This time there was no question about it, Zavier heard incredulity in the Architect's voice. "You want to CONTROL The System? This is quite impossible, I'm afraid."
"Not The System, with capital letters," Zavier corrected. "The system as it applies to me. I want to control the way my advancement goes. I want to decide my fate and my choices."
"I can make a special exception and allow you to choose between multiple skills and abilities. You could then have finer control over your development."
"That's not what I'm asking for. That's a choice of no choice. I don't want to choose from the options presented to me; I want to create the options. And in alignment with that, I want to be able to choose how to distribute my stat points. I understand that I won't be able to control the passive ones that are more of a metric, like attack, defense, class, etc. But I want to be able to choose where the points go."
"This is beyond unusual. This is the biggest request that has ever been presented," The Architect seemed offended that Zavier even proposed the idea.
"It's my energy and I will be earning it. Once it is given to me, I should get to choose what happens to it. I get that you stay in control because we need training wheels to keep from negative unforeseen consequences, but I don't need that."
"That is very presumptuous of you to assume."
"I'm not saying I'll get it right, and I'm definitely not saying I know everything. I doubt I'll be able to min-max myself. But I should have the freedom to make those mistakes."
The Architect considered, "What would be the benefit to us to provide this to you? This is highly risky."
Zavier nodded. That was a fair point. "I'm sure you can't give me a lot of answers about why you're here," he saw the Architect nod. "But I can make some inferences. Feel free to stop me if I'm wrong, but if I'm at least mostly correct, will you consider my requests?"
Silence, then the pen clicked.
"Okay," Zavier leaned forward excitedly and rubbed his hands together. "What you've done to our planet must take an astronomical amount of energy. And by astronomical, I don't mean 'one or two suns' worth of energy, it must have required energy collection and expenditures like nothing our greatest scientists could fathom."
Click.
"This is going to be wildly expensive. That kind of expense isn't going to be a rich being's playtoy or something that was done on a whim. It has to have a very specific purpose."
Click.
"In that case, unless there's something I can't even imagine, that really only leaves two reasons; entertainment or military."
A moment of silence preceded the next click.
"It's possible it's just entertainment. Lord knows that reality shows generate a ton of revenue here. But that wouldn't be in alignment with what has happened so far. You haven't been throwing us into dire situations that might be entertaining to extraterrestrial species. You could have cut off our technology and laughed as we frantically tried to recover stone age knowledge. Instead you've been training us. You've given us clear objectives for growth, finely controlled access to your technology, and training periods to learn about our new bodies before handing us the weapons that could have killed us if we were completely unprepared."
Click.
"This tells me it's military. And if that's the case, we're being groomed for enlistment into some sort of war. I'm sure we'll be conscripted at some point - you wouldn't spend this kind of money on us and then just let us run free, but first you have to judge our abilities and where we'll fit in. You're giving us enough leeway to grow in the ways that are optimized to us, but not enough for us to destroy ourselves right off the bat. I'm sure that as we all grow stronger we're going to start neatly fitting into boxes, sorry, 'classes' that tell you exactly where to place us once we've reached whatever threshold you need to conscript us."
He paused but waved his hand before the pen could click. "Don't bother, I'm confident I'm on the right track. Now, where this leaves us is the question of me."
He looked at the Architect and saw that the old man was now leaning forward with a fascinated glint in his eyes. He waved his hand in a smooth gesture. "Continue," he said with a smile. "I'm very interested in what comes next."
Zavier felt that this was the make or break moment and he rushed to grab it before it slipped through his fingers. "Let's say you click your magic pen and give me everything I asked for. Worst case scenario, I fuck it all up. I completely screw up my advancement and either get killed by something or become so functionally useless that I may as well kill myself. In that case all you've lost is one person among billions, but you've gained the knowledge that this method of advancement doesn't work."
The Architect mulled this over for a moment then waved his hand again.
"But let's say it works," Zavier whispered. "You can see what my race is truly capable of if some of our elites have the power to craft their own advancements. We have some truly astounding geniuses on this planet, the kind that can fathom ideas that I wouldn't even be able to understand the description of. The fact that you're fighting a war means you haven't WON that war, which means you need genius level tacticians, scientists, creators, and fighters. You need people that stand so far above the ranks, so far outside of the standard deviations, that they can turn the tide of battles just with their presence. In a world of Storm Troopers, you need some Thrawns."
The Architect paused for a moment and Zavier got the distinct impression that he was researching his references.
"And if this works for me, a regular old mook, then you'll have a case study for what will happen if you decide to do the same for the greatest among us." He then sat back in his chair, the energy of the moments before leaving him.
The Architect studied him for a long period, neither of them moving. Then he sat up straight, tucked his pen into his lapel pocket, and folded his hands on his lap. "This intrigues me and I am convinced to see where it goes. We will need to work out the ground rules, though. Even with this, you must have some 'training wheels', as you so adequately put it. The full scope and nature of The System is so far beyond your understanding that even a glimpse into the full power of it would be like giving you the power to control a single photon and throwing you into the heart of your sun. So, here are the terms."
He and Zavier talked for some time before they were both content with the agreement. Zavier stood and stuck out his hand with a huge grin on his face. The Architect stood as well, but instead of shaking Zavier's hand he simply placed a plain, silver pen into it. Then the room disappeared.