We divvy up the stuff and the sole surviving Dwarven miner starts assessing what needs to be done.
I see a passage. Aleanghi sends down the bat. There’s somebody down there, coming our way. Turns out to be gnomes. And not friendly garden gnomes, mind you. These are Svirfneblin. Gesundheit.
Several times over the last few months my daughter has mentioned that she wanted to go inside a particular office building near our house. I can’t blame her. It’s big and shiny, with a mirrored glass and polished marble exterior and a fountain out front. She mentioned it again on her way to the dentist yesterday, and she was so anxious about going to the dentist that I suggested we go visit it the following day. Which was today.
I learned a lot of valuable lessons from my mother, most of them by her example. But one of the ones she taught me which was stated expressly was, “If you look like you belong somewhere, people won’t question it.” Very true. I put that to good use many times working in TV. With that in mind, I put on “business casual” attire for our trip. Em belongs everywhere, so she needed no dressing up.
We roamed around the halls, with me directing us so that we didn’t pass the same place too many times. Then I said, “Would you like to go to the top floor and look out the windows?” Answer: yes!
We took the elevator to the 14th floor. (Em: “This is like a ride!”) Just off the lobby was an office occupying all of the window views. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me. Window offices must be in high demand, they wouldn’t just put a window on a hallway when they could charge big bucks for it instead.
We went to the receptionist, and I said, “Hi!” with a big smile. The receptionist said, “Oh, hello!” I said, “I’m wondering if I could ask a favor. She (pointing to Em) was wanting to see the view from up here, I’m wondering if there’s a window we might be able to look out of for just a minute.”
The big conference room with the best view was right behind her and obviously in use, but she thought for a moment and looked around and said, “Sure!” and added, “Oh, I can’t believe she’s so big!”
It was at this point that I realized she thought Em was the daughter of someone who worked there. Two choices presented themselves. One, correct the misunderstanding and possibly have her tell us we couldn’t go into the office, or two, just roll with it.
You know me. I’ll do anything for my kid. I chose to roll with it.
The receptionist gave us both visitor badges and showed us to a smaller conference room. And the view was great! We could see all the way to center city and beyond, and Charlotte’s famous canopy of trees was stretched out as far as the eye could see. Really spectacular.
Once we’d had our fill, which didn’t take long with a ten-year-old’s attention span, we went back to the reception area and gave our badges back, and I thanked the lady warmly. She said, “I just can’t believe she’s so big. Do you think she looks like Angie?”
I smiled and said something like, “Just look at those eyes!” which could work as “not at all, Angie doesn’t have eyes like that” or “yes, of course, Angie has eyes just like that!” and technically I wasn’t telling a falsehood. Thankfully somebody else came up and in the confusion the response was lost. Unfortunately, the receptionist said to the newcomer, “Look, that’s Angie’s girl!” We beat a hasty retreat to the elevators, where we shared a car with the lady who thought Em was Angie’s girl.
Mentally, I was saying, “please don’t know Angie, please don’t ask questions” but the polite silence of the elevator saved us. She got off and we continued down, our excellent adventure at an end.
Em had fun, saying, “That was like a dream!” She wants to go back again. Unfortunately, we can’t go back to that office, since before we get back Angie could come in and hear that her daughter had visited. I’d rather not have security called on us.
There’s a nearly identical tower right next to the one we visited. We’ll sneak into that one next time.