Spending My Retirement In A Game

After the two loafs of bread had sufficiently cooled down, Benjamin waited till it was around 8:30, at which time he then started properly making breakfast. First, he cut up the bread he made into a total of 10 slices and set it down on his cutting board next to the stove, and then grabbed a wide pan, in which he then mixed a few eggs, milk, and a pinch of salt together.

Once everything was properly mixed, Benjamin placed some of the slices of bread into of the egg-milk mixture and let them soak it up as much as possible, before getting out two of his pans, melting butter in them after setting them onto his stove.

"Alright, time to make some nice breakfast!" Benjamin exclaimed to himself with a bright smile before stepping over to his fridge, where he kept some nice, thick slices of bacon that were ready to just be put into the pan right off the bat.

So, now Benjamin cooked some of the french toast in one pan, while he cooked some of the bacon in the other, and seemingly, the smell already woke up one person.

"Mornin’ Grampa." Benji said with a loud yawn while he was rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, sitting down at the stool on the other side of the kitchen counter.

"Good morning Benji! How’d you sleep?" Benjamin asked curiously, flipping over some of the slices of french toast and bacon in the pans while getting out some different berries out of the fridge to serve with them.

"Really good, actually. I was hella tired yesterday... still am, to be honest." The young man then sighed loudly as he took out his phone.

"I get that, you’ve been traveling all day yesterday, so of course you’d be tired." Benjamin chucked in a low voice as he heard another door open, as it seemed like Tony just woke up as well, and once he noticed that his father was making breakfast immediately walked over to Sean and Katy’s room to wake them, although they apparently protested a little bit.

But after a few minutes of convincing, three more people joined Benjamin and Benji for breakfast.

"Sooo goood!" Katy yelled out loudly after taking her first bite of the french toast, basically shoveling the rest of it into her mouth.

"Katy, eat more slowly, alright?" Her dad asked, and she nodded with a light pout, before Tony looked over to Benjamin again. "But yeah, it really does taste great, as always Dad."

"Haha, thanks you two. But what do the four of you want to do today? Do you want to relax outside in the garden, maybe take a swim in the pond? Or we can go to the new Mall, if you guys are interested in that?" Benjamin suggested, and it seemed like nobody really had a huge preference on what they wanted to do, beside one person, Benji.

"Actually, I’d like to take a look at your capsule, if you’re fine with it? I’d love to see what that’s actually like..." He explained with a grin, before his grandfather immediately nodded.

"Oh, of course! You won’t be able to play, I’m afraid, but you should be able to enter the desktop mode." Benjamin told him, then looking over to the other three. "You can go ahead and try too, of course. I don’t think you can actually do all that much in the desktop mode, definitely nothing even nearly to the degree as in the game, but it’s fun to play around with it."

"That would be really cool! Is it actually like real life, like how Prime industries says it is?" Benji asked curiously, obviously not being able to wait to test the capsule out. Arranging him to be an Alpha player was obviously the best choice Benjamin could have made.

"Yes, it is! It’s quite incredible if I’ll be honest. I didn’t expect something to that degree myself when I first started the capsule up." Benjamin explained, before remembering the package that he opened a few hours ago, and thought that Benji and Tony may be quite interested in it. Since he already finished his breakfast, Benjamin quickly stood up and rushed to his room, grabbing the small phone-like display as well as the metal sphere, bringing them back to the table where everyone was waiting.

"Hm? What’s that?" Benji asked curiously, while Tony leaned in as well while wanting to know the same thing.

"It’s something that Prime Industries sent me, it’s like a personal assistant connected to the capsule somehow. I’m starting it up right now for the first time myself, so I don’t really know too much about it." Benjamin explained while trying to find the ’On’ button on the sphere, but apparently, there was literally nothing of the sort on its outside. So instead, he started up the ’Phone’.

The prime industries logo quickly appeared, but then soon flowed around and the white parts on the black background formed something that Benjamin already knew. They looked simply a lot like the eyes of Rover, the capsule’s assistant AI.

They first seemed to be closed, but soon enough opened and a voice came out of the speakers. "Hello there, Benjamin! Remember me?" Rover asked happily, even lightly squinting his eyes like one would with a large smile on their face.a

Surprised, Benjamin sat the phone down against a bottle of water so that everyone could take a look. "Hey there, Rover... So you’re the personal assistant that Prime Industries sent me?"

Confused, Tony tuned in before Rover could even answer. "Wait, you know what that is?"

And then, before Benjamin could answer, Rover started his explanation.

"He sure does! Every capsule is equipped with their own personal artificial intelligence to assist the user in their tasks! This device that I’m currently using to talk to you is another neat gadget that you’re sure to love! It has tons and tons of functions, all connected to the capsule and the game itself! And that nice ball over there is just as nice! Benjamin, in order to activate it, could you lightly tap the gadget onto it?" Rover asked as he was looking over to the old man, who curiosly nodded.

"Sure, but what happens when it actually turns on?" He then asked while lightly tapping the sphere with the phone-like gadget, before Rover’s eyes immediately disappeared from the display, leaving it completely black again.

Kind of scared that he broke something, Benjamin then looked back and forth between the two gadgets, before the sphere finally reacted and twisted on its own axis for a few seconds, before rolling forward, backward, and to the sides, as if calibrating its position. A few seconds later, Rover’s eyes appeared on its surface and his voice began coming out of it.

"Tadaa! Rover in real life!" The small robot-sphere then exclaimed, rolling around the table to look at and greet everyone sitting at it, while Sean looked at it in complete awe.

"Grampa! Grampa! Look, it’s moving! That’s so cooool!" He yelled out, while Tony, Benjamin and Benji could just stare at Rover in a mixture of confusion and awe themselves, before Benjamin slowly nodded.

"Yeah, it really is pretty cool. So? I’m sure there’s a good reason for you to have a body, right?" Benjamin asked, before Rover’s eyes moved up and down as if trying to show that he was nodding.

"Yup! I can do many things! I can keep small, important items or information within my physical or data storage with military grade protection, I can connect to all of your home devices so that you can quite easily control everything, or have me control it however you like automatically, I’m something like a charging station for many different devices, I can play music at an incredible quality, of course I can-"

"Rover, stop. So you can do a lot of small things... I’ll figure all of your functions out at some point, but tell me a few of the most important ones, alright?" Benjamin interrupted, as it seemed like Rover would simply continue talking and talking for quite a while if he hadn’t.

"Of course! I’d say my most important function is this!" Rover exclaimed before a small hatch directly underneath his eyes opened up to form a ramp, and five tiny balls came rolling out of it. "There’s more of me! Tiny Rovers! Since you can’t take my main sphere with me everywhere you go, you can grab one of these on your way out and can basically control every function of my main sphere through it! Well, you can also do that through the other Gadget, but these are a lot more nifty, right?" Rover asked with a seemingly smug voice, leaving Benjamin to simply chuckle.

"Sure, they are. I’ll just keep one of them with me in that case." He said as he grabbed one of the small spheres and began playing around with it, before Tony grabbed one to take a closer look.

"And there’s enough of a mechanism in here for them to actually work properly? I’m sure Natsuo would be interested in these." Tony exclaimed as he set the small sphere down on the table again before it quickly disappeared inside Rover’s main body again.

"I’m 100% certain that he will be, yeah. Doesn’t he freak out about new tech a lot?" Benji said with a smirk while taking a picture of the small spheres to show his friends, and his grandfather quickly nodded as he stood up to put the dishes in the dishwasher.

"Yeah, I’ll show Rover to him when he comes here, I bet he’ll be pretty happy about that. But anyway, talking about Gadgets, I’m pretty sure there’s a pretty neat Gadget store in the new Mall. I walked past it once, and they seemed to have some cool things there."

"Well, can we check that out today then? I wanted to try out some new smart-glasses, and I was thinking about getting a new laptop for College soon. Most Gadget stores should have a few good ones, right?" Benji asked while standing up and helping Benjamin out, before the old man nodded.

"Yes, I think so. There are a lot of people running around with those button things behind their ears these days, right? I think they have a new version of those."

"Oh, yeah, those are pretty cool. I like the feeling of having actual, large over-ear headphones on my head, but those are pretty nice too. They’re good to use in class anyway." Benji laughed lowly, before noticing that he was being stared at by his dad.

"Oh come on, I already managed to graduate with a 4.0 GPA, so it worked out in the end, right?" He complained, leaving his dad to do nothing but sigh.

"Still, try to at least pay attention in college. You’ve got an amazing scholarship, and you shouldn’t take that for granted."

"Nah Dad, they won’t throw me out of the scholarship programm. I’ve got grades and sports going for me, so they’ll most likely keep me no matter what I do. But don’t worry, it wasn’t my plan to not pay attention anyway. I don’t want to fail any of my classes there, that would suck..." Benji sighed out while scratching the back of his head, dropping back down onto the stool he was sitting on before.

"You’re really a multi-talent, huh? Anything you’re not good at?" Benjamin laughed loudly as he slapped his grandson’s back softly, grabbing the phone-like gadget that came with Rover’s sphere, and Benji sighed loudly.

"Well... getting enough sleep? I can never manage to do that..." The teenager laughed while leaning over toward Benjamin again to take a look at what he was doing.

Meanwhile, wha Benjamin actually did do was quite simple. He looked through the different ’Programms’ on the display, until he saw a few that caught his eye.

First, there was the ’Chat’ programm, and when he clicked on it, he managed to see the chats that he previously had in-game with the other players, and he seemed to be able to actually message them with this while not playing! This would be a great thing to keep in touch with everyone, for sure! He seemed to even be able to message Kiron, surprisingly.

He was able to access his status as well, and could see detailed information about each of his skills, the same as he would be able to see regularly while in the game.

But there was one function that seemed to really be the most interesting. The moment he clicked on the small icon, he was able to see something like a live-stream, displaying everything that his character was seeing at the moment.