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[NSFW] - Gamer Power In Real Life (Commission)

Work, Work (3,122 Words)
I really, really needed money, but I honestly had no idea where to get any quickly. I guess I'd have to get an after school part time job. Previously, I'd avoided them for the simple fact that they'd eat into my limited free time, but with my new full knowledge of every single subject for the entire year, I had more free time.
I wound up with a minimum wage job at McD's, but it was enough - it brought in a decent amount of useful spending money, and, going in every day, doing whatever needed doing, kept a fresh trickle of experience points coming in. It didn't take too long before I had leveled up again, leaving me to seriously consider how exactly to spend the resulting stat points.
Levels took more experience points for each successive level, like you would expect from a video game. My current sources of experience were rather... piddling, to be blunt. It was going to take longer and longer for each additional level that I hit, so I should assume that I didn't have an endless quantity of stat points to spend, to waste them all willy-nilly.
My Intelligence was way up. I could feel the difference. It was hard to describe other than with almost self-referential words: clarity, precision, access. Information that was important came to the surface easily, things got connected to one another as I added new skill books to the pile, bit by bit building out my awareness of how the world worked in a whole new way. Old memories came up too - a news story I'd heard years prior came to mind when the manager tried to do something stupid. I'd never have managed to pull that information up, that quickly, without the change. So Intelligence was valuable, definitely - but I didn't know how much more I would need.
Strength was a hard skip, as was Agility, since I'd already raised them by exercise and I didn't need more than "a decently fit body" to be fine for the rest of my life. I didn't plan to get in any kickboxing fights.
My body didn't really get tired, any longer. Work could hurt, it could be unpleasant, but I could stand on my feet all day if I had to. Gamer Body meant I didn't even have to sleep, and since I also had Gamer Mind to keep me from having my brain completely fry, I spent my nights doing homework, browsing the internet on my smartphone, and just generally fucking around. So, Endurance seemed like a waste to buy, too.
That meant Intelligence, Wisdom, and Luck were my remaining stats. It wasn't that I was opposed to Luck, I just wasn't sure what it meant. It said "Raises the chances of positive random events occurring, and lowers the chances of negative random events occurring." If it meant better odds at Blackjack, then it was a huge waste of points, since that would mean one good trip down to Vegas before all the casinos barred me. If it meant literally everything in life that wasn't completely deterministic (i.e. almost everything), then it would be incredibly valuable... but probably not that visible in its effects.
I decided to hedge. I was going to put a third of my points into each of the stats, but I decided to just put a third of them into Luck. If I noticed that suddenly things started to go a lot better for me in the next day or two, then I'd dump the rest into Luck; otherwise, I'd split the remaining points, 50/50, between Intelligence and Wisdom.
The only particularly lucky thing that happened to me over the next couple days was finding a quarter on the street when I left my job at McD's, and I remembered keenly that it wouldn't be the first time I had seen a coin on the ground while out walking, so, I had to conclude that Luck had a fairly marginal effect on meaningful random events, and threw the remainder of my points into a mix of Wisdom and Intelligence.
Shortly thereafter, I happened to notice a used book store and had the sudden thought that there was a great way to collect a lot of new skills, relatively cheaply: go inside and buy every book that triggered my "book learning" ability. Or at least, every one that I could afford, with my first paycheck from McD's.
In the end, I wound up collecting a wide variety. Books on painting; on boxing; on cooking; on doing math in your head; on dance; on judo; on gardening; on three different programming languages; on Japanese, Spanish, French, and Chinese; on emergency first aid; on car repair; on makeup; on sewing... well, it was a big fat pile of books, in the end. Just for space/weight purposes - I would have to walk home with the books, after all - I had to actually cut a few out that didn't seem like they'd be that useful. But I walked out of there with over two hundred dollars worth of books in a big old box. When I got home, I went through them one by one, careful to take a breather in between each one to make sure that my brain didn't fry from using them too quickly.
It didn't. Within an hour, I'd picked up a bunch of skills, though, admittedly, I was pretty sure a decent number of them weren't exactly up to par. It's hard to learn the entirety of Japanese from a book, and while I could (haltingly) read it (frequently having to search for kanji I didn't know), when I tried watching Japanese language clips online, I'd often have to rewind, or just guess or look up words I didn't know. Much the same applied to the other languages, though at least English shared a bunch of vocabulary with French and Spanish to help me out there.
The books themselves were trash at that point. Empty spines with blank pages. I threw them out.
As I sat back in my room, reviewing the new knowledge which had entered my brain - and definitely there was plenty of it - I now started to actually think about what I wanted to do with my life. I could probably do... basically anything, really. A few hundred bucks for the appropriate books, some point assignment to make me better at it, and I'd be able to become whatever I felt like.
Before, life had seemed like it was something with an inevitability to it. I'd been born to a poor family, barely scraping by, going to school more as a process of going through the motions and spending time in young adult day care, rather than actually thinking it would amount to anything. I could have paid attention in class and gone every day, and I'd still be far behind anybody who went to an actually good school. So I hadn't. Since I'd gotten this ability, I'd gone pretty much every day, but that was because attending classes regularly was ticking up progress in various quests to get me experience point rewards.
By this point, I was pretty sure I had basically mentally finished my classes for the semester. I'd have to do the homework and the tests, but I knew all the relevant material. So...
So.
What did I want?
It's one of those big, open-ended questions, that really involves thinking. I didn't used to have many of them. The thought idly came to mind that maybe this was because I'd raised my Wisdom. Or maybe my Intelligence, I guess. They'd both gone up at the same time, and it was hard to say what the difference was.
So. What did I want?
I had never been particularly popular, at school. I knew some people, but I didn't really have much in the way of friends. Maybe if I had, I would have told one of them. But when I thought about that, I thought... ehn. Friends would be nice, I guess, but it didn't feel like I was desperate for them, or anything. If I had been, I probably would have gotten them long ago. It wasn't like I was some weirdo or bullying victim. I was just not that interested in hanging out with other people.
I looked around my room. The mess of it. The smallness. The few things, gathered over the years, from birthdays and so on. Surfaces were arrayed with trash that neither I nor my parents cared to clean up. My bed was slightly uneven, one end a fraction of an inch above the other. The mattress was old enough that there were parts that just had no more spring left in them - I'd had to rotate it one hundred and eighty degrees so that I could sleep properly. The pillows were yellow, underneath their covers. The sheets had a hole in them that I'd unceremoniously closed up with a stapler.
I wanted money. That's what I wanted. I had some cash coming in from my new minimum wage job, but I wanted real money, something I could genuinely work with and succeed with. I looked at the receipt from the used book store and went over the skills I'd picked up, using my smartphone to try to hunt down work that a seventeen year old could do in them. Not a lot of people were ready to take a half-assed Japanese speaker on as a translator, nor was I going to make much money sewing things, but... drawing. Art. It was something where the artist just gets paid, right off the bat, in direct proportion to the art they produce. I knew you could make a few hundred dollars per piece, by some googling for how much people paid.
I mean, you could make more if you drew people's weirdo furry characters, but I didn't want to do that.
Once I'd resolved to get started on becoming a professional artist, I got a fresh quest - to get the necessary materials. I had a smartphone at the moment, plus what knowledge of drawing and painting had been stuffed into my head from the skill books, but my family didn't have a sketch book, or a scanner, or even a PC. So I'd have to figure out how to get one of those, and the answer, of course, was more work at McD's.
While I waited to get enough money to buy a computer and a tablet to draw with, I spent spare time drawing in notebooks, and picked up a few more relevant books an the bookstore - a how to draw anime book, a Photoshop for Dummies, a digital art book, a guide to color theory... I could literally see myself getting better at art, as my skill list filled out and each individual skill gradually acquired points from some incredibly detailed drawing of the teacher or the room or another student or whatever else, that I managed in class.
Even sitting near the back row, though, I didn't completely escape attention. The girl sitting next to me tilted her head over at some point, looking at my notebook, and I didn't quite have the presence of mind to hide it from her.
Spoiler: Neighbor
Part of that may just have been because she was pretty cute. Short, dark black hair that reached just barely to her shoulders, with dyed blue. She had painted nails and big hoop earrings, but had a sort of... friendly goth, aura around her, I guess is how I'd put it? "Huh," she said, simply, as she saw the detailed drawing of the teacher's face, every last bit of his jawline and cheekbone and hair captured to the best of my (quite substantial, now) ability. "You're pretty good. Want to draw me?"
I actually had already drawn her - she sat further away from me in a different class, and she had a fairly interesting-looking profile. But, being a teenage boy who just had a girl start talking to him, I was lucky to manage a, "Oh, sure."
You might think that the teacher would care that a couple students were talking in the back row. If you thought that, you'd never attended my school. The teacher for that class was one who "everybody knew" you should "avoid being alone in a room with him" - and this advice was more often relayed to male students than female ones, though it wasn't as if anybody felt confident that he wasn't an equal opportunity offender. By extension, he didn't give a fuck about his students except for doing whatever it was he did. My parents had already had an encounter with him after he "checked my back for bruising" when I took a tumble, and ever since, I'd been off his list.
Knowing that he wouldn't care about what I did, I just switched to a fresh page and started to sketch, the girl sitting next to me burning holes into my hand as she watched me work. She idly chewed on her pen the whole time, this sort of quiet, effervescent energy as she stared. Occasionally, she'd pull the pen out, do the back and forth motion when you catch it between two of your fingers and wobble them, and wind up in the process scraping it against her desk in a manner that made me mentally note that it probably wasn't sanitary - but, I didn't say anything like that to her out loud, feeling somehow intimidated by her watchful eyes.
By the end of class, I had a decent sketch of her done. I just tore it out and handed it over to her, and she took it quietly. "It doesn't have a signature," she said. "If you become a famous artist or something, it'll be worth more if it has a signature." With the light, friendly smile on her lips, it felt more like a warm compliment than an actual attempt to get me to give her something worth more money, but I still wrote down the signature anyway. "Hm. Shaun Grissom. That's a nice name. I'm Amber White. Can you put down your number, too?"
If I had not boosted my Intelligence and Wisdom before then, I'm fairly certain that I would have completely missed why she was asking, and cluelessly written down my number. My heightened stats, though, realized that she was asking for those things because she was interested in me, and I took in a small breath through my nose, willing myself not to respond too much as I wrote down my number. I even managed to ask, "Can you give me yours, too?" without stuttering.
She smiled at that, writing down her name and number at the top corner of my notebook, and including a little heart symbol in case it wasn't already obvious what she was after.
Then we had to get to our next class, which was lucky for me because I was all out of conversation pieces.
I wasn't a particularly sociable guy, I'll admit it. I had never asked a girl out before that point, even at seventeen, never felt that much of an urge to. I hadn't had any crushes, really - either girls on the television or in real life. But I was still a teenage boy who had just gotten attention from a member of the opposite sex for the first time in his life, and was only able to keep practicing drawing in the next class due to my Gamer Mind helping me focus on the task in question.
I drew her again, from a different angle, in a behavior that might charitably been described as oblivious, if I hadn't realized how borderline obsessive it was, trying to remember the exact frame of her chin, the way she held her pin, the quiet, almost bored look of her features as she sat there, completely ignoring the teacher because there probably wasn't much advantage to listening anyway...
I was still working my way up to the money for a tablet and a PC by that point. I figured I'd be able to buy them with my next paycheck, if I kept my expenses down, which having a girlfriend might interfere with since I'd have to take her out on dates, but this was also the first time a girl had ever shown interest in me, and she was cute, and I was a horny teenage boy. I finally got up the will to call her up just a few minutes after I got home after school.
"Hey. This is Shaun," I said. "This is Amber, right?"
"Yeah," she said. She seemed to have that same perfected bored/oblivious note to her voice as she spoke, like the whole conversation was just marginally interesting enough to participate in, but not enough to really throw everything into it. "What are you calling about?" She asked, after a couple seconds of silence.
"I was wondering if you wanted to model for me." My art was the only thing that I knew she liked about me, and we could talk as I drew.
"Mm... sure. When?" She prompted.
"This weekend? Whenever you're free, really. My schedule's flexible." Empty, more like it, but no reason to say that.
"Kay. Hmm..." she trailed off, and I could hear her thumb pressing at various buttons on her phone as she fiddled with it. "Saturday evening? Around three. How long will it take?"
"Maybe a couple hours," I said. "I could subdivide it, if that's too long."
"Nah. It's fine."
I let out a quiet breath, managing to have the presence of mind to pull the phone far enough away from my mouth to hide it. "Great. I'll see you then, then."
There was a bit more of that awkward back-and-forth where neither of you is quite comfortable hanging up, until finally she said, "My dad's wondering who I'm talking to, gotta go."
I barely got in a "bye" before the phone call cut off.
I then got a quest: Clean Up Your Place Before Amber Comes Over. Some of these quests actually had a punishment: lose your job, lose respect, lose closeness. You can imagine what the punishment for failing to clean up my place was.
Luckily, my parents weren't packrats, just slobs, so I could pretty much throw out most things, and I made a stack of what I wasn't sure about - letters and documents and receipts and stuff, in contrast to all the old food containers and empty pill bottles. I managed to finish the quest before going to sleep that night - and it was a Wednesday, to boot.View This ThreadUnread Watched Threads
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