I woke with a headache so powerful it brought tears to my eyes. I sat up in bed and screamed. There was simply no holding it back—it hurt too much! My hands clutched my head when I heard stomps in the distance. It was Dad, rushing from the room next door. In his hands was a baseball bat. Upon seeing me, he dropped it and rushed to my side.

  “What’s wrong, Milton?” he asked, rubbing his hand against my back.

  “Head,” I choked out between the tears.

  “Did you fall?”

  I went to shake my head, but the pain was too much. Instead, I gave a thumbs-down gesture.

  “Let me get some medicine.”

  He left my bedroom and returned with a small cup of liquid pain-relief medicine. I carefully downed it before giving it back. It tasted pretty terrible, but it would—hopefully—reduce the pain some… in an hour. Dad sat with me the whole time. As the medicine began to kick in twenty minutes later, I finally stopped crying.

  “Are you ok now?” he asked.

  “Still hurts but not as bad,” I told him.

  “Need me to stay with you?”

  “No. I think I’m ok now.”

  He nodded and left me alone, taking the baseball bat with him. If it had been Mom, I would have been at the hospital already—and maybe she was right to be worried like that. Yet, for this, I knew what was going on. The mass of memories had been shoved back into my head—another fifteen years was not doing my brain any favors.

  With the lessened pain, I could think long enough to realize what I needed to do.

  I tried to Heal myself but ran into an error immediately.

  Right. There was that. I remembered my plan and purchased the stats I wanted to test.

  After buying what I wanted, I Healed myself until doing so made my headache worse instead of better. Blood—it turned out—was a combination of health and magic. Using a small amount didn’t have much of an effect, on how I felt—like there was a sort of buffer there—but overdrawing it would have adverse effects on my body. It was the sort of thing I now had an intuitive understanding of after unlocking it.

  I sighed now that my headache was mostly gone—notwithstanding the overdrawn blood. I debated going back to sleep, but decided to at least read over the note I’d shoved to the side of my vision before I did.

  I shuddered after reading the note. I didn’t like the idea someone—or something—watching me at all times. I couldn’t imagine being intimate with someone—or even myself—knowing that some deity was recording the whole thing like some kind of pervert. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. It would have been better to be blissfully unaware.

  As I thought about it more, it did make sense. How else would the system know when to give me experience for what I did? Quests seemed to come from what I was doing or what I was about to do. The only way that would be possible was if it—the system or the deity, it didn’t matter which—was able to read my mind and actions at all times. Ugh!

  At the end of the day, I knew it didn’t really matter. I was being spied on and there wasn’t anything I could do about it—not really. Anything capable of making the system and turning back time was more than capable of snapping me out of existence. I knew it would take note of my grumblings, but what else was I to do? Nothing! That’s what.

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  I closed my eyes. It took far longer than it needed to, but I fell into a fitful sleep. Dreams of being turned to paste by some sort of eldritch being or another haunted me.

  I awoke late in the morning to the smell of food wafting up from below. I dressed and walked downstairs. My head still hurt, but it was muted now. Even though the medicine had worn off, the healing I’d done on myself had been enough to ease my suffering enough to be functional.

  As I walked down the stairs, I considered the best way to convince Dad that I was a time traveler… again. It was already the third time I was doing this and this whole song and dance was getting old. A floating light was just boring. If I was going to wow him, I would do it right. A floating me, on the other hand… now that would be something. The problem was that I didn’t have any practice flying around. That was something I would need to try, but for now, I needed something flashy that I had some skill doing. A quick Search found the perfect candidate.

  The skill allowed me to cast a series of sparks from my hand. After testing it, I guessed I could light a fire with them if I tried, but they would suit my purposes. Flashy was what I wanted and the skill had that in spades.

  “Good morning,” Dad said when he saw me walk through the kitchen and into the hallway where we ate out meals. “How’s the head?”

  “Better,” I said.

  “Good. Good. Hungry?”

  “Mhm.”

  “Sit down. I’ll bring you something.”

  I did as he said and he returned with my least favorite sweetened-sand in milk. Still, I was too hungry to complain. Didn’t mean I was happy about the breakfast offering.

  I stood up after finishing my cereal, which caused Dad to look up from his phone. I waved to get his attention.

  “Dad, I have to show you something,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “You’ll want to sit down for this one, and probably put the phone down. I don’t want you to break it by accident.”

  Dad dutifully put his phone down and gave me his attention.

  “There’s a famous movie line… we’re not in Kansas anymore. Well, look at this.”

  I put my hand out, palm up. I cast Spark twice to make a small shower of sparks. It was like a sparkler that shot upwards. Thanks to my testing, I knew they would burn out long before they reached the floor below. Dad didn’t know that and jumped up.

  “What?!” He exclaimed.

  “Magic, Dad.”

  “Again. What?!”

  “You’d best start believing in ghost stories, ‘cause you’re in one? Yer a wizard, Milton?”

  “B-Wh-Can you just not do that inside?”

  “I won’t burn the house down, if that’s what you’re saying. Time travel’s a weird thing, you know?”

  “Oh, time travel as well? What are you going to tell me next… the world’s ending?”

  “Well, there’s that, too, I suppose.”

  “Aaaah!” Dad yelled.

  “Well, that’s certainly more of a reaction than me spinning a ball of light around like I did last time,” I grumbled.

  “Well at least that wouldn’t have potentially burned the house down!”

  “I did say you should sit down for this,” I chuckled. “So can you please? I’d like to hit the ground running and do better than I did last time.”

  “Well, mister time traveler, what did you do last time?” Dad asked, sitting down in his chair.

  “Farming, mostly. Some magic, too. Helped a bit, but a bit isn’t enough to save humanity, so here I am to try again.”

  “Well that’s a letdown. And here I thought you’d win the lottery and take over the world.”

  “Might help, but no. I do know the lottery numbers for this week and next week. But those aren’t important, you know? Didn’t help enough.”

  “Fine! I get it, just tell me, ok?” Dad pleaded.

  “Can you at least call me Eddy? Milton is too old fashioned.”

  “Alright, Eddy, I’ll do that. Please tell me the lotto numbers.”

  “I will, I will. First things first, though. I need to talk to Grandpa Joe. He’s got some seed money that’ll get me going. Can I borrow your phone?”

  Dad picked his phone up and handed it to me. I input his code and sent the email to Grandpa Joe. I included the code words and some other notes. I stressed the need for the laptop and the crypto. Without those, I was pretty much dead in the water. When I was done, I locked the phone and handed it back to Dad.

  “So what now?” he asked.

  “Your lotto numbers and then off to the back yard to mess around and wait for Grandpa Joe to come over. Also, can you please get some internet for the house? I could really use that… and a way to drop out of school, too. That would be nice.”

  “I don’t have money for an internet connection right now. After the lottery?”

  “Fine. The drawing’s in two days. I need it by Monday next week at the latest.”

  “Alright, alright. I’ll do that, provided I win.”

  I gave Dad the lotto numbers before going to the backyard. I originally planned on doing more of the same—farming—but I wasn’t so sure. With how much strain the time travel was putting on my body—specifically my brain—I didn’t think I could handle more than one more restart. And even that was going to be rough!

  Even if I included investing in businesses, I didn’t think I would come close to what I really needed. No, whatever I did, this was going to be the last real chance I would have to get big chunks of experience. When I went back the next time, that was it. Anything I wanted—or needed—to test would have to happen now. I couldn’t put it off until later.

  As for earning that experience? Well, the pesticide dumping project had given me some ideas. I was caught because I didn’t take precautions. I wasn’t going to be so foolish this time around. With some planning—and abusing the system—I would be able to do as I pleased.

  I knew that—by going this route—there would be some negative consequences to what I was going to do. That said, everything would return to how it was supposed to be as soon as I restarted again. It was a comfort to know that everything—and everyone—was essentially fake. I was glad they wouldn’t remember. It would be better that way.

  Before I went back inside, I thought over the vision I had been granted. It revealed issues I hadn’t really thought about that much. There were the obvious ones—like how skills needed an energy source—but there were more obscure ones. There was too much variety in terms of skills available. Without some kind of limiter to direct people towards what they needed, it was a free-for-all and the outcomes weren’t good.

  The solution—in my eyes—was classes. A class was a way of tilting the distribution of points in whichever stats I ended up going with. It would also allow me to narrow down the amount of skills available to pick from. Maybe there were ways I could have the classes give free skills in the same theme—like gun skills for a duelist. Then there was the other side of things: the professions. Was that something worth including as a class or as a separate choice? I added these to my list of things I needed to try.

  I headed back inside and up to my room to think. Dad gave me some paper and a pen to write down my notes. By the end of the day, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to accomplish. I had a lot of experience that was simply burning a hole in my pocket. I would keep enough to restart in an emergency, but the rest would go towards forwarding my plans.

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