All Dolled Up!

Charlotte

Charlie yawned. "Alright, let's get some more of the attic done before I hit the hay."

"You seem tired," I told him. "If you want, I can clean up the rest of the attic myself. I have the rest of the night, but you have work tomorrow, don't you?"

He stifled another yawn. "I mean..." he glanced at the clock, we had spent more time than intended in relaxation. The drowsiness was getting to him - I could tell, and at last, he seemed to yield. "Alright, but don't do too much or overexert yourself."

"I really can't, you know," I said. I never truly felt tired in this body, even if I was 'awake' or rather, 'aware' constantly. Much like food, this body seemed to have no real need for sleep, though I could go into a state similar to deep sleep when I was bored and there was little to engage me.

He smiled. "Sure, but we all have our limits, if not physically, then mentally."

He went to sleep, and shortly thereafter the sun came up.

For the next few days though, I still felt rather jumpy around the shadows, as if an evil doll with red hair might pop up out of the darkness to get me. I even made sure that the light in my room was always on for the next week.

I wish that I could maybe apologize to that little girl one day, but alas, it had been so long since that incident, multiple decades even, that she might even be buried six feet underground at this point even if I could find out her name. The residual guilt was something I would just have to live with, possibly forever, even.

Charlie's POV

The next days, or nights rather, were busy with work at my job so I didn't get to see Charlotte that often, though one day while returning from work I saw the package I had been waiting for from my mother. The sun had already come up, so I could only wait for nightfall to be able to show her what I had gotten her.

"I have something for you," I said, beckoning to Charlotte as this time, I went to her room with the box.

"What's in that?" she asked.

"A collection of my old phones," I said. 'Some of them are old smartphones, I thought that you could use one."

She peered into the collection and grabbed an old flip-phone. "This one looks like an actual phone with numbers you can dial. I don't know why you call these other things phones when they're more like televisions."

"Well, you can still dial things with the touch screen," I told her.

"And this one has a typewriter attached to it," she said, picking up my father's old Blackberry that I had gotten to use once he had upgraded to a newer model.

"Yeah, so the thing is that they all work like that," I told her. "They also have that kind of well... I guess you'd say typewriter keys, but they only show up on the screen." I grabbed an old smartphone, and thankfully this one was still compatible with one of my chargers, and after plugging it in, I found that it worked fine. It wasn't compatible with the latest 5G tower networks, but that was fine- I didn't intend to put a SIM card in it at all. Most of the phones in the box were completely useless now to use as actual phones, but the Wi-Fi capabilities of this one worked so there was no need for anything else - Charlotte couldn't leave the house after all. "And by inputting things you can use them too..."

I spent about fifteen minutes teaching her the basic interface of how it worked. By then, I had told her how to make calls, disconnect calls, charge the phone, and send messages. She seemed to understand a few of the basics, though I wasn't sure if she understood all of it. I had no way of knowing what she wouldn't know or get hung up on given the whole thing seemed pretty intuitive for me, though it was completely alien to her. Modern 'phones' were less phones and more computers after all, and trying to get the hang of one would take a lot of time.

"What does this icon do?" she asked, pointing to an Internet browser.

"Ah, I would avoid that.... I mean, I wouldn't go ahead and check on what that is until I can give you a chance to see it, I mean, do it with you," I said.

Now, she was a grown woman and you could argue that she didn't need 'supervision' at all - and that I was being somewhat paternalistic in deciding what she couldn't do - but on the other hand I really didn't think she was ready to handle the Internet quite yet. I was allowed practically unsupervised access to the internet when I was younger as my parents didn't fully understand it - back in the early 2000s, the 'golden age' of the 'wild west' of the internet, so to speak. I had seen multiple things I probably shouldn't have, and if something as relatively tame as Annabelle was enough to set her off, it was best that she not see what the world wide web had to offer. There was also the issue of her revealing too much of herself online, which could have its own issues.

I had to head off to work that night, though before going in, I did give her a call just to see if she could understand how it worked.

"Hello! Can you hear me?" she practically shouted into the speaker. I really hoped she hadn't spoken to my sister like that.

"Yes, yes, I can- you don't need to speak so loudly by the way," I told her. "Next, let me see if I can text you."

It was a simple text that read: 'Hello.'

I got a response five minutes later: 'Hello STOP I hope you have a nice day at work STOP I also think that I am doing this correctly STOP'

I responded: 'You don't need to use the word 'STOP' this isn't a telegram, there are periods. And I'm doing ok, thank you very much.'

She responded: 'Ok I see.' Five minutes later, another message: 'How much does it cost to send a message?'

'Oh, it doesn't cost money to send one the way we're sending it. There's no limit and you can message me as much as you want,' I told her. Technically something like an SMS service would have a limit back in the old days, but not something like this, and I'm pretty sure most service providers offer unlimited texting now.

'Oh, I see,' came the reply. 'I might be busy at work, so I might take some time to respond to things,' I told her. I then decided to send her a smiley face emoji, which seemed to blow her mind and I got five messages asking how to send one. I told her, though I didn't think she figured it out until an hour later when she sent me a string of texts that were all just various emojis, occasionally asking what each one meant.

Most of the time, we just communicated this way through text if we wanted anything, though two days later I got a phone call from her.

"Charlie! I figured it out!" she said, excitement in her voice. I was on a break at the time, so I decided to hear her out.

"Figured what?"

"I knew I had seen that weird symbol we were talking about earlier somewhere," she said. "Remember that book in German that I had found along with Aunt Emily's necklace - it was there as well!"

"Oh, right," I said. "Okay, I'll check it out when I get home. Or you could send me a photo of the page."

"A... photo?" she asked. Right, I should've brought that up with her and I tried to walk her through how to take a photo.

And ten minutes later- she did manage to send me a photo- of herself that is. She was rather enamored with the concept of a camera, especially now that she had one in her pocket, and sent me various pictures, some of which were out of focus (she likely had no idea how to delete the ones she didn't want or hadn't figured out that she didn't need to send every single photo she took). She finally did send me a photo of the picture of a page of the book that she was talking about, which was actually legible.

Yeah, it looked like the same symbol and I told her, once again, that I'd take a look at it when I got home.

When I did, she was asleep, as was to be expected. The weekend was next, so it wasn't an issue for me to stay up a little in order to examine the book a bit more. Not to mention now that I had the time, I intended to help Charlotte out with something.