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In the middle of the night, after Camillo passes out on top of his covers but before he wakes up in the morning to drag himself to class, a new app is quietly installed on his phone.
camillo gets a magic app
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There are now two states on the page: “TALON”, and “Default.”
Try tapping “Default” to switch.
(When he does, there are a couple of greyed out dropdowns and a little arrow pointing to CONFIRM.)
Z blinks, a few times.
His nails are short, and when he picks up his backpack to rifle through it it’s not causing him any hand-based issues.
“…what the fuck was I looking for,” he says, mostly to himself.
You can switch between save states at any time. Memories, Quests, and Routes will be saved with their state.
“Yeah, but, like. Which.”
He dumps his whole backpack out on the bed. There’s a lot of loose papers in there.
"Well, which classes do you have today?"
Quests? Routes? Oh man. He's not sure whether to be terrified or excited.
“Oh! Shit. Right.”
He starts rifling through papers.
They can make it all the way to Z’s next class like everything is normal, if Camillo wants.
Camillo does want. He wants to do that, and then get pizza from the food court as if everything's normal, and curl up alone in a booth with his feet up on a cushion and his back to the wall, and only then does he want to take another look at the magic app.
Z is currently making him a very respectable 1 Pearl per minute, even in his default state.
Camillo’s current pearl count is 536.
He takes deep breaths and stares at the screen.
Obviously there are limits on what's okay to do, even for a good cause. He can't go around changing people left and right without their knowledge or consent; not everyone is as chill as Z, and there's hardly anyone he knows that well. Poor Evan, or whatever his name was, is probably having an awful day.
On the other hand -- he's got to make some changes to someone, if he wants all those rewards. (Assuming they're for real -- but he really has to assume that, for now, doesn't he? Everything else seems legit enough.) And plenty of the things he can change aren't something that anyone picked for themselves in the first place. If he gives someone, say, long toes, that's not really so different from happening to be born with long toes. If people's hands were suddenly less sensitive, they'd complain about nerve damage, so really they should be fine with slightly more sensitive hands, unless they just coincidentally happened to naturally have the perfect amount of hand sensitivity.
Not to mention: some of the things he can do are good. Really good. He can help his little brother transition. He can fix his dad's back pain. And someone out there has to want really sensitive hands.
What can he buy with five hundred Pearls, anyway.
He’s halfway to $1000, which apparently costs exactly 1000 Pearls. For 100 Pearls he can expand Papa Johns’ delivery radius to cover his house. For 250 he can buy today’s Small Mercy (2/2), whatever that is. For 500 he can remove the blind spot on the road by his old high school that got a kid killed last year driving to crew practice.
Oh.
Apparently he’s taking a minute to be sad about the stupid guy he played one board game with once, and the stupid funeral Valentine made him wear a stupid suit for, and the stupid slideshow with pictures of the guy with his kid sisters.
He can stop that from happening next year, or the year after. For the price of — what, giving Z a weird morning? Z would be so pleased.
And by the time he makes it back to his dorm room this afternoon — even if he doesn’t do anything at all — he’ll be able to do the pizza one, too.
(He hits the button.)
There’s a little flourish of scattering animated petals as the reward redeems.
This launches him into another tutorial section.
Tap to go to the home screen.
This is one of the main buttons at the bottom of the screen. It brings him to a sort of splash page with a graph of his pearl income and a few buttons and a little portrait of Z at the bottom next to some conspicuously blank space.
Tap NEWS to see your news feed.
There’s a post feed here, with only one post on it, a small local news article about the completion of construction work on the dangerous McAllister turn.
This page will keep you updated on your impact on the world!
Swipe down to refresh.
This adds another post to the feed, a press release about a novel antiviral targeting the measles entering clinical trials.
The press release is right there. It’s even on an actual .edu website.
It was out about half an hour ago — not much time to be picked up by any actual news outlets.
He picks up in three rings.
“This is a surprise!” he says, in a tone of genuine delight that almost manages to conceal the undertone of profound concern for his well-being.
Why does Valentine sound like he’s going to explode. “I call! — my Friday linear algebra class got cancelled,” this is a flat lie, “so I was thinking about cutting the TA section that morning and making a three-day weekend of it, come home a little early.”
Sigh.
“Yes, all right. Thrilled enough for nachos.”
He’s had so much practice making cheese sauces in the last several years.
“I know, right? You should send me a picture.”
Actually, if he wants verification, he should really have checked if it was already fixed before he bought the reward. The app could just be scraping recent news headlines and offering them as prizes.