The Laptop - Ch.56 - Solving Problems (Patreon)

Both my girlfriends were sound asleep, curled up on either side of me, as I lay awake and quietly stared at the ceiling.

Thanks to all Annie's training I'd lost count of the days again, but it felt like at least a week had passed since our brief visit to the MGAS Popławska. After upgrading my little pink laptop I spent a day and a half getting used to my new ocular implant thing. Which also included customizing the heck out of the UI.

The first thing I did was pick some new colours for all the graphical elements, and as a sort of hat-tip to the old laptop went with a palette that used a lot of pink. All the light grey highlights were now a friendly bubblegum pink, while the text went from black on grey to purple on pale pink. I also messed around with the font until I found something that made me happy.

In terms of more practical customizations, I set up a few emergency macros. The most important one was a 'safe mode' shortcut. With the old laptop I had to open the character editor, select my sheet, navigate to the class field, drill down to a sub-screen, edit a field, then exit my data and confirm I wanted to save the changes. Now all it took was blinking my eyes five times in quick succession. I also had one that would let me spawn more of those healing potions, with a few quick side-to-side eye movements.

The next thing I did was set up a 'favourites' list in the expeditions app. Even though I didn't have a lot of location IDs yet, I figured it would be a good idea to keep the important ones in a handy list.

I also rigged up a way to type and make selections using only my eyes, instead of having to rely on obvious hand movements. It was like fifty times slower than typing, but it meant I had full hands-free access to all the functions, so I could use it even if I was tied up or something. Or if I needed to use it without anyone noticing I was up to something.

Then as one final nodd to the old pink laptop, I started referring to the new interface as either 'the laptop' or 'the new laptop'. It was maybe a little silly, but I actually kind of missed the retro pink and white hardware. I felt like my girlfriends and I owed it a lot, even if our lives had become significantly more complicated since I got my hands on it.

That's not what was keeping me awake though, at least not this time. Tonight I was thinking about home again.

My girlfriends and I had dinner with Frank and Annie earlier, and my former boss surprised us by announcing that it was time for him to pack up and leave. At first I thought he meant he'd be heading to some other town or village here on Daearen, and I was worried about him travelling through the woods alone with all his merchandise. I hadn't forgotten our encounter with the goblinoids, and I knew a lone merchant would be a juicy target for monsters like them. Or even just regular human bandits were probably a thing here.

Then Frank clarified that the past few weeks had all been a fun vacation, but he was ready to head back home. He quietly explained that he'd already started packing up his wares here, and first thing in the morning he'd set out with Myrtle and his wagon. Then once he was clear of the town and all the locals, Annie would open a portal for him so he could return to Earth.

There were a few more rounds of drinks after that, as we all bid him safe travels. He was planning to leave at first light, so odds were I wouldn't see him again until it was finally safe for my girlfriends and I to return home as well.

Eventually we all turned in for the night, and my girlfriends didn't seem to have any trouble getting to sleep. It wasn't so easy for me though, mostly because I still hadn't shared the bad news with them yet. About losing the house, Chelsea's car, our bank accounts, education records, identification, and everything else that tied us to Earth-742.

I knew I had to tell them sooner or later, but I kept putting it off. Partially because I didn't want to upset them, and partially because I still had hope that there was some way to fix it. Like for one thing we hadn't been gone that long yet. Even if I didn't know the exact date back home I figured it couldn't be more than a month. And there was no way the city would have noticed that the house was abandoned then seized it and auctioned it off that quickly.

At most, I figured the neighbours might have noticed we weren't around. Maybe they realized Chelsea's car hadn't been moved in a while. Maybe there was some mail piling up in the mailbox? Then again, maybe not. All our accounts and bills and everything else would have vanished after we came to Daearen, so the only mail we'd be getting was junk mail.

After a few more minutes I activated my laptop interface then opened the inventory editor, and called up my own inventory list. Then I switched to the tab that let me summon or rez new items, which gave me access to a few different realms' worth of options. As long as I knew what something was called and which realm it came from, I could conjure up just about anything they made back on Earth-742, along with Daearen-2605, Enðedd-0, and Popławska-3210.

That last one probably had some amazing sci-fi gadgets that I'd normally be really excited to play with, but for now I limited my queries to Earth-742. And instead of searching for some generic commodity like take-out latte or delivery pizza, I was actually trying to find the inventory record for our home. I figured since it was in my inventory list before, it had to be in the system somewhere. And I was right.

I didn't bother trying to 'summon it' since I knew that wouldn't work for real estate, but I carefully examined the data as I lay cuddled in between my girlfriends.

The first thing I confirmed was the property didn't have a new owner listed. Next I verified that nothing else about the place seemed to have been changed since we left. Finally, on a whim I tried the same command I used when I seized the property from Edward.

"Oh shit!" I gasped quietly as my eyebrows shot up and a wide grin settled on my face.

Even though I was on a different realm it actually worked, the system let me add the house back into my inventory. It wasn't just the house either, all the contents and everything else on the property came with it. Suddenly my inventory listing was huge. All the stuff I left behind in my bedroom was back, plus a whole lot more. I quickly realized my listing now included all my girlfriends' belongings as well, everything they'd been forced to abandon was all there too.

My smile faded at that point, and I spent the next hour or so quietly sorting inventory and moving things to Gwyneth's and Chelsea's listings. It was kind of boring, but I wasn't going to complain. After all, I'd just solved one of our biggest problems.

There were still a few other issues we'd have to deal with when the time came. I'd have to recreate our ID and get everything re-established in various government databases so we were properly set up as citizens again. I also needed to get Gwen and I re-enrolled in our college programs, and do the same for Chelsea and her university course. But at least we had our home to return to, and Chelsea's car would be there waiting for her. And with that happy thought, I was finally able to drift off to sleep.

In the morning we all followed our usual routine, I used the laptop to summon up a nice breakfast which my girlfriends and I enjoyed in our room. Then Annie arrived at our door to begin another day of training. Some days Gwen and Chels stuck around, other days they went out and kept themselves busy. Today was one of those days, the three of us exchanged some hugs and kisses then my girlfriends left while Annie came in and took a seat at the table.

I didn't actually know what the two of them got up to when they went off on their own, since this little village didn't exactly have much to offer in the way of entertainment or tourism. Sooner or later I'd ask my girlfriends what they did to pass the time, but for now I was focused on my half-elf mentor. But before she could dive into my first lesson of the day, I wanted to share my news with her.

"So I managed to solve another of your secret quizzes last night," I announced with a smug grin on my face.

Annie's eyebrows crept up slightly as she responded, "Is that so? Which one, and what was your solution?"

I still had half a cup of latte left over from breakfast, so I had a sip of that as I leaned back in my chair. "The matter of our home and everything else we left behind on Earth? Like I figured, we haven't been gone long enough for the property to be repossessed or sold. So last night I was able to reclaim it, along with all the contents."

"It took a while to sort through the huge list of belongings," I admitted. "But I did it, I made sure all my girlfriends' stuff went back into their own inventory lists."

That smug grin returned to my face as I had another sip of my lukewarm latte, but Annie didn't respond the way I'd expected. Instead of praise for solving her puzzle or more questions for me to clarify my process, she just stared at me with a confused look on her face.

After a couple seconds she finally asked uneasily, "You didn't return to Earth-742 did you?"

"Of course not," I frowned at her. "You still haven't told me how to check that it's safe."

She still seemed confused as she asked, "Then how did you get ownership of the house? We're on a different realm, I didn't think it worked like that."

"It's sort of the same way I got this latte?" I replied with a shrug. "Accessed the inventory system for Earth-742, put our home address into search, then examined the record when it came up on the screen."

I continued, "The inventory system treats real estate as a special category, so obviously I couldn't just rez up a copy of it here. But there's a command to transfer ownership of a record in-situ, that's how I got the house from Ed in the first place. So I did that again, only this time it also gave me ownership of the contents too since everything else on the premises was listed as abandoned."

By that point Annie's confusion had given way to surprise, and after a few seconds of her staring at me like that my smug smile returned.

"Did I just teach you something?" I grinned. "I hope that means I get bonus points when you grade me for these lessons."

The half-elf rolled her eyes then admitted, "I didn't know that would work across realms, but I've never had any reason to try it for myself. So well done Lisa. I'm sure that's one less thing for you to worry about."

"And since we're on the subject of different realms," she added in her 'teacher voice', "Have you made any progress figuring out how the location IDs work?"

I drained the last of my latte then nodded, "Yeah. I would have got it sooner if I was better at converting between base ten and base sixteen in my head. I still don't have enough examples to say if it's the same across the board, but I have managed to decode the one for home. And the one for the MGAS Popławska."

She motioned for me to continue, so I dove in with what I'd figured out. "You mentioned at one point that the system had a maximum limit of just over four thousand realms. Four thousand and ninety-five is FFF in hexadecimal notation. So looking at Earth-742, that number becomes 2E6. The first four bytes in the location ID for home is D2E6."

"The generation ship was listed as Popławska-3210," I continued. "Turn that number to hex and you get C8A. The first four bytes of the location ID there were DC8A. Same thing with this realm, Daearen-2605 in hex is A2D. The location ID starts with 9A2D. So the first byte was a mystery but the next three are just the realm number converted to hex."

"The rest of the Popławska code was easy. We were on deck 2430, in compartment 12193. Convert those two numbers to hex and you get 097E and 2FA1. Swap the position and that's the location ID. That still leaves the first byte, but I assume it's a check digit."

"Back to the code for home," I smiled, "The second block is 0311. Convert that to decimal seems meaningless, but if you take the first three bytes you get 031. That's 49 in decimal, which is the latitude in degrees north for the city where we live. From there it was easy to decode the rest. The only stumbling block was figuring out how they differentiate east and west, north and south. But that was pretty easy too once I saw the pattern."

When I finally finished Annie smiled back, "Perfect score. So I'm assuming you know what those numbers actually represent now, when we say Earth-742 or Daearen-2605?"

I nodded, "I called it a realm number, but it basically indicates which server the realm is running on. From 0 to 4095, or from 000 to FFF in hexadecimal. Because if every planet is named after some variation of 'dirt' or 'earth', you need a way to specify exactly which one you're referring to. After all there might be two Earths, but only one of them is realm number 742."

"Right again," my temporary teacher stated. "And as a reward for getting a perfect score, your lesson for today will be short and direct. How do you know when it's safe to return to Earth-742? How do you know any other given realm is safe to visit?"

That got my attention, and I sat up straight while she continued, "Call it up in the expeditions app, put in the location ID like you're going to open a portal there. Don't try and activate the portal, just read what comes up in the information screen. Same as you've been doing for any other realm you've visited lately."

My eyes widened and I immediately activated my interface then hit the expeditions icon. It only took me a second to pull up my favourites list, and a moment later I had the data sheet for home floating in front of me on the translucent display.

Sure enough it was right there in bold text, "Note: Realm Security Protocols In Effect."

"So all I have to do is keep checking this?" I asked. "When that security protocol message disappears then it's safe for us to go home?"

Annie nodded, "Bingo."

"That was your final lesson for now," she announced as she got to her feet. "I'm going to get back to work, but we'll keep in touch through the connections app. You're welcome to keep hanging out here on Daearen as long as you want, or if you and your girlfriends are ready for a change of scenery then go wander the realms. Just be careful, try and avoid anything too dangerous."

"I'll ping you when I need you to head home so we can start working together on Earth-742's problems," she added as a portal appeared in front of the doorway.

I frowned at her, "Hold on! How do we explore other realms? I don't have any other location IDs."

"Check the archives on Enðedd. There's loads of information there," she replied. Then as she stepped through her portal she added, "Bye for now kid, I'll be in touch."