A message

Morning comes and goes. It isn't until close to noon that Xander wakes up. All is fine and well, and like usual he checks his phone while he waits to fully wake up.

This time, however, an unusual notification jumps out at him as soon as he unlocks his phone. A rather horrifying notification, for it is a message from his mother.

Dear Xander,
it is difficult for me to do this, especially in this manner, but enough is enough and a decision had to be made. You're an adult now, have been for some time, and you should be able to take care of yourself by now. We've been supporting you all this time in the hopes that you'd get a job, or maybe go to college. But that hope has petered out now, and it's become clear to us you won't do anything with your life without some motivation. So, here's your motivation. We're giving you one last month of support. After that, you'll have to pay your own bills.
Please understand, we're doing this for your own good.

• Ma and Pa

Xander stared at the message for some time, his foggy brain trying to make sense of the letters. Once it clicked, however, he wasn't happy, to say the least.

"How dare they! How fucking dare they! Is this how you treat your own son?"

While on the outside he may have had a bit of an outburst, on the inside he was already planning and plotting.

Just you wait. It may not happen today, tomorrow, or anytime soon, but I will have my **** for this. Then you'll regret doing this, this injustice.

Still, in the meantime I have to figure out how to make some money. Kind of lucky that this happened now, when a bunch of possibilities just opened up for me. If I'm really lucky, I'll be able to offload the entire problem and just have magic deal with it.

But how to do it...?

Alright, I can think of a couple of ideas. Not sure which one will actually work though. One, just straight up materialise cash out of magic. Two, basically the same but digital. Three, magic up some kind of item or service that I can then sell. Four, some kind of mind control.

Well, I can see one possible problem, at least with the first one. Easy enough to test it.

Just like the many times he did it yesterday, Xander grabbed his wand and prepared to do some magic. This time: money summoning.

However, as he activated the spell that's create a crisp dollar in his hand, he immediately felt his magical energy plummet. It was gone so fast and yet no results to be seen. So, the spell pivoted. Instead of just becoming a waste of energy, the spell shifted from creating a dollar, to taking a dollar from somewhere else and teleporting it to Xander's hand.

While this might have accomplished his goal, it expended his entire magic pool for it. And also left him extremely horny once more. His morning wood definitely wouldn't be going away now.

Oh fucking dammit! At least I know I won't be using option one. Money suddenly disappearing from places would definitely bring the wrong kind of attention. Not to mention the whole using all of my energy thing.

Speaking of which, let me take care of that.

A couple minutes later Xander was recharged and ready to try again.

Hmm, how to do it digitally? First I should make sure magic can even interact with the digital world. So... what should I have it do as a test? Probably write some kind of program, right?

Why not go with something relatively simple.

Xander makes his way over to his computer and waves his wand at it, instructing it to make a version of the popular Flappy Bird game.

There's a significant dip in his magical reserve, but not enough to deplete it entirely. At the same time, a new icon appears on the desktop of his computer.

And lo and behold, when Xander opens the program a functional version of the games boots up. Well, it's certainly _a _version of the game. There's the slight difference in that instead of a bird flying between pipes it's a... torso... flying through huge penises. A very well endowed torso.

Damn, that's awesome. Sadly, it does also mean I can't use this method if my spells are going to be altered by my desires and thoughts. Sure, maybe I could find somewhere to publish this, but I doubt many people would pay for this.

That just leaves me option three and four. Which really is only option four, since I can't actually think of what I could sell that wouldn't run into the same problems as the other options.

Besides, I would have wanted to try this eventually anyway. Let's just hope it's possible. I'd be a damn shame if the "can't target self" restrictions was actually a "can't target humans" restriction.

As it was already lunch time anyway, Xander decided to order pizza. That'd get him lunch AND a guinea pig. In the meantime, he decided to do some more preparation.