Sunday starts with someone, who's clearly annoyed, knocking on a door. Then they let themselves in, and there's a knock on my door. I am incredibly confused because this doesn't appear to be my room, and I'm fairly sure I wasn't drinking last night. Oh right, new apartment! Wasn't I supposed to move in tomorrow? Then I remember Mom and Dad making googly eyes at each other last night. Jessie drove them home and I fell asleep quickly after laying on my new mattress.

I quickly take stock of the situation. I have no pants on. Jessie is outside the bedroom door. Somehow she got into my apartment. I need to brush my teeth and use the bathroom.

I roll off the bed and crash to the floor. Right. The bed isn't assembled yet. I get myself off the floor and find the light switch. Properly oriented, I open the door. “First, how did you get in here. Second, what time is it? Third, why are you in my apartment?”

“Put some pants on.”

Whoops. I back into the room a little and close the door enough so only my head is sticking out. “My questions stand.”

“Fine. I got a copy of the key from Matt. It's just before dawn. And I want breakfast.”

I look skeptical. “So you broke in for breakfast?”

“You could say that. You'd be saying it while walking to your parents, but you could say it.”

“Fine. I'll be out in a minute.”

I take a moment to dig through the clean clothes pile to find something suitable for exercise and study, then rush through my morning routine. Breakfast turns out to be pancakes with fruit, and it's delicious as usual. I wait until we are in the car before I lay down my ultimatum.

“I'm only feeding one other person. If you want food, you'll have to keep everyone else from bugging me about it.”

“Your parents will probably bug you, but I'll scare off anyone else. Just don't go showing off or feeding the masses. It's not like you can't cook massive meals and drop them in your inventory as easily as cooking for one.”

“The masses aren't breaking into my house before dawn. But that's a good idea, I'll stock up some.”

I start to make a grocery list, but have to stop because it's easier to just get all the basics and let my power decide what's appropriate. I'm thinking I will be eating fresh bread instead of pre-sliced from now on.

We arrive a few blocks from my parent's house, and walk through the woods to get in the back door. It's past dawn now, and they still aren't drinking their morning coffee. I think about going upstairs and immediately decide that's a bad idea, so I drop the mattress in the kitchen and drag Jessie out for the morning run. She indulges me and we spend about an hour doing laps in the woods before we are both exhausted.

I didn't really push myself beyond human today, but a fast steady pace seems to be good for vitality or general fitness and health. As we get back to the house, I can see some coffee has been made, and the mattress is gone, but my parents are nowhere to be seen. Again, I consider going upstairs, and again, I decide I'd rather not.

“So, what are we doing today?”

“Well, after the great job your father did on that salesman in the mattress store, I wanted him to prep you for your interview, but it looks like I'll have to do that. Let's head to the library. I want to put your Speed Reading to the test.”

“Alright. Just another day studying. Glad to see not too much has changed in my life.”

* * *

Jessie had a sweet tooth, so we stopped at a candy store before heading to the library. She really loaded up on the sweet stuff. I was impressed and a little shocked. She promised to share later, so the shock wore off. Once we arrived at the library, we immediately rented a room so we wouldn't draw attention with my Speed Reading. I had been pretty fast going through the rental contract, and I was fairly certain I could do better this time. Jessie had me reading internet guides on negotiation, and went to grab some books for me to read.

I think the writers of these guides may have gone overboard with the common sense, but then the guides are posted on the internet. Common sense is pretty rare there. It was interesting how negotiations differed between the things you were negotiating for/about. I felt like I was cramming a year of debate club into my brain. You could say it all boiled down to “be assertive,” but you would be wrong. Sometimes acting like a jerk is justified.

What made it worse, was that I would be going up against someone with infinitely more practice than me. Someone who negotiates day in and day out on matters that affect peoples lives in a very primal way. You want to live somewhere nice? You have to negotiate your pay. You want good food? Money. A car? Utilities? Entertainment? You better have some cash. So the person who stands between everyone in the company and a raise is a little scary.

Worse, I was coming in at a huge disadvantage. I was basically being press-ganged into something I didn't fully understand, but as I had just learned, that was not an insurmountable challenge. I didn't even know if I was going to be paid, but if you don't ask, you don't get. The benefits for my parents were already apparent with the protection they would receive. I suddenly had an amazing apartment and a perfect mattress.

More than anything else, I had Jessie in my corner. Yes, I was putting her at a risk, and she might be better off letting me twist in the wind, but we had known each other forever, and she really knew her stuff. Maybe she can't drink legally yet, but she had more experience than possibly any other person on the planet. I was worried, but not panicking.

So even when Jessie came back with a massive stack of books, I still gave her a great big smile. It was a nice little moment when she gave me a smile back. She went about organizing the books into two piles. She didn't get very far when I realized what the piles were for. One with fun and bite sized books, and the other with mammoth books you could kill a person with. Hey, some of those were textbooks for the classes I'm taking! And I'm not paying attention to textbooks anymore. There's a third pile now. Candy.

There was chocolate, dark chocolate, peanut butter chocolate, M&Ms, Reese's Pieces, even a little box of chocolates where you can know what you're going to get if you read the inside of the cover. I had known, intellectually, that she had all this stuff, but there is a smell chocolate gives off, and here amidst the books and endless paper scent, all I could smell was chocolate wafting through the room.

“You have my attention.”

“Well that's good to hear. As I said earlier, I will be drilling you on negotiation. Now that you've read all those articles, I assume you can guess at what we have here.”

“Clearly you have chocolate for me so that I will stop sobbing once you wipe the floor with me.”

“Don't be a dolt. Tomorrow is as important for me as it is for you. There is a threshold of idiocy you have to pass to make me not look bad for taking you in and not hanging you out to dry. That threshold can be met in the very first meeting, long term, or not at all. I would very much like to pay this debt as soon as possible, and if that means I have to hammer you from a golden shit into a golden egg, then that's what's going to happen.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Now I wish she had gotten some of those chocolate eggs. Oh well. “We will be negotiating over my reading material today. The candy will either be part of the negotiations, or a reward for negotiating well. Yes?”

“Yes.”

We got down to brass tacks, which made me think of shiny things, which made me think of those gold foil covered chocolates, which is silly because it's just regular chocolate in gold foil and I had regular chocolate here. I do want to pay off Jessie's 'debt' quickly, but today was more about practice with chocolate on the line, rather than the real thing where lives may be at stake. I didn't want to piss off the strongest person in my corner, so I took the whole thing seriously. It wasn't like I couldn't cook up my own chocolates. Now I was thinking of making trips during harvest season to countries around the world to get the freshest ingredients possible. Magic may or may not get things fresh from around the globe, but I would imagine for bulk ingredients, it's cheaper to go to the source.

I'm not really just daydreaming, I'm multitasking. My skill Mind Partition lets me daydream and hold a conversation at the same time. More partitions usually cause a decrease in thought speed, but I could hold two at full speed. The skill was progressing fast and I might be able to hold three full speed trains of thought soon. Any more than two right now would decrease my overall thinking speed which seemed like a bad idea while negotiating.

While I'm negotiating, I realize Jessie doesn't care which books I read, and the candy is just there to complicate things. A few of the larger books look interesting, and I want to test my Speed Reading comprehension on some non-fiction. I make the exchange through negotiation speak, and then wonder if that wasn't what she was trying to get me to do the whole time. The final agreement gains me two pieces of candy, my choice, per large book, and two small books to every large book. I also get a say in what she goes to fetch next.

There are too many large books for me to read, so she is going to prioritize smaller books next run. I ask for video game strategy guides, some superhero fiction, and a few books of proverbs. She seems to approve and I choose bite sized pieces of chocolate, finish before diving into the books, and just take three off the top of the piles.

Whereas before I felt like I was cramming a year of debate into my skull, now I feel like there is a fire-hose surgically attached to my skull, and someone just turned on the spray with super-saturated information. There is definitely some synergy between Speed Reading and Eidetic Memory. At one point I start reading faster than I could comprehend the material, so I used my mind partitions to go over the text I was missing and integrate it into a cohesive whole. This was not the most efficient way of using those partitions, so I scanned through a few books, committing them to memory without actually understanding the material. Then I dedicated each of my partitions to reading one book at a time. Spread thin like this I could read twelve books at 40% speed each, increasing my overall speed by a factor of 5.

Skill 'Focus' Unlocked!

When Jessie got back, I was sitting back with my eyes closed and all the books back in their piles. I had scanned through all the books and all that was left was to process them. It would take a couple hours at my current speed. More than a few of the books were very dry. Most of my mental partitions were happy reading interesting stuff, but a few were almost terminally bored, until I unlocked the Focus skill. The new skill lets me focus on things without boredom or distractions. I was pretty thankful for this, as I really did not want to know what happened if some of my mental partitions disagreed with the rest and went to war inside my head.

Explaining this while only using one partition at 40% speed was very difficult. I got the point across with small words and she went to get different books, more practical stuff this time. A boyscout manual, something to show me how various engines worked, a guide to etiquette. Aside from Focus, I wasn't gaining any new skills, but my knowledge skills in different subjects were shooting up ridiculously fast. Every time a skill went up, I felt like I gained a more general understanding, and a few pieces missing in the books I was reading were filled in. Sometimes I would get a feeling that a fact in one of the books was wrong, even though I had no reason to suspect that. A few Google searches later, and I learned to trust my skill over the books I read. Still, it would be foolish to assume my skills would alert me to everything that was false.

I kept feeding my memory the books to be consumed later, and by the end of Jessie's third trip I had enough to keep me up all night. It was starting to get silly. I would need to find a way to gain unimpeded access to the library, or find a different solution. Jessie seemed satisfied that I had enough for the night, and said the rest would be taken care of. I didn't understand how, but I figured she knew what she was talking about.

* * *

With nothing really at stake, we continued our negotiations over lunch. I lost the pepper shaker to my 401k account, but got the mustard from my expense account. We negotiated over where to go next, but I'm pretty sure she had her mind made up beforehand and it wasn't going to change despite my Herculean efforts. In the end, we went clothes shopping.

This wouldn't be so bad if I were picking something up, or if I was just accompanying her, but we were to go clothes shopping for me. I needed work clothes. This was clearly the 4th or 5th level of hell. And I wasn't able to complain too loudly because she was picking up the tab.

We ended up with two suits, five shirts, four pants, new shoes, two ties, and a couple fresh packages of underwear and socks each. Thankfully everything was off the rack. It still took four hours.

I was unable to even contemplate doing anything else today. It's not like I had a headache, or was even very stressed. It was the comfortable numbness of being dragged through the abyss and finally being let out. We went back to our apartments and I spent a good three hours decompressing before she broke in again and demanded food.

I picked up a spatula and waved it at the oven until the process started and I could let it self-cook. Gourmet Hamburger Helper. I wonder if there was a meal so awful that I could cook it perfectly and it would still be awful, and maybe she would stop breaking in. Probably not, she'd just take over the menu and then I wouldn't even get to choose my own food.

After the intruder left, satisfied with her meal, I spent a few hours putting away the things I had haphazardly left in the various rooms in my apartment. I hooked up the washer and dryer we picked up from the mall, and folded my clean clothes. It almost looked like an adult lived here. The practice I got at the library let me read two books while maintaining one mental partition to do actual work. I finished up the negotiation and etiquette books in anticipation of tomorrow. I considered reading through the night, but I didn't want to experiment the night before my interview.

As I drifted off to sleep I reminded myself to get up in time to cook and get to my morning class. The mattress should take care of the rest.

Jack Ambrose Webb's Statistics

Strength

33

Wisdom

22

Agility

39 (+1)

Charisma

30 (+3)

Dexterity

41

Luck

3

Vitality

35 (+4) 

Transcend

2

Intelligence

54 (+4)