System Architect

I awoke the following morning to find that the quest reward had been 102 experience. This brought my total available experience to 43,746. Between the costume and the quest, that was an entire day’s worth of experience as a bonus, so I felt satisfied. In the back of my mind, I wondered just how much more I could have gotten if I’d driven around with Dad to scrounge up all of the leftover candy. As it stood—though I didn’t know the correlation between amount I received and the experience gained—I ended up with a little over five pounds of the sweet stuff.

I also realized upon waking up—and collecting my thoughts—that I had a money problem. Not in the short-term—the crypto proceeds from Grandpa Joe would last a while—but in the long term. The income from writing was paltry and I doubted it would get much better than allowance levels. Now, I wasn’t going to stop trying to get the word out, but I couldn’t rely on that to cover my expenses. What I needed was a better way of earning money.

Dad suggested I rake leaves and mow lawns when I asked him over breakfast. He said I could borrow his tools for the jobs, but that I also had to reimburse him for gas and stuff on the mower if I decided to go that route.

While at school during the day, I considered those and came up with another one that had slipped my mind. Building up to it would take time, but I could get deals to write stories for people. I knew most of those stories would be adult themed—a whole can of worms I wanted to avoid given my present… circumstances—but the ones that weren’t might be worth the squeeze.

I was able to find some groups online that catered to buying and selling the written word and sent out feelers there using my other writing efforts to snag some potential clients. I didn’t expect to hear anything, so instead I asked Dad in the evening to see if the landlord needed help raking their yard or if they knew anyone else who did.

It was the following morning when I got replies to both efforts. The landlord didn’t need help, as they hired a company to do it, but they did know a couple of neighbors who could use the help. I made note of them for later in the day. I had a couple replies in the online group. One was promising but the other was a furry who didn’t read the part where I wasn’t going to do anything adult-oriented. I shot a message to the promising one.

After getting dressed and having breakfast with Dad, I grabbed the rake from under the back porch and let Dad know I was going to see if I could rake the neighbors’ yards for some cash.

“Let me come with you,” he said, groaning as he rose to his feet.

I waited for him to get his coat on before we marched up the driveway. The houses in question were the first two houses when turning right out of the driveway and onto the sidewalk. We stopped outside the fence of the first house.

The house was an old Victorian painted pale blue. The yard in front of the house was leaf-strewn but not overly large—maybe a tenth of an acre. A wrought-iron fence separated the street from the lawn. There was a gate at the center with a flagstone path running to a porch that wrapped around the front of the house.

“Do you need me to go with you to the door?” he asked.

“I got this,” I said nervously.

“I’ll watch from here, then.”

I opened the fence and walked to the door. I searched around for the doorbell and eventually found it slightly hidden off to the left of the door frame. I rang it and waited… and waited… and—

“Hello?” an older man asked upon opening the door.

He saw me with the rake and smiled. He looked up behind me and then back down to me.

“Oh! You want to rake my yard?” he asked.

“Yes,” I nodded.

“Great! I see your old man is teaching you the value of hard work! Tell you what, I can give you—“

He rifled through his wallet and counted what he had.

“—fifty bucks if you will rake the front yard into my compost pile on the side.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“Here, let me show you where the compost pile is.”

I followed the man down his front steps and across the front of his house to the side. The side area was littered with leaves and some twigs from a storm that had rolled through a few days earlier. At the far end was a section with several piles of leaves and grass clippings. The man pointed to it.

“If you can put all of the leaves on the left side by the fence, that would be perfect.”

“Covering the pile with the grass clippings?” I asked.

“That’s the one!” he laughed and walked back into his house.

I walked to the corner of the front yard that was farthest from the compost pile. Before I began, I let Dad know what the deal was and he walked away to let me begin.

The leaves were still damp from the storm and the yard hadn’t been touched all season. I struggled to loosen up and liberate the leaves from where they were stuck between the tufts of grass. That the grass was a bit long certainly didn’t help—it kept getting caught on the rake’s tines and I had to clear them with my foot fairly often.

From the corner of the yard where I started, I went back and forth diagonally in lines, pushing the heavy mass of leaves forward and cleaning up behind as I went. Each trip up and down the line of leaves took longer and longer as both the amount of leaves and the distance I had to cover increased.

At some point, the width evened out and then began to shrink. When that happened, I ended up with two sides of the line of leaves that were growing more than the center. It was around that time that I ended up moving portions of the pile all the way to the compost pile that the old man had indicated before going back and moving the much-reduced leaf piles at a quicker pace.

I was exhausted by the end. It had taken me almost two hours to do the work. My arms felt like lead and shook from the effort. I climbed the stairs and rang the doorbell. The old man came out and walked the yard with me. Then we went back to the foot of the stairs.

“You did a great job, young man!” he said, putting a few bills into my hand. “With work like that, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of people wanting your help!”

“Thanks,” I said, stuffing the money into my pocket after counting it.

I waved bye to the old man and exited the property through the front gate. I walked home slowly not because I didn’t want to be home—I did—but because that’s just how tired I was. I placed the rake in its place under the back porch before climbing the back stairs to the porch slowly.

I found Dad sitting at the small table in the hallway. I plopped down on one of the chairs.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Good,” I said, flashing the cash. “Tired.”

“I bet!” Dad laughed before schooling his face to be more serious. “Just so you know, I won’t be able to afford this place on my own so I’m going to have to move out when the lease is up in January. I’m looking for a place now so I should hopefully have something soon.”

“Moving sucks,” I commiserated.

He glared at me for my word choice but said nothing about it before he continued.

“I let the landlord know this morning. I’ll need your help packing and cleaning over the next month. As for moving, I’ve got a couple friends that would probably help for a six-pack and some pizza.”

“Ok,” I said.

This wasn’t unexpected. I remembered moving out of the house at the same time, but it was to move in with his then girlfriend—and later my stepmother. This time around, he hadn’t met her through my existence’s interference. Those sorts of butterfly effects were something I had understood would happen—in passing at least—but I had not thought about what changes I would be making with every choice. While resetting the time line would—in a sense—fix any mistakes I’d make along the way. I’d need to be more careful in the future.

Over the next several weeks, I helped Dad pack when I was with him. Alongside that, I made some good progress on the blanket—even though I had even less time with the whole moving thing. By the time it was early December, I was ready for Elizabeth to help me complete the blanket.

“Elizabeth,” I said when I arrived at the meetup with Mom.

“Oh, hello Eddy,” she said.

“I’m done stitching all the rows and even the border. What do I do now?”

Elizabeth helped me lay out all of the completed parts.

“Now is the most fun part!” she said. “You’ll have to stitch all around the outside and then secure the batting in the middle by stitching patterns—quilting—or by tying string at various locations.”

After all the stitching I had done to get the thing together, I strongly considered making the knots. Before I decided, I needed to do as she said and secure the back to the front with the batting in the middle.

I was thankful that the batting I had chosen was on the thinner side. This made it easy enough to position between the bottom—which wrapped over the edge to form a small border around the top—and the top. Elizabeth and I pinned the stack together. It was tricky to do because of the way the bottom and top joined together. Eventually, we got the seam ready for stitching and I started on it.

That seam took an entire week to complete. By the time the next meetup took place, I was putting the final few stitches on. Part of what took so long was my insistence on making the seam as strong as I could. I wanted the blanket to last until I returned.

The final step was to decide how I wanted to secure the center. I was just done with stitching so I opted with the tying option Elizabeth suggested. I chose a thick silvery thread and punctured the blanket every second or third junction where four patches came together. I staggered them with each row of ties so that the ties made a diagonal pattern to contrast the vertical and horizontal lines of the patches.

By the end of the meetup, I was done. I looked the blanket over one last time before folding it. It was full-sized with two-inch square patches sewn into a pixelated wintry scene. The silvery ties looked like icicles dangling from the blanket. Around the edge was a pale yellow that was—in turn—ringed in a dark blue strip where the back met the front. I smiled. I felt proud of what I had created.

Crafting Experience: Wintry Blanket

Exp Gained: 481

“You did a wonderful job!” Elizabeth gushed when she saw the final product.

We showed Mom and the two women folded it for me and chatted together. I yawned. It was time to go home.