He would have gone after Ailis, but for a text

'Ding!' Seamus looked at his watch and read the message from Ailis: "In sorry Daddy, I'll explain later, okay Daddy? I'm not ready to have a particular conversation with you and I just need until after classes, okay Daddy? Forgive me Daddy?"

Dumbfounded, Seamus replied: "Okay sweetie, we can talk later. There's nothing to forgive on your side. I need to explain some things on my end!"

A swift reply: "No, Daddy. There is something you'll need to forgive me for Daddy. I just, can't right now, okay Daddy?"

Sighing, Seamus wrote back: "Okay Ailis, we'll talk later. You're my daughter, I'm proud of you and love you, no matter what, you know that, right?"

There was a worryingly long delay before he got another reply: "Yes, Daddy. I'll talk to you later Daddy."

Alice quietly said: "She doesn't say Daddy very often unless she's feeling low and needing comfort."

"I know. I wish she would talk to me about what's going on with her, has she said anything to you?" Seamus asked.

"No. She's come home the past few days and closed her door immediately. She's stopped eating breakfast here and been eating dinner at the college. She said it's because she's swamped with an English assignment but I don't believe her." Alice stated.

Pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut, Seamus asked: "Have I really been that clueless to have missed that? I noticed that she kept the door locked when I said good night, but I thought that was just because she was feeling the need to set boundaries as an adult, which didn't explain the feeling I got that she was hiding something but still..."

"You've been busy at work. It's understandable." Alice said.

Seamus looked at her, haunted, "since when is it understandable that a man not notice when his family is going through something?"

"Honey, stop." Alice stepped close and put a hand flat on his chest and then her other finger on his lips. "You provide for us. That was the deal. I stopped working to take care of the kids, you dedicated yourself to being the best you could be at school and at work. You got your masters degree, and worked your way up by letting me do what I needed to do, which was taking care of the house until I needed you to step in and help out."

Sighing, and opening his mouth to try to rebut her statement, Alice shook her head and continued. "I knew there would be times you'd miss things, you knew there were times you'd miss things. That's the deal. It's worked for us. We have two, loving, brilliant children, one of whom is in college and wants to follow in her Papa's footsteps. The other, is dedicated and studious when he isn't playing video games all day long." Alice smirked at this. "I didn't need you to step in yet so I didn't ask. That's not on you, and that's not on me. That's the way life is."

Giving himself an all body shake, Seamus nodded his head and kissed her. "When did you get to be so wise?"

"Every silver hair." Alice replied.

Snorting, Seamus looked at the five silver hairs he could see and smiled. "Breakfast is cooling down, and I still need to find out who Mandy and Samantha are, and why they showed up."

"They are our neighbors, three doors to the south. Their parents passed away a few years ago in a car crash but since they were 17 at the time and deemed mature enough, they were declared legal adults and finished school. I think they are 26 now." Alice said.

"How? Have we ever had them over?" Seamus asked, starting to walk to the dining room table.

Smirking, Alice said, "You'll never believe this, but you my dear just became a stereotype."

Seamus stopped short and looked at Alice: "Huh? Oh. Wait. You're kidding, they weren't the ones that babysat Ailis when they were younger, were they?"

Starting to laugh, Alice nodded her head.

"Oh crap. This is bad. I wonder if Ailis recognized them." Seamus groaned. "Do you think if we moved the app might stop working?"

Snickering, Alice said: "honey, when have you ever known electronics to stop working just because you move to a different town?"

"Well, there's this little town I read about, I think it's in West Virginia, where they don't have radio signals at all, no cell phones, no wireless whatsoever due to interference with a critical government security infrastructure." Seamus said.

Alice looked at him in horror as she was sitting down: "You're kidding, right?"

"About moving there? Yes." Seamus bowed his head and said a quick prayer with Alice before starting to eat. "But about the place being real? No." He chewed his bacon thoughtfully. "Gina seems confused one moment and present the next, let's see why." Scrolling through the list of changes for Gina, he saw the Mood Ring Eyes, a raft of hotkeys copied over from Alice, Good Girl, the Cups Runneth Over-DD: Group (Custom Girls)... Wait. Group. Crap. "Uh, honey?"

Alice looked up at his voice. "Yes?"

"You know that one time when you were muttering under your breath about that flat-chested she devil?" Seamus asked.

"Yeeeessss?" Alice said haltingly.

"She's not flat chested any more." Seamus stated.

Alice laughed hard. "Oh, this is too good, I wish I could see the look on her face when she woke up this morning."

Seamus winced, "This is going to make my day just a little more interesting though, especially since I just filed that claim with HR yesterday."

"Ooh. Yeah, that'll be fun. Everyone at work trying desperately to avoid looking or asking what the biii-" seeing the look on Seamus' face Alice changed track, "witch did last night to get new breasts when she has been so vocal about her disdain for fake and plastic people, yeah that'll be interesting. HR sexual harassment complaint filing happy harpy of a biii-witch that she is."

"Honey, I had a hand in that too. I shouldn't have complimented her hairdo without prompting." Seamus said.

"Honey, no. Complimenting someone's hairdo isn't harassing them unless you do it in a creepy way, and from what I've heard on the spouse grapevine, she did it to keep you out of the running for the director slot she was angling for." Alice insisted.

Seamus sighed. "She might have, but I don't like gossip, you know that. Too many possibilities of misinformation."

Alice reminded him: "And when the previous director publicly said he was planning on working another five years but the spousal grapevine insisted he was retiring that week?"

Seamus grimaced. "The grapevine was right. I know, the grapevine is right the vast majority of the time." He sighed. "But I can't do anything actionable about that from hearsay."

Alice grumbled and attacked her eggs angrily. "Well, don't see me losing sleep over her getting a little payback."

"Alice Geraldine Malone, you know better than that." Seamus started.

Alice glared at him: "what? Payback only hurts the person doing the payback? Payback doesn't help long term solutions? I know this!" She aimed her fork with eggs on it at him. "And just because we did some of that play in the bedroom ten years ago doesn't give you the right to act like my father right now!"

Seamus winced and sighed. "Yes dear, you're right. That was wrong of me. Forgive me?"

Alice sighed too. "Of course, I know you don't like it when I go off on the people you work with when you can't do anything about it. It's just frustrating."

Seamus pushed some of the food around his plate and then sat back and said: "we need to send Sean to camp for the next couple of weeks. He'd been asking to go, I know we didn't want to send him yet, and couldn't really afford it, but I think we need to."

Grateful for the change in topic, Alice nodded. "Yes, I agree. Too much going on around the house right now and I don't want him stumbling into something he shouldn't see or hear."

"It's settled. Do you want to give him the good news while I'm at work? I know the bus was supposed to leave today by 1400. I can have the payment in before I leave. They reminded me I can pay all the way up until four hours before and that'll give them time to make the adjustments to the schedule." Seamus waited for her nod and then switched from the Custom Girls app to his payment app, made the payment, got the confirmation number and then forwarded it to Alice. "Done."

"One week of space camp, one week of computer camp. Our son really does like the STEM fields, doesn't he?" Alice said.

"Yes. Too bad I can't get him into reading, even though he really enjoyed that book: 'Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants' that I gave him." Seamus groused.

Alice laughed. "Honey, I didn't understand half the terms in that book and I still found it hilarious. Of course he would have loved reading it."

Smirking, Seamus reached out and held her hand, "what, you didn't understand the terms: Red Fuming Nitric Acid?"

Snorting, Alice replied, "sure, I understood the terms individually. Put them together and what does it mean specifically? I'm not a chemist."

"What? And I am?" Seamus mock teased her.

"No, you're a materials scientist and a systems engineer." Alice stuck her tongue out at him. "And one whom is going to be late to work if you don't get a move on. Eat!"

"Yes dear." Heaving a put-up-on sigh, he looked forlornly at his now cold eggs and ate them mock-morosely.

"When Ailis is ready to talk, she'll talk." Alice squeezed his hand, looking deeply at his face.

Nodding, Seamus continued to eat.

"And when you're ready to grope the babysitters some more I'm sure they'll be over again soon." Alice said dryly.

Coughing as he choked on some bacon, Seamus glared at Alice, who smirked at him. Sighing again, Seamus went back to scrolling through the recent changes to Gina. "Ah. Here it is. French Kiss combined with Good Girl. Since Good Girls don't randomly French Kiss other people, the Custom Girls awareness setting: Aware And Blasé shall be temporarily switched on during their French Kiss time. After their French Kiss time, Aware and Blasé shall be switched to Aware. Wait, there's an awareness setting?!"

Alice perked up. "Huh, that could be useful. Just imagine, I make my way to work during the day in some fancy negligee and nothing else, walk into your office, and then ride you during the week until I have a screaming orgasm. That's not during the weekend, right? I can have as many of those as I want?" She chewed her food, face studiously bland as she said everything in an even tone.

Seamus, who had been distracted by what he was reading and trying to find where the awareness setting was, finally clued in to the fact Alice had stopped talking. "Pardon, honey? Yeah sure. You can, wait. Sex at work?! That'll be an HR issue for sure! You know we have cameras and it's all ITAR spaces!"

Smiling like the cat that ate the canary, she blinked her perfectly eye-shadowed and mascara'd eyes at him. Then she licked her cherry red lipstick lips at him, pursed them in a kiss, got up from the table with her finished plate and grabbed his empty coffee mug on the way by.

"Honey... Please tell me you aren't seriously considering this?" Seamus started to get up but a head on his shoulder pushed him back down as Alice whispered: "Finish your breakfast dear."

Wondering if this sex crazed fanatic had always existed inside his wife and the app had just brought it out to play or if something else was going on, Seamus thought for a moment as he chewed. No, he thought, she'd always been playful, the last few years had just worn on them a little. This was like their first few years of marriage. Seamus smiled. He had his newlywed sex life back. He frowned. But still, he'd need to find those awareness settings before something went really wrong at work, especially now with Jill working...in......the.........same............ohcraphe'dforgotten. They were going to be working in the same office from now on.

Switching over to her, he saw that Jill was indeed the recipient of new breasts, and a host of hotkeys, one of which was: Forget the Last Thirty Minutes, usable once per day. Hmm, potentially useful. She had also been given...the same change as the two babysitters from this morning. Finding that awareness setting was going to be critical, and apparently he would be using the hotkey faster than he expected.

Looking at his count, he saw that he had 83 to spend again. Looking it through, he'd gotten a few from the kiss this morning, a lot from sex with Alice, some from first time groping, some from seeing bare breasts of a Custom Girl, and a few that were hidden. Frowning, he tried to figure out what the hidden ones were from but it refused to say anything more than he had received a few gems for an event. It wouldn't even give a time that the event had occurred. He had also received the expected daily dose.

Shaking his head, Seamus stood as he finished his last bite. "Honey? I've got 83 to spend today. I've got to figure out how to handle the influx because this is an overwhelming amount to spend just on you."

"And that's just from this morning. Imagine what a day next to she-who-shall-not-be-named will give you." Alice stole the dishes from his hands and started cleaning them.

"We have a dishwasher, you know." Seamus smacked her butt.

"I know, but it doesn't get them all the way clean." Alice protested.

"That's why I installed a more powerful one. And bought the better dishwashing liquid." Seamus tried again.

Alice turned and gave him a kiss. "No helping. My chore. You helped last night. Scoot."

Shaking his head, Seamus chuckled and walked out the door to hop in his hydrogen fuel cell truck. Pain in the butt, they'd had to get a hydrogen fuel cell fill system installed at the house, and traveling with it was a nightmare because there just weren't enough filling stations but they had done their part to avoid some of the damage done by lithium mining while avoiding the ecological problems with petroleum based fuels. That had made them feel good. At least until they went further than 200 miles from the house, because at that point the round trip became a problem and they had to default to their combustion vehicle. But it was a big reason they couldn't afford to do much now, as all their spare money had gone to this setup, plus a little. But, it was nearly paid off and they could start having fun again soon. Hopefully.

Seamus grinned at the power under his feet. He loved this thing. No matter how much ribbing he'd gotten for getting it in the first place, or any time he showed up at the yard. At least, until the boss' boss had bought one himself and installed a filling station at the yard. That reminded him, they had the state town hall meeting next Wednesday they would need to find time to prepare for-trying to get the state to buy in on supporting expanding filling stations for hydrogen fuel cells was an uphill battle but Congresswoman Takahashi seemed to be very for the idea.

Seamus frowned as he waited for the stop light to turn. Congresswoman. This app had been very specific about attaching itself to women around him, even if he didn't intend on it. And he was about to have a face to face with a Congresswoman. This could go...very badly. Members of Congress had supporting staff, bodyguards, press around them all the time...he had to find a way to get a handle on...

*Beep!* "Sorry!" Seamus looked around and then drove through the green light, pulling into his parking lot at work, thoughts running a mile a minute about the best way to handle this. He walked around the corner to his office and stopped in his tracks. Nothing was there, the entire office was stripped bare. Even the ceiling tiles had been removed.

"We decided to redo the office while we were at it." A female voice from behind him announced. Jill. Of course it was.

Putting on a **** smile, Seamus turned around and said: "Good morning Jill." Crap, he hadn't had the chance to finish finding those awareness settings.

To which Jill said: "Good morning Seamus." And then she promptly ripped her shirt buttons while pulling her blouse apart, yanked her bra up, grabbed his hands and then placed them on her breasts and held them there. "I'm going to enjoy working so closely with you from now on. Good morning Susan, we need to talk about the client's change proposal before QPR next week, okay?" She said over his shoulder to Susan, a configuration data manager who had apparently just walked around the corner.

Seamus closed his eyes and thought: why? Why me?