Penny was starting to become a little exhausted from all the work, research and teleporting she was doing. Not the studying though, that was actually fun and relaxing with all her new abilities. That also spared her the headache of searching for data transfer machine to expedite her learning. Earlier that morning she had decided to spend the day leisurely by playing games, eating junk food and starting a few PhD courses online, mainly in applied mathematics, computer sciences with specialization in algorithms, combinatorics, and optimization, just so she wouldn’t get bored too fast. There was also the problem of her finances starting to decrease that she didn’t want to think about at the moment. Also, as she found out at the patent office, because she always left the companies she worked for to file for patents, her patent application was going to be approved after 2 to 5 years, so she couldn’t earn money from that. She looked at the full body bulletproof suit in the corner of her lab and sighed. At least her suit had profited from the research. She still had the money to pay for a new commercial space and splurge a little on luxuries, but not enough to start a new research project on the same scale as the FuBoBuS. But she was not going to think about it, she was going to play.

Except all her hardware was work optimized and not game friendly, so she went to an electronics store and bought 2 game optimized laptops, Windows and Linux a Macbook pro, an Xbox One X 1TB, a PlayStation 4 Pro, Nintendo Switch a very powerful, very expensive tablet computer plus all the peripherals for her various machines including 3 new monitors. Now of course she had to carry several heavy loads to her home, but she had a solution for that too. As soon as she was out of the store she ducked in a side alley and shoved all her purchases into the pocket dimension. When she got home she spent another hour setting all the consoles, periphery, debugging and downloading popular science fiction and fantasy games. When she was done it was already time for lunch, so Penny decided to go out and eat in a secret restaurant she had found when moving to the neighborhood. It was good to go out without thinking about business and just enjoying yourself. The last week with all her work, travel and thinking, she had been so busy she ate all her food blended together in a glass. Some of it was even good, but that was no way to live your life, she had to make some drastic changes. First she had to start eating healthier and start exercising, maybe even doing some yoga, tai chi and meditation, after all magic was real, so maybe the eastern beliefs about energy flow also had some troth to them. When she got to the restaurant she ordered a healthy tuna salad on a bed of veggies and for the main meal she had seafood pasta. Penny had just finished her lunch and was paying, when her real estate agent called and told her he had found some places for her to look at. If everything went smoothly she could see the places at the end of the week and if she liked one of them, be ready to move at the start of the next week.

Penny was sitting in her living room staring at 1 tablet, 2 laptops, Macbook and 3 monitors, all of which were running one game or another. She had Portal 2 on the MAC, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order on the PS4, Minecraft on the Windows, No Man’s Sky on the Xbox, Pokemon game on the Nintendo, EVE Online on the Linux and Assembly Line on the tablet. She had just taken a shower, plopped on the fluffy carpet in just her underwear and manipulating one console with her hands and another with her bare feet, or at least trying really hard, and then alternating between the games. She even had a pen for tablets in her mouth with which she manipulated the app game. She was having fun, making manipulation errors, pushing the wrong button, but proceeding onwards despite all that. And then when she was collecting resources in Minecraft and No Man’s Sky and errant thought occurred to her. “Look at all these resources.” And indeed there were a lot of resources in games just lying around not being utilized and if you ran out, you could just load a previous save and you had a parallel reality to collect from again and again. ”And now I am thinking of work again. But at least I solved my research resources scarcity. I will still have to purchase materials for prototypes or the IRS can come after me. Unless…” Not going to foreshadow or spoil the future by showing you her next thoughts, just know it will be a pretty ambitious project. Back to her gaming Penny just found the Portal Gun and her eyes immediately lit up.

-Shiny object. Want!-And the next moment she was in the game taking a closer look at the gun. Her avatar was frozen in place, not moving, breathing or otherwise reacting. She was an avatar for otherworldly beings to inhabit while visiting this world.-Huh, the physics for the gun doesn’t hold up for my world without serious magic help. Might as well modify a spell to do the same thing, but at set coordinates instead of surfaces. Those boots on the other hand need little magic help and they will look good with my costume.-So she approached the avatar and striped her of her boots before going back to her living room. Work will wait, it was time to play.

And she did play, until another shiny object caught her attention. But this time she waited until she found a save point, then customized it in the temple, before teleporting and swiping the Jedi’s lightsaber. Just imagining all the innovations she could make on cutting equipment and energy storage made her squirm in delight, not to mention all the veggies she could cut with that bad boy. Fruit Ninja was the past, here comes the Veggie Jedi. Penny snorted and then giggled at her fantasies about vegetable annihilation. Then there was Assembly Line. The game had fascinating possibilities for a real world factory applications, just max out everything in the game and either place a transport enchantment before a seller or transport the machines in the real world and set up a factory with them. The only problem was that there were only 1M downloads of the app. Maybe more people knew about it and just didn’t download it or it was just these people and that was it. There was of course a workaround, but she had to wait to implement them, and besides, she was relaxing and playing games, not thinking about work. While playing the Pokemon game, Penny had another errant thought. ”Can you enter a world modified by cheat codes and obtain their items?” And of course she tried it immediately. She downloaded a DS and Gameboy emulator and started looked up some popular code. She decided to try the master ball cheat then looked inside her inventory to see if they were there. After confirming the cheat worked, she tried to dimension travel to the game and that too worked as intended. Frisking every pocket of the backpack took a little while, but eventually she found what she was looking for, shiny purple balls she could hold and caress or… you perverts take your minds out of the gutter and focus. If cheats could manipulate the laws of this world, could she modify it with magic too? Wasn’t there a signal that automatically teleported any ball after your sixth to a pokemon server with your name on it? If she swiped the computer then enchanted it so the signal could travel through dimensions to the transport network she could keep all her creatures in one save of the game and withdraw or switch them as she liked. ”I wander if Godzilla can play nice with the pokemon?”

Penny traveled to the nearest pokemon center and transported the computer in her pocket dimension, after that she went home and continued playing her games until late that night. There were many Items she stole from other sci-fi and fantasy games, some of which weren’t even magical or technologically advanced.

The next morning Penny got up early and started doing exercises, first tai chi and then yoga and then finishing it all of a round of meditative breathing. How did she know how to do all that? You can find everything on the internet these days. And then she spent an hour doing cardia with Dance Dance Revolution and then she took a shower and then had breakfast. And then she tinkered with her new acquisitions, the Long Fall Boots were first painted black and then enchanter with feather fall spell, after all falling is a kind of transportation, that could activate automatically when approaching an obstacle at bone breaking speed or manually when you didn’t want to activate the first enchantment and instead leave it to the second enchantment. The second one she put on the boots was a modified teleportation enchantment, but instead of teleporting matter it teleported energy and more specifically kinetic energy. She could fall with terminal velocity and she would come to a dead stop the moment she touched the ground without feeling the g’s or even needing to bend her knees. All the teleported energy could be stored and then released through the gauntlets she was in the process of fabricating. The gauntlets also had a second enchantment that prevented the released energy from traveling through her arms so she wouldn’t break them when punching.

The pokemon computer was enchanted to send and receive a signal from the transportation grid and then send and receive signals to and from the master balls. All the tinkering on that particular devise involved several dimensional travels to the game world. The master balls themselves were left alone for now until she studied them thoroughly to see if they had some kind of space folding technology or mater to energy conversion and back. She could easily copy them with her magic by enchanting a pocket dimension in a container and maybe taming magic while they were inside. She did like how they opened on contact so maybe she was going to imitate that too.

The rest of the day was spent studying courses from 6 different universities at the same time, the only thing preventing her from taking more courses was the lack of more computers and maybe the hours of the day. When she got to bed that night there was a lot to think about. All the research papers she read today were sparking all kinds of new ideas and she was excited to try some of them out.