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"You're gonna like this, Mairi, Milliways is a little different for the next few seconds..." says Enzo, opening the Door.

The turquoise three-year-old accompanying him shrieks with delight when she sees all the toys. "MAKE MAKE MAKE!" she cries, rushing forward and making Enzo glad she is habitually kept on a leash.

"Make all you want," he agrees. "That's what they're here for."

{tinytag: Mark Grayson}

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"Enzo, dude," says Mark, from where he's building with Legos on a table. No, scratch that, building with Legos in the table. "What the heck? I just started figuring this place out, and they changed it. And what's with the 'possible reconfigurations'?" Mark appears unchanged, just out of costume.

"Hey, Mark! It's only for a couple days. It's a holiday. You get to choose a new form if you want. You can even decide to keep it at the end, but you'll change back unless you really want to."

Mark laughs. "I don't think so. Not this year, at least. I think I'll stick with what I've got on." He spots the leashed toddler. "Babysitting duty keeping you from joining in?" He motions to another chair at the table. Said toddler seems interested in making, and there are plenty of Legos.

"Nah, I brought her here to play. I'll pick my form later. This is my niece, Mairi. Mairi, this is Mark, he has powers too."

"Hi!" chirps the toddler, and floats herself up onto the offered chair.

"Hey, Mairi." Mark is an only child, but he likes kids well enough. "You want to build with the Legos?" Mark's started on a race car, but it's missing seats and a roof (and a driver, but any fan of toy cars will tell you that drivers are irrelevant).

"Yes!" Mairi grabs a variety of blocks and starts sticking them together with no particular design plan.

"Excellent!" He grins at Enzo. "Cute kid. How're things in the electronic universe?"

"Pretty good. I'm about to go back to school. Cubefall's a good way to end vacation."

"Yeah," agrees Mark, looking around, "this would be a pretty good summer-ending blowout." He spies a piece that might serve as a seat on his Lego race car and pries it loose from the table, clicking it into place on his toy. "Anything special for senior students this year?" he asks. "Internships or ride-alongs or the like?"

"Yeah, actually! They partner us up with a full Guardian and we follow them on their duties. I hear we'll even get to go into the Games with them, now that we've got Game sprite mode!"

"Cool! We have kids who work with the local cops and fire department and get to ride along, so I figured you'd have to do something like that. What's Game sprite mode? Armor and weapons?"

"Oh, no, that's just rebooting, we always do that. Game sprite mode," he taps at his icon, and it shifts into a triangular configuration, "is when the Game thinks you're really part of it, so when it ends, it takes you with it. Which isn't great, but if we lose, it's better than nullification."

"Well, yeah, I imagine it would be," says Mark. "But where would you go when the Game leaves?"

"To whatever system the Game's played in next."

Mark's pretty sure that's not how software works on his side of the CRT, but he doesn't say it. "So, you just get carried along with the Game? Can you get out of Game sprite mode in the next system and, I don't know, email yourself home?"

We can only imagine how it would complicate EULAs.

"Yeah. Well, sort of. The first time it was tried, Matrix and AndrAIa—my brother and sister-in-law—did it. AndrAIa invented it, actually. I mean, she'd just invented it, so no one else knew about it. So everyone thought they'd been nullified, and the system was offline anyway 'cause of the war, and then they kept landing in offline systems so they only way they could leave was through another Game..." He sighs. "It took them a long time to get home."

Mark nods. "That's harsh, man," he says, sympathetically. "But, on the upside, you have a way of surviving a Game now, even if it sends you off into the Internet. And as long as your home system is online, you can get home. That has to be good for morale, at the very least."

Casting about for a subject change, he asks, "So, what'd the Bar offer you for this holiday?"

"Oh, yeah, it's amazingly better than before!"

He summons his vidwindow again. "All stuff starting with E, go figure. An echidna, something called an Electric Monk, and three different elephant things."

"An Electric Monk?" asks Mark, laughing. "Does he go 'ooohmmm'?"

(The narrative apologizes for the pun, but suspects that Douglas Adams thought of it a long time before he did.)

"Does this thing come with definitions?" His own vidwindow pops back up, with the image of the tubby, bearded man replaced with the picture of a schnauzer puppy. "Because I have no idea why there's a Philadelphia Eagles player in here."

Enzo snorts. "I don't think so," he replies to both questions. "I think I'm gonna go with the elephant. They're cool, and I can still use my trunk."

"Hmm. You might want to go outside for that. Elephants are kinda huge," Mark points out. He looks back at the picture of the schnauzer. Why a schnauzer? I mean, sure a dog, but why a schnauzer in particular.

Then it hits him. Because Science Dog is a schnauzer. He starts laughing.

"Well, yeah, of course. You shoulda seen when I was a dragon. I had to find a cave up in the mountains to sleep in."

Blink. "What?"

Mark gestures to the picture of the dog. "It's a schnauzer," he says, still laughing. Then, before Enzo can say anything, he shakes his head, and adds, "Like Science Dog. He's a schnauzer, too." He laughs again.

(It makes sense to him. Promise.)

"Science Dog?"

Mark realizes that, yes, while the Multiverse is really cool, they probably don't all have the Adventures of Science Dog, Heroic Hybrid of Hound and Human. He wipes his eyes, and tries to explain.

"Science Dog is my favorite comic book. He's a dog, who was in a temporal explosion, and got evolved a million years into the future in an instant. He had adventures and defends the Earth from evil."

"I'd show you a picture if I had one of the comics on me, but they're all at home. Anyway, I was trying to figure out why the Bar picked a schnauzer. Science is a schnauzer." He pauses, then adds. "It was funny to me."

"You can show me later. It sounds cool!"

"We gotta dog!" declares Mairi.

Edited 2012-05-30 20:16 (UTC)

"You do?" asks Mark, grinning. "What's his name?"

"Frisket. He used to be mine, but now he looks after the girls. Especially Ana's, 'cause she's younger and 'cause she belongs to Matrix and AndrAIa. He's mostly theirs, he was with them in the Games."

"Frisket dun like Daddy," Mairi observes.

Mark nods to Enzo, and asks Mairi, "And why doesn't he like your Daddy?"

"Dunno."

"Frisket never liked Bob. I mean, he doesn't like much of anyone outside our family, besides kids, but Bob is family now and he still only kinda puts up with him."

Mark nods. "Sounds like Bob needs to keep a large supply of dog treats within easy reach."

"That might get him as far as a truce."

Though, in truth, they more or less have that now. Due entirely to Mairi's existence, we should add.

"That's a start, I'd say. Of course, I've never owned a dog, so what do I know?"

"Oh, we don't own Frisket. He just hangs out with us and lets us feed him."

Mark, as he said, is not a pet owner, so he isn't sure how that's different from owning a dog. But he's just going to accept it. "You'll have to introduce me to Frisket one of these days, Mairi, since you're clearly his person."

"Okay! An', an', an' he won't eat you."

Mark grins and gives Enzo a look. "Oh, I don't doubt that."

"This is Frisket. He likes to chew on tanks."

"Huh. That'd be something to see." Still, Mark's gone toe-to-toe with three supervillains (well, two officially, and he had help on the second one), so he thinks he can handle a dog.

Most likely, and besides, Frisket does have Guardian code, so he doesn't actually try to eat anyone unless they really deserve it. Plus, he knows chewing on Users would short him out.

"Sometimes he's caught cars."

Mark considers this. "I'm guessing this isn't your average toy poodle," he says.

"I think the User version's called a Doberman?"

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