Rolling across the carpet, the boy's arms started waving in idle protest, slowly at first, before he was lightly struck against a nearby railing. He gasped his way out of sleep, like a drowning child finally breaking the surface of the waves. "Hey!" The man shouted as he carefully burst into the room, trying to balance what remained of the soup he was holding "Get outta there!" It was covering one of his hands, the one still grasping the porcelain bowl tightly. They had done it now, and hadn't done their due diligence in making sure the beast was still sleeping before carrying on with their plot, but their goal had ultimately been accomplished, and besides, try as he might, it was hard for the man to completely disguise the fact that he was suppressing a smile. "Liam," The man looked back at the boy who was now sitting in a daze, looking down at his feet, "Finally up now? There's some soup in the kitchen."
That was, he supposed, good enough for family time (for a few hours, at least). This is not to say, obviously, that he wouldn't be brought back into the delegation of the house, so to speak, as was almost immediately evidenced by Emily storming in, her face red, like she had been somehow forcing up all the air and blood into her little puffy cheeks. No introduction, no greeting, court would be held the moment she ran into the room, and quickly tried to force out the words, "Calvin took one of the pieces we were playing with and won't give it back and keeps pretending like he didn't take it even though every time we play Rundog he ruins it and then just pretends like someone else did it!" She was about half a second early enough to bypass her father's pending engrossment in the process of what he liked to call firing the big gun, but it only gained her half of the man's attention, and none of his sight, which was now sucked into the plunger situated between the dashboard and his face. It was one of the older models; not enough room for a big display in front of him, and people tended, in practice, to like getting very close to the screen, since the resolution was good enough that dots would appear out of the normal visual range, although a microscope might have helped a little in actually seeing them. "There's a bunch of spares for everything," The man said, hopelessly trying to offer a simple solution, "Don't tell me you guys lost it. You're gonna have to put away your game and look for it if that's the case." Scrolling, clicking, charting out new areas in the vast emptiness, the two of them were now beginning their own sort of game, familiar as the assortment they had brought with them. The man's objective was, as always, to prolong inevitably having to give the child his full attention, or else come up with some robust solution that bypassed all of her inevitable complaints for why what he had offered up until then wouldn't do, and the girl's goal was, well, wasn't it obvious? It was to spend time with the man, and prevent him, for as long as possible, from getting to his daily workload. She was more cat than child, constantly walking across your keyboard, and sitting there if you let her. Well, maybe that wasn't entirely true, but it was too early to consider complaints like these irritating just yet, and so, this was how he preferred to see it.
"If you didn't let the kids sleep wherever they wanted to, things like that wouldn't happen, you know." The man was trying to keep his eye on what looked like a very, very slightly odd scattering of tiny spots near the middle of the monitor as his wife, Evelyn, walked in. The words floated vaguely in the air; he was trying to hold onto them, decipher their meaning, while focusing on the tiny courtroom drama invited into the room by his daughter, all the while avoiding losing his place on the gun. Why was it always so taxing on his cognitive resources though? Everyone wanted him to work harder than he needed to to understand what it was they wanted, when it was all of them, without fail, who were interrupting him. The next purchase he was going to make for the house was some kind of ticket machine, with a screen to match, that would tell them all when they could come to the front. He turned to a large and weathered reference book kept handily nearby. It was kind of a choose-your-own-adventure style of text. For the default magnification of the scope, which is what he liked to keep it at for referencing purposes, the book would tell him that if the spot was this colour, or this shape, or this orientation from other dots, and so on and so forth, turn to page whatever, and slowly the categories of what you might be looking at would be narrowed down. It was by no means perfect, and made all the more imperfect by errors in human sight and pattern recognition, but the pages were practically worn down to tissue paper from use. "Goooood morning Mrs. Me, how's the coffee today?" He asked, ignoring his lovely wife's criticism, and despite the fact that the man himself hated coffee. Emily shied away from her mother as soon as she came in, preferring instead now to momentarily forget her troubles, and hold onto her father's hand in order to pull herself up to his favourite book and slam her hand on it, trying to read it. Or, as one might interpret from past experience, trying to rip one of the aged pages out. With trained reflexes, the man delicately grabbed the girl by her wrist and slid it slightly forward before she could pull away, and before carefully lifting it off the thing.
"Not great, I'm worried that mold is starting to grow on the burner element."
"You're always worried about mold" He responded, distractedly.
"And I'll continue to worry until the day I die... From mold poisoning.
"Well, you could throw it out. We'll get a new one." Which would mean four months or so without coffee.
The woman sat down and tried to recapture some of the joy of sleep for a moment before reaching down beside her chair, pausing again, and looking up at the little girl who had invaded their little office space. "Emily, go play now, daddy and I have to talk and do work." And, when the girl was done slowly sulking her way out of the room, Evelyn finished with "And close the door behind you." Before watching the girl carefully to make sure that it remained all the way shut, and beginning to rummage through her bag to pull out a low-energy consumption handheld device. By her husband's estimation, it would have been about dead by then, so, naturally, Evelyn would want to run it into the ground quicker as her fear of losing it slowly mounted to a quiet, anxious frenzy. He told her it was better to just "lose the addiction early, and get the pain all done with up front", but there just wasn't anything quite like getting lost in one of the games from her childhood, or even a semi-new release, while she still could. It used to be that she'd bug Will, her husband, to throw caution to the wind and put the shield up, just for an hour of one little day, so that she could get a nice charge. She was half joking, and knew that any direct sunlight coming through the windows was best used instead for reserve power, especially given the uncertain nature of their work, but she could tell it started to get to him over time, so she reluctantly dropped it, only hinting at the subject every now and then when the man especially annoyed her.
"What d'ya got?" She was suddenly right against his hear, and the man jumped a little at the sound of her voice, nearly losing his contact with the gasket in front of him.
"A whole lotta nothing, just how I like it."
"But what do you hope it'll be?" The man didn't pull his book out unless he skeptically had a hope of something, and she could tell, besides, when he was grinding through every dot on the map, reviewing and dismissing them, in preparation for an exciting main course, so to speak.
"An adventure." The woman didn't bother to raise her head, but his words evoked a view of all the cramped corridors and rooms around her. The mess, the worn out machinery and interfaces. The great adventure they had been on up until then was very different than those that she enjoyed indulging in in games, where pacing was constant, and exciting, without a pause for breath. What spanned between those points of interest was an emptiness that seemed, at times, to be as vast in time as it was in space.
