“So dad,” Perry asked, lacing his fingers together over the breakfast table. “How was your night?”

Dad was a hawk-nosed, slender man with a receding hairline and a goofy grin, belying his profession as Mom’s arch-nemesis.

“Nothing too out of the ordinary. Had a bit of difficulty sorting things out there in the middle, but it went pretty well, all things considered.”

“Yeah, I saw the fight on the news,” Perry said. “You took down Blaze and Terramorph in a two-on one. Congratulations.”

“For legal reasons I cannot comment on that,” The Mechanaut said, taking a sip of his orange juice. “How was your day?”

“Four words.” Perry said. “Trimming. Claudette’s. Hippie. Bullshit.”

There was only one person in the world who called Hexen Claudette, and Perry was glaring at him.

Dad’s eyes bulged and he coughed out a spray of orange juice from his nose.

“Really Darryl?” Mom said, giving Dad a sour look.

“It was ten years ago!”

“Are you the reason I can’t use magic?” Perry asked.

“So the System finally booted, that’s great news! I thought you’d be mature a couple years earlier, but late bloomers are-“

“Dad. Are you the reason I can’t use magic?” Perry asked.

“Son, it was ten years ago, and your mom was doing rituals that nearly killed you! I got a bit emotional about it, and the Tinker Twitch took over. Your mom and I already worked through this and…you’re not gonna listen to me, are you?”

“Probably not,” Perry said, meeting the supervillain’s gaze.

Dad broke first.

“You know what? I’m just gonna go finish breakfast in the lair.” Dad said, picking up his plate.

“I want a divorce,” Perry said.

“Now, let’s not be hasty,” Mom said from the other side of the table. “Your Father and I didn’t think it would be healthy for you to grow up in a broken home.”

“I’m legally an adult already, and this is healthy!?” Perry shouted, pointing to where Mom was eating scrambled eggs and bacon in full Hero kit, her face hidden by a pointless domino mask.

She was on call.

“Don’t shout at your mother.” Dad said.

“You promised to kill her entire family a week ago! That includes me! And YOU!”

“Eh, it’s theatre,” Dad said, waving it off. “Ninety-nine percent of the big-leaguers are just putting on a show.”

“It’s true,” Mom said. “There was a release latch on the inside of the cage he caught me in last month. It had a cute little beetle on it.”

“I know you love beetles,” Dad leaned over and kissed Mom on the cheek.

“So you dicked around with my body without my consent,” Perry said, glaring down at breakfast. “And what have I got to show for it? Nothing!”

“Well, it sounds bad when you say it like that. Show me your stats,” Dad said, sitting back down beside Mom.

Perry wrote them down on a napkin and sent them over to Dad.

Dad inhaled through his teeth as he poured through the line of zeros and one 1.

“Well, you have one HP, that’s…something.” He glanced up at Mom. “I guess it didn’t trim very much.”

“I told you he had a destiny,” Mom said with a smug smile.

“Yeah, well, your magical destiny nearly fried his brain.” Dad said with the tired air of someone who’d rehashed the same argument a million times.

Mom blew air past her lips, picking another clump of eggs off her plate.

“All I have is one HP, I don’t even know what HP does!” Perry said, interrupting their squabble.

“Hit points.” Dad said with a frown. “I thought you played video games.”

“But what does it do!? Do I die when it hits zero, how much damage can it take? Do I have internal organs or am I just a big bag of hit points!? And why only one!?”

“Ah,” Dad said, grabbing his pen. “Well, originally, hit points were used to describe how many hits from a cannon a ship could take before sinking.” He started doodling a ship. “A lot like the game battleship, bigger ships had more hit points. So when I was working on your system, I designed each hit-point to absorb anything from the force of a boxer’s punch, all the way up to a 40cm cannon.”

“The hit points work as a shield, so if you hit zero, you won’t die instantly, you’ll just be out of absorption, and if you take another hit, Pbbbll,” He gave a raspberry and made an exploding motion.

“So I can take…one hit from almost anything, then I’m totally vulnerable? That’s my superpower?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s dumb!”

“They come back while you sleep!” Dad said, sounding offended. “No repair or recharge costs other than a good night’s rest! That is design elegance, right there.”

“…Fine. What was that about trimming causality?” Perry asked.

“Well, you said you really wanted to be in a videogame –“

“You asked me that question when I was eight!” Perry said.

“Right. Anyway, I needed to find a way to make ‘XP’ a real thing,” Dad said, making quotation marks. “So I came up with Causal Trimming.”

“Which is?”

“Okay, so imagine every action you could possibly take. You could go any direction and do anything within your capacity.”

“Uhuh,” Perry said.

“So there are an infinite number of possible actions, and among those actions are a tiny fraction that are extremely self-harming, or simply where you don’t do anything at all ever again. Stuff you would never ever decide to do.”

“Okay.”

“So there’s still a possibility you could do them. The System erases possible branches that will never come to pass. It takes those potential futures and renders them into energy, which is then relabeled ‘XP’

“So how does doing my homework raise my ‘XP’?” Perry asked.

“Well, look at it this way. The infinite number of possibilities available to you would be slightly greater if you had a firm grasp of your schooling, and weren’t grounded for not doing it.”

“So the total amount of infinite possibilities available to you ever so slightly expands when you do things that benefit or enrich you, including your homework. That expansion into new and exciting possibilities includes dead ends, which are trimmed for XP.”

“I…don’t get it.”

Dad sat back in his chair, twiddling his thumbs as he tried to come up with a better explanation.

“Okay, let’s do some hypotheticals. Say you pet a stray dog and get 1 XP. That’s because there’s a very small fraction of potential futures where being on that dog’s good side will benefit you.”

“What about the dead ends?”

“Forget about the dead ends, they exist in every branch. It’s a constant so we can ignore it.”

It was kind of creepy to imagine there were constant parallel dimensions where Perry started hurting himself for no reason at all. “Kay.”

“Then let’s say you save the president and gain ten thousand XP. Why would you get so much more XP than for petting the dog?” Dad asked.

“Because…having an in with the president would expand my infinite possibilities a lot more than a dog.” Perry said.

“And more infinite possibilities, means more branches that can be trimmed without causing damage to your Prime Branch, and therefore more energy to fuel your System.” Dad finished. “That, in a nutshell, is how my XP system works. Pretty cool, right?”

“I’d have to do my homework two hundred times to level up,” Perry said. “That’s gonna take all year.”

“You wanna level up faster? Do something amazing.” Dad said with a shrug, finally taking his breakfast over to the broom closet. He locked himself in, and there was a faint hydraulic whine as the elevator descended into Mechanaut’s lair.

“But be safe about it sweetheart,” Mom said, kissing him on the forehead. Her communicator was blinking red. A moment later she stepped out the door and gale-force winds wrapped around her and lifted her off the ground, launching her into the sky.

And just like that, Perry was alone with his thoughts, and the entire weekend to stew on them.

Something amazing, huh?

Perry went to his room, and opened the ‘Forbidden Closet’.

There, at the bottom of the closet, under a layer of clothes and dust, was his huge tub of failed magical experiments from ages ten to thirteen.

He glanced over at Terry, floating serenely in his tank.

“We got some work to do, Terry. But first…homework.”

Quest Complete!

Do your homework! 5 XP

Current Quest: Make the laws of physics and magic your bitch!

Reward: 1000 XP, Class Selection

Growing human brain cells on a microchip was insanely difficult. They required an incredibly precise environment, and even then, they tended not to live very long, But the nerve cells contained in Terry’s sub-brains were incredibly resilient, allowing someone with limited resources and relative inexperience to grow them almost as easily as algae.

Mom and dad thought nothing of Perry’s pet, but he was the key to getting what he’d been aiming at relentlessly for the last eight years.

Like I would ever quit trying to do magic. You are too naïve, father mine.

Perry had three microchips, each of which weren’t nearly ‘micro’ because of the plastic casing with temperature, moisture and nutrient control keeping Terry’s brain cells alive.

The octopus hadn’t liked getting jabbed with a needle, but it had taken an entire herring in exchange for some brain cells it could regenerate anyway, so both parties felt like they were getting the better deal.

Now that Perry had mastered keeping Terry’s brain cells alive on a microchip indefinitely, all he had to do was teach them how to cast spells.

“Hehehehe,” Perry chuckled evilly, rubbing his hands together as he booted up the training program, which taught each of the three bio-chips to do a specific series of actions in exchange for a tiny little dopamine hit.

He felt like a Dracula, lying in bed staring at the ceiling for hours before he was able to finally sleep, just staring at the blinking lights on his desk.

The next morning, Perry unplugged the chips from the training program and gave them four hours to ‘sleep’,

He nearly couldn’t stop himself from plugging them into the test spells, as he paced back and forth in his room for nearly two hours before he finally managed to distract himself with a book.

RING!

The four hour timer went off, and Perry leapt out of bed, dragging out the spellframe prototype from under the desk.

The spellframe in this case was a modified sieve with an electric motor, speaker, and a powerful full-spectrum lightbulb. Simple stuff.

Inside the sieve was perfect 3:1 mixture of unicorn crap and glowstone.

“Alright,” Perry said, plugging the spellframe into the output of the ‘Grow’ chip.

Moment of truth.

He plugged the chip into his computer, then ran the program.

Grow.EXE

“Ko’berath, Ko’berath, Ko’berath, Ko’berath,” A tinny voice came over the speakers as the electric motor on the sieve began stirring the dust, mixing it up and allowing the dust to fall through the colander directly past the powerful 300 watt bulb, which shone like the sun.

Literally.

The dust collected in the pan underneath the bulb, where a tiny syringe grabbed a bit of the dust and with a tiny little puff, blew a miniscule amount of the glowing golden mixture over a pot with a bit of clover in it.

Perry stared, his heart pounding in his ears.

The clump of clover started growing, filling the pot, the stems thickening as it gained no less than three inches of height in a handful of seconds.

“YES!”

In the small hours before he absolutely had to go to bed for school, Perry felt like he’d just landed on the moon.

Quest Complete: Make the laws of physics and magic your bitch! 1000 XP, Class Selection.

Congratulations! You have reached level 1!

Please choose a class!

Come on, Mage, wizard, anything….come on…Perry waited with bated breath as the Class choices began to roll in.

Tinker

Space Tinker

Industrial Tinker

Geo-Tinker

Garage Tinker

Bio-Tinker

Ray Tinker

Submersible Tinker

…

Perry’s eyes widened in horror as a list of nothing but Tinker variants paraded past his vision in a blur of motion.

“Oh, come on, Dad!”