Utilitarian Wishes

He had, in a way, gotten what he wanted. He had the key to a puzzle he'd struggled with and more or less given up on. But that wasn't what he'd originally come for, and...

Well, the chance was right there, wasn't it?

"If it's alright with you," Angelo said after a moment's pause, "I'd still like to pursue... well, something. I have a general idea of what I want, and even if it's not changing the existing power, it's still something I'd like to, uh, have."

Wording this was... weird, wasn't it?

If he'd wanted to upgrade his arm, it would be as easy as anything to go up and visit Mister Takeda. Even if Angelo still owed him for the arm itself, he had no real doubt that Mister Takeda would have probably enjoyed tinkering with his arm and adding new features.

He'd always loved tinkering.

He eyed the forms, taking a moment to compose his thoughts.

"When I first started being able to... ah, do things fast, the first thing that occurred to me was that I'd be able to read fast. Being able to read things just by flipping through, or something like that, would be... well, a huge quality of life upgrade. Right now I can remember everything perfectly, but I still consume books at a normal rate, so I still have to take the time to manually read through the entire book."

Which was, to say the least, a lot of time. Or, realistically, it wasn't much time at all, but it felt like ages for him.

It was kind of hard to put it exactly into words, because there was no clear term for what he wanted. There was so much variety. He already learned quickly, but that was natural. Similarly, he retained information more or less perfectly.

"I guess.. something like super-enhanced speedreading?" Angelo said, trying to put it into words. "I already remember everything I read. But when I have a book, I still have to manually flip through and read each page. If I could speed through, then it wouldn't be an issue." Would it be better if it was just magic?

"I was thinking something like... a modification of the power I talked about before. Where it lets me speed up the process of actually reading."

Forms. Of course there'd be forms, and Angelo reached out, skimming over the contract carefully.

"Old?" Angelo said as he read the contract. "You don't look a day over three hundred."

His dad would have died just to spin in a metaphorical grave if Angelo hadn't read the whole thing through carefully, so he made a point of doing just that, working methodically through it. The language was clean enough, and it was obvious Jericho had a professional put it together.

'Ability that allows me to absorb knowledge from books in a quick manner.' Angelo wrote out carefully, deciding to avoid getting too specific. The idea was clear enough.

"I pay in... a secret?" That seemed more viable to him than steady worship.

Given the two, Angelo knew which he'd pick. Giving up a secret would take up only a small amount of his time. The question is did he have a secret valuable enough to warrant it? Mentally, he rifled through his secrets, alarmed to realize that there were a lot. How did he end up with so many?

His father seemed like the first, obvious one. But even if he was allowed to share someone else's secret, it seemed wrong. The power was for him. It should be his secret, and he wasn't the sort of person who'd trade away the secret of a friend for it.

So his own secrets. Something he wanted to keep. Something that-

Ah.

He knew what the secret was going to be, even as he sat there, furiously trying to come up with something else. Something that was secret that wasn't going to hurt to say it.

But it was going to have to be that. That was the secret he desperately wanted to keep. That was the one that felt like it would have to be pulled out from between his fingers.

"Do I just... tell you?" Was there a formality? He didn't want to blurt it out and be told he had to do it in a special way.