I'm fine! Everything is fine! It's not like the lives of me and my family depends on my decision here. Oh, wait! They do! On one hand, I can trust the figment of my imagination, let him kill me and my family, and then send my wife and I back 30 years in time to attempt to save everything living on the Earth, or on the other hand, we can take our chances with Gaia, mother-nature herself, who has decided that humanity fucked the Earth up so much that she would rather kill EVERYTHING and start over from scratch. Okay, that choice ends up being simple enough, go with the one who isn't trying to kill you. Err, the one who is going to kill you in a way you can survive? Whatever, the one who isn’t in a genocidal rage.
“Dave!”
Whoops! Must pay attention to the confused / angry / panicky wife. I take her hand and pull her into a hug. “I’m here. If you calm down and close your eyes it feels like the kids are here too. I realized that as soon as I stopped panicking and figured out we really don’t have a choice here”.
After a few seconds, her death grip turns into a hug and she takes a deep breath. “I can feel them. You’re here so I can deal. But now whenever I close my eyes or think about it, I see a blue box welcoming me to ‘The System’ and telling me I have 16,151 Points. I see The System Store with different categories like Magic and Psionics. Nope. It sounds like one of your role-playing games with too much damn math, you're doing the character creation.”
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Not letting her out of the hug I respond, “Can do love. We should both read the pamphlets Sammual gave us and see if we have some sort of character sheet or status screen…. I’ve figured out that if you think ‘Status’ when you want to see your System Status screen, a large blue box that has a very detailed character sheet pops up. Concentrating on any of the blue boxes and wanting them to close makes them go away”. After a moment I mused, “I would love a chance to go back and redo my life with this sort of advantage. What can we do to make this survivable for you? I only have to put up with my dad for 3 years or so, no big deal. You have to survive your mom for at least 4 years and wait at least 6 years before you have a munchkin back.”
Sometime after the recording of Sammual stopped talking, he disappeared, and the ‘room’ we’re in turned into a copy of our den. We both sat down and after a bit of thought, Sarah responded to my question. “I survived her last time but you can’t predict crazy and this will be before cell phones were a thing so I would need a way to talk to you and a way to keep her from burning down the house while we are in it”!
“OK” I said, “with access to magic and psionics that should be a non-issue”. I noticed what looked like a message queue of other System messages in their blue boxes including a Quest announcement for the ‘New System User Tutorial’. “Umm, I just noticed a message queue and in it, a tutorial. I think we should do that and read Sammual’s pamphlets before I get distracted again”.