It was two days after my trip into the wilds when I woke up to find that my clothes no longer fit me. I must have leveled up again. I walked over to the mirror to look. Four year old me was a little taller but otherwise exactly the same as I remembered from Lv3: dull brown hair, light skin, and grey eyes. It wasn’t a welcome sight, mostly just the dull sight of a dull person. Apparently if I got powerful enough or had enough money then my appearance could be changed however I liked. It was a strange thought, but not at all unexpected for Paradise. I put it out of my mind and went to the task of adjusting my clothes to fit my larger frame.

This level up took a lot less time than the previous ones. I knew that some of the requirements were ‘mental’ and, according to my father, ‘not something I needed to worry about’; but the requirement of raising my Stability was always going to be the hard part. Er, Constitution, not Stability. I’ve spent too much time around my Father and his theories again. Either way, I could kind of understand why this stage had gone by so quickly. Just the fight alone had stretched what my body could take, and that wasn’t even considering the attack in the alleyway. I’m still not sure what he was expecting to get out of that fight.

I headed out into the hallway in time to see my Father before he left for work. “Congratulations, Son. You certainly are growing up quick! I would stay a bit longer to celebrate but I’m likely going to be late as it is.” He reached down and patted my shoulder. “Go see your mother whenever you are ready to get started with your next tasks. I’m sure you will like it!” He gave me a wink that made no sense to me at this ungodly hour of the day and I watched him leave.

Let me just say it now. I miss coffee. More than anything else, that is the one thing I’m still not sure I can do without. I wake up clean and refreshed otherwise, so showers are not really a priority (weird as that sounds), but would it kill people to have running water so that I could try splashing it on my face to wake up? Mornings are evil and I am convinced that this entire planet has conspired to make them as bad as possible. Why else would there be a modern society without coffee? Could modernity even develop without the black brew of the dark gods? An evil plot is the only explanation that makes sense.

I made my way to my parent’s room door and knocked. There was some sounds of distress before my Mother called out something between a loud groan and the words “Come in.” Opening the door I saw her in something like a bathrobe with a disgruntled look on her face. Unlike my Father, my Mother was a sane, rational, decent human being. That is to say, not a morning person.

“You’ve grown,” she observed. “Why are you here so early?”

“I happened to wake up and Dad told me to come see you first thing,” I replied. “It isn’t like I have anything else to do right now.”

She gave me a slow, uncomprehending look before nodding me over with a grunt and walking to an empty section of wall and reaching up to touch it at waste level for her. “Put your hand up next to mine and feed energy into the house like you are trying to mark it. I’m going to link you into our home’s structure.”

I nodded and silently got to work. It usually took a while with smaller things and I could feel the drain, so there was no way I was going to be able to mark something the size of the entire house. Was she just going to stand there beside me all day or were we going to take shifts to let my energy recover. I thought about asking but, at the moment, that seemed like work. I could feel my mana spread out but it was being repelled by the mana that was already in it in such a way that only my active direction was keeping it where I wanted it. The process was painstakingly slow, especially since I felt like going back to sleep, and I heard Mom yawn. As I continued the feeling started to change so that my energy was no longer pushing and being pushed but instead started to spread throughout the wall, the room, and the entire house.

“Good,” Mom said. “You can now fix the house if you break it. I have one other thing for you.” She went into the back room and brought back a baseball sized orb and handed it to me. It was black, featureless, and sat in my hand like an oversized baseball. “Be sure to claim it before doing anything else. That’s a training tool that will help you get through your next three stages, even if you don’t have anything else.”

“Great.” I said, not sure if I should be excited or not. “But what does it do?”

“It lets you use ‘magic’.” She answered. I immediately perked up at that explanation. I would finally be able to do some real magic! “Depending on how you put energy into it, it can do a few different things. My husband and his friend told me to mention that it was ice attribute, which should help a lot in if you have to fight something with a fire attribute in the future.” She continued to herself, trailing off. “Mostly I’m just glad they found something that won’t break my house too badly…”

“Right, and ‘ice’ is?” I asked.

“The complex element of Earth and Water.” She answered. I would have expected Water and Wind to make ice, but I guess that ‘Solid’ ‘Water’ did fit the theme. Fire/Wind was probably thunder or lightning. Would that make Fire/Earth into coal or something? “Do you have any other questions?” she asked, pulling me back to the moment.

I was all smiles, excited to get started. “How do I use it? How do I make it do stuff? What can it do?”

“Calm down,” she said with a slight smile. Most of her smiles were slight, unless she got caught completely off guard, but I was getting better at recognizing them. “If you put enough mana into the orb the energy will ‘burst’ out as an attack. ‘Interrupt’ the flow with more energy to cause a different effect, in this case it will leave a proximity mine that will float and fade away till it runs out of energy or someone bumps into it. Finally, you can ‘charge’ it up to create a third effect that is greater than the others at the cost of more time and energy spent. Remember these three modes of operation. A lot of things use them.”

I nodded excitedly as I reviewed what she had said: burst, interrupt, charge. Then I stopped as I had a thought. “Um, what do I do with the mines afterward? I don’t think it would be a good idea to just leave them sitting around the house.”

She nodded back. “Just set them off. They are constructed of your own energy so they won’t hurt you, but do be careful that the explosion doesn’t knock you over. It shouldn’t yet be too powerful, but you are still quite small. You can also use the burst mode to take care of the mines as well. The burst mode is what you should be focusing on, not the interrupt, since it will help you the most with your current stage.” It was interesting to hear that my energy wouldn’t hurt me. I wonder if that was a universal property of magic or some sort of safety feature built into the item?

“Right, well, I should get to that. So if you will excuse me.” I started to head off as I spoke. Is it wrong of me to want to play with my new toy?

“William,” my Mother called, calling to me before I got more than a few steps away. “Be sure to claim it first.”

I nodded as I started running to the couch and getting started. Tagging and claiming items weren’t exactly hard tasks, now that I knew how to do it; they just took a while. I had to tag first even though I knew that it should be possible to do both tasks at once, and only then could I truly claim the item. Both tasks were the same in how they seemed to work. Mentally pull the item in while opening the floodgate of power to fill the item at a conceptual level. I imagined that it was like interacting with items at the level of Plato’s ‘Realm of the Forms’, but that was probably just me romanticizing it and Dad would have some scientific explanation to demystify even this sort of magic.

The hard part was in getting the stupid thing to activate. Eventually I went to my Mom and she tested it to confirm that it wasn’t broken or anything. Her explanation was that I just wasn’t putting enough energy in it. I kept at it for hours, only stopping to try to figure out what Mom was doing in puttering around the house as though she needed to personally inspect every inch of it. Her only explanation was “keeping up the house” and “that is not important, you will learn soon enough.” Ugh.

Eventually Dad got home and took over for Mom. His only advice was to “keep pushing” and that it was like using a completely new muscle that you would have to learn to use. When I asked if it was the same for people here who were born and suddenly had a tail or something he got a bit excited. He then went into a hour long discussion of autonomous movement and coordination that, while being somewhat interesting and an excellent distraction, didn’t actually help me at all.

The trick, which I ended up learning early the next day, was to actively push the energy while still holding control of it and holding onto the item in the same part of my focus that had the energy. I also had to put in a lot of energy. It was enough to make me dizzy the first couple times I tried. I actually managed to activate the third mode first, the ‘charge’ mode, since it required so much less energy to get it started. The low initial cost was nice but was ruined by how it used up mana over time and was underwhelming in effect. All it did was make a sphere of cold in a single foot radius sphere, or roundabout. The first mode was similarly underwhelming, as all it did was make a short conical blast out the opposite side of the orb. Weirdly it had no recoil but did knock my arm away when I reached in front, but it was hard to do anything interesting with it because the effect always came out the opposite side as where I held it to put the energy in.

The real fun came with the second mode, the ‘interrupt’ that created a floating blast mine. The downside was that it dropped me to empty mana with a single use, as opposed to half empty with the ‘burst’ mode, but that was somewhat mitigated by how I recharged in something like five minutes. The upside was that I could do so very much with it. The first neat trick came when I realized that it took a couple seconds for the energy to finish forming into its sphere and ‘arm’ its explosion. This meant that I could take the thing to move it around, wedge it between walls and furniture to knock them apart, even take the thing and throw it.

In totally unrelated news (no sarcasm here, of course I didn’t stick a blast mine behind the couch to see if I could blow away from the wall. Why would you think that?), I also got experience using my mana to fix a lot of things. I could speed up the process with more mana but it was inefficient in a way that meant five minutes of more passively feeding mana into it would recover more than pushing all my energy into it and then waiting five minutes to recover, and I still had to sit around doing basically nothing with magic while I waited to recover in both cases.

And so I waited, feeding mana into the wall and the couch (which I was also now linked into, see the afore mentioned incident that I will totally deny if asked about when I am older). I passed the time by watching my Mother do her weird ‘aimlessly walking around every inch of the house’ thing that she did. It seemed methodical but not so structured that she didn’t modify her route from time to time. It was something that she did every day, usually one of the first things after she got dressed and checked her pad. That pad was another thing I was curious about. My parents told me there wasn’t an ‘internet’ but that pad was obviously connected to something… and I’m getting distracted again. The distraction thing has gotten easier but still pops up from time to time. Nope, not the time to think about that; I’m watching my Mother do her weird shuffling tour of the house. It is almost like she thinks that there is an invisible and immobile person hiding out and she is determined to find them by bumping into them. You know, that or vacuuming.

Wait, could that be it? I waited for my Mom to pass by before jumping up to run up behind her.

Also, running has gotten easier. I feel more like a gangly pre-teen than an awkward child. I would say this point was ‘neither here nor there’, but it was kind of both here and there since it dealt with getting from here to there.

Coming up behind her got me my answer in the form of a clean and refreshed feeling all over my skin. “You’re cleaning with magic!” I stated the obvious.

“Yes.” She answered, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were doing that?”

“I did.” She answered definitively. “I told you that I was taking care of the place when you asked what I was doing before.”

“But you didn’t say you were doing it with magic!”

She gave me a slight frown. “Why should that make a difference?”

“Because it’s magic and magic is cool!”

“You are very odd. Didn’t you tell me that, in your old world, there was a machine that would clean the floors at an appointed time and then return to its place to recover without any more work necessary for its operation? That seems far more ‘cool’ than what I’m doing.” She tried but she just wasn’t down with the lingo. Neither am I, really, but she doesn’t need to know that.

I nodded. “Remind me to tell you about Stabby the Roomba sometime.” I stopped before I got too far off track. “But that isn’t important right now. What is important is that you can teach me how to do that cleaning thing. I tried asking Dad to teach me the cutting thing he did with his finger but he thought I might hurt myself or someone else with it.”

She nodded in her own stoic way. “You will learn in time. Have you practiced pushing energy into your arms to increase the power you can apply?”

I sighed. “I have but it is just so boring.” I waved my hands in the air in hokey display of mock excitement. “Ooooh, I can move furniture around slightly faster than I could otherwise. How special.”

She nodded, ignoring my sarcasm. “It is a vital skill, not unlike the ‘magic’ that excites you. The utility may be mundane but, if nothing else, it is far more efficient then your new toy.” She gave me a slight smile as she spoke.

“I know, I know. It just isn’t very magical.” I really wasn’t sure how to explain it any better than that. There was a certain wonder about how some things that were just not possible in my old world but here they were commonplace. There were no cars or planes because people could run faster than cars could drive off-road and either fly themselves or teleport more easily than a plane could operate. There were no hospitals because healing was common and no graveyards because nobody died. And, better yet, I could learn to do these things myself! I could fly or teleport or even do something as mundanely magical as cleaning a shelf by simply waving my hand over it. Or I could coat arms with mana, which didn’t even make a glow, to get what didn’t even amount to super-strength.

She nodded and, although I wasn’t sure if she understood, she was at least willing to take me at my word for why I was focused elsewhere. “So what are you going to do now?” she asked.

“Actually, there is one thing I want to try.” I knew that when I created the mine orb it popped up just on the other side of the tool from where I put the mana in and was of similar size and shape but, if I did it when something was in the way, it still appeared overlapping the item. I broke a chair leg figuring that out, and I had to fix it afterward. But what would happen if I tried overlapping part of myself? I could always try overlapping my hand but that seemed boring and being four meant I had a ready made excuse. So instead I attached it to my butt. Nope, no good reason, I just thought it would be funny.

It popped up overlapping part of my posterior, gripping my gluteus maximus, and properly arranged on my ass. Unfortunately I could already feel the thing breaking down even before it was fully formed. This was about to be a very short experiment. So I decided to sit on it. This was a perfectly valid experiment to see if it had enough force to get me standing again. It had been able to move the couch, although not far, and the blast seemed to be amplified somewhat on the chair leg; so it had a fair chance of success.

“What is it that you are doing?” My Mom asked.

I looked toward her to answer just as the mine went off. True to form it didn’t actually hurt when it went off, but it did launch me across the room to ram into the wall and then fall to the floor. The wall hurt and so did the floor. The experience left me a bit stunned. Vaguely I could hear my mother’s voice in the background as I came to my senses.

“What was that?” I asked once things started making sense again.

My mother looked at me with panicked eyes as she looked me over. Yeah, that made sense. I did just fly five feet through the air right in front of her. “Are you alright? Is anything broken? Does it hurt anywhere? Tell me and we can find someone to heal you up. You’ll be as good as new. After that…”

“Mom,” I interrupted her rant and looked myself over. Everything seemed to be in the right place. I ached a bit from the whole ‘bouncing off the wall’ thing but nothing was broken and the pain didn’t get worse when I moved. “Everything seems to be good.”

She eyed me skeptically. She was probably using some sort of ability on me as I took her pause to take inventory of what had just happened. “Are you sure? You appear to be injured.”

“Yeah, I’m ok.” I answered offhandedly as I realized the gravity of what I had just done. “In fact, I’m better than ok! I’m great!”

“What?” she asked with no small amount of surprise. She quickly regained her composure and continued. “How can this be when you hurt yourself?”

“Because: Rocket Jump!” I spoke, looking straight into her eyes. This discovery was great and awesome, but it deserved a certain level of respect for how great and awesome it was.

She stopped at that, as though her entire thought process had grounded to a halt. I wasn’t surprised, this was just that great a thing. “What?” she asked in a confused tone that showed she had less respect for the great and awesome thing that I had shown her than she should.

She probably just didn’t understand. “A rocket jump is where you use an explosion, like from a rocket, which is an item that fires a projectile that then explodes, in order to propel yourself forward or upward farther than you could reasonably jump on your own. It didn’t really work in real life, before, because of the whole ‘chunky salsa’ rule and dismemberment issues. It was great in games, though.”

The confusion on her face grew more intense. “Chunky salsa rule?” she asked, as though she was trying to piece out what it meant. The rule was a common unofficial rule added to games to make them more like real life despite the rules sometimes not working like you would think would be obvious. It stated that anything that reduced your character to the consistency of chunky salsa was automatically fatal, no matter what the other rules of the game might say. For instance some systems might have a rocket deal ten six sided dice worth of damage, or 10 d6; roll them and that is how deadly the explosion was that your character got caught in. Characters in the same system might have a total of 40 or 50 points of damage that they could take. So, even if the player took that rocket and aimed it at their own feet, they would likely survive; this despite the fact that, in real life, the explosion would be very obviously deadly. Hence, to preserve reality, the ‘chunky salsa’ rule was born!

My Mother’s face took on the look of confusion, then revulsion, then went completely flat. “What?” She asked, her voice sounding completely deadpan.

“This is great!” I answered. “It obviously wasn’t possible in my old world, but here I just need to figure out how to aim!”

“What…”

“And land, I suppose. That hurt, but it isn’t like I won’t just heal up.”

“What…”

“Oooh! I could use it to see the top of the shelves! Or maybe even try to land on top of the house!”

“What…”

“I wonder if I could,”

“Stop,” she interrupted me. She quickly snatched the orb out of my hand and pointed down the hallway. “Go to your room. I’m calling your Father.”

I’m pretty certain I messed up there somehow. “Um? Should I just,”

“Go.” She cut me off. “To your. Room. Now.”

I headed off in that direction, turned to see her staring at me, and then walked in and closed the door.

I honestly wasn’t sure what I had done. I don’t think I messed up the wall but, even if I had, it wouldn’t be the first time and it usually just makes her annoyed and she tells me to fix it. Maybe it was because I was focused on using the orb rather than the other more boring uses of magic? I don’t think it was because of me getting hurt. After all, she was the one to repeatedly stab me to death. Could it have been something to do with the whole ‘chunky salsa rule’? It is a dumb game mechanic meant to keep characters in pen-and-paper games from walking away after having a car fall on them or something equally as outlandish; but here everyone walks away no matter how large an the object that crushes them or crazy the injury. I couldn’t really think of anything else that I had done. I talked about getting on top of the house, but that didn’t seem like it would be the problem that got her so upset.

I wasn’t happy to have her upset at me, and it did hurt and feel bad, but at least this time I didn’t feel like crying. Mostly I just felt bummed out. At first, when I was younger, crying came so easily that it was impossible to not start bawling when things went sideways. Now I just feel down and unable to even think about anything good, but I could probably distract myself with how flighty my mind was. It was weird seeing the changes in my emotionalism and the newfound ability to hold onto multiple thoughts at once. It seems like such a small thing until you are denied it. But all this did beg the question of how I wanted to end up. Perhaps over time I would develop to be a lot like I had been before, only a healthier and more physically active version of myself. Or maybe I could choose to be different, a less sarcastic and more optimistic person than I was. There was only one problem with that: I liked sarcasm.

The sound of the door opening broke me out of my introspection and I pressed my ear to the door to hear what I could.

My Father spoke first. “I got here as quickly as I could, now what is the problem?”

“William, he… He tried to blow himself up.” She said, her voice less stable than I had ever heard it before.

He nearly shouted his relpy. “What?! How?”

“With this.” She presumably showed him my orb or pointed at it or something. However it was done, the point was made.

After a couple seconds he answered. “He can’t actually hurt himself with that, all he can do is knock himself over. I doubt he can even make the floor slippery and fall.”

“He made a mine on the ground and then sat on it. He then became quite excited to repeat those actions.”

About half a minute went by, and a noise that I couldn’t identify, before he spoke again. “I’ll go speak with him.” After that I heard footsteps and ran away from the door to sit on my bed. Moments later the door opened.

My Father looked around before coming in and pulling up a chair to sit across from me. He didn’t speak.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow and asked a question. “What happened?”

“I used a mine to throw me forward, like a catapult or something. Mom got upset even though I wasn’t badly injured and sent me to my room.”

“Didn’t it hurt?” he asked with a bit of a frown.

I shrugged. “Sure, a little bit, but it wasn’t that bad. Besides, not only do I heal damage over time but I’ll just come back if I die. I don’t understand what the big deal is.”

He shrugged. “It isn’t that simple. Getting hurt is scary. Dying is scary. Most people never truly get used to it. Those that do, it tends to change them. Life isn’t meant to leave and return on a whim.”

I understood what he was saying but, with reality of this world being what it was, it didn’t make sense. “Why is it so hard for people to figure out that you aren’t really ‘Dying’ when you ‘die’, just ‘resetting’? Getting hurt never means a forever handicap and injuries almost never have to deal with complications; and people even regenerate the damage they do have with a little time. It really isn’t that complicated, even a child could figure it out. And I mean a child from before, not one of the reincarnated ‘children’ that everyone is here.”

He gave me a look. “I doubt most children could figure something like that out.”

“They can and they do,” I explained. “Children in my world don’t play games with a lot of deaths in them when they are too young because they can’t tell the difference between how things work in video games and real life. Kids manage to figure it out pretty early, though. Only people with mental problems can’t tell the difference between how things work between video-games and reality.”

“So you think this place is like a video game, then? That’s why you are so minimizing of the fear of death and injury?” He frowned and looked away as he spoke, seemingly measuring my words against some unknown standard.

I sighed. “Dad, it seems pretty obvious if you really think about it. We come back from the dead, don’t need to eat or go to the restroom, have character classes, stats, health and stamina and mana totals, magic and monsters. And even the rules of how things work are video-game like. Granted, it is a system that I’ve never seen before and some stuff just seems overly complex, but if the Paradise is as old as you say then that may just be power creep. Do you have any idea how convoluted some games get after they have been running for a while, with new systems and options added onto the old? This feels exactly like that.”

His frown only deepened. “But you said video games are supposed to be fun but you find all this practice tedious. Doesn’t that seem not ‘video game’ like?”

I shrugged. “This is obviously the tutorial and I’m having to go through it the long way. No ‘press “A” for fireball’ for me, I actually have to learn how to do it. On the up-side that means this ‘game’ system is probably a lot more free-form and adaptable than most, so no Gygax magic here!”

He looked even more confused, though the frown had reached its maximum potential. “Gygax magic?”

“Ugh, sorry. I got a little off topic. It is a system where people have individual spells but they can pretty much only ever do one specific thing. If you want something more powerful you either need a different spell or an ability that works on the spell. But my point was that this system isn’t like that. Abilities that might be intended for one thing can be used for something else if you are creative.”

“Like using a proximity mine ability to… ‘rocket jump’?” he asked dubiously.

“Yeah, exactly like that! I wasn’t trying to hurt myself or anything, I’m just doing the most basic stuff that any player would do; trying to figure out the system and what weird and whacky stuff I can do with it.”

He shook his head at that. “William, most kids don’t try to blow themselves up once, let alone multiple times to experiment.”

“Then maybe they…” I stopped speaking rather than finish my thought: ‘maybe they aren’t players, maybe they are NPCs.’ Non Player Characters, developer sanctioned robots, background and filler stand-ins for the actual players; you could call them whatever you wanted, but it didn’t change anything. They were the fake people programmed into a video game setting to do all the boring work and who never really have any effect on the world. It wasn’t flattering. There was even a popular meme built off the concept that not everyone was meaningful existence: ‘Are you a player, or just part of the game.’

“William, what’s wrong?” he asked in a concerned tone. I must not have hidden what I was thinking about very well. In all fairness, I hadn’t really tried. The thought had completely come out of no-where and fit so unfortunately well. And yet I had started to think of Edmond and Thea as my actual Father and Mother. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my parents from before, I do and try not to think about them too much because it is depressing to think that I will never see them again, I had just also started to think of these people as my parents in this life. I didn’t want my new father and mother to be changeless NPCs, not ‘real people’ in any meaningful sense of the word.

Eventually I decided to go to the heart of the matter, to the meat of what I found wrong with the world with a single question. “Why not?” Even if this didn’t set my mind at rest it would, at the very least, change the subject.

“Why not what? Why don’t other kids blow themselves up to test stuff?” He asked, and I nodded. “Because it is scary and hard to do?” He tried after more than a few moments worth of consideration. He shook his head and seemed to try again. “Because hurting people changes you, regardless of how much. Pushing another living being, and especially a thinking being, to their limits so that they break only changes you that much more. That isn’t to say that the change is all bad, we need people who can stand up against others, even when it means they get hurt. Your Mom is one of those people. She helps people by protecting them, even when it means protecting them from other people.” He smiled a bit at the mention of his wife.

And then the smile was gone and he looked saddened, even angered. “It just isn’t meant to be easy. People who don’t care about the pain of others, they end up doing bad things. It doesn’t matter that people come back when they are killed or that injuries fade. Theft of one’s most treasured possessions may be impossible and one’s personal skills and ability can never be crippled or taken away. And yet… trolls will find a way.” He spat out his words, as though calling someone a ‘troll’ was one of the gravest insults possible.

His view on trolls seemed out there but then, in a world were so many of the ways that people were horrible to each other were impossible, maybe it was normal? I’ve played plenty of games with trolls, some were good natured although most were malevolent, and so I could understand the sentiment. I didn’t agree with it, but I did understand. Still, for all I knew this was his personal thing and not a ‘Paradise’ thing.

Even so, there were more important things to talk about at the moment. “So why was Mom so upset? I wasn’t trying to hurt her or mess stuff up or anything.”

“She thought you were trying to hurt yourself.” He answered.

“I… but…” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “I’m fine. Nothing is broken and the few hit points I lost have long since recovered. Don’t people eventually get used to getting hurt and recovering? At least those people who fight a lot or who come from worlds with quick and easy recovery; that has to be normal for them.”

He inclined his head. “Yes, but you’re still just a child and the way you flinch when you get hurt makes it clear that you aren’t used to it.” I wanted to answer back, but he was right and I wasn’t sure what would reassure him. He waited a few seconds as I deliberated, and then continued. “She’s worried about you. We both are. The way you push yourself… it isn’t normal. Most people don’t rush in to get hurt, even if they know they will grow stronger for it. They have to learn those types of behaviors.”

I nodded in understanding. This time I really did understand; they thought I was the weird one here. Video games, and even the equipment to play them as a casual pastime, were an impossibility on most worlds. People were either fighters, or not; but I was not a fighter who had experience with the tactics and thought processes of someone who was. Most people came from worlds with one standard of physics or another and had to take a good amount of time to adjust; but I had experience with video games where anything could change and I would choose switch between their worlds at a whim. So what I saw as normal gaming behavior for what may as well be a ‘full dive Virtual Reality’ with the pain settings turned up beyond what was normally allowed, he saw as something completely different. My quick acceptance with the different rules of the world seemed like someone disconnected with reality and my easy acceptance of pain probably seemed like someone who didn’t care about self-preservation.

“I think I understand,” I started slowly, “but I’m not really sure how to explain it. This world may be different from my own, but I have seen things that were similar though… um…” I tried to search for the right word to express what a ‘video game’ actually was, “through ‘shared imaginations’ of other people. They would create entire miniature worlds that thousands or even millions of people would spend some time living in. I haven’t gotten in a fight in the real world since grade school, but I have fought thousands of people in those shared worlds and even worked my way up the rankings of the best of the best. I have seen worlds of peace and world spanning wars. Galaxy and interdimensional spanning wars, even. In some worlds death was semi-permanent or partially debilitating, while others death happened multiple times per minute with no downside beyond having to try to succeed again. I know I’ve mentioned ‘video games’ before, but that is what they were. Sure, they were for fun and pleasure, but they were also my life profession and passion. You can’t understand me and how I react to the weirdness of Paradise without understanding that.”

My words had gotten more confident by the end. For his part he seemed to be listening and started even nodded along. I had no idea how much of what I was saying was getting through. Still, it needed to be said and, if I was going to get along with my parents, they needed to accept my ‘unusual’ background.

Finally, after what felt like forever, he shook his head, like he was trying to dislodge something, and answered back. “It is like a strange bit of magic, unique to your old world. We will try to take that into account when dealing with your… ‘nonstandard’ behavior. I’ll talk with your Mother. She still won’t want to see you hurt, especially till you can take a hit without flinching, so I would ask that you be careful in front of her. Can you do that for me?”

I nodded in affirmation. It would slow down my experimentation but it would be worth it to keep her from freaking out again.

He gave me another look before speaking up. “Your old world was weird, even weirder then most. Do you know that?”

I rolled my eyes. “This world works like a video game. That seems plenty weird to me.”