The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.

-Albert Einstein

After Perry dropped off a man-sized chunk of prawn he’d snagged off the beach to the man-hunters, he went back to his house and got verbally reamed for a good half hour for nearly getting people killed at the beach.

His mom for going too far, his dad for not going far enough.

Perry just wondered how they knew.

By the time Perry finally went to bed, he was exhausted and passed out in a matter of seconds.

There was so much to do tomorrow.

***Tomorrow***

Perry inspected the seedy 2-story motel.

The walls were thin, but strong and durable, the rooms chintzy looking. The water pressure, internet and electricity was good, though. Perry didn’t bother making those poor to maintain the façade.

There was an empty pool in the back, just waiting to be filled up, surrounded on three sides by the back of the motel, offering it a fair amount of privacy despite being right next to the road.

The gym had weights for civvies, and bowflexes with steel cable and spring steel as thick as Perry’s arm for the bruisers.

The rec room had pool, ping pong, a couple discount T.V.s, some dead consoles he’d resoldered, some video games…

The carpets were weathered and stained with unknown fluids, but clean, there were some refurbished couches and a bean-bag.

In short the place was objectively as comfortable as mathematically possible. Too ostentatious and people would be afraid of relaxing. It had that lived-in feel that would encourage people to slouch, spill their drinks and eat chips on the couch.

Perry was pretty proud of that part.

Perry didn’t have the materials to make a secret elevator, so he’d just taken a page from Dave’s book and made a staircase in the Manager’s Office.

Underground was much more unfinished.

The lair was a huge open space, filled with heavy-duty power hookups and vents. His previous workshop took up a tiny corner of the space, covered in C-4 smudges.

The industrial chemistry equipment was on order, but since it was High Tide, shipping was delayed, of course.

Still, Perry could easily picture his lair filled, humming with power as one project after another was developed.

He felt a manic chuckle rising from inside. There were no capes around to give him funny looks, after all, so he went ahead and did it.

“MUAHAHAHAH!”

Quest Complete!

Make a proper lair!

Reward: 300 XP, Lair.

Congratulations! You are now a level 3 Garage Tinker.

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Garage Tinker

Level 3

HP: 4

Body: 3

Stability: 3

Nerve: 6

Attunement: 12

Free Points:4

XP to next level 1848

“Hah, hah…ha..”

Perry did a mental double-take at his free points. It was one point higher than it should’ve been, confirming a suspicion he’d been harboring.

Oh my god. I think Attunement effects the Generalist perk.

Perry ran over to his computer and opened his excel spreadsheet.

He’d made a handy graph for the multiplicative power of a stat at any given level.

He made a new line and entered in his levels in a column, from one to twenty, then started crafting a formula for his Attunement growth in the other.

Let’s see, there’s 3 guaranteed stat points based on the standard +1 free floating per level and +2 Attunement per level automatically.

That’s three points that never change. Now…it SEEMS like Attunement affects the Generalist Perk, which normally gives me two extra points per level.

Last level, I hit 10 Attunement.

Perry glanced over at his stat column and slid down to 10.

1.628

2*1.628= 3.256 extra stat points from the Generalist perk.

Math checks out. Presumably it was rounded down.

Three free points, and two more points modified by my Attunement level.

In the level 1 row, Perry entered 5, the amount of Attunement he’d had at level one, then crafted a formula directly beneath it in the level 2 row.

=ROUNDDOWN(L2+3+(2*1.05^L2), 0)

L2 being the cell directly above that had his level one Attunement, or 5 in this case.

The ‘0’ told the round down function to round down to the nearest whole number.

So the function looked like this: 5+3+(2*1.05^5), rounded down to the nearest whole.

It gave back 10.

Heart pounding, Perry extended the spreadsheet down, each function grabbing the numbers from the previous one.

His skin went cold.

The list looked a little something like this:

level Attunement 1 5 2 10 3 16 4 23 5 32 6 44 7 64 8 112 9 587 10 5.48465E+12 11 #NUM! 12 #NUM! 13 #NUM!

A tingle went up Perry’s spine.

Is that right? IS THAT RIGHT!? HOLY HELL IS THAT RIGHT!!!??

It looked right based on the gut check until it got to level eight and went freakin’ bananas.

Perry painstakingly did the math for each cell until he got to level eight.

112+3+(2*1.05^112)= 587.314

587+3+(2*1.05^587) =5,484,645,342,965.424

Five Trillion.

Four hundred and eighty four billion.

Six hundred and forty five million.

Three hundred and forty-two thousand.

Nine hundred and sixy-five!

STAT POINTS!

AT LEVEL TEN!

Perry leapt out of his chair, his heart slamming in his ears as he shut off the monitor.

He didn’t want anyone to see that.

ANYONE.

Not his parents, not Heather, not himself. Nobody. Perry wished he could scrub it out of his memory, so mindreaders couldn’t catch wind of it.

All of Perry’s hair stood on end on the back of his neck.

His math was showing him that he could become strong enough to spank Solaris like a willful child at level ten, should he continue putting all of his free points into Attunement.

That was no good.

Perry had something of an insider view into ‘The business’ since he was twelve and caught his parents duking it out in spandex during a field trip.

Supers strong enough to destroy the world tended to get dogpiled. Which he definitely would be by level 11, if not 10

There were a lot of people, on both sides of the aisle who wouldn’t hesitate to kill him before he became strong enough to wipe out a city by accident. Most of them, even.

One kid in exchange for millions of potential victims if he ever made a mistake or got angry? The math checked out. Perry wouldn’t fault them for making that trade. Even the combined wrath of Mechanaut and Hexen was a goddamn fart in the wind compared to the damage Perry would be able to do in the future.

The protection his parentage offered him was cosmetic in relation to that staggering number.

Perry paced back and forth, his heart slamming in his chest as he tried to think it through.

There was no reason he had to keep growing Attunement exponentially. Except it would be like kneecapping himself in order to stay secret.

If anyone did figure it out, though, he would be kneecapped and have a harder time defending himself.

So, go for broke, or try to fly under the radar?

The deciding factor was when he glanced at his stats.

At level 9, his Body would be 9, with 10 HP.

Not even double human standard, and he’d die on the 11th hit.

Didn’t matter how high his Attunement got, someone would be able to kill him easily by bypassing his inventions and going straight for the squishy meatsack.

I guess it depends on whether or not I can hit level ten before anyone realizes what’s going on. I could easily divert a couple million points into Body, Stability and HP. Then I’m untouchable.

Perry sat back down and opened up his spreadsheet, deleted the newest cells, then went to the XP graph he’d been putting together. It appeared that he needed 25% more XP for each level, and his current level confirmed this trend.

So…

Level

XP to next level

1

1250

2

1562.5

3

1953.125

4

2441.406

5

3051.758

6

3814.697

7

4768.372

8

5960.464

9

7450.581

10

9313.226

In the last month, I’ve accumulated ~3800 XP

1000 to get to level one, 1250 for level two, 1562 to hit level 3.

Perry selected all the XP cost cells between level 3 and 9 and autosummed them.

29,440.4

Let’s be conservative and remove the first 1000XP I got. That probably is statistically unlikely to happen again

2800XP a month, Est.

1 year.

One year from now, should he stay the course, he could be…something beyond human understanding.

If he diverted so much as a single point into something other than Attunement, the numbers dropped drastically.

Spread my stats out and become an amazing superhero beloved the world over?

Feed Attunement until level 10 and become God?

…Mom and Dad always say aim high.

Decision made, Perry ripped his sweet custom-built computer out of the wall and smashed it on the concrete floor, then slagged it with thermite. Deleting was not thorough enough. Not with technopaths out there.

The only place the spreadsheet remained was in his head.

Need Counterintelligence. NOW.

***Later***

“You seem distracted,” Heather said.

“Hmm?” Perry hummed, pulled out of his thoughts by the tap on his shoulder.

“You don’t look so hot, what’s up? I thought you’d be thrilled to finally have your own Lair.” She spread her arms and motioned to the vast underground space he’d carved out under the motel.

Honestly it was mid-low tier for a lair. Way, way better than before, but still pretty underwhelming, in both size and defenses. Perry’s rush of joy from making this one had already faded when he realized it might eventually be measured against the strongest that planet Earth had to offer.

It would fold like tissue paper.

“It’s good, I’m just thinking about how to stop my parents from spying on me,” Perry said.

And thereby avoiding people killing me because I might accidentally destroy the solar system next year by making a gizmo that inadvertently creates a black hole.

“They’re too nosey,” Perry finished with a thin smile. It felt fake, even to him.

“Something you wanna tell me?” Heather asked, reading him like a book.

“Well, yes, but operational security dictates I keep it to myself. It’s seriously bad news if a mindreader gets wind of it.” Perry said.

Imagine me being some minder’s puppet with limitless power. Another doomsday scenario.

“Alright, that’s all you gotta say,” Heather said, backing off.

Perry had done a little more mental math over the last few hours. Even if he spent half the stat points he got every level on something else, he would still go supercritical by level 13. About two years worth of XP, by Perry’s reckoning.

He couldn’t guarantee the numbers were perfectly accurate…but they were close.

He could spend ninety-five percent of all the free points he got on something other than attunement, and he would go supercritical around level 20. About fifteen years from now.

The thing that really made him sweat?

If Perry put Absolutely ZERO points into Attunement, it would still go up by two points per level.

at level thirty-five he would be getting eighty-two stat points.

All those points and the ones preceding it had to go somewhere.

Assuming an even split between HP, Body, Nerve, and Stability, that would be approximately two hundred and fifty points in every stat.

It would take three hundred and seventy-three years to reach level thirty-five…but Perry was likely to actually live that long.

If Body slowed the aging process, then dumping a quarter of his points into it would buy him too much extra time, and his stats would eventually go supercritical, somewhere around level three hundred.

So Perry’s choices had been boiled down to

A: willingly commit suicide by time.

Or,

B: Watch his stats inflate exponentially whether he wanted them to or not as his friends and family withered and died around him over the eons, until eventually he ripped the fabric of spacetime by existing.

Or,

C: Die violently in a fight somewhere.

There was always the option of not spending his points, but that fell under Suicide by time.

Perry’s skin was gripped with a cold sweat as existential dread of the inevitable filled every nerve. It felt like his entire world was fading away and nothing existed outside save his whirling thoughts and the fear of the choice between death and infinite suffering.

Perry caught a glimpse of Heather’s worried expression.

It filled him with a candle-flame of hope that dispelled the looming dread.

You know what, screw that. By that measurement, my Nerve should be at least a hundred by the time I’m old.

Nobody ever said the System can’t be modified. Dad may not understand it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be able to. I’ll figure out the solution.

The chances of it being truly unlimited exponential growth just means that eventually it has to make me smart enough to come up with the perfect solution to the problem of unlimited exponential growth.

If it’s not unlimited, then I’m worried about nothing.

And besides. Who knows what I’ll be like when I’m three hundred years old? Maybe I’ll be fine with killing myself around then. This only becomes a problem if I stubbornly try to live forever.

The last vestiges of the looming dread dissipated, and Perry felt like he’d gotten a new lease on life.

He could always kill himself. No matter what, he had the power to end his own life.

Fear of death was what had locked him into that hypothetical eternity of torment. Why not just punch your own ticket when you were old as balls and ready to check out?

Perry wasn’t ready to die NOW. But three hundred years from now…who knew?

“Figure something out?” Heather asked, glancing up at his relived expression curiously.

“Yeah. I decided to kill myself,” Perry said.

“What, WHY!?” Heather demanded.

“Your pretty face,” Perry said with a genuine smile.

Heather punched him in the shoulder.