"All of you seriously got a pretty lady AI helper?!" Axel demanded of his friends as they all sat around the table enjoying lunch after they had finished their Pod's calibration testing. "That's such bullshit! I was stuck with a helper that looked and sounded like that old wrestler dude, Hulk Hogan."
"Bummer," James said as he popped a fry into his mouth.
"Maybe they knew that you'd spend more time flirting with the virtual girl than you would going through the calibration," Pear suggested.
"Or they knew that I'd be too much for the ladies to handle working with after they took my perfected body into account," Axel said with an exaggerated sweep of his hair.
"More like you just got a bad luck roll when you were assigned a helper," Mark said, trying not to laugh at his friend's antics as he ate.
"Yeah, yeah, whatever Marky," Axel waved his words off. "Anyways, Pear, you and I never got to finish talking about your dad's doctor appointment. Things good?"
"Oh yeah," James nodded in agreement. "How's Uncle George doing? Good news?"
"Not really," Pear said, his voice falling with his mood as he remembered what the doctor had said.
"Well then, how bad is it, man?" Mark asked his friend quietly.
"I remember this from earlier," Axel told Pear. "I can tell them that part if you need me to."
"It's fine," Pear told him before looking up at the other two. "The doctor said that the tumors are all terminal. Doesn't give Dad any longer than two years."
At his words the other two sucked in a breath and winced sympathetically as Axel reached over and gripped his friend's shoulder.
"Oh stars, Pear," Mark said, skirting swearing by an inch. "That's terrible."
"Maybe say something that's not obvious, Mark," Axel suggested.
"What am I supposed to say?" Mark demanded.
"Guys," James spoke up to head off the budding argument. "Let's leave that alone and be here for Pear, okay?"
"Thanks, Jim," Pear said with a small smile at his friend.
"What's the doctor planning to do to help your dad out?" James asked.
"He said that there's medication that can make things easier and it could even make the tumors shrink enough that they disappear or get small enough that they can operate," Pear said. "Dr. Jonson also said that all the meds cause serious side effects and those can all be worse than what they're being used to treat. Stroke, heart attack, seizures in a rare few, and paralysis from some of them."
"Well, the medications can help then," Mark said. "You're dad's going to have to be careful and he might end up in a hospital before he can have operations done, but I'd rather have Uncle George around than not."
"That's what I decided too," Pear agreed. "But, Mom and Dad talked about it and if Dad has a heart attack or stroke with his condition, they can't guarantee that he'll be okay. Dad also signed a DNR before they left and put a clause about paralysis in there."
"What about the idea you had?" Axel asked. "The one that you didn't get a chance to tell me about before your calibration appointment came."
"I thought that dad could get a Pod and play Astrana while he took the medicines," Pear told them. "His muscles will be paralyzed and he'll be monitored by the best medical equipment available in it, so he could keep himself moving and hopeful."
"Plus," he continued in a quieter voice, "Dad could do things with me without stressing himself if he could play. I miss fishing with him."
"What did the doctor say about that?" Axel asked. "Any ideas?"
"He said that if he could get the right grants and permissions then it could be something that would end up with Dad being paid by C99 for acting as a tester for this kind of thing," Pear said. "They've already done testing with coma patients and people that were paralyzed when they were developing the Pods, this would just explore a different medical application of them that would build further on what they've done."
"Then, let's hope that your doctor gets his shit together and can set this up with your dad," Axel said assertively. "Once that's in play, Uncle George will make a full recovery and we can all go fishing with him in Astrana."
"Sounds good to me," Mark said with a smile.
"I don't like fishing," James admitted. "Maybe he'll barbecue for us though."
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As his friends all began to make suggestions for what they could do with Pear's dad in the game, Axel couldn't help his smile from growing wider. Or from discreetly paying the check the waitress brought by their table.
"Oh yeah," Mark said as they left the restaurant. "Did you guys get a chance to do your homework for Astrana?"
"Please, Mark," Axel begged, "don't call it homework. You'll make video games boring for me."
"Whatever, Axel," Mark laughed. "Did you do what you said you were going to do, though?"
"Yeah I did," Axel sighed. "Why don't we start with Pear though?"
"So you didn't do your homework? Gotcha," Pear nodded as Mark and James began to laugh harder.
"Fine," Axel said, beginning to walk away from his friends without looking to see if they would follow him. "I'll show you who did their homework. The city we want to start in is the biggest neutral city-state that sits in the center of the continent the locals call Tauran. The city is called Hero's Crypt because it's the resting place of the previous generations of heroes who stopped continent spanning wars between the Light Pantheon and the Dark Pantheon. Its location allows it to be a center of trade between the races that worship either Pantheon without forcing the Neutral Pantheon and races to choose one side over the other."
"Should I continue?" he asked with a smile as he looked over his shoulder.
"Don't let us stop you," James encouraged him with a smile as Mark gaped in astonishment at him.
"Mark pick your jaw up, you're going to trip someone," Axel said with a laugh before continuing. "The Light Pantheon lays claim to the races Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes. The Dark Pantheon claims the Orcs, Goblins, and Gremlins. Humans, Halflings, and Beastmen are the Neutral races. All of the races have their own perks that you can get and they all tend to stay apart from each other with good reason. That's why we want to start in Hero's Crypt, as the largest neutral city with its own governing body, it doesn't force any of the races not to mix, so it has the biggest population of Half-Humans and friends and the biggest mixing of the other races without any issues."
"All that doesn't tell us where we're meeting in the city," Pear pointed out.
"I'm getting there," Axel assured them. "Naturally, as the biggest city with a history that boasts the presence of heroes, the city has the greatest fantasy trope ever. Dwarven-owned and tended bars and taverns. I looked into a lot of places that were available from what C99 revealed in the beta tests and I found the perfect place."
"You going to keep rambling and leave us in suspense?" Mark asked.
"I might if you keep interrupting me," Axel said before flashing a smile at his friends. "Nah, I got nothing else. The place I picked out is a lovely hole-in-the-wall tavern in the middle-class part of the city that doesn't discriminate between races and Pantheons called, The Barfing Minotaur. I can't wait to see it."
"Well, looks like it's Mark's turn to tell us what he found out about the party and guild systems," Pear said.
"We're just skipping over the greatest name in fantasy history?" Axel asked. "I guess that's cool."
"Axel, that had better be you!" a woman yelled out as Axel shut the door to the apartment he shared with his sister.
"If it wasn't me, then you'd have a bigger problem to deal with than you'd want to, Marcie!" he called back as hung his jacket on the hook by the door.
"Oh, don't start with me, little man!" his sister called back as she entered the living room area in her pajamas. "You left before I even woke up and you were gone for the entire day. What were you doing?"
"Why do you care all of a sudden?" Axel asked her as he dropped to the couch and grabbed the tv remote.
"I care because Mom told me I had to keep an eye on you," Marcie said. "You know how she gets with us out of the house. If she can't get ahold of one of us she drives the other nuts and practically goes hysterical. I was looking forward to sleeping in today, and she woke me up and has spent the entire day calling and texting me looking for you."
"Don't know why she couldn't find me," Axel said. "I had my phone."
"Was it charged?" his sister asked as he pulled it out of his pocket. His expression told her everything she needed to know.
"Call her," she told him, holding her phone out to Axel. "She can't help worrying about us, but she can keep things to a minimum if she hears from us."
"Sorry, Marce," Axel said as he dialed his mother. "I was too excited by what day it was."
"Thursday?" she said skeptically. "The twenty-fifth? In March? What's so special about today?"
"Today was the day that I had my Pod calibration done," he told her. "For Astrana."
"Oh, your big game that you're excited for," she nodded. "Just give my phone back when you're done."
Before Axel could answer her, his mother picked up the phone.
"Marcie, did you find him?" she asked immediately.
"Hi Mom, great to hear from you too," Axel said.
"Axel! Do you know how long I've been looking for you?" his mother demanded.
"Marcie told me," he said. "I forgot to charge my phone last night and it was dead by the time I left the house for C99's office building."
"What were you doing at their offices?" she asked. "Did you get a job?"
"No, I couldn't apply there if I wanted to," Axel told her. "Today was the day that the guys and I had our calibrations for the personal Pods we got to play Astrana together."
"Did everything go alright?" his mother asked, her mood improving from the near hysterics she'd been in to a more comfortable one.
"It seemed to," Axel told her with a nod as he flicked through channels to find his favorite nature documentary channel. "Pear told us about his dad's doctor's appointment afterward when we all got lunch together."
"Oh, how did that go?" she asked. "I was worried about George myself when you told me that he was going to have testing done."
"Apparently things weren't good," Axel said, skirting the exact issues. "The doctor said that he can try some medicines but he's worried about some of the side effects of them."
"With how things are going in the medicine production field, I'd be worried about that sort of thing too," his mother said. "There's not anything left to make that can help us without causing even more problems and risking worse things for us."
As his mother continued to ramble on about anything and everything she could think of, Axel tried to pay enough attention to her to keep up while trying to watch the educational adventures of a leopard seal in the Antarctic Sea as she hunted penguins and fish while searching for a mate.