*Beep Beep Beep*

A phone alarm blared with what seemed like enough volume to wake an entire neighborhood.

“Uuugghhh.”(MC)

A hand reached out to turn off the alarm as the owner of the hand slowly woke up and stretched, before getting out of bed. As I got up to get ready for the day I walked through my room, ignoring the many decorations as I had seen them millions of times before. The cyan blue painted walls gave off a feeling of calm serenity. The bookshelf was filled with stories from every genre imaginable, from encyclopedias and random fact books to manga and comic books, a few mystery novels sat off to one side and an entire shelf was dedicated to horror stories by Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.

Three computers occupied the desk, one was absolutely ancient and was held together with duct tape and a dream, the monitor it was linked to had a web page open to a web novel about an eldritch horror living as a human in the modern world. The second was an old model and was running a singleplayer game of minecraft, the player character was afk farming mobs into an absolutely massive sorting system. The third and final computer was only a generation behind the latest stuff and was the only computer without a program running, there was a new VR headset linked to it through an extension cable capable of reaching the bed, but the headset was on the desk next to the monitor.

The shelf above the desk had several trophies and medals on it, one read:

Beach Junior Athletics 2022

Rockets

Rowan Baelz

The trophy featured a person kicking a soccer ball. It was gold plated and had a marble base.

The top of the dresser had a few family photos and a couple piles of video game CD cases. One was labeled “Super Mario 64” and another was labeled “Halo: Reach”. One of the photos featured a younger looking version of me standing next to an older looking boy while a man and woman stood behind them. I was holding a fishing pole and my older brother was holding a foldable tent. My father had a hunting rifle and my mother was holding a cooler. I remembered how the camera fell off of the rock right after it took this picture every time I looked at it.

With a yawn I made my way to the restroom to get ready for the day.

After freshening myself up and getting dressed, I made myself a quick breakfast and left for school. My brother was staying in a college dormitory and my parents both worked late shifts recently. My father was a technician for a factory an hour's drive away from the house and my mother worked the night shift as a security guard for a pizzeria.

I sighed as I walked to my highschool, a journey which only took 5 minutes. I hope it gets here today, I can’t wait to play Champions of Asteria. I finally managed to save up enough allowance to get it ordered but the wait has been torture! As I entered the school building I heard a familiar voice call out to me,

“Yo! Roe! You’re right on time today as well huh.”(???)

I turned around and saw a boy roughly seven inches taller than me with slick black hair and brown eyes. His freckled face framed by thick-rimmed circular glasses and a baggy outfit that made him look bigger than he really was. As I opened my mouth to speak the bell rang once, an alert that we were, in fact, just on time.

“Hey Benjamin! And I’m not sure what you mean, this is the same time I always get here.”(Rowan)

“Yeah, you always get to school right on time. Anyway, I’ll see in the club room after school. Later Roe!”(Benjamin)

As Benjamin turned and jogged off to his class, I took a breath and began walking to my class. It only took a couple of minutes to reach my classroom and as I closed the door behind me the bell rang once more, signifying the start of classes for the day. The teacher, a man who looks like Dash’s teacher from The Incredibles with a name tag that says “Mr. Shellburg” on his shirt, took one look at me and then promptly looked back at whatever he was drawing on the blackboard before saying,

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“You’re right on time Miss Baelz, please take your seat and we can begin.”(Shellburg)

I went to my desk and sat down. Smiling, I picked up the sheet of paper that was on her desk and looked at the big red “A” in the top right corner. These were the results of Mr. Shellburg’s surprise quiz yesterday. Mr. Shellburg was a diligent teacher and often used his surprise quizzes to see if his students were actually studying. The quizzes could happen at any time and have any number of questions about any number of subjects, the popular crowd hated them for that very reason. The other reason why so many students hated the surprise quizzes is that, Mr. Shellburg will read out the score of each and every student who took the quiz and mark anyone who didn’t as having failed.

I see the three stooges are seething right now. They’ve tried to leverage their influence and wealth to get rid of the teacher a few times but their efforts never bore fruit, and he avoided any scandals spectacularly.

“Alright, All of you had a quiz yesterday so I’m going to announce the results. Adam, You scored 88% correct and got a B+. Bartholomew, You scored 85% correct and got a B...”(Shellburg)

I Toned out the teacher for a while and only paid attention again when my name got called.

“Rowan, you scored 96% correct and got an A…”(Shellburg)

Not bad, I usually score higher though. The rest of the lesson was fairly normal, and my classes after that were normal as well. Learn some new math formulae, the next event to be recorded in the history textbooks, stuff we need to know for the tests and exams coming up later, and some brief social interaction with other students who take the same classes as me. All in all, normal.

Once the school day was technically over, the various clubs, sports teams and other student organizations had their meetings and their practice and whatever else they had during this time. I am a member of the “General Science and Engineering Club” and made sure to attend for the mandatory amount of time.

Upon entering the clubroom I immediately saw Benjamin and Gustav pouring their hearts into their new toys. Small robots that stood up to their knees and about as wide as a tissue box. The robots were confined to a corner of the room and were fighting each other, one was designed to look like some kind of Godzilla-Trex thing and the other looked like an Optimus Prime rip-off.

Calvin sat in the opposite corner reading a book about bioluminescence and the various creatures that have it. On the table next to him was an insect carrier filled with fireflies. In the middle of the room sat Anna, hunched over the computer, working on another part of her big project, an artificial intelligence. It was questionable if the antique computer she was working with could even run an Artificial Intelligence but, I wasn’t about to trample on her dreams. That and if she actually managed to make it work it would be absolutely awesome.

“Hey Roe! You got a sec?”(Benjamin)

Ben called out to me from his robot fight corner. I went over to him and Gustav.

“I’m only here for the mandatory 10 minutes so, not really no.”(Rowan)

I said so, Ben looked a little downcast at the news but that was instantly replaced with curiosity as he asked another question.

“What’s going on that you would leave early? What happened?”(Benjamin)

“I am getting my copy of Champions of Asteria today. So I’m leaving early to play it longer.”(Rowan)

Ben’s and Gustav’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates at that statement. I noticed that Calvin also started paying more attention over here, but Anna remained glued to her project.

“Wow! I was gonna see if you had any input that could help us fine-tune the mechs, see if we could make the battle last longer by reducing their attack power or something, but if you're about to start playing CoA then I can’t really keep ya.”(Benjamin)

“Yeah, you’ve been waiting to play that game for a while now. Far be it from me to keep someone from doing something they had to wait that long to do. That wouldn’t be very gentlemanly of me.”(Gustav)

Ben and Gustav looked at eachother and kept whatever they wanted help with to themselves. I would probably help them out with it next monday but I was not waiting any longer than necessary. Ben turned back to me before speaking up.

“Hey you remember my username right? FarmingEngineer323? Send me a friend invite when you finish the character creation. I’ll accept and send you a gift pack when I log in.”(Benjamin)

“Yeah, if I’d ever played it I’d do the same thing.”(Gustav)

Ben and I both looked at Gustav with a little bit of confusion.

“Didn’t you already play the game though?”(Benjamin)

“Yeah, on my brother’s copy. I don’t actually own the game myself or an account. He let me play for a couple days while he was at camp.”(Gustav)

“oh.”(Benjamin)

With that cleared up Ben turned back to me.

“Yeah you go play the game. Have some fun. With how everyone treats you like an assistant and consultant for everything we do here, you deserve some breaks now and then.”(Benjamin)

I rolled my eyes at that.

“That’s my fault not yours. I’ll help out with whatever you’re doing on monday”(Rowan)

It wasn’t their fault that I spread my knowledge out over every subject. Looking over at “My” corner, I could see the multiple half-read books on physics, biology, chemistry, quantum mechanics, engineering, and psychology. They had multiple bookmarks sticking out of them at various places, marked for facts that I found particularly interesting.

I was a jack-of-all trades master of none type of scientist, as a result I could be relied on by everyone to help out with their own separate projects. While it was true that I didn’t get like this on purpose, after all I just liked learning interesting things at my own pace, nothing wrong with that, It also wasn’t something I was unhappy with.

That said I also was free to choose when I didn’t want to do stuff. It just so happened that I didn’t do that often.

After the ten minutes were up I went straight back home. I didn’t even stop at the vending machine on my way.

When I got home there was a small box on the porch hidden from view of the street. It had my name on it and was from Pantheon Entertainment. It’s here! I grabbed it and carried it to my room. I had done today’s homework yesterday just so that I could spend all of my free time today playing Champions of Asteria.

I opened my door and flipped on the light…