"Well, no, the first step is you gotta get a passport, obviously," Carl said as he looked across the table at the juice-drinking Vol. "Not like someone can just pick up and walk into another country without their papers."

"Right. Passport." Vol rubbed her forehead. "So much… I don't know. Stupid work?" She tilted her head with her face scrunched up into a grimace. "It's like nobody can do anything without a paper that says they can do it first."

"Is it not simply the same as the Onyxfell badge of citizenship?" Mina asked. "Perhaps the precise format of the credentials differs, but—"

"Nah, definitely not," Vol said, shaking her head vigorously. "Even if you don't have a badge, you can still get into the city, and it's not like it really even gets you much other than a discount on the taxes, but the taxes are really high anyway. I think?" She frowned. "Yeah, sounds right. Yeah, Aquila made the taxes really high, so everyone wants to get a badge, so then you pay to get the badge, which lowers the taxes you have to pay, but they're still really fucking high, except it seems less high because of how high they'd be without the badge. Some smart people shit."

"You've not disproven my conjecture," Mina said.

"Uh…" Vol took another drink from her glass, which reminded Carl that he was still trying to figure out exactly how to describe the flavor of the juice, prompting him to also take a sip from his own glass.

They'd been trying to figure out how to describe the flavor for the past half hour or so, with a meandering, unfocused conversation taking up the time between sips. Mina had tapped out almost immediately, claiming she wasn't thirsty enough and was just enjoying the flavor even if she couldn't put words to it, but that just left more of the large, half-empty pitcher for Carl and Vol.

Currently, Carl felt that he'd made some small amount of progress, but he'd also made no progress whatsoever. He was tantalizingly close to a description now—like being about to finish clearing the ticket queue at work but then getting a call from Greg about how he'd lost the internet again—and it was probably going to be in either this sip or the next that he came up with—

"It's smooth," Vol said suddenly, her frown returning.

Carl paused. He swirled some of the juice around in his mouth. Was it smooth? In the literal sense, it was a pure juice with no pulp or anything, so it certainly wasn't rough. But then in the sense of drinks, smooth had another meaning.

"Yeah, it's smooth," he agreed with a frown of his own. "Not really that satisfying of a description though."

"Really isn't," she agreed. "Almost reminds me of bargus fruit, but it's not quite… Sort of misses that spiciness."

"What the heck's a bargus fruit?" he asked.

A mechanical rumbling sounded from the direction of the garage, indicating that Annie was home.

The weird thing about Annie getting home now was that it was pretty early for a school day. He could understand her being home super early yesterday given that she was taking care of Mina—and he was still waiting on some answers there too, though he still wasn't really in a rush given how stressful the day had been and how relaxing it was to just hang out—but she usually ended up staying until at least… Well, probably she wouldn't be home for another hour most days, which wasn't that much of a difference now that he thought about it?

"It's green, about this big," Vol said, holding her hands up to indicate a size of a baseball, "sort of a leathery shell. Also has one side that's flat. That's how you know it's not a mistenis fruit, which is round all over and really fucking poisonous, though they don't even grow on the same continents, so it's not like anyone's gonna mix them up anyway."

The door to the garage opened and Annie stepped in, immediately looking down while she slipped her shoes off and onto the nearby mat before she lugged her work bag towards the kitchen.

"Hey, Annie," Carl called. He watched her approach, and on this occasion, he really appreciated how amazing she looked at her age. Whether it was just the afternoon light filtering in through the windows or some new makeup trick she was trying out—possibly related to moisturizing, which was something he'd been meaning to check on—it seemed like the lines he'd grown accustomed to on her face were gone. In fact—though he knew he was obviously biased—he might even go so far as to say that with how she was looking today, she could've passed for a woman in her late twenties.

"Welcome home, Annie," Mina said.

"Hey," Vol called.

Annie halted at the last greeting, and her head tilted as her pretty face took on a baffled expression. "Um… Vol?" she said, her eyes fixing on the short-haired woman.

Vol rubbed her forehead. "Urgh, I fucked up the order again," she muttered. She took another swig of her juice.

"Carl, can I talk to you for a minute," Annie said in her We Need To Talk, But Don't Make A Big Deal Out Of It tone as she resumed her entry into the kitchen. "Hi, Mina, how's everything going?" she continued, flashing the household's newest addition a smile. She slung the strap of her bag around the nearest empty chair and leaned down to give the girl a hug.

"We've been discussing architecture and international travel," Mina said as she enthusiastically returned the hug with a delighted grin. "And attempting to devise an adequate description for this juice Vol's brought with her."

"Juice, huh," Annie said, brushing her hair back from where it had fallen across her face when she'd leaned down.

"Wanna try some?" Vol asked.

"Maybe in a few," Annie said. She fixed her pretty eyes on Carl, and he grew distracted momentarily. "Carl?"

"Oh. Right." He had to get a handle on this. It was obvious to him that he'd really missed his wife during the couple game-weeks he'd been gone, but now he was back in the real world where nobody else even knew that he'd spent way too much freaking time logged into a VR game—though as he glanced at Mina and saw how happy she looked, he again decided that the time had been very worthwhile, and even though it was a little hard to readjust, he wouldn't make any different decisions with anything there even if he had the chance.

It was with this in mind that he got up out of his chair. "Be right back," he said, following Annie towards the stairs. "How'd your day go?" he called to her.

"Good, good," she said as she started up. "Just the usual bureaucratic bullshit with the departments. Working at home go okay? Been a while since you've done that."

"Uh, yeah, went sort of fine," he said as his mind warily circled his memory of the last call with Gab, during which it sounded like she'd said some pretty crazy stuff that he was absolutely certain he must've misheard.

They walked down the hallway towards their bedroom, with Annie already shucking off the sweater she'd worn to work in preparation to change into house attire, which certainly didn't include the dress shirt, stockings, or long skirt she was wearing.

"What's sort of fine mean?" she asked, frowning at him over her shoulder when she turned into the room.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Well…" He grimaced. One of the great benefits that came with having a wife like Annie was that she knew him pretty well—better than he knew himself sometimes, if he was being honest, so pretty well was probably an understatement in that usage, and maybe he should've used a different description—which meant that, while they were totally in sync most of the time and worked to each others' benefit, she also could tell when things weren't quite right just based on a few words he'd said as a hedge. Not that he'd ever lie to her, obviously, but sometimes he just tried to find exactly the right time…

His thoughts came to a halt as he noticed something.

Annie had a small scar on the left side of her stomach, just above her navel. She'd gotten it when she was a kid from falling off a bike and flopping embarrassingly onto a sidewalk, or so the story went when she told it.

But now that scar that he'd gotten used to over the past couple decades was gone, as he noticed in the course of seeing her change out of her work clothes while he stalled for time. It wasn't like he just couldn't see it either, since she was just standing there next to him in a well-lit room. He was positive she'd had it… Well, he was positive she'd had it last weekend, at the least, which meant that it had disappeared at some point since then.

"Well, what?" she said as she pulled a t-shirt down over her torso, followed immediately after by a sweatshirt.

"Well…" He focused again, turning his mind back to work stuff with considerable reluctance. "We're kinda having a bit of a crisis now, I guess," he said.

"A crisis?" She turned back from her closet as she began to tie the strings of her sweat pants, her brows raised in concern. "What's going on?"

Carl sighed, and he walked over from the doorway to sit on the bed, feeling like he needed to be sitting to go back over this kind of thing. "Well, I kinda screwed up really bad," he said, shaking his head. "There was this thing going on Thursday afternoons—"

"The Thursday afternoon slowdown?" Annie said, coming over to sit next to him.

"Yeah, good memory," he said, smiling a little. "It was just this minor thing, but I kept putting it off because there was always more important stuff, but then I finally looked into it, and it kinda turned out to be way more important, even though it didn't seem that serious originally. And I dug into it more, and it was just way past anything I could deal with, and there was this whole meeting with the C-levels, and we were worried that it might wipe out the whole company."

"The whole company?" Annie said, sounding stunned. "It's that bad?"

"Yeah, it's pretty crazy," he said, sighing once more. "And because I kept putting it off—"

"But it's not like you were just sitting around the office twiddling your fucking thumbs, Carl," Annie interrupted. "You were even doing your mails and tickets from home a lot of nights."

"Yeah, but I kinda wasn't doing the right stuff," he said. His head sank down a little. "I should've at least checked this out a bit instead of punting it for the past year."

"Is that what your new boss…Abby? Is that what she said?" Annie asked, now sounding upset. She brought her hand up and started rubbing his back.

"Gab. And no, she seemed like she got that my team's been maybe a little small for what we've been having to handle, and—Er, I think we must've had a bad connection for part of the call, at least, but she said she wants me to take some vacation time since I haven't used any this year. And we're…maybe hiring more people? That's the part I'm pretty sure I misheard. Sounded like she said we're hiring thirty two more people for my team—which would bring us up to forty including me—but that's—"

"Forty?" Annie repeated in a tone of incredulity. "Carl, that's fantastic!" She wrapped her arms around him tightly from the side. "You've always been saying how you wish you had a team around that size."

"Yeah, I mean, it'd be great, and obviously that'd put us in the top fifth percentile of companies for our overall employee to IT employee ratio, but I'm pretty sure I just misheard," he said, even as he enjoyed the hug. "She probably said 'three or two'. I mean, that's obviously gonna be way more reasonable than quintupling the size of the department. Got a meeting tomorrow morning, so it'll get cleared up then, I'm sure."

"Even two or three would be a big help," she said, rubbing his arm. "So everything's okay now?"

"I guess?" He looked down at her and shrugged. "We're gonna be contracting some specialists to take care of things, so I'll be involved in that once we get the ball rolling through HR and probably as a reference for system stuff during the process, but otherwise… Somehow I'm not fired."

"They can't fire Techworld's Sysadmin of the Year from twen—"

"Ugh," he groaned, his eyes unwillingly flicking to the framed photo of the article's header that Annie kept on her dresser, and he chuckled just as unwillingly. "I think you care about that more than anyone who's even in the industry."

"It's such a good photo of you, Carl," Annie said in an increasingly breathy tone as she leaned towards his ear. "Sudo R M dash Z F panties."

Carl snorted into a coughing laugh, leaning forward on his knees.

"I screwed it up, didn't I," she muttered as he continued to wheeze for what was probably longer than she'd expected.

"I think you meant R. Not Z," he managed between chuckles.

"Shit, I've been saving that one for too long," she said.

He sat back up after another moment and gave her a big hug, finishing with a kiss onto her frowning lips. "I liked it anyway."

It wasn't always the case that Annie made tech jokes, but she did drop them on occasion, and they never failed to make him laugh, even when they didn't quite work.

They sat together for another moment in silence, and her frown eventually changed from annoyance, to puzzlement, and then back to annoyance. "If everything's okay at work—and it sounds like it's more than okay if you're getting at least some of that headcount you wanted—then I wanna know what the hell she's doing here," she said, giving him a look that he interpreted as We Talked About This, And I Thought We Had An Agreement.

"Uh?" he said, replying with a Which Agreement Was That Exactly? expression that left no room for mistaking his confusion.

"You said none of that was going to follow you back home." Annie raised her brows, which emphasized the statement and let him know that this was now Serious.

"Er, well, she just kinda showed up at lunchtime?" Carl said, considering but then ultimately deciding not to employ his Confused Innocent Stare skill since he felt like he'd been using it too much lately, which was leading to a natural immunity. "She said you guys knew each other, and Mina was really happy to see her, so…"

It was kind of a weird scenario in that it wasn't one that had ever played out before. There had never been a time when a random friend of his from an online game had showed up at the house, and, maybe more importantly, there had never been a Vol in the house, which was maybe the more relevant point now that he thought about it, since Annie could be a little prickly sometimes, and Vol could be a little loud sometimes, and if they knew each other, then maybe that meant that they didn't really get along, or—

"She said…" Annie's expression grew more complicated, and he wasn't immediately able to decipher it. "Well, yeah, we… Yeah, we've met? Sort of? Um…"

It seemed like the situation was weird for her too, so he gave her time to gather whatever she wanted to talk about. Obviously it made total sense that she'd know Vol after getting to know Mina since those two had become pretty good friends recently, and it'd even been the short-haired woman who delivered the pep talk that had gotten his daughter over her moping phase.

"Did she say why she came?" Annie asked after a short while.

Carl shrugged. "Just said she came to hang out, and Mina seemed like she was getting a little antsy, so it was good timing."

"So… It's not like she's planning to stay or anything, right?"

He frowned. "I doubt it? I mean, I don't know where she's staying, but I can't imagine she's just gonna barge in and expect that. And wait a minute, didn't you tell her our address?"

Annie's frown deepened. "No. I didn't."

"Huh. Must've misheard." He jammed a finger into his left ear and wiggled it around. "Really having some weird hearing issues today. Might need to get it checked out if it continues."

"Is it just today, or has this been going on for a while?" she asked in a concerned tone.

"Just today, I think?" he said. "Maybe I'm overthinking it. Been pretty stressed lately."

She patted his leg. "Well, let's make sure you book some of that PTO like your boss said—assuming you didn't mishear that too—so you can stop being so stressed. And you tell me if this hearing thing gets any worse, alright?"

He nodded. "Yup. Is it a problem that Vol's here? It kinda surprised me when she showed up, and I didn't really…"

"No, no, it's okay. I'm glad you're getting to spend some time with one of your friends, even if she's… You know. Like, crazy thunder goddess."

"Yeah, she's something else when she gets going," he said with a faint grin, recalling that time she'd thrown him over the wall the first game-day they'd hung out, and then the time she'd whacked a guy with a building, and the time she'd fought a giant mech, all of which she seemed to treat like totally normal, everyday occurrences. And maybe they were? He didn't really know that much about the game, so it could well be the case that was just how high level gameplay worked on the beta server.