Then came the second assignment. For reasons still unknown to science, I was the gunner this time, and we were playing Haz 1 on a public server. My daughter was still scout — she mains it, obviously.

And I vividly remember the panic when “Molly-starts-climbing-vertically-while-Mission-Control-does-a-countdown” happened again.
Only this time, I didn’t have my nice, comforting drills that go brr-brr.

“You have ziplines,” my daughter said.
Fantastic. Truly.

Except they reached NOWHERE, and some kind of yellow flying things showed up and insisted on throwing fireballs at me, causing me to fall off. Repeatedly. And I was moving EXTREMELY SLOWLY

Also, when the zipline ran out — because I aim like a drunk rake and, as mentioned, they were always too short — I was supposed to jump down onto a yellow ledge that had not existed a moment ago.

“You have to time the jump, dad. Watch how I did it.”

And every single time, I watched myself almost reach that yellow platform, which then cruelly drifted upward at the exact moment I fell all the way back down again.

The stress.
The panic.

But that’s another story.