"Ugh, what a headache." Carl tried to relax as he squinted in his roof recliner, but he was finding it difficult even despite the increased comfort of his new cotton clothes.

"It absolutely staggers me that there's no penalty for destruction of property in this scenario," Mina said, sitting in a recliner next to him.

They were looking out over the forge area, where the workers had long since resumed operation.

"I did good!" Phonia cheered with her arms raised over her head, sitting on the edge of the roof with her feet dangling off.

"I guess you did," Carl reluctantly acknowledged. He'd come up to the rooftop to think after things had gotten settled—which had mostly happened due to the annoying Reviewers running off once they realized they were in over their heads and Pertinax shouting for his workers to return to their duties, giving Carl a thumbs-up before he himself headed back to work with his giant hammer—but he'd barely managed half an hour before his peace had been broken. And that was after he'd taken his first in-game shower, too, finding the experience to be surrealistically relaxing until he'd recalled that he needed a towel and had to yell for Mina to bring him one.

Also they had towels now, apparently.

"Should we have informed Pertinax of my race?" Mina asked.

"Eh, seemed like he was pretty surprised people were fighting just outside his spot. I'll give him a heads up tomorrow on my way back from getting coffee."

"And what will become of the street?" Mina asked. "Phonia returned their frozen car to them—"

"I did!"

"—but the other has already ruined the road. Despite this, Pertinax, who stands to lose money if transit near his place of business is impeded, seemed unconcerned."

"Hm." Kinda interesting to think about. Maybe there's some kinda auto-repair for the roads. Seems like something Roger or someone on his team might put in. They spent all that time getting underwater moon gravity right. Road construction is pretty trivial by comparison.

Mina yawned, then took a sip from the mug he'd brought her the previous day.

A few minutes passed.

"Phonia, can you construct something to block the suns for me?" Mina asked, sounding sleepy.

"Okay!"

A stone tower rose up and extended outwards to cover her.

"Should I do you, too, master?"

Carl looked over with suspicion. "If you mean the umbrella thing, then okay."

The brightness of the late afternoon suns dimmed as a stretch of gray rock obscured his overhead vision.

"Thanks," he said. His eyes moved to her horns.

"Do you also want me to do—"

"No." Carl sighed. "Let me think in peace."

A soft snore emerged from the recliner next to him after a couple more minutes.

Carl glanced over with a slight smirk. That's adorable.

Mina was curled up on her side, facing him, with the scarf he'd gotten her draped over her head. One arm was stretched up to the top of the recliner, and the other was hanging off the side.

Reminds me of Sammy. She always falls asleep in kinda wacky poses. Like that time I found her asleep while upside down in the recliner in the den. Or the other times when I'd get too close and she'd grab on in her sleep and wouldn't let go. Teenagers are on a totally different level when it comes to sleeping ability. He shook his head. Wish I could still do that. I must've missed out on Dad's napping genes.

He let his mind wander for a while before he brought it to task.

Alright, first is time. Yesterday was three minutes. Today was three minutes. Real-yesterday was also three minutes. Is it… The idea made his head hurt. Maybe it's variable right now and that's like, a maximum scaling value?

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He considered various possibilities for a lengthy period of time. Alright, well it's just after noon now. I'll check again the day after tomorrow if I still haven't thought of anything somehow. Can't imagine it taking that long, but this is a tough problem, and I might have to work with Gab until I retire if nothing crazy happens. Worth taking the time to get it right so we can have a strong foundation to our working relationship.

Carl sighed. Getting a little tough to stay in here though. I miss Annie and the girls. Gonna have to get extra big hugs real-tonight to make up for it. I guess it's not like they'll even know. Probably for the best. If Annie knew I was spending so much time "obsessing" over what's probably a really simple problem…

He scratched his beard a little. Wonder what she'd say. Well, I know what she'd say. She'd fight to the death to keep the current system. Lot of guys in my position would probably do that too. It's technically sound.

A considerable amount of time was spent ruminating on the merits of such a strategy. He imagined dozens of scenarios and played them through until their natural conclusions.

After a while, Mina stirred, then went back down to the workshop floor mumbling something about glyphs or whatever, taking the doll with her.

Carl continued to think, however. He spent several hours in total before Mina came back up to ask where he'd like to go for dinner. In fact, he didn't particularly wanna go anywhere at that moment, so they had leftover pork shanks and potatoes, which neither of them was going to complain about.

Mina had departed downstairs again, this time teasing that she was working on schematics for his surprise.

Still, there was time for thinking after dinner as well. Feeling that he was on the brink of a new idea, he activated his high-level, once-a-day Galaxy Thunk skill.

Instantly, his thoughts coalesced and sharpened.

Yes, he'd considered the problem in some depth. He'd worked various angles, evaluating both the likely outcomes of full flattening and not-flattening—or de-segmenting and segmenting, if he wanted to be technical, which usually he did—as well as the ramifications of each option. He'd considered partial segmentation as well, though it seemed unlikely to be viable.

What he realized he needed to spend more time considering were the ways in which he could describe each option, feeling as though there were a lot of possible outcomes there. For example, if he went with the method that Annie would no doubt choose—and he was, of course, completely certain he knew which method she would choose because they'd been together for over twenty years now, though their twentieth anniversary was coming up next year, he recalled again, and he needed to start considering something for that since he was sure she'd begun her own research and would astonish and amaze him like she always did. He still remembered how she'd gleefully come to him with the brochure for the resort they'd gone to for a week in celebration of their tenth anniversary, having found a classy sort of place which had an adjoining fishing lodge for him to enjoy while she remained on the beach reading during the couple days of accumulated Me Time they'd each be wanting at some point.

Yeah, Annie really was the best. He'd never imagined that he'd find someone else who understood Me Time like she did, but that was Annie. She was a little prickly about some stuff, but she was always willing to talk things through, even when they were fighting. Such fights didn't last long, of course, since neither of them was really able to remain upset with the other for any great length of time, but they happened naturally just as they would in any relationship. No, fighting wasn't something either of them enjoyed.

In the context of a relationship, that is.

There had been a time—well, it seemed like another lifetime at this point—when Carl had enjoyed fighting very much, though it had been of a different sort, and it hadn't been in real life. In those days he was very good at fighting, and he knew everything about it. The thought reminded him of Ir'alith, who seemed like she was probably pretty strong and also good at fighting, though he'd never seen her in action.

In fact, he'd yet to see any real fighting in this game, the closest being the drivers at the lower track who were really more like jousting in cars, now that he thought about it. He wondered how Ir'alith would do in that sort of setting. Allowances would have to be made for her character's tail, of course, which would probably be tough to get into a regular seat. Then again, she could also probably use it to attack other cars while driving around, though that might be against the rules in some way—not that he really knew what the rules were, which he realized was probably something he should look into at some point in case he had to argue with one of the refs, who he was sure probably existed somewhere—and what was he just thinking about?

Right. Ir'alith. The more he considered it, the more he had to admit that she really did have a pretty face. He meant that purely in the context of her character model, of course, but he felt it was a reasonable thing to acknowledge. She'd clearly put time into the whole thing, and she looked great. Sure, maybe his opinion was slightly skewed by the fact that the only time he'd seen her not wearing that awesome glow-y armor had been when she'd been wearing some very skimpy lingerie-type underwear, but he was feeling confident that he could remain objective and not get too stuck on any particular details related to that, even though he again had to admit that her horns at that time had been oddly cute in a certain sense as opposed to the much larger ones she seemed to be walking around with lately, though those were also interesting in their own way.

There was some question in his mind about what they felt like. Had the doll managed to accurately reproduce them? The tail felt incredibly similar, though his memory on that matter was a little fuzzy—no pun intended—from the time that had passed, and he felt—again, no pun intended—like he'd have to do a side-by-side comparison to really be able to tail—pun intended. Certainly her tail was better than Annie's had been, which was the thought that broke the channeling of his skill and caused him to once more grow sluggish from the strain it had put on his body.

Carl struggled to escape the confines of his recliner, which felt more like a prison in his weakened state. At last he was victorious, and he managed to stuff both of them back into his inventory before stumbling back down the stairs and into his sleeping rec—nope, he was gonna use the bathroom first—liner where he instantly fell asleep despite the fact that Mina was still awake and tinkering with something at her workbench.