The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 410

Chapter 410: 410 | Executive Summary for Lukas [SPACECRAFT BONUS]

Percy’s document opened with a table of contents.

A table of contents. For an insurance regulatory analysis. Written by an eighteen-year-old with blue hair who timed his showers to the second and considered emotional vulnerability a statistical event.

I flipped to page one. The header read: REGULATORY FRAMEWORK ANALYSIS: CATEGORY SEVEN PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION EXEMPTIONS AND THEIR APPLICATION TO NON-STANDARD ASPECT DEVELOPMENTAL PROFILES (REVISED DRAFT 3.2).

Page two contained a glossary of acronyms. Twenty-six of them. Percy had alphabetized them and included pronunciation guides for the ones derived from Latin legal terminology.

Page three was a flowchart.

I put the document down. Picked up my phone. Texted Percy.

give me the version for people who don’t read insurance law recreationally

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Reappeared. Disappeared again. This was Percy deciding whether my request constituted intellectual disrespect or legitimate time management. The dots reappeared a final time and stayed.

Page 31. I anticipated this. Section titled "Executive Summary for Lukas."

I flipped to page thirty-one. Percy had written the section header in slightly larger handwriting than the rest of the document, and underneath it, in parentheses so small I had to squint: (I am disappointed but not surprised.)

The summary ran two pages instead of thirty-four, and it read like a human being wrote it rather than a regulatory textbook that had gained sentience.

Category Seven covered progressive manifestation, meaning Aspects that continued developing past initial activation. The classification existed because a handful of documented cases showed genuine late bloomers whose powers kept evolving for months or years after first appearance.

The IHL created the category to avoid reclassifying these people every time their Aspect did something new. So far so good.

This was the bucket Diane and I had shoved my entire fictional identity into, and it fit well enough that three separate diagnostic appointments had accepted the label.

The problem Percy identified lived in subsection language that nobody read unless they enjoyed suffering.

If two or more independent agencies filed registration inquiries against a Category Seven file within thirty days, the regional IHL office generated an automatic secondary verification request.

Someone in an office reads the file, confirms the classification matches observed capability, stamps it, moves on.

Three agencies had filed inquiries against my registration in seven days.

The verification request should have appeared on the public docket eleven days ago.

It hadn’t.

Percy’s analysis offered three explanations. First, the regional office was slow. Average processing lag sat at eleven days, and bureaucracies ran behind schedule with the reliable consistency of continental drift. Second, the request had been filed and subsequently buried through administrative channels by someone with access and motivation.

Third, the request had been generated, reviewed, and cleared before it reached the public docket, which required someone inside the system who could see the paperwork before it became visible to external observers.

Percy’s summary concluded with a recommendation section containing exactly one recommendation: Maintain current classification. Do not volunteer additional information. Let the system’s ambiguity work in your favor. Category Seven’s language is deliberately vague because the IHL wrote it to cover situations they didn’t fully understand, and situations they don’t fully understand are situations they prefer not to examine closely.

Underneath this, in the same tiny parenthetical handwriting: (This is the smartest thing I have ever written and you will never appreciate it properly.)

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