They were still talking — Magnus was in the middle of rejecting Ethan again — when the System did something unprecedented and deeply suspicious.
[You Have Leveled Up.]
Magnus froze. This had never happened before. Well, he had leveled up before, but never just randomly out of nowhere like this. It usually only happened after sex, either after a quest completion or after he was intimate with Alex, which was why he'd always assumed his experience and levels were tied to his sex life.
"Magnus?" Alex's voice cut through, closer now. She'd noticed him go still mid-sentence.
He didn't answer right away.
"Bro?" Ethan waved a hand in front of his face. "Did I break him? I was only joking about the cheek-kissing thing, mostly."
"He's not broken," Sofia said, though she sounded less certain than the words implied. "Magnus?"
"I leveled up," he said finally.
The room's attention snapped fully onto him.
"You what?" Aaron said.
"I leveled up. Just now." Magnus looked around at all of them, still processing it himself. "Randomly. Out of nowhere."
"Is that… a good thing or a bad thing?" Chloe asked carefully.
"It's not good or bad," he said. "It's just something that's been happening—a System thing. Everyone has a level. Mine started at level one and I've been leveling up ever since I'd gotten the thing."
"Right, then what's the problem?" Valeria asked.
"It's… never happened like this before."
"What do you mean, like this?" Aaron prompted.
"Right, sorry. I'm doing a terrible job explaining." Magnus rubbed the back of his neck, trying to organize the thought before he said it out loud, because saying it out loud was going to sound exactly as strange as it felt. "Okay, so… every time I've leveled up before, it's been tied to sex. Either completing a quest, or just… you know, being with Alex. That's it. That's always been the pattern. I actually thought that was just how the System's whole leveling framework worked. Experience through sex, level up through sex, everything through sex." He gestured vaguely, encompassing the entire absurd shape of his situation. "It made sense, given everything else about it."
"Right, the whole sex or death quest thing." Ethan nodded. "But?"
"But I'd just leveled up," he said slowly, "in the middle of a conversation." He gestured vaguely at the interface only he could see. "Before I was level seven, now I'm level eight."
Silence.
"Right, and there's nothing remotely sexual about what you were doing just now," Jade said.
"Well, I mean, unless the idea of kissing my cheek was sexual to Magnus." Ethan spread his arms.
When everyone stared at him, Ethan raised both hands. "Hey, I'm a very attractive man. To both genders, or so I'm told. That's just objective fact."
"He's got a point," Camila immediately supported her boyfriend.
At the same time, choruses of "Nobody says that!" and "Who told you that?" rang out.
"Your opinions don't count." Valeria smacked Camila's shoulder.
"Rude!" Ethan and Camila both protested.
Jade cleared her throat. "Let's get back to figuring out what Magnus was doing, shall we?"
"I wasn't doing anything," Magnus said. "I was just sitting here. Talking. That's it."
The room processed this collectively for a moment.
"Okay," Jade said, leaning forward with the focused expression of someone who found this more interesting than alarming. "This actually matters a lot. If the System's whole framework isn't purely sexual—if it can register experience from something else—that changes what we think we understand about it."
"Which is already not much," Sofia muttered.
"Every time we think we understand it," Alex agreed, "it surprises us with something that makes it feel like we're barely scratching the tip of the iceberg."
"What were you actually doing, though? Specifically," Aaron asked. "Not just 'talking.' What were you saying? What were you thinking about saying next? Feeling?"
Magnus tried to reconstruct it. "I was annoyed at Ethan. Amused, probably, underneath the annoyance. I was thinking about how to shut down his test proposal without actually agreeing to anything. That's… that's really it. Nothing profound."
"Could it be the audience?" Valeria offered. "You were surrounded by a lot of people. Maybe it's not about romantic or sexual context specifically. Maybe it's about connection in general — social bonding, trust-building, whatever."
"That would track with the Sofia trust-building mechanic," Aaron said, already turning this over. Over the weekend, this had come up as one of the topics they'd talked about, so everyone was up to date on everything Magnus was dealing with by now. "If the monthly quest rewards trust development without requiring sex specifically, then maybe the System's underlying framework has always accounted for non-sexual growth. You just never saw it manifest as a level before because it was always folded into something else."
"Could be." Magnus glanced at Sofia's menu. "Already up to eighty-four percent trust with Sofia as well. Just six percent left."
"Or," Ethan said, "it's random. Sometimes things just happen and we build elaborate theories around coincidences."
"That's possible," Aaron admitted. "But that's not a useful theory. We can't test randomness."
"You can't test theories that are wrong, either."
"We haven't determined this one is wrong."
Jade held up a hand before that could escalate. "Can you actually see your experience bar? Like a number, a percentage, something quantifiable? Not just the level itself."
Magnus paused, focusing to bring up his own menu again.
"…Yeah," he said slowly. "I can. There's a bar. It's…" He narrowed his eyes at it. "Can't zoom in on the actual numbers, though. Wait!" He watched it for a second. "It might actually be moving right now. In real time."
"Moving how?" Sofia asked immediately.
"Filling. Slowly." He kept watching it. "It just went up a little. I think. Unless my eyes are just seeing things."
"That's not reassuring," Jade said. "What are you doing right now?"
"Nothing. Just watching the bar and talking to you."
"So talking counts," Ethan said.
"Maybe," Magnus said. "Or maybe it's something else entirely and the talking is a coincidence."
"It's gauging engagement, maybe?" Katie offered.
"Okay," Valeria said, clapping her hands together. "Let's actually test this properly instead of guessing. Aaron, you're good at experimental design. Take charge."
Aaron looked briefly pleased despite himself. "Fine. Magnus, keep watching the bar. We'll try a series of controlled variables and see what, if anything, moves it."
What followed was twenty minutes of increasingly chaotic experimentation.
They tried silence — no movement. They tried Magnus reading aloud from a random book Katie had brought — negligible movement, possibly him hallucinating after staring at the thing for too long. They tried Magnus solving a simple math problem Aaron gave him — nothing. They tried bringing Tony into the room to interact with him — a small increase, though nobody, including Magnus, understood how that worked. They tried a staged argument between Magnus and Sofia — something inconsequential, deliberately performed for the test, both of them raising their voices with theatrical commitment but nothing actually at stake — no movement. They even tried… violence, per Maya's suggestion.
"What if it's because you were annoyed at Ethan earlier? Try punching him."
"What?" Both Magnus and Ethan turned toward her.
"If annoyance was what triggered it, maybe acting on that annoyance will trigger it again," she said, as if that was perfectly reasonable. "C'mon, guys. For science!"
Ethan actually thought about it. Then he turned back to Magnus. "Alright, punch me, bro."
Magnus stared at him in disbelief. "I'm not gonna punch you."
"Come on, bro. It's a testable hypothesis. Just punch me."
"No!"
"Come on, punch me!"
"No!"
"C'mon, bro! If you don't, I'm gonna hug you, and give you a kiss on the cheek."
Ethan spread his arms and started walking toward him.
"Ethan, don't!" Magnus started backing away.
But Ethan was already getting into his space. Then Magnus's hand shot out, and Ethan was hovering three feet off the ground over the living room table.
"Bro!" Ethan exclaimed. "…This is kinda awesome, actually!"
"Okay, I'm gonna set you down now if you promise not to try and hug me out of nowhere again."
"No promises."
"Ethan!" Magnus said but still lowered him down anyway.
"Wait!" Aaron held out his hand to stop him. "Did it move?"
"What?" Both Magnus's and Ethan's heads snapped toward him.
"What we were testing!" Aaron snapped. "Did levitating him in the air move your exp bar?"
"Oh, right!" Magnus said and turned back to his menu. He narrowed his eyes at the thing and scratched his chin with his free hand. "Well, it… probably did?"
"You don't sound confident," Jade noted.
"There're no actual numbers to go on from, but it seems a little fuller than before. Maybe two to five percent?"
"Right. So that's a maybe-yes?" Ethan asked.
"Can you spin him?" Camila raised a hand.
"What am I? A toy?" Ethan started, then thought about it. "Actually, yeah, spin me!"
"I'm not spinning you!"
"Spin him!" Maya shouted.
"…Spin him." Nicole said.
Then, almost all the girls were chanting, "Spin him!"
Magnus looked toward Aaron.
Aaron pressed his lips together. "…I mean, a slow rotation might provide additional data."
"…He does have a point." Jade jabbed her thumb at him.
Magnus turned to Miguel — the only adult in the room, apparently.
Miguel simply shrugged. "Don't drag me into this."
So, Magnus did the only thing he could do.
He muttered: "Why is this my life?" then spun Ethan in the air.
The bar moved a little.
"So using your powers counts." Aaron wrote it down.
They took a break for lunch, then continued again afterward. Aaron suggested a more targeted test: "Try actually listening to someone. Not just hearing them talk, but actually paying attention to what they need from the conversation."
Chloe, still a little shy about being singled out, ended up talking about a difficult conversation she'd had with her parents before Spring Break. Magnus listened — really listened, the way he always did without thinking about it, picking up on what she wasn't saying as much as what she was. The bar moved. Not by a lot, but it clearly moved.
"Okay," Aaron said, writing quickly. "That's data."
They tried the opposite: Ethan talking at length about something trivial while Magnus deliberately only half-listened, nodding along without engaging. No movement.
"So it's not just conversation," Sofia said. "It's attention. Actually listening versus nodding along halfheartedly."
They tried having Magnus read Aaron's menu, checking in on how his Trust had shifted over the week and asking him, genuinely, how he was feeling about everything that had happened — the powers, the ghost that may have been a System host, all of it. Aaron answered honestly, admitting he'd been more unsettled by the cardiac arrest revelation than he'd let on. The bar moved again, more than it had for Chloe.
"Vulnerability," Jade said slowly. "Or trust. Or both."
"Makes sense, considering his monthly quest with Sofia," Aaron agreed.
Then, they unleashed Maya onto Magnus. The test was simple: Maya would be Maya, tasked with being as unreasonable as she could be, and Magnus would have to try and calm her down or manage her somehow. He honestly thought this was just everyone's way of torturing him at this point, but he tried anyway. And whatever he'd learned during their shared adventure in town last Tuesday seemed to do wonders. The bar moved a substantial amount.
"So it's not that performance doesn't count," Aaron said slowly, staring at his notes. "It's that performance without a real outcome doesn't count. The staged argument with Sofia this morning didn't resolve anything real, because there was nothing real to resolve."
"But actually de-escalating something, talking down someone," Jade added, "even if the delivery is calculated or performative—that counts."
By the end of it, they still had more questions than answers.
"This is genuinely frustrating," Aaron said, staring at his notes like they'd personally wronged him. "There's no clean single trigger. But there's a shape to it, at least."
"What shape?" Magnus asked.
"It's not about doing things to people. At least, not consistently," Aaron said slowly. "There's definitely a social component. But what it's actually measuring is inconclusive. What we've confirmed so far seems to be: attention, trust, actually caring whether the other person is understood. And whatever your System values, it's rewarding genuine interaction more than isolated achievement." He looked up. "Which is a strange thing for a System built around sex quests to be tracking."
"Unless," he continued, working through it out loud, "it wasn't ever really about the sex. The sex is just a means to an end."
"Or maybe," Ethan said with a shrug, "we just haven't seen the full picture yet. Maybe the effect is delayed, or cumulative, and we're catching the tail end of something that started building a while ago."
The room considered both possibilities without settling on either.
"Both are plausible," Jade said. "Neither is provable with what we have right now."
Magnus, meanwhile, kept watching the bar, which had gone still again, sitting at whatever fraction of progress it had accumulated with no clear explanation for any of it.
"Well," he said, "that's deeply unsatisfying."
"Look on the bright side," Jade said. "At least now you know some of the things that increased your exp. Which means you can focus on or avoid them, depending on whether or not you want to level up faster or slower."