Mark and I chatted for a while longer, catching up and sharing experiences throughout most of the night, and then we agreed to look into The System independently while keeping in touch via soul-mail (his term) – s-mail sounded stupid, but we both agreed to find a better term later. So I went offline and tried to get some sleep.

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… I gave up on sleep after about 5 minutes. Stupid idea anyway, sleep was. Not like I had anything important to do tomorrow. So I went back online, gave Mark a quick hello (he laughed), and focused my attention figuring out what the heck the Celestial had given us.

At first it seemed like a formless blob of information in a sticky putty form – hard to work with, and harder to get anything useful from. The more I tried, the more I realized that it was responding to my thoughts and expectations: If I expected it to be difficult, it would be. So I tried to calm myself down and think.

Ok, so apparently I can absorb energy from the universe. Great. If I can spend it, there must be a way to quantify the amount of energy I have. Soul-points? That sounded dumb, and I regretted it instantly as The System responded – I had 1.0000 soul-points suddenly (again with the four decimal places!). That was not very helpful, but I felt like I was making progress.

I played around with it, wondering what I could spend these points on. I thought about what I was doing just before the message popped up: Trying to shoot a spark through cutlery. Not very super-power-like, but it’s a start. I thought about spending the soul-point on that, and wondered what the effects and limitations might be. And The System responded; 1 soul-point would get me a minor lightning-bolt like ability, but I could pump more points into the ability to increase the effect.

At this point things were looking a LOT like a point-buy role-playing game, which was what I was both hoping for and kind of expecting. It was definitely a relief, because if there was one thing I was good at, it was power-gaming the heck out of a role-playing system! I absolutely loved optimizing character builds, and would happily spend ten or more hours getting the most out of a character that would only see combat for less than twenty minutes.

I wasn’t a munchkin though (someone who breaks a system to win), and if anyone ever mentioned it I would passionately and enthusiastically defend my position. I was always a team player, and my goal was that everyone have fun – therefore my characters were always well rounded, and I built them based on the personality I had come up with, not weaknesses in the rules. This was part of the challenge, and I was damn proud of my ability to squeeze more out of a role playing system than most other gamers I knew.

When I focused on the lightning-bolt ability I got a deluge of information about what I had to do to make the ability take effect. It turns out that it wasn’t as simple as just allocating points, but I suppose that made sense: This was real life, not some kind of game. All I had to do was follow the steps listed and visualize the soul-point energy in my body transforming… and the instructions listed exactly the steps I was taking back before all this started. But it did give me a very helpful tip.

Minor Lightning Bolt was 40% trained and required 1 soul-point; I couldn't buy it yet, as I needed to train it to 100% first. Minor Lightning Bolt was upgradable, and after spending 5 soul-points in total it would convert to Lightning Bolt. Since I had spent about five minutes ‘training’ the minor lightning bolt ability before and it was at 40%, I estimated that I only needed another six minutes to complete the ability! But I had to decide if it was the best use of my precious soul-points. This would require some planning…

At this point I sensed mom trying to wake me up, so I went offline with a quick goodbye to Mark (he seemed distracted).

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The next few weeks went by quickly, but my most interesting discovery came on the third day I had access to The System. I was getting tired with having go online every time I wanted to check on my abilities, and I wondered if there was any way to access or change things when I was offline – I had already seen a bunch of real-life pop-up messages sent by the Celestial, so maybe that was something I could do as well.

I spent the day with mom as usual, me playing and listening to her chatter away, her keeping busy around the house (it’s amazing how much dust gets in here), with breaks for feeding and walks to buy food or just get some air. From what I could see most parents just set their kids in a pen and left them to their own devices, or tied them to their backs and forgot about them. Mother was a lot more proactive with me than that, which was both a blessing and a curse at this point.

During my small amount of free time during the day, I tried dozens of different ways to access The System, but nothing worked. No tingle, no sparkle of light, and certainly no pop-up windows. Then at night, when I finally had a chance to go online, I tried something similar. Again, nothing. All the information I got here was in a weird straight-to-mind form, which made things difficult to search through. If I wanted something, it would come to me: But there was no way to just peruse information that I knew nothing about.

But I did have a minor breakthrough: I wished there was a status or abilities menu I could just flip through when I was offline – and suddenly there was. I had to decide what was in the menu, but once I did I could tell it would give me updated information. So, in effect, I could create a character sheet for myself.

I had a lot of trouble getting it to show up when I went offline, but I figured it out after messing around a bit. Then I experimented with formatting the chart and getting values to match the labels (harder than I expected), going offline every now and then to see how it looked. I was fairly happy with the results, but I still had a lot more work to do.

Strength: 100%

Dexterity: 100%

Intelligence: 100%

Fitness: 100%

Will Power: 100%

Perception: 100%

Charisma: 100%

Total Soul-points earned: 1.0000