"Why do you ask?” She looked at him, dragging herself round slowly, so she was facing him and leaning against the bench, nervously unscrewing and re-screwing a nut and bolt. “Are you feeling alright? You're looking like you've seen a ghost." Scowling a tiny bit at that Alex sighed, “A ghost? ……I wish. More like a killer robo-dog.” She shuddered slightly remembering the dream where the dog had actually gotten to her. She vaguely hoped that she hadn’t said it loud enough to be heard, but realistically she knew she had, she wanted to tell someone, but wasn’t sure a stranger was the best bet. Although…, thinking on it, maybe a stranger was ideal. If he knew something, there was a possibility he could help, and if he thought she was psycho; well there was a chance she wouldn’t have to see him ever again. And if his believing she was psycho meant one less customer for her dad, that was a small price to pay, and probably the worst it could get.
With that she decided to spill, and hope for the best.
“You’re gonna call me stupid, but I swear there was a Matrix-like episode last night, although I guess the world looked more like the one from Tron Legacy, but there was this dog with the sharpest teeth, like someone had shattered a window and added the glass to torn corrugated iron and a jarful of nails and then shoved them haphazardly into the thing’s giant maw. Not to mention it attacked me, even though the thing was only about knee high. Terrifying. Anyway, I got to this world-thingy by logging into a thing called ‘The Hack’. Which might be the name of the world? Oh well. Anyway, there was no one else there, at all. Except the killer robo-dog, that tried to attack me, but I killed it, at least it turned to dust. There were these glove things with knives on the front, that’s what I used to tear it to pieces. But……… I’m not even sure that it was real.” She spit the words out faster than a Gatling Gun, but slow enough to still be heard. Keeping her voice relatively quiet so her dad couldn’t hear as she explained, Alex added, after a small pause for breath; “My username was Anon.”
She had been twisting the nut and bolt the whole time she was talking, and had threaded and unthreaded it quite a few times. Finishing her story she looked down, watching her nimble fingers as they deftly pushed the nut around in circles, till finally it dropped off the end. She didn’t want to look at Akio, she didn’t want to see his reaction to her tale.