And Elix is at the dining table, doing something on a tablet that might be homework or might be a game of some kind, hard to tell. 

"Bruce! Did you sleep well?" 

"I did, thanks! When one of you has the time, I heard there was a spare computer I could use to look up stuff like when my doctor's appointment is?"

"Oh, right, yes! I'm so sorry, I should have thought of that. Guess we don't exactly have a standard checklist for people arriving from another world! Elix, sweet, can you go get your Dad's spare tablet from the storage area?" 

"Moo-om. Do I have to. I'm practicing." 

"You can put it on pause, can't you? Which I can't do to these eggs." 

"I can go look for it if you don't mind me poking around in there. Or just wait until you're free."

"My son is perfectly available. Elix, you could show him your attic setup?" 

"I guess I could." Apparently this is appealing enough to compete with practicing. Elix pauses his tablet and hops up willingly enough. "Follow me?" 

"Sure. What were you practicing?"

"It's a new game for spatial skills! You need to fold or unfold things in your head in order to solve the puzzles in the maze and know what way your character should go, and it's on a timer, and -" 

Elix chatters about his spatial skills game, almost without pauses for breath, the entire way through bounding up three flights of stairs and swarming up a ladder to a trapdoor in the ceiling. "Here!" 

Sounds like a nifty game! "Ooh, a trapdoor, fun." Into the ceiling with him.

It's an unusually nice attic! It's finished, though not painted with anything more than plain grey primer; there's no exposed insulation-foam or boards or any other hazards for a small child, and it looks like it was probably set up as a playroom at some point. It's currently mostly stacked with boxes on one side. 

The other side has...some sort of complicated bizarre-looking contraption; it resembles a blend between a weightlifting rack, one of those electric massage chairs that show up at airports as a novelty, and an...ergonomic computer workstation? There are gloves hanging from wires, currently draped respectively over two halves of one of those ergonomic keyboards, and a number of other straps and Velcro bits, also dangling wires. All the wires snake together underneath the chairbench part, joining into a sort of umbilical cord that goes...somewhere...probably that box... 

Elix is bouncing with suppressed glee. "Dad and I made it!"

He bends and reaches, tenderly and lovingly, for a box resting at the foot of the chairthing, which, when opened, proves to contain what's recognizably a VR headset. 

"It's for working on the virtual-online Chaosworld! ...There's not very much there yet but it's a work in progress!" 

"Oh, wow, that's so cool! What senses and motor outputs does it support?" A virtual chaos world? Despite, or perhaps because of, his disinclination to all things chaos, he can see the potential and it's impressive. He can also see that he could easily spend the next several hours tinkering with the setup, but 1) it is not his, and 2) he has important life stuff to get done first.

Elix is delighted to explain! He flits around pointing out different wires-from-velcro-straps that do motion detection. The system detects movement in all four limbs and also turning your head! They're working on adding a stirrup-type setup and shoes, so that you can "walk" and feel appropriate pressure in your feet, and with more thought they might even be able to cover "different textures of ground to walk on." Currently the way to "walk" is to sort of fake the walking motion by moving your knees up and down, which has more verisimilitude than the previous version which was 'use the control on the joystick.' 

He surfaces after several minutes of talking nonstop. "- Oh right I'm supposed to get you a tablet one sec–" Elix darts across the room and dives into the stack of boxes in the other corner. 

Bruce has several ideas for getting different ground textures, the most promising one being loosely based on those Earth toys with all the pins where you can make an impression of your hand or your face or whatever, but yes, tablet, good idea. Time to see how differently general-purpose computer UIs turned out, which is also pretty exciting!

Elix digs out a fairly generic-looking tablet screen; it's about the size and thickness of a magazine, matte grey, with a flip-back cover like a book, and also a clear plastic roll-down cover that doesn't appear to impede using the touchscreen. 

"Okay let's go charge it!" He bounces back over to the ladder. 

Unfortunate how it doesn't fit in a typical pocket, especially when traversing a ladder, Bruce thinks as he follows Elix back down, though there's a lot to be said for nice big screens.

"Has this planet managed to agree on a single kind of charging adapter? Mine hasn't."

"For these, yes! Took five years of arguing about the standard before they picked one to roll out and imported this sort of tech from the Underworld. I think the Underworld still has about twenty different kinds of power-charging." 

"I guess it would, wouldn't it. Does a lot of stuff get, hm, beta-tested down under like that?"

"Yeah! That's where everything good comes from! For tech stuff, anyway. It's sort of a new thing, I guess? A hundred years ago there wasn't nearly as much stuff being invented."

"Yeah, technology on Earth has sped up a lot in the past several decades too. We think it's a mix of greater population, greater wealth so that population can afford to spend more time inventing things, and a couple of innovations that make more innovation easier."

"Huh, cool, makes sense." 

The standardized charging station turns out to be wireless; it's a flat black panel on one of the walls, apparently magnetic, with a couple other tablets of different sizes stuck to it. A cord trails from the bottom of it into the wall. 

"This is the really fast sort of charger," Elix says brightly. "There's portable ones and ones you can just plug into your wall sockets, but all the new-built houses have the central-installed kind now. It'll be good to use in - ten minutes, probably. Let's go get breakfast?" 

Breakfast is on the table. It's scrambled eggs with wilted spinach and shredded cheese mixed in, with crackers and fruit on the side.