Chapter 7: Thermodynamics of Earth Gaming

Hi, it’s me again, Sierra Fox. Everyone’s favorite ex-space tyrant who somehow ended up living in my sister’s closet. Not exactly where I pictured myself when I was overthrowing an intergalactic empire, but hey, life comes at you fast.

After everyone had their fill snooping around my room, I beamed my family back to our good ol' suburban home. Everyone left with a souvenir.

Dad was holding a gold bar in his hand, beaming from ear to ear.

Well, he couldn’t stop touching that 12.4 kg gold bar like it was a mysterious alien cat. Knowing him, he’d probably try to pawn it one day without telling us, and I wasn’t about to explain that to the police. So, I gave him a more ‘realistic’ 100-gram piece—way easier to pass off as “something I found in the backyard.”

For Mom, I gave her something truly rare—a necklace made from pure Starsteel. An exotic material found in the hearts of supernovae, with a metallic sheen known for its strength and beauty. It’s durable but not overly heavy. The kind of necklace that screams classy, high-end space fashion without screaming, I was stolen from a dead queen’s jewelry box.

Of course, Mom didn’t know where it came from, but she kept looking happily in the mirror after she put it on.

Okay, maybe it was pried from a dead queen's hands during a bit of orbital bombardment, but hey, she wasn’t using it anymore.

Lily was a tough customer. Naturally, she gravitated toward anything that glowed or floated, which would’ve been impossible to explain if someone accidentally saw it. So, we finally settled on a strip of Tritanium—a highly durable metal widely used in starship armor.

She claims it’ll help with her university studies in material physics. But let’s be honest, I highly doubt that. I mean, is there really a class on alien starship armor?

What about me? Oh, I got my own souvenirs—a bag full of tools, drills, wires, and panels to build a new room in Lily’s closet. You know, the fun stuff.

After we cleared everything out of Lily’s closet, I got to work on my space magic. Actually, it’s just dimensional physics, but my sister doesn’t need to know that.

I started by installing dimensional panels, then attached the spatial controllers to their wires. After several dozen cable ties and some painful cable management, I connected the microfusion reactor to the system and... voilà! Lily’s closet slowly expanded into a 10-by-10-meter room.

Then I started making my room a little more ‘homey,’ beaming down my stuff piece by piece, fresh from my industrial replicator. A bed here, a desk there, and some decor for good measure. Oh, and let’s not forget a custom-made gaming PC from space that would make even an exaflop supercomputer blush.

Lily watched the entire process with wide eyes, but as I plopped down on my freshly replicated couch, she crossed her arms and gave me that determined look that always meant trouble.

“This is not fair!” she suddenly declared, stomping her foot like we were kids again. “How come your room gets to be bigger than mine? I’m moving in!”

I blinked. “Wait, what? You—what?”

“You built a whole extra dimension in my closet! I want in!” Lily stomped her foot again, which was both hilarious and terrifying at the same time. She wasn’t kidding.

Okay, so maybe this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but I wasn’t about to have a full-blown sibling war over it. We’ve fought over less, honestly. Like who got to hold the remote. At least this time, there was dimensional physics involved.

“Fine,” I shrugged. “We’ll share it. But don’t complain when I’m up gaming late.”

“Can’t you just use headphones or something?” Lily insisted, clearly determined to invade my space.

Well, if I really want to, I could just route the audio directly to my nanomachines anyway. But that’s not the point.

“Last time I checked, you freaked out when I was walking around in boxers,” I pointed out, reminding her of something from ten years ago.

“That’s not going to be a problem now.” She gestured at my body. “And I will tell Mom if you walk around naked in a cape again.”

Hey, that only happened once… on Earth.

So, with that settled, I rearranged the room a bit and printed out more stuff for Lily.

What about her old furniture? Well, we decided to leave it there for cover-up purposes. If someone comes into the room, we can pretend we’re still using it.

“Wow, it’s so bouncy and soft!” Lily bounced on her bed like a maniac, but suddenly she sat up and went quiet. Then she grabbed a book from her backpack and looked at it seriously.

“What’s up?” I asked, peeking over her shoulder.

“My thermodynamics assignment! It’s due tomorrow!” Lily yelled, her face turning pale.

I raised an eyebrow. “Tomorrow? And you waited until now to start?” Classic. I couldn’t help but grin. “Why didn’t you do it earlier?”

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She glared at me. “Because you picked today to drop back into our lives like some intergalactic wrecking ball! I had everything planned, and then—bam! Space brother returns with a moon-sized spaceship, and he looks like my little sister instead while I’m also failing thermodynamics!”

I held up my hands defensively. “Okay, okay, I get it. I’m a distraction. My bad.” I might have ruined her productivity, but hey, at least I didn’t blow up any planets this time. “Alright, what’s the problem?”

Lily dragged her massive, overly complicated textbook out of thin air—or more accurately, out from under a pile of clothes in her part of the closet. “This.”

I peered at the page she had open. Oh boy, it was one of those complicated physics problems where letters start pretending to be numbers, and there are weird symbols that look like someone sneezed on the page. Fantastic.

She pointed at the question. “I have to calculate the entropy change of a closed system undergoing an isothermal process with constant pressure and variable volume.”

I blinked. “Right. Uh-huh.”

Silence.

“… You’re not even pretending to understand, are you?” she asked, deadpan.

“Well, thermodynamics isn’t hard—it’s just that I need a second to translate these weird symbols.” You see, thermodynamics isn’t that difficult for me. Any space tyrant should understand it because it gives us a legitimate reason to execute anyone who sneezes about perpetual motion engines.

“Anyways, how much have you done?” While translating those wiggly symbols in my mind, I decided to check how much Lily knew.

“Uhm… here…” Lily shyly showed her worksheet.

Well, she had written her name and the question. That’s it. Her assignment was emptier than a hologram.

Seeing where my sister was on the evolutionary scale, I decided to explain it from the beginning.

“So, you take the integral of this equation,” I said, gesturing to the squiggly lines on her paper, “and apply the boundary conditions to the volume.”

Lily nodded, furiously writing notes. “Uh-huh. Makes sense.”

“Then, once you account for the heat transfer—don’t forget that—it’s just a matter of plugging in the constants and—boom! Entropy calculated.”

“...” Lily looked at me with deadpan eyes.

“Okay, let’s try again.” I pointed back to the squiggly lines. “Take the integral and apply the volume limits…”

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Well, in the end, I had to finish the assignment for her…

It’s around 1 AM—well, technically it’s “next morning,” but you know what I mean. And thanks to the nanomachines buzzing around in my bloodstream, sleep is optional.

So, what does an ex-space tyrant do in the dead of night when the universe is quiet, the stars are boring, and her sister is snoring softly in a room that’s technically also a closet? Simple: she games.

Now, you might be wondering, “Sierra, aren’t you above Earth games? You know, having run a galaxy-spanning empire and all?” And to that I say—absolutely not. I mean, how much could things have changed in the past ten years? Surely Earth gaming has made some strides since I accidentally got sucked into a wormhole and spat out at the edge of the solar system, right?

Time to find out.

I booted up the PC, installed Steam, and browsed the game store. What to play? Something fitting for an ex-space tyrant newly returned to Earth, of course. My eyes landed on Hellhiker 2—a cooperative shooter about surviving hordes of bugs and bots. Close enough to my old job, right? Except, instead of commanding legions of genetically engineered soldiers and robotic death squads, I’d be blowing them up.

“Good enough,” I muttered, hitting the download button. A few seconds later, the game was ready to roll.

I jumped into the first multiplayer lobby, headset on, ready to lay waste to some digital enemies. But something funny happened. The other players didn’t exactly know how to react to me.

“Hey, newbie, what’s your loadout?” one player asked, voice crackling through my headset.

“Oh, just, uh, standard plasma rifle,” I replied, pretending like I knew what I was talking about. I mean, come on, how hard could it be? Shoot the things, win the game. Right?

Another player chimed in. “Wait, hold on. Are you… a girl?”

Uh-oh. Here we go.

“Yup,” I replied, trying to keep it casual.

“Dude, we got a girl on our team!” someone shouted, like I’d just announced I was an alien from another dimension—which wasn’t entirely inaccurate.

“Oh, great. Now we’re gonna lose,” another player groaned. I could practically hear the eye-roll.

Now, normally, I’d use my telekinesis to remotely choke someone for that kind of attitude, but, you know, Earth laws. So instead, I took a deep breath and muttered, “Oh, you have no idea who you’re messing with.”

We started the game. Bugs swarmed in from every direction, bots shooting lasers at us from across the battlefield. And instead of working together like a team, my fellow players turned into something out of my old empire—chaos incarnate.

“Dude, stop stealing my kills!” one player screamed, firing wildly at the air.

“Bro, I’m not! You’re just slow!” the other guy retorted.

“Are you even aiming at the bugs? That’s, like, half the point of the game!” someone yelled.

“Forget the bugs! I bet I can snipe Sierra from across the map!”

I dodged lasers and bug guts while the rest of my team fell apart. Honestly, this felt more like a reenactment of my crew turning into a weird cult that worshipped me back in the day. Only, instead of bowing at my feet, they were actively trying to sabotage each other—and me.

“Focus! We’re being overrun by bugs and bots,” I yelled into the mic, but nope. They were too busy arguing about who was the better player. One dude even started shooting in circles just to “see what happens.”

It was ridiculous. And strangely familiar.

“Alright, that’s enough for me,” I muttered, disconnecting from the game. “It’s like dealing with a bunch of space cadets after three days of no sleep.”

I decided to shift gears—no more chaotic multiplayer madness. What I needed was something calming. Something wholesome. Something far removed from the stress of commanding armies or dealing with Earth-based gamers who didn’t know how to focus on objectives.

I booted up Stardrop Valley. Farming? Sure. Relaxing pixelated farming. I was going to plant virtual parsnips and water crops like the overpowered, space-faring deity that I am.

As I clicked away, tending to my digital farm, I couldn't help but chuckle. My alien-tech PC is a thousand times faster than anything Earth has, but here I was, using it to grow turnips and befriend pixelated villagers.

And so, as the hours ticked by and the sun began to rise, I continued my farming adventure, waiting for Lily to wake up and inevitably question my life choices. But hey, when you’re an ex-space tyrant living in a closet, you’ve got to find ways to pass the time.

And honestly? Growing virtual crops in a closet felt like a pretty solid way to start the day.