# Chapter 2: The Tutorial is Broken
Michael didn't go downstairs right away.
He sat on the edge of the bed — his father's old bed, in his father's old room, in the house that smelled like lemon cleaner and morning — and listened. The floorboards creaked below him. A pan clanged against a burner. And then, rising through the thin walls like a sound from a dream he'd already forgotten:
His father's laugh.
It was the laugh. The specific one. The one that started in the chest and rolled outward like a wave hitting a breakwater, too big for the kitchen, too big for the house, too big for a Tuesday morning. Michael had heard that laugh exactly three hundred and twelve times during the year they'd had together. He hadn't counted on purpose. His brain had just — kept them. Filed them away in the part of his memory that refused to let go.
Three hundred and twelve. He'd counted them in the dark, in the weeks after the funeral, the way a miser counts coins.
And now there was three hundred and thirteen.
Michael pressed his fist against his mouth and breathed through it until the shaking stopped.
*He's alive. He's downstairs. He's making breakfast and he's alive and I am not going to fall apart on the first morning of my second chance.*
The blue screen hovered patiently in front of his face, as if it had all the time in the world.
**[CURRENT MISSION: LIVE A NORMAL LIFE.]**
*Right. Normal. I can do normal.*
He got dressed in yesterday's clothes — the only clothes in the dresser, because this was the first day, the very first day of the year that had ended in cemetery dirt — and went downstairs.
Michael Sr. was standing at the stove with a spatula in one hand and a coffee mug in the other, wearing a t-shirt that said "WORLD'S OKAYEST MECHANIC" in peeling iron-on letters. His shoulders were broad enough to block the window. His hands were already grease-stained, even though the shop didn't open for another hour, because Michael Sr.'s hands had been grease-stained since approximately 1987 and no amount of soap had ever fully reversed the situation.
He turned when Michael came in, and the grin — the wide, easy, park-a-truck-in-it grin — hit Michael like a physical force.
"Morning, champ! You look like you slept in a washing machine. Eggs?"
Michael opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
*Say something. Say anything. Don't just stand here staring at your dead father like he's a ghost. He's not a ghost. He's making eggs. Ghosts don't make eggs.*
"Yeah," Michael managed. "Eggs. Please."
He sat down at the kitchen table. Carrie — Stepmom Carrie, with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a smiley face drawn on the grocery list in too many eyelashes — set a glass of orange juice in front of him and squeezed his shoulder.
"You okay, kiddo? You look a little pale."
"Just a weird dream," Michael said, which was technically the most accurate statement he had ever made.
His father slid a plate of scrambled eggs across the table. Michael looked at the eggs. He looked at his father's hands — the broad, scarred, grease-stained hands that had taught him to change a tire, that had ruffled his hair, that had been folded across a chest in a casket forty minutes ago in a timeline that no longer existed.
He picked up his fork and ate the eggs.
They were slightly burned on the bottom, because Michael Sr. always got distracted by his own jokes halfway through cooking. They were the best eggs Michael had ever eaten.
"So," his father said, dropping into the chair across from him with the easy weight of a man who had never once worried about the structural integrity of kitchen furniture, "big plans today? You and Bill gonna hit those free weights?"
"Yeah," Michael said. "Yeah, I think we're gonna work out."
His father nodded approvingly. "Good man. Just remember — you can't rely on brute force. If you strip the threads, you've broken the whole system. You gotta find the right wrench."
Michael's fork stopped halfway to his mouth.
The words landed in his chest like a bell being struck. He didn't know why. He wouldn't know why for months. But something in the back of his brain — the part that had lived through a year that hadn't happened yet — filed the sentence away in the same place it kept the laughs.
"Yeah, Dad," Michael said quietly. "I'll find the right wrench."
He made it to William's basement in fourteen minutes. He would have made it in twelve, but he stopped twice on the sidewalk to stare at things — a mailbox, a fire hydrant, a dog being walked by a woman who had no idea that interdimensional monsters existed — with the wild, grateful intensity of a person seeing the world for the second time.
The basement was exactly as he remembered it: a bunker of organized chaos. Posters on every wall — *Final Fantasy X*, *Dragon Ball Z*, a faded *Solo Leveling* print that William had ordered from a sketchy website and defended with his life. A fortress of empty soda cans surrounded the beanbag chair like a medieval fortification. The weight bench in the corner was buried under a layer of dust so thick it had developed its own ecosystem.
William was cross-legged on the beanbag, thumbs moving at inhuman speed on his handheld console, his face locked in the expression of a man performing open-heart surgery.
Michael had already done this part. He'd already burst in, already shouted, already shown William the screen.
But that was the first rush. The adrenaline. The *holy crap I have a game screen* energy.
Now it was three hours later, and the adrenaline had curdled into something worse: a problem without a solution.
The whiteboard told the story.
William had dragged it out of his closet — a relic from his brief, intense phase of trying to learn Japanese by diagramming anime subtitles — and covered it in a web of arrows, circles, and increasingly desperate handwriting.
**OPERATION: GRIND LOGIC**
At the top, in red marker: **HOW DOES MICHAEL GAIN EXP?**
Below that, a list of failed experiments:
~~1. Lift weights (STR still 5)~~ ~~2. Read Byzantine history (INT still 10)~~ ~~3. Heroic mail rescue (LUCK still 3)~~ ~~4. Fold fitted sheet (DEX still 6 — sheet won)~~ ~~5. Fight spider web with broomstick (unlocked FEAR OF ARACHNIDS?)~~ ~~6. Meditate with "intense heroic intent" (fell asleep)~~
"We're approaching this wrong," William said, pacing the length of the basement with the manic energy of a man who had consumed four energy drinks and was vibrating at a frequency only dogs could hear. "We've been treating this like a standard JRPG. Repetitive action, trainer NPCs, the whole *Blitzball* paradigm. But the System isn't responding to any of it."
Michael was sitting on the weight bench, staring at his stat screen with the hollow focus of a student who has studied for the wrong exam.
**[STRENGTH: 5]** **[DEXTERITY: 6]** **[CONSTITUTION: 7]** **[INTELLIGENCE: 10]** **[WISDOM: 9]** **[LUCK: 3]**
Three days. Three days of trying everything they could think of, and the numbers hadn't moved a single point. The System sat there like a loading screen that knew he had nowhere else to go.
"Maybe it's broken," Michael said.
"Systems don't break, Michael. Systems have *rules*. We just haven't found the first one." William stopped pacing and jabbed his marker at the whiteboard. "In *Dragon Quest*, the Hero has to prove his worth by protecting the innocent. In *Final Fantasy X*, Tidus had to literally learn to kick a ball. In *Persona*, you have to build social links before you can—"
"Will."
"—access the deeper mechanics of the—"
"*Will.*"
William stopped. Michael was looking at him with an expression that was no longer frustrated. It was something quieter. Something that had been building for three days beneath the comedy of fitted sheets and spider webs.
"I have a year," Michael said. "One year until the day my dad dies. And I can't even figure out how to gain a single point of experience. What if I can't do this? What if the System gave me the cheat code and I'm too stupid to use it?"
The basement went quiet. The hum of the ancient refrigerator filled the silence.
William put down the marker. He walked over to the weight bench and sat down next to Michael, which required him to shove aside a pile of strategy guides and a half-eaten bag of chips.
"Mike. Listen to me." William's voice had dropped the manic energy. This was the other William — the one who showed up when things actually mattered. "You are not stupid. Your Intelligence is literally average. The System said so. That's not an insult; that's a baseline. And you know what average people do? They figure things out. They just take longer."
"That's not as comforting as you think it is."
"It's not supposed to be comforting. It's supposed to be *accurate.*" William pushed his glasses up his nose. "We've been thinking like players. We need to think like developers. If you designed a game, and the player couldn't figure out the tutorial, what would you do?"
Michael thought about it. "I'd... give them a quest marker."
"Exactly. A quest marker. Something in the world that says *go here, do this, the game starts now.* We've been sitting in the tutorial zone grinding air. We need to find the trigger."
"So where's the trigger?"
William grinned — the slow, dangerous grin that meant he'd had an idea that was either brilliant or catastrophic, and he genuinely could not tell which.
"Snack run. Now. We think better in motion."
It was 1:07 AM, and the streets of Ripon, California were the kind of quiet that only small towns achieve — the deep, settled quiet of a place where nothing has happened since 1987 and everyone is fine with that.
Michael and William walked side by side down Willow Street, arms loaded with the spoils of a convenience store raid: two bags of chips (one barbecue, one "Extreme Cheddar Blast" that William insisted was a tactical necessity), a six-pack of the off-brand energy drinks Michael liked, and two liters of a liquid so aggressively blue it looked like it had been designed by someone who had never seen a natural color.
"Okay, new theory," William said, crunching through a chip with the intensity of a man solving the Riemann hypothesis. "The System won't activate until you respond to a *real threat*. Not a spider web. Not a fitted sheet. A genuine, life-or-death—"
The scream cut through the night like a knife through wet paper.
They both froze.
It came from the park. One block away. A woman's voice — high, raw, terrified in the way that only real terror sounds, nothing like the movies, nothing like the games, just a human being who had encountered something her brain could not process.
William's bag of chips hit the sidewalk and burst open like a grenade.
"What the hell was that?" William whispered.
Michael was already running.
He didn't think about it. He didn't calculate the odds or check his stats or consider the tactical implications. His legs moved because a person was screaming and his body had decided, before his brain could object, that he was the kind of person who runs toward screaming.
"Mike! *Wait!*" William's voice cracked behind him, pitched somewhere between terror and outrage. "We're Level 1! *We're Level 1!*"
Michael vaulted a low fence, crossed the overgrown lawn of the park in four strides, and skidded to a stop in the central clearing.
A woman — middle-aged, blonde, clutching her ankle near a picnic bench — was staring up at something that did not belong in the same reality as picnic benches.
It was roughly man-sized. Its skin was a sickly, pale grey, stretched tight over bony limbs that bent at angles human limbs did not bend at. Its face was a geometry problem written by someone who hated geometry — four glowing yellow eyes that darted in different directions, a mouth full of needle-thin teeth that chattered with a sound like a sewing machine running on bone.
It was the ugliest thing Michael had ever seen, and he had once watched William eat a gas station burrito.
The System exploded across his vision in urgent red:
**[WARNING! HOSTILE ENTITY DETECTED: UNIDENTIFIED 'SCRAPPER' D-CLASS PREDATOR. TARGETING INNOCENT.]**
**[NEW QUEST! PROTECT THE INNOCENT!]**
**[OBJECTIVE: DRIVE OFF/DESTROY THE SCRAPPER PREDATOR.]** **[REWARD: 10 EXP, UNLOCK [SKILLS] MENU, 1 STAT POINT.]**
Michael's heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his fingertips. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to run. His Luck was 3. His Strength was 5. He was a fifteen-year-old boy holding an empty soda can, and the thing in front of him had teeth designed for a purpose he did not want to think about.
But the woman was on the ground. And the quest said *Protect the Innocent.* And somewhere in the back of his mind, beneath the terror, a small, stubborn voice said: *This is why you're here.*
Michael threw the soda can at the creature's face and screamed the only thing that came to mind:
"HEY! Over here, you off-brand Gollum!"
The Scrapper's four yellow eyes swiveled toward him.
Behind the oak tree at the edge of the clearing, William pressed his back against the bark, clutching the remaining bag of Extreme Cheddar Blast chips like a holy relic, and whispered a prayer to every game developer who had ever lived.
The tutorial had finally started.