Or at least that’s what Ralph’s parents had always told him. After all, why should a random fairy grant a child power out of nowhere, because, say, the child had wastefully tossed a coin into a fountain? Childhood, Ralph’s parents informed him, was all about learning your limits, not learning your limits only to break them in one spectacular moment for all the wrong reasons.

Ralph believed his parents. But he remained curious.

His parents kept the family tree hidden under their bed, wedged so far behind the dusty holiday decorations that Ralph had to be careful not to set off the dancing Santa when he sneaked it out. He’d creep back to his bedroom, secret himself under his superhero comforter, and tremulously unfold the parchment. It was a lengthy and complicated thing, as trees go, with many wild touches. Branches ended abruptly, marked with skulls and crossbones and labeled with cryptic phrases like
NASTY CAULDRON INCIDENT
or
WHOOPS — DANGLING MODIFIER
or
WHUMP BY DRAGONTAIL?
All until it got to the most recent century, where the deaths were labeled with words that still sounded magical but were actually commonplace, like
ANEURYSM
and
METASTASIS.

Steve and Mary Stevens were not the sort of parents to make a lot of rules. They didn’t need to, because their son wasn’t the sort of boy to need them. Ralph had always been a peaceful child. Some might even have called him happy. But had anyone sat him down and asked him whether such a thing were true (which, incidentally, no one ever had), that person would have discovered that he was an awfully serious boy. He would have replied that he’d always felt directionless — that even the most clever of minds couldn’t piece his life together in such a way as to produce meaning.

And Ralph certainly didn’t have the most clever of minds, much as he may have believed otherwise. In a boy of average looks and below average athletic ability, cleverness was simply the one attribute relatives could find to compliment him on. So his self-esteem grew a little out of whack. Seven years old: He challenged the Ukrainian kid in his class to a lunchtime game of chess, dared Becky Phister to finish the Belgian Bears books before he did, and argued passionately with his teacher that Portland was the capital of Oregon. Ralph failed in all these things: The Ukrainian kid trotted out a textbook four-move checkmate, Becky Phister finished
The Last Strudel
while Ralph was still on
Boofer Makes a Bungle,
and his teacher made him look up the capital of Oregon. Which was, in fact, Salem.

Despite such defeats, Ralph had something many of his classmates did not have: permission to make mistakes. Ralph’s mother and father never punished him when his so-called cleverness led him astray — as when, for example, vapors from his homemade chem lab eroded the floorboards and caused the dining room to tumble into the basement. They were, in fact, endlessly tolerant — except when it came to their one ironclad rule:

Ralph must never, ever, make a wish. Not under any circumstances whatsoever.

As a result, for the first nine years of his life, Ralph was blissfully unaware of what his peers were doing whenever they spied the first star of the night or caught an eyelash or ripped apart a turkey’s Y-shaped furcula.

Once fifth grade came around, though, the school calendar finally shook out in the right way that he could celebrate his birthday on the very first day of class. His parents sent him to school with two dozen chocolate-frosted cupcakes, along with a sealed note to his teacher informing her that while the Stevenses were happy to provide treats for Ralph’s birthday celebration, he was to sit out in the hallway for the whole thing. The risk of someone’s adding a candle and peer-pressuring him into making a wish was too great.

The first day of school is an ordeal for anyone, but it was especially hard for Ralph, who had to wait in the hall staring at a
SCHOOL
is
COOL
poster (a bespectacled worm emerging from an apple) while everyone inside ate his cupcakes. His humiliation only grew when he found out that, while he was outside, Johnny Keenes had gotten into the secret pocket of Ralph’s backpack and pilfered the portrait of a level-eight paladin, whom Ralph had spent a great amount of time sketching in case he ever came across anyone willing to play a role-playing game with him. The character’s life story was written on the back, and was soon lampooned in Bic graffiti and pasted on the wall of the classroom, where a stream of cupcake-eating cretins shuffled past and made fun of the missing birthday boy’s hero. Sir Laurelbow was of a forgotten order of Lamp Knights responsible for journeying the realm and spreading their light, both ideologically and literally
(ha ha!),
following a lonely quest until the day the Lamp Knights would rise again, aided by the Priestesses of Julanisthra
(Julanisthra! Geek!),
should they ever be awakened from their slumber by the suitable sequence of magical runes (
(Magical runes! Woot, woot!).

When Ralph returned and saw his hero smeared with marker and spit-balls and chocolate icing, he ran from the room, seeking refuge in the nurse’s office. Through the glass cylinder of tongue depressors he could spy a corner of the infirmary door’s chicken-wire window, at which Johnny Keenes regularly found reason to peer, sneer, and leer “Sir Laurelbow!” before bolting away.
Laurelbow,
Ralph thought angrily.
Why couldn’t I have named him Sir Commando? Sir Heart of Steel?

Once he got home, Ralph typed out a spreadsheet of arguments he could draw from to convince his parents how very cruel they had been. Foremost among them, of course: If they’d let him make a stupid wish, he’d have been saved massive humiliation and pain.

The Stevenses read the spreadsheet, listened politely to their son’s accompanying rant, served him a pair of chocolate-frosted cupcakes Mary had placed in the bread box that morning precisely in case Ralph had felt left out at school, then gave him the Talk.

The real reasons for his parents’ wish prohibition was far more gruesome than anything Ralph had anticipated. Wishes, they told him, had destroyed many of his ancestors. Those who hadn’t been destroyed were maimed, crippled, hobbled, enfeebled, deranged, or made to disappear. The examples they used to make their case were certainly graphic. Margaret Battersby (b. 1750, d. I76I) had wished for money and wound up with a coin-shaped tunnel through her body after a gold piece was shot at her from a cannon. Xavier Battersby (b. 1752, d. I76I) had wished for his sister back, wound up with Evelyn’s rotting backside affixed to his own, and died of infection. Amy Qualin (b. I8I9, d. I84I) had wished for children and wound up financially ruined when she was deeded an orphanage built over a sinkhole. Rupert Battersby (b. I830, d. I894) had wished for peace in Europe, and caused Prussia to disappear entirely. Sigmund Seinhold (b. I899, d. I9I7) had
wished to be better at rugby and kicked a ball so hard at his next game that it disemboweled three teammates. Bethany Heald (b. 1940, d. 1949) had wished for magic ponies, gone on a long quest to find them, and finally wound up squashed beneath magic ponies.

The ends of most wishes, the Stevenses finished sadly, were less dramatic but equally tragic. The child never returned, forever lost on a quest to obtain his or her heart’s desire.

Thoroughly swayed by his parents’ parade of gruesome examples, Ralph gave up on wishes and settled on hard drives instead. He played as many computer games as he could, tinkering with them and developing his own mods and maps and dungeons. He even, unbeknownst to anyone else, applied to the holy grail of jobs, the only job that he’d ever really, really wanted: video game designer.

Not a programmer, mind you, but a
designer:
the guy who dreams it up and puts it all together, then sees his vision fulfilled by millions of kids mashing buttons at his command. And not at just any company — at MonoMyth, the one with all the coolest licenses and long-running franchises, designed simultaneously for all platforms. MonoMyth had famously employed a teenager to develop the bestselling Goddess of Misery line of console games, and Ralph was sure that someday he could best even that.

Yes, Ralph was only fourteen. But he had a programming portfolio to dream of, a sheaf full of game concepts inked into bent spiral notebooks, and a flash drive’s worth of code. What had the ad in the back of
Computer Gamer
said?

MonoMyth seeking designer with intimate knowledge of the electronic gaming industry, 3—4 years programming experience, and employment history reflective of capacity to helm high-profile projects.

Check, check, check. Surely the genius of Ralph’s ideas would make up for his lack of any employment history beyond mowing lawns! He assembled all his samples (they filled a shoebox that he wrapped in brown paper and banded twice over in packing tape) and mailed them off well before the deadline.

The MonoMyth rejection letter, a fuzzy photocopied slip of paper addressed to “applicant,” suggested he reapply as an entry-level software coder. At the bottom of the letter was a scrawled blue consolation:

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