A Good Day
Luz’s POV
Luz was humming to herself as she set her bike up in the garage. It had been a good day for her. Boscha hadn’t bothered her, the patatas bravas she’d cooked at Eda’s would definitely be enough for her and her mom later and maybe even for a little breakfast for herself tomorrow, and thanks to Amity she should be able to get the water back on by the end of the week. She was feeling good.
On the other hand, not needing to cook while doing homework was something that she definitely wasn’t used to. It took about five minutes of sitting at her desk with her history textbook in front of her for her to understand that it wasn’t going to work. She kept zoning out and it just felt like she was being completely unproductive. After a few more minutes of staring at her textbook, she sighed and got out her laptop. There was something that she’d been working on for a while that she could maybe have running in the background.
One cool thing that Luz had discovered a while back was programming. It had started with her calculator, back in middle school when they had started learning the more advanced equations for mathematics Luz had quickly realized the redundancy of having to type in the same long list of numbers and symbols over and over again. Don’t get her wrong, she could remember every one of them but typing out the quadratic formula every single time it came up was time consuming especially if there was a mistake. However, it took her about five minutes of youtube crawling to find a solution in the form of programing her calculator to do all that crap for her while she only needed to input the variables.
Of course Luz could still do everything the old fashioned way if it came down to it, but it saved a lot of time on homework and tests that she was allowed to have a calculator in. Then, after a very long internet rabbit hole, it eventually sent her down the path of game development that she was still on now.
One of the less efficient but less dangerous ways of gaining gold in The Boiling Isles was to go mining in some of the designated areas. It was dull and repetitive, mainly just dragging the mouse over to glowing spots of light and clicking, but it was something that could keep young children occupied while their parents were busy so there was that. Luz pulled the game up and then opened up the coding and input a sequence that was designated to her computer. Then, with the press of an enter key, her avatar started banging away at the wall while slowly but surely, the amount of gold in her inventory increased.
Luz smiled, content with the program she’d spent a good length of time developing last summer. A lot of bots got caught and kicked off pretty quickly but she’d done her research and was careful, she’d added a slight time delay to the mouse and even programmed in a random ‘miss’ every once and awhile just to make sure she didn’t send up any red flags. She knew that the main developers were actually pretty okay with mods and things like that as long as they were done on private servers instead of the main game. Some of the cool weapons and spells that people have come up with on their own had even made their way into the main game and that was actually how the artificer subclass had started out.
Luz had worked on some stuff like that in the past but it was nowhere near as polished as some of the things she’d seen on youtube, and of course she wouldn’t bring any of those into the main game. It was one thing to create a fireball gun in the privacy of your own server but bringing that thing into the main game was cause for getting banned. Technically, the mining was illegal too but that would probably get more of a slap on the wrist than anything else, it wasn’t like she’d programmed her character to beat other players in PvP settings; though it had been done and if she gave it an honest try, Luz could probably do it too.
With the soft tinkling of gold being added to her inventory in the background, Luz went back to her homework. It was suddenly a lot easier since she could finally focus instead of zoning out. History was boring, english made her hate Shakespeare, math took all of two seconds, and with nothing else to do with her life, she pulled Amity’s headphones out of her backpack and started troubleshooting them. She had two days but why not get started right?
Amity’s POV
Amity sat in her computer chair, clutching a pillow to her chest. She could see that Lazura was online but wasn’t sure if she should go on as well. With a sigh, she set her head down against her desk. This was so much easier before she had a crush.