“OK, I’ll show you again.
First, you put this… here.”
“That’s not how”
Maggie said hesitantly.
“Oh shush now.
I know what I’m doing.
Like I said
You put this here, and then you”
Maggie groaned with frustration.
“But Charlotte, why do I have to do this.
Can’t you just do it?”
Charlotte sighed. “Maggie, you can’t just expect someone else to do this for you.”
“But it’s hard,” Maggie complained.
“Come on, you can do it,” Charlotte said encouragingly.
“Yeah, but when am I ever going to need to know how to do differential calculus?”
Maggie put down her pencil and rested her head in her hands.
“Don’t ask me.
You just asked me to help you with this.”
Charlotte motioned to Maggie’s homework spread out over the kitchen table.
“It’s not my fault that those population growth graphs can be analyzed more easily than they showed you in class.”
Maggie took off the VR goggles.
They weren’t so many goggles as lightweight glasses with earbuds.
Despite looking like a cheap toy, they probably cost more than Maggie’s laptop.
She carefully placed them on the table before getting up and going to the fridge.
She returned with her water bottle,
condensation already forming on the frigid metal,
rolling it back and forth across her forehead before unscrewing the cap and taking a sip.
Then she sat back down,
put the glasses back on, and tried to make sense of the bars and graphs on the paper before her.
Whenever Maggie looked up,
Charlotte was quite literally climbing the walls.
She had recently realized that an unlimited virtual wardrobe, and no reliance on the laws of physics,
opened up untold possibilities for outrageous cosplay.
Right now she was crouching on top of the open door,
wearing a red and blue catsuit with a web pattern.
Her generously padded posterior made her Spiderman impression less convincing.
The web pattern on the catsuit slowly changed as Charlotte found more reference images online.
Finally, Maggie closed her books.
She leaned back and sighed heavily.
Charlotte jumped down from the door and sat on the corner of the table.
She cocked her head to the side and looked at Maggie.
“So, still dry?”
“Um, yeah,” Maggie said.
Charlotte’s matter-of-fact attitude about incontinence was still a little jarring to her.
“That rewrite of yours put things right.
I can’t wait to get rid of these pads.”
Maggie reached down and adjusted herself in a very unladylike manner.
“Good.
Wanna see something cool?” Charlotte asked with a sly grin.
Maggie realized she wouldn’t get anything else done before Charlotte got this out of her system.
“What?” she asked warily.
Charlotte stood,
her catsuit slowly morphing into a reasonably accurate copy of the classic Wonder Woman outfit,
complete with star-spangled plastic panties covering her diapers.