"I would kill a rabbit if I were hungry and rabbit was handy. What's vat meat?"

"Vat meat is - meat without involving an animal, basically, you make chicken or beef out of a vat of proteins instead of a bird or a cow. It's more ethically consistent than meat you have to kill things for, but we can't make it without Devisors or Gadgeteers yet, so it's way more expensive than real meat. It's mostly a thing in California, I think, they're really big on caring about their ethics."

"Gosh. What exactly is the difference between Devisors and Gadgeteers anyway?"

"Gadgeteers follow the laws of physics. Like, if a Gadgeteer makes something, then theoretically somebody else could've made it, the Gadgeteer just did it faster and better and without needing to look up the science behind it or waiting a hundred years until science got to that point. Devisors, on the other hand, don't have to follow the laws of physics, we just have to be internally consistent. Powers Theory folks say it's a kind of Warper ability, that we believe in something so hard that we create pockets of unreality where the things we make can actually work. Like, the stuff I make out of cardboard - cardboard is just a kind of paper, really, but I've got this intuition in my head saying that it can do pretty much anything if I just give it a chance, and what do you know, it does. Historically most of what it does is explode, but. Anyway, most Devisors aren't as obvious as I am about it, they do things that seem to make sense unless you actually know something about the field they're working in."

"That sounds confusing, but it's all going to look like a mess of crazy technology to me for a while..."

"Yeah, probably. I apologize on behalf of Devisors everywhere for making it even more fucked up."

"That's okay."

"Anyway. What were we even talking about... vat meat, killing things, laser gun, inventions. Yeah. I've got a ton of stuff I want to make, but I'm gonna make the gun first so I can be sure it's not all just gonna blow up."

"Well, good luck."

"Thanks! I'm kind of hoping it isn't a matter of luck, though. Luck having historically been kind of not my thing."

"You're meant to have a normal allotment now though, right?"

"Supposedly! It's a weird thought."

"Takes some getting used to?"

"Yeah. Maybe I'll get used to it when good things start happening to me. Well, I'm open to the possibility."

She giggles. "What classes are you taking?"

"Uh... English, French, math, history, Devisor workshop, AP physics, and patent law 101."

"What does AP mean?"

"Advanced Placement - it's college level difficulty and when I go to college it'll count as preexisting credits. If I go to college. There's some college-level courses without AP in the name, but it's always stated somewhere."

"This place is a weird hybrid of high school and college. I guess maybe it's more like other high schools here."

"Nah, it is in fact a weird hybrid of high school and college. Other schools have AP classes, but usually only a few, and no other college-level courses. Hell, some of the higher sciences are graduate-level. Typically they're reserved for Exemplars or Gadgeteers, though. I'm going to see if I can get into a couple of them, though. The more I know about the laws of physics, the more efficiently I can break them."

"Having laws of physics is a luxury you should appreciate!"

"Oh, for sure. I will break them very politely. But if the universe didn't want me making some waves, it shouldn't have given me this power."

"I guess that might or might not be a valid inference here, I don't know!"

"Fortunately, we don't have much evidence that the universe is even sentient. So I feel pretty good about my chances."

"That's fortunate."