Hailey was smarter than your average six-year-old. She was advanced in her school work, regularly helping her teachers with other students, and helping older students with their reading. She had been having a hard time herself, lately, though. Not with school work, she could deal with that. Her problems were at home. Her father stopped at a bar every night on his way home from work, then stopped at the store to pick up a 12-pack for consumption at home. Her mother drank wine by the bottle. Finally, her little sister was always bugging her, but that's what little sisters do. Abby was 4, and quite the tom-boy to Hailey's "little princess" character.
Recently her parents had been considering divorce, but after a great deal of turmoil, they decided to try to work things out again. At least her father was in the house again, but Hailey's mother was keeping him busy with landscaping work and chores around the house. He suspected she was trying to get the place fixed up before kicking him out and filing for divorce for real. This was one of those days when Tiffany (Hailey's mother) was having Dan (Hailey's father) tending to things in the yard. The pool was put in so late last year that they didn't have a chance to landscape around it before winter...this work would really help the houses curb appeal if they had to liquidate their joint assets.
Hailey was in the basement hiding from her sister and the neighbor boys, Jake (10) and Harry (8). Her mother was friends with their mother, so the boys were frequently at the house getting into mischief. Hailey wasn't the only one in the house that didn't care for these two gremlins. Dan had regular altercations with them. They had destroyed his stereo in the garage with their water guns, almost broken his RC boat in half while running it in the pool without permission, and the thing that irked him the most, they referred to him as "Dan" and his wife as "Mrs. Thompson". Tiffany regularly undermined his decisions and the boys had seen her berate him and treat him with no respect, so they felt that they could do the same. When he would tell them to do something, they would say, "Yeah, right, Dan, Mrs. Thompson said we didn't have to listen to you".
Things were about to change for everybody when Hailey found a device in the area of the basement she was hiding in. It looked a lot like her mother's Palm Pilot, but she hadn't seen this one before. Hailey had figured out how to use the Palm Pilot first, then instructed her mother on its operation. She figured she might as well go ahead and see how this one worked, too. Maybe if she was really good, she could have it for her birthday this weekend! She turned it on and looked through the menus. It had a port where she could hook it up to the computer, so she plugged it into the USB port and it instantly installed itself and showed her a diagram of their property and where everyone was. She thought it was neat how it looked like a game using people she knew. She clicked on her dad first and a box came up with all of his details. She giggled when she saw it listed the size of his privates. It also offered a bunch of changes she could make to his character.
The changes intrigued her. She had been upset with her father lately and figured this would be a good way to take out her frustrations on him. She decided to play around with the options for his character while she was waiting for Jake and Harry to go home for dinner. She saw all kinds of possibilities from gender to age to species. Finally a thought came to her that brought a smile to her face. She would changer her father's character by...