair of light brown leather pants, a light blue, frilly blouse with a white shirt under it, a white…whatever the heck that scarf-thing was called, and a pair of well-made leather boots.

He looked down at her face, feeling a surprisingly deep sense of satisfaction for having just saved her from needing to run back to her body when she logged back in. He carefully sat her in the driver's seat of her car, then brushed her blonde hair away from her face and back over her ears. Sammy always hated it when her hair got in her eyes back when it was long.

Carl stood back and grinned. Yeah, not bad. Car looks better with her in it, even if there's still a bit of blood scattered about the front of it. Hope she has time to play again soon. "Alright, Seth'tith, I'll see you when I see you. Logout."

A status window containing the familiar timer, which activated any time he logged out while outside of a town or otherwise designated "safe" zone, appeared.

Logging out in: 5

He took another deep breath, enjoying the cleanness of the air.

Logging out in: 4

He looked around, marveling at the realism of the arid landscape surrounding him.

Logging out in: 3

He flexed his toes in the dirt, feeling like maybe it wasn't so bad being barefoot after all, even if he'd still be glad to feel shoes on his feet again in a couple seconds.

Logging out in: 2

Another weird, random lightning bolt flashed through the sky, this one significantly larger and accompanied by a massive boom.

Even the weather has bugs? Carl shook his head.

Purple lightning sparked to his right at the rear of the car.

Logging out in: 1

Another status window suddenly appeared.

Mina has come online.

A portal opened.

Mina turned quickly her head to the right. "We've done it!" she shouted. "We've ma—"

At the same time, a tall figure, glowing green and drenched from head to toe in an insane amount of blood and gore stepped through the portal, carrying a human head by its hair in one clawed hand and a giant spear over its shoulder in the other. Green eyes shone through a slit in the helmet, flickering pink for an instant, and a wide grin full of poi—

Carl was back in the grayish-black of the character selection place. Whoa, that was a lot at once. Mina really chose the best and worst time to log back in. And that… Yeah, that must've been Ir'alith. Looks like she had a real party somewhere. Maybe I should log back in?

He considered it for a moment. Nah, Seth'tith's there. He's a great dad. He'll make sure Mina's okay after what we went through. And…I guess Ir'alith and Mina could probably use some time to talk considering…

"Logout," he said reluctantly.

Carl blinked, feeling slightly disoriented as he always did when he came out of VR but nothing compared to the severity of when he'd had his headband forcibly removed the week prior. He took his headband off and set it back to dangle off one of the drawers of his desk, then put his glasses back on.

He stretched his arms over his head, turning his neck from side to side. What time is… He stared at the clock on his computer monitor, which hadn't switched itself into its low power mode to save energy despite being on a ten minute timer to do so.

Carl continued to stare. How's it only 12:04?

The time ticked over to the next minute, breaking the spell.

At times like this, there was only one thing Carl would do.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and accessed his contacts, then tapped the first entry.

A soft ringing sounded in his head from the bone conduction headphones that were built into his glasses.

After the second ring, the call was answered.

"Carl?" Annie said, sounding confused.

"Hey, Annie," Carl said, a grin on his face as his previous worries slipped away. "Glad I managed to get you before your lunch ended. Just wanted to call and say I miss you."

The line was silent for a moment.

"I miss you too?" Annie said, seeming somehow uncertain, probably because she was grading papers or something while she talked. Teachers were always busy.

"Anyway, that's it," Carl said. "I'll—"

"You wore your khakis to work today?" Annie asked abruptly.

Carl frowned, then he looked down to make sure. "Yup."

"Tan ones?"

"Uh-huh."

Annie let out a deep breath. "Okay, just, um… Just checking! I've gotta go. Love you, Carl."

"Love you too," Carl said.

The call ended.

Carl let out a contented sigh.

Maybe today wasn't going to be such a tough day after all.