Like you’re high

“You’re messing with me, right?” she reacts.

“I know right!? This virus is insane. I don’t even know how it got on my phone.” you tell her truthfully. “Dad, I think your phone’s just dead” she tells you.

What?

You turn your phone so you can see the screen and you can clearly see Cassie’s profile on it, so your phone can’t be dead. You tap on it to go back and open Stella’s profile instead. Yeah, your phone’s working, so what’s Stella talking about?

- Craig, Stella - Affection Score: 100. (+24)

Not that it’s real, but you’re genuinely happy that this thing thinks your daughter’s fondness of you has maxed out because of that intimate and intense conversation. It actually puts a genuine amused smile on your face.

“What?” you hear her ask.

“This virus thinks you’re devoted to me now” you tell her, and show her the score on the screen on her profile.

“No, I said that. Didn’t I just say ‘I can’t lose you’? What did you think I meant by that?” she said without a hint of it being a joke. She was completely serious in admitting she is a devoted daughter who loves and supports you.

“Wait, are you calling me a virus?” she says with genuine confusion, with a hint of being offended. Your face fills with panic and you immediately shake your head to say that that wasn’t what you meant.

“You’re showing me a blank screen reflecting my face, what was I supposed to think? Is this like a metaphor? Like your phone screen is a mirror and you’re showing me the face of someone ‘devoted’ to you?” she says doing air quotes on ‘devoted’.

You don’t turn the phone to face you this time, and instead move your head to see what she’s seeing. You intentionally smush your cheek into her cheek, which she reacts to with fake annoyance, followed by giggling. You look at the screen again and see her profile with her score on it. It even has a message underneath her perfect score that you didn’t notice before, and you read it out loud to her:

Congratulations! You’ve taken a person’s affection score to the max!

New feature unlocked: Traits – You can use the points you’ve earned by improving affection scores to buy different Traits that affect friendly relationships for either you or your friend. Think carefully of what you want!

“What the hell are you talking about?” your daughter asks. “I’m just reading what’s on the screen” you tell her, still staring at this new message. You acquired points you can spend on traits?

“Dad, I’m really impressed with your ‘pretend reading something on a black screen’ acting, but I’m getting worried.”

Can she really not see what you’re seeing?

“Are you tripping? Did you take shrooms or something?” she asks you.

“What? No!” You look at her, and she’s just staring at you now. How is it possible that she can’t see something that you can clearly see on your phone? Before you can ponder that question for any longer, your parental instincts kick in again. “How do you know what shrooms do?” you ask your daughter.

She panics a little, before quickly recovering her composure. “No. You’re not changing the subject. What’s going on with you? You’re acting like you’re really seeing something on your phone right now.”

Your head’s beginning to hurt with the amount of thoughts going through your head right now. Is she pranking you? No, can’t be. She looks serious about her concern for you. Could it be a hallucination? Probably not. You’ve had those before, and you’re thinking way too straight for this to be that. Finally, the thought you didn’t even consider before pops up into your head.

Magic? It was weirdly making sense to you. You haven’t charged your phone in a while so it wouldn’t be a surprise if the battery died; and if you can somehow open an app on a dead phone and it’s some kind of fantastical app that keeps track of your relationships but also enhances how quickly you build them… that’s gotta be magic, right?

Then again, you’re considering magic over hallucination because you’re thinking way too clearly for it to be a hallucination. ‘Yeah, that tracks’ you think sarcastically.

You rub your temple because this kind of thinking is giving you a migraine.

“Dad, can we just drop this for now?” Stella asks you, her voice filled with worry.

“Yeah, I think I need to drop this for now too. It’s giving me a headache.” you tell her.

“That’s probably just you coming out of your high” she responds.

“How do you know so much about ****!?” you ask her, half-joking because you trust her not to do the **** stuff if she was doing ****, but also concerned because you are still her dad after all.

“I’m in college now, Dad. Let me live a little” she answers you casually. She has a point, but you can’t help your parental instincts to be a wee bit concerned. Speaking of parental instincts, you remember that she wasn’t in the stoop where you expected her to be when you came to talk to her.

“Hey, where’d you go by the way?” you ask her before making your way up the stoop. “Isn’t this your go-to spot when you’ve had a tantrum? I was surprised you weren’t here.”

“First of all, that was not a tantrum and you know it.”she says with all seriousness. “Second,” she hesitates, clearly not sure if she should continue.

“Hey,” you say after grabbing her for a hug. “I love you. I trust you. Whatever it is, I’ll try to understand”. You give her a fatherly smile, the kind that shows that you’re just concerned but you’ll still love her no matter what it was.

She looks at you and stares right into your eyes. She has a look of doubt, but ultimately she relents.

She takes a box of cigarettes out of her pocket.

Author’s Note: The interaction for reaching maximum score, and the glossary entry for Traits are from Fantasy’s David Walker branch.