Well, it turns out it's not that hard to distract yourself when you have superpowers.

John didn't pay much attention to class after that. Even without the use of his phone, it wasn't easy to keep his mind focused on something as seemingly trivial as technology and operations management. After all, when you had dozens upon dozens of magical pop-ups at your disposal, who needed phones?

For the most part, for the rest of the hour, John was left distracted with the initial appearance of his new quest. He had long since accepted the most recent of his daily requirements, but there was still some confusion on his part.

His mother wasn't unreliable, or untrustworthy with information like that. If he told her it was important, and he felt like she knew after that conversation, then she would have kept it a secret. John felt certain of that.

So why had the quest been phrased like that? Had it just been made off his initial worry?

No, John thought and read through the quest once more. Something like that couldn't have been spawned from his mind. The idea of killing her off... it couldn't have come from him. The thought of ****, of taking the option ahead of him to kill off his own family, it wasn't something he would have thought off. It wasn't a part of him. It made him sic-

There was a skip in the air, something that John felt, not physically, but emotionally. A pause as it hit him.

He didn't feel sick at the idea of killing his mother. He didn't feel bad, or wrong. In fact, the most accurate way of describing what he felt about the idea was just... nothing.

He didn't feel anything for it.

A part of John, his thoughts specifically, both told him and let him know that it was wrong. It was something he shouldn't and wouldn't do because she was his mom, but for some reason... it was like he couldn't actually feel that it was wrong. That, of course, only made the young gamer even more worried about his situation.

Was it an effect of his powers? A part of this new Gamer Body of his or Gamer's Mind?

His thoughts came and went, and minutes turned into hours as his first hour of the day passed him by. He learned nothing from the class, and barely managed to get any meditating done.

By the time second hour came around, John wasn't any more prepared for it. He spammed his Theft ability two more times at the start of chemistry, and managed to swipe a simple five bucks off of one person and a random chemical bottle from one of the cabinets in the classroom.

Theft Increased to Level 2! Cost: 24 mp
Theft: Take a randomly selected item from a person or a container and move it into your own personal inventory, or take an item from your inventory and move it into the inventory of another person.

John closed the pop-up with a silent tap to his desk, each screen that he had open moved to rest discreetly on top of the desk like that's where it had been made to sit in the first place. A desk that seconds after that was curtly destroyed with chemistry equipment by the teacher when the class lesson called for an experiment.

The experiment, as far as John was concerned, was slow to start. Like the rest of his classes for the day, he didn't pay much attention to it. However, with the help of the rest of his classmates, the partners he had for the experiment, it didn't matter that he wasn't paying attention, at least until he almost blew the table up.

"Please don't mix that in there," a soft voice said from the other side of a wall of test tubes and beakers. The feminine pitch of a bored, and now also annoyed, tone reached John's ears just before he had started to pour. "If you add that much, it won't just be some chemical fire you make, but an inferno..." she said, and John stopped.

John blinked at the small sloshing glass bottle in his hand, and then over to the much larger container, already full of ingredients that had been added in by his classmates. Both glass containers were fairly similar in design, the difference was that the one that the rest of his classmates had been working with was nearly empty, nothing more than a pile of greyish powder coating the bottom of it; while John's bottle was filled almost to the top with a pointless amount of liquid that he was pretty sure had said that it was an acid of some kind.

"Better yet..." his classmate spoke up again. "How about you take this..." She paused and slid a small glass pipette underneath the chemistry set to him. A couple of long seconds passed as John picked up the glass dropper and held it up for her to see through the distorted image of all the glass equipment. "...and use it to add a couple drops to this metal bowl here?" she finished and slid John a circular metal tray with a little rim around the outside of it. Inside of the tray, in a pool much smaller than had been made inside of the initial beaker, was the exact same greyish mixture the rest of his classmates had been working on.

New Skill: Alchemy, Level 1.
Alchemy: This ability both allows you to learn the alchemical knowledge associated with individual items through identification spells (like Observe), and correctly know the different methods and how to use them for the refining and mixing of components used in creating things with them.

John didn't react after adding the acid to the mixture, and for the first few seconds, neither did the mixture itself. He saw the pop-up appear to the side, but ignored it for the time being.

The class fell silent as each table seemed to gather around their own individual test and watch as the chemicals bubbled where they each dropped the acid onto the compound. There were no gasps, or audible noises as a thin misty line grew into the air from each table, and they all watched with growing suspense. It was silent, like everything had suddenly died and, out of the corner of John's eyes, he noticed a grin of wicked glee on the face of the chemistry teacher.

The peace was shattered by the sound of around a dozen nearly consecutive cracking noises as each individual experiment exploded into flames. All around John, the class erupted into a cry of surprised gasps and shrieks, followed by various fits of laughter as they all giggled from the brief scare. Once again though, John didn't react... but then...

Neither did the girl who had helped him with the chemicals.

She just stared straight ahead.

Straight at him.