You're an idiot ignorant of his own power

On the drive back home in your beater truck, Pearl’s words bother you.

You’re not the first idiot to obtain unlimited power.

Pearl called you an idiot. Worse, she was right. You already accepted that you’ve made mistakes left and right with your power. That you haven’t been thinking ahead. But it's more than that. Deeper. Do you even understand what your power is?

At a stop sign, you pull the black card out of your pocket and reread it.

Anything you want is now yours, whether physical or immaterial. All you have to do is claim ownership of it.

You’ve done very little to determine the true extent of your sudden graduation present.

Sure, you’ve figured out some handy concepts during yesterday’s party. You can claim physical items like a car, you can claim intangible items like Pearl’s snarkiness, or Jane’s workout routine, or Yutong’s help. You can relinquish claims, returning claims to their real owners, or you can transfer ownership from one person to another. Like when you gave Pearl free reign over Zoey’s knowledge about clothes and her sense of style. You can also change things before giving them back to their original owners, like you did when you adjusted Pearl's romantic dreams, or her memories about consent.

But it doesn’t stop there. When you returned a pair of seats to the movie theater after you left them in another couple’s care, you said they'd revert to the theater after a fixed period of time. Or when you put Pearl in trance by temporarily claiming her consciousness, you set up a verbal trigger to return her to wakefulness when you gave the word. You've set conditional states on when claims should change hands.

Which means your power isn't just absolute, it's also programmable to some extent. Your power comprehends meaning, enough to obey logic. It understands intent. It remembers instructions.

Or, if your power doesn't understand instructions itself, then whatever gave you the power in the first place does.

You shake yourself of the cold, alien thought. That's beyond the scope of your responsibility. Right now you need to think like an engineer, not a mathemetician. It's not your job to figure out where math comes from. It's your job to understand how to use it, and so far, everything you’ve tried has worked. Everything.

So what are the limits?

Are there any?

You hold more power than anyone in history, but just like Pearl said, you’re not the first to wield powers beyond comprehension. A lot of the assholes who did wound up dead.

If you want to avoid the same fate, and keep the good thing going that is your life, you need to do start taking this seriously. That means practicing with this power. Stuying it. Learning it. Not just so you can understand what it is, but so that when you're ****, you won't trip over yourself and lose everythiing.

From now on, you have to accept that doing it alone isn’t an option. This is too big for your limited perspective. You don't know much about Roman emperors, but you reckon they had advisors, councilors, and friends.

Pearl is great, but she's just one person, and you've already meddled so much with her already. You’re in a relationship now - sort of - and you already feel bad for screwing things up with her once. But like she said, you have other friends. Other people who care.

You need a new perspective, a new way of looking things. Preferably with somebody smart.

And the smartest person you know? That'd be Yutong Liu. At the party, her guidance was invaluable for opennig up your mind to the possibilities of your power. How long would it have taken you to figure things out without her help? So, if you're ever to truly understand what it can do, the first step has to be picking up your experiments where you left off, with Yu. She knows he right questions to ask.

And, it just so happens that Yu is the one girl whose help you're certain you can count on anytime, day or night. Afterall, her help was one of the first things you claimed.

Halfway home, you abruptly change course. You turn off the main road and onto a quiet residential street. It's been a minute since you've been there, but you'd never forget the way to Yutong's place.