Carl was deep into a new project.

He'd decided to—just in case—start checking out more of the IT applications he'd received. He still wasn't imagining that he'd heard correctly before when he thought Gab had said thirty two more people, but he'd had a pretty stressful morning and early afternoon, and he was trying to decompress a bit by changing his mindset, and the ticket queue was pretty quiet, relatively speaking. At some point, he was going to fill this network engineer role, so it wasn't like he was wasting his time.

One benefit of working at Fire as a hiring manager was that he never ran out of applicants. No, he received applications in a mostly-unfiltered, overwhelming deluge, and the problem he'd faced since he joined was that there were just too many to sift through. He'd delegated a good chunk to Adi and Erica over time—though the latter of the two was still out on maternity leave—but it was just an endless flood, and paring it down to only candidates who met the team's exacting standards was—

A notification lit up for his inbox, signaling that he'd gotten a reply to the feedback mail he'd sent Roger the previous day. He switched his focus and began to read, though only because this was a mail from another Director at the company, and not—

"We're back!" Vol called loudly, interrupting his reading after he'd nearly gotten through the first line of Roger thanking him for the compliments.

"No, we've been here the entire time, naturally," Mina said, sounding annoyed.

"Oh. Yeah, just feels different being, uh, back here. On the first floor. Instead of up on the second floor. Talking."

Mina walked into the kitchen with a pleased grin on her face and Vol a step behind. "How has your problem solving been progressing?" she asked as she continued around the table and gave him a nice side hug around the shoulders.

At the hug from his daughter, Carl felt some of his dad powers returning after being sapped through the course of the afternoon when he'd had to repurpose the energy to dispel stacks of the Ugggghhhhhhhhhhhh Work debuff he'd been afflicted by. "Well, it's going," he said, patting one of her arms. "You're having fun, it sounds like."

Stolen novel; please report.

"Didn't expect it, but things're a little interesting here," Vol said. "Who the fuck would make pyramids that big? Lot taller than they look once you get up to the—"

"Or so she imagines after we've viewed several images on the tablet Annie lent me," Mina cut in as she stepped back.

"So you were…just looking at pyramid pics?" Carl said. It wasn't what he'd been expecting, that's for sure. Then again, Vol was involved, and she never really did anything that he expec—

"Nah, we were exploring," Vol said. "Checked out the pyramids, part of that big wall thing, some statues—"

"All on the tablet, naturally!" Mina added.

"—and some big buildings. That one in the really hot place was really fucking tall."

"I believe it was called the Burj Khalifa," Mina said, now stroking her chin. "Truly a marvelous display of architectural and engineering prowess."

"Yeah, sure," Vol said. "Really fucking tall. Heavy too."

Carl had vague knowledge of the building that they were talking about—it was…somewhere in…Asia, definitely—but not really enough to carry any sort of conversation, which he was shifting his focus back towards now that he was getting into dad mode. "I didn't know you were into construction stuff," he said, realizing immediately after the words had been uttered that it was obvious Mina, a girl who was so interested in mechanical engineering that she'd built more than one functioning car in a VR game, would be super interested in all that stuff, which meant he probably needed to do some reading up so he could hold a conversation about it.

"Oh my, yes, it's quite fascinating," Mina said, her tone shifting to the same one she'd used when talking about her car designs as she turned to look back at him. "I'm certain you're already aware, but it's incredible how the engineers were required to construct all manner of additional support and tool simply for the purpose of raising the building materials high enough to continue construction. They'd not conceived of a method for pumping concrete to such an altitude prior to this endeavor, so—"

Carl settled back into his chair with a sigh as she continued with noticeably increasing excitement, feeling suddenly more content. Maybe he'd take the rest of the day off after all. It was crazy to think about after how much stress he'd just been feeling, but somehow, it seemed like things were going to be okay.