The front door opened.

"Yup. 'Kay, I'm home now, so I gotta go for a bit," Bobby said, accompanied by the sound of the door shutting and followed by the rustling of shoes being taken off.

Carl fired off the internal mail he'd finally gotten around to writing Roger using the company VPN, including the gushing praise he had for how realistic some stuff had been, then some of the issues he'd found—which, of course, didn't include the supposed physics bugs he hadn't found, since they were apparently just the result of having stats that seemed way too high and overpowered in the one starter zone but then as soon as he left were actually garbage, and instead mentioned real bugs which were more like how the auto-translation feature seemed to be shorting out for Vol randomly—and then further compliments about how incredible the physics and time scaling were, closing with—

"Hey, Dad, why're you home?" Bobby asked as she came into the kitchen with her book bag over one shoulder.

Carl stared. Had his youngest daughter always been this adorable? It felt like ages since he'd last seen her. "Hey, pumpkin!" he said, tipping his laptop screen down and rising from his chair at the table. "I got lonely at work, so I came home early."

Bobby wrinkled her nose. "Don't you work in a big office with…" She brightened mid-sentence and came over to give him a hug.

It was a great hug.

In fact, it was a hug Carl had been anticipating for two weeks, and finally receiving it seemed to ease a burden from his mind that he hadn't even realized was there.

"It's cool having you home earlier," she said a short while later after he'd recharged some of his Dad Energy from the medium-length hug. "Why can't you work at home anymore like you used to?"

"Well," Carl began as he always did when she asked this question.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Then he stopped and considered it in full.

Now that Gab was in place, why couldn't he work from home more often? The only reason he'd needed to be at the office all the time was—excepting the infrequent cases when he had to personally deal with physical hardware—all the freaking meetings, and those were all…gone…

A grin broke free of his beard. "Maybe I will," was something a lesser dad might have said.

Not Carl Weathers.

No, Carl Weathers, Carl M—Theodore Weathers, to be precise, would never say something so bland and uncool.

"Well," Carl said again, pushing up his glasses, "the reason I haven't been able to work from home is that I've been training a machine learning algorithm to do all my in-office tasks, and it really took a while. But I just installed it on the Carl 6000 robot I built from scrap parts that I found in—"

"Daaad," Bobby said, rolling her eyes but unable to stifle a grin that mirrored his own at his masterfully crafted embellishment that he'd had to think pretty fast to come up with on the spot like that, which was just a skill that dads picked up naturally.

"Uh, actually, that's company secrets, so don't tell anyone. Anyway, I think my schedule's gonna be a bit more flexible now. What do you think about that?"

"Awesome!" Her grin brightened, and her eyes turned hopeful. "Maybe you'll have time to try playing New Era with me now?"

Carl grimaced, but he managed to conceal it behind his beard. That was another topic he'd been considering bringing up with Annie, though it was now seeming like a topic likely to be brought up regardless of his careful planning. This exact moment—or even week—was definitely not the right time for it though.

No, if he wanted to be technical, now was indeed the time for something else, which was to say that he did kinda have a job while he was down here and not intruding on important Talking upstairs: Annie had asked him, providing the unnecessary bribe of a very sweet kiss that he'd enjoyed but absolutely didn't require—though it wasn't like he was going to say no, obviously—to prime the girls—their girls—when they—well, their biological girls—got home—though saying it that way made it seem like there was going to be some kind of favoritism, which neither Carl nor Annie would ever be a part of—from school so they—and it was then that Carl realized that what he'd been worried about was gaining the approval of Bobby and Sammy, because if they weren't on board with everything, then he wasn't really sure what would happen, but it wouldn't be good—would be ready to meet Mina.

Their new sister.

Maybe?