Peter needs to stop having morning freakouts they're getting tiring.

The first question he should've asked wasn't "what should he do if he has the power to change causality?" it was "how would he test the hypothesis that he does?"

He ought to have been thinking about experiments.

If it's not a coincidence, the thing that he was doing that caused this was thinking about what he was going to do to catch the simulators' attention.

So.

You know what would catch their attention?

You know, if anything would?

Becoming the Grim Reaper.

Is that possible? He doesn't know. He has no idea. But apparently you can just work for the Grim, like, collecting souls and shit. And given what he has learned/recalled about careers on this weirdass fucking world, maybe the top position of the reaper career is replacing the big boss. He'll never know unless he tries.

Okay he guesses this isn't exactly a freakout per se, just another instance of "his brain was hard at work while he was asleep and is now pouring stuff he should do or change about his life on him". Maybe that'll happen less once there are fewer things to learn and think about.

He's pretty sure he's had this thought before.

Whatever.

So, he is probably not becoming famous, except he's going to continue blogging. Instead, he will try to join the reaper career, which means that he needs to go to tomorrow's Thinned Festiveil, and then he shall climb the ranks et c.

In the meantime: magic practice until lunch, then his presentation, then his exam.

By lunchtime he has learned one more practical spell: a cleaning spell that feels like it can pretty generically clean anything including, like, people.

...can it do that well enough that he doesn't need to take showers anymore?

Sure can!

Pogggggggg becoming a witch was an awesome idea.

Anyway yeah school things now, and those he'll just timeslide over.

It's 3PM. Peter's presentation was fantastic and he did great at his exam.

Of course it was and of course he did. He's always been good at those.

A cab to Del Sol Valley would take like fifteen minutes to get there so he has forty-five minutes to kill before the party, but probably more if he doesn't want to arrive precisely on time. Which he probably doesn't, "fashionably late" is a thing, right?

...it is a thing, right? That's not one of the things his memories lied to him about?

Siimgle suggests it is a thing.

Okay cool, so, he's going to spend this time doing some more let's call it research on his party's host.

Sue him, he's curious. If Lucas Yahontov didn't want to be known he wouldn't have gone to such lengths to make himself known.

Sure, what does he want to know?

Probably the tabloids are uninteresting, so, maybe the vlogs? What does he vlog about?

Himself, to a large extent. He talks about prepping for a gig, he advertises his products and his shows and his movies and his Simstagram page, talks about his exercise routine, gives fashion tips, and so on.

But he also does a ton of reviews, like, a ton, of all sorts of things: restaurants, bars, cafés, parks, lounges, nightclubs, computers, phones, VR headsets, lip balms, moisturizers, makeup, clothes, accessories, sex toys, board games, items of furniture, etc. He goes into detail about what he did or didn't like about everything and why, giving personal anecdotes of usage and rating the products along several dimensions from the practical to the aesthetic.

He's actually a really engaging speaker, for all that he sounds a bit like a self-absorbed, insufferable prick. Also a Sim, you know, so there's still a cap for how articulate he can actually be, but he's very reliably hitting that cap.

Maybe a bit too reliably.

...okay, uh, Peter's very thankful for all of that narration, but he is not going to spend enough time watching these videos to get all of that context. If nothing else, they're kinda long, and he has a party to attend. He notes the sheer variety of topics and decides he might watch them later, especially when, yes, he does realise that Lucas Yahontov seems to be reliably hitting said cap in articulateness.

Like, say, if Peter were trying to record a vlog in which he was trying to reach a Sim audience and had learned how to speak at just the limit of what they could understand while still being engaging and interesting. You know. A bit like that.

He shouldn't get his hopes up, though. He should just go to that damn party and ask the man himself if he is a person. That'll be easiest of all, and save him some heartache if he turns out to be wrong.

To Del Sol Valley.

Lucas Yahontov's mansion is the biggest, fanciest mansion in The Pinnacles, a walled neighbourhood where only the rich and famous live. It's three stories of modern architecture with two outdoor pools on the second and third floors' balconies, and the walls are dominated by windows that offer absolutely no privacy whatsoever and display the flawlessly decorated insides.

Not, of course, that that matters much, since between his vlogs, interviews, meets & greets, and parties, anyone could get a complete blueprint if they wanted, including everything except for the secret vault right in the center of the ground floor.

The ground floor which, by the way, is not actually where the front door is. You gotta climb some enormous glass stairs up to the floor above that, instead.

...Peter thinks it is not envy that's making him think he would actually hate living here. Like, yeah, having a pool at home is cool but two outdoor pools and one indoors in the basement gym is a bit much, and there is so much space. He guesses maybe if he had a huge family or just, like, lived with a ton of people, but apparently Lucas Yahontov lives only with his two grandkids? And this is too much for just three people.

Oh he bets it's the grandkids' birthday party if it's anyone's. They were teens, right?

Yep. Identical twins, Zachary and Eric Yahontov. Actually, out of all of the things Lucas Yahontov is super open about, his grandkids aren't. They've often been, like, there, when he threw parties and all of that, but beyond that he's managed to keep them relatively out of the spotlight. When he's asked in interviews about them he says that they can answer the questions themselves when they're old enough if and when they want to, and paparazzi trying to take pics of them are the one thing that seems to reliably make him mad and tell a pap to shove it.