Carl came awake, feeling the reassuring comfort of Annie nuzzling onto the side of his chest. He let out a contented sigh, feeling like this was a morning where he could go for a lazier waking-up than usual.

Annie apparently felt the same, because she cooed softly and nuzzled his neck.

Something poked Carl in the side of the head, and he batted at it while grumbling. The object was weirdly hard and thin, widening as he traced it away from himself.

Annie cooed again, and he realized she was just poking him with one of her horns.

Carl settled back down, feeling simultaneously muzzy and also foolish for having even been bothered by something so…

Carl frowned.

Did Annie really have horns?

He was slightly more awake now—though not by much since he hadn't had his morning coffee—and the question was harder to answer than he felt it should've been.

Did she?

He worked backwards, as he did when he solved many types of problems, like when he knew he needed to be at one of Sammy's basketball games by eight, which obviously meant he'd need to…

Annie snuggled in deeper under his left arm, and her velvet-like tail caressed his face soothingly.

Yeah, that's right. Annie had horns and a tail.

Carl dozed for another few minutes under his wife's delicate ministrations, feeling unbelievably relaxed.

Annie really was the best.

Carl frowned again. That Annie was the best was something he would never dispute. It was a fact, and that was just how things were. With that said, however…

Did Annie really have a tail?

It was so hard to think in the morning before he got his coffee going. Also, he now realized, he kinda needed to use the toilet.

Carl cracked his eyes open, seeing that Annie was already wide awake and smiling at him—probably watching him sleep again because she said he looked cute when he was asleep—and grunted, letting her know that he needed to get up.

She rolled to the side, naked, because…

Carl frowned a little more, but the combination of No Coffee and Need To Pee status ailments was overpowering his faculties. He rolled over the side of his bed and onto his feet, heading for…

Carl frowned even more. Why was the bathroom on the wrong side of his bedroom this morning? Whatever. One thing at a time was how he liked to deal with things, and that was especially true in the mornings before he got his coffee. He stumbled over to the bathroom, feeling pleased by the subtle coolness of the stone against…

Carl was pretty sure that his bedroom had a hardwood floor, but he wasn't totally positive at that moment. He made it into the bathroom and used the toilet, pulling the chain attached to the ceiling when he was done because it made so much sense that there would be a mechanism to flush the toilet which didn't require him to bend down. He staggered back to bed, where…

Alright, something was definitely going on. Carl struggled powerfully, activating his last resort Everything Is On Fire At The Office skill to achieve some amount of wakefulness. He blinked a few times for good measure.

Not-Annie, who was the sex doll that Mina had named… Carl rubbed his beard. Phonia. Yeah, that's it. What the heck. "I thought I said no doing that," he said.

Phonia knelt on the chair, smiling up at him.

Naked.

With Annie's body.

But also all the best parts of Annie's costume.

Yup. Way too much in the morning. Gotta get her some clothes. After coffee.

"You said there was going to be no sex," Phonia said in a soft, cheerful voice. "But you didn't say anything about cuddling!"

"Okay, no cuddling."

Phonia pouted. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you don't like me."

"I don't."

Phonia's lips started to tremble, and tears formed in her eyes. "Not even a little?"

Stolen novel; please report.

"Nope."

The tears vanished, and her pretty face contorted into a thoughtful frown. "Shit, I really thought that'd work."

"Why…" Carl rolled his eyes. Can't believe I'm talking to an NPC sex doll first thing when I wake up. Ah, shoot, I was just gonna take a quick nap, wasn't I? He sighed, then stretched. That was some great sleep. And even if it was weird, this thing is freaking amazing at cuddling. Guess that's something I gotta give Linda for writing in, at least, even if it's still weird that NPCs exist in the game for this and nothing else. Whatever. Let's see…

Carl immediately activated his Galaxy Thunk skill, feeling like he needed to go full power while he was still in a fresh state of mind.

The networking problem came back to him. Gab wanted to de-segment the networks, reducing the complexity, improving performance a tiny bit for some outbound traffic, and eliminating the ability to contain issues within the network. Not only was this going to be a non-trivial amount of work to implement, ignoring the time that it would take for everyone in his—their—department to adjust, but also Annie had a really pretty face. Her nose was perfectly set in the center, being small but not too small so as to be weird rather than cute. She had very kissable lips as well, as he knew from decades of experience, and few things brightened his days like getting a sweet welcome-home kiss from her.

It was really her eyes that drew him in though, Carl had decided long ago. She had such amazing, deep blue eyes that seemed almost like they were photoshopped or something because of how vivid the pigmentation was, and—

"You really stare at me a lot for someone who said no to sex," Phonia said, interrupting his channeled skill.

Carl suffered incredible backlash from the forced termination of his strongest thinking ability, the natural trade-off for the increased cogitation capacity that it afforded him. He blinked rapidly, his eyes losing focus, and he tipped to the side, his balance wobbling. "Halwefalk," he said with dismay, knowing that he was about to fall over.

Phonia caught him with her tail as he toppled, gently righting him. "Careful, master," she said in a teasing tone.

The short duration debuff faded, restoring Carl to his muddled morning self. "Uh, thanks," he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.

"I love you, master," Phonia said in a shy voice.

"Uh-huh."

"Really?!" Phonia exclaimed quietly, staring at him. "Not even a little?"

"Nah, let's just stop with that."

"Fine…" Phonia blew a strand of purple hair away from her eyes. "So what am I supposed to do?"

Carl shrugged. "Help out Mina whenever I'm not around?" I guess the nap didn't help. Well, I said I was gonna log out after, and that's what I'm gonna do since I'm responsible, even though I didn't manage to come up with anything. "I'm gonna log for a while. Logout. Logout."

The bright lights of his office returned, and he grabbed his glasses. Feels like adjusting to logging out is getting easier. Let's see…

Having previously spent a minute out of the game considering matters before logging back in, he'd had only five minutes remaining before noon when he returned to the game.

Currently, the time was eleven fifty eight.

"Hm." Carl crossed his arms and stared at the matching time displays on his glasses and computer monitors. So that was another three minutes. He rocked a little in his chair as he considered it. I guess that was maybe around the same amount of time that I've been logged in each time so far. So is it like, four-ish hours in-game to a minute in real life? He reached up to scratch his beard. I still haven't come up with any ideas for this thing. And I've got a lot of time I could think in the game…

Carl considered it deeply. This was actually an incredible opportunity. He could, potentially, use this feature whenever he came across especially difficult problems like this one in order to give himself a little more time to responsibly come up with effective solutions. On the other hand.

Full stop, because there was no other hand. He had a timer that would log him out now. And actually, why was he even still thinking about this?

He needed to get back to thinking about things that mattered.

Carl took his glasses off and logged back into the game.

Phonia watched him, still naked on the chair and looking exactly like Annie from the neck down, minus the tail, which looked like Ir'alith's, but that didn't concern him.

Coffee. Gotta…

It had been practically forever since he'd had any coffee, and he was already beating himself up for not having some when he'd logged out. He felt his brain shifting into low power mode, unable to form higher-level thoughts.

Carl was now suffering from the detrimental Coffee Withdrawal debuff.

He shambled over to the workbench, recalling vaguely that he needed some kinda coin-things, and grabbed a few coins out of the coin jar, jamming them into his pocket. He made for the door next.

"Where are you going, master?" Phonia asked.

"Coffeeeee," Carl groaned. "You stay here. Guard."

"I'm not allowed to fight," Phonia protested.

Carl turned around, glowering at all the things that were impeding his ability to be drinking coffee at exactly that moment. He didn't remember what… No, there was… He closed his eyes for just a second while he remembered. There was Mina up on the second floor, and nothing could ever happen to her.

That was just a fact.

"You," Carl said, pointing at the woman who looked like his wife but with some parts that were from a costume she'd worn recently, "guard Mina," he said firmly, pointing to the second level.

Phonia shifted, looking uncomfortable. "I can't."

"Why?"

She chewed on a fingernail. "Um…"

Carl was getting tired of this thing that was stupidly preventing him from getting coffee into his body as fast as possible. "You're gonna do it. End of discussion."

Phonia snapped to attention, and her eyelids fluttered as her body twitched. "Yes, master," she said, her voice doing something weird that he didn't care about.

Carl pulled open the door and shuffled out, closing it behind him.

The place outside the workshop was the worst place he'd ever been. The sun—suns, because everything was the worst right now—were blinding at whatever time of day it was that he couldn't be bothered to check. He focused on one of his passive skills, Coffee Sense, and followed the direction that it indicated as he slipped back into full autopilot.