The Billionaire's Beginnings

Exposition

It was finally his senior year. Richard couldn't wait to graduate and get to college. He wanted to be a mechanical engineer. His genius level IQ made most all of his work impossibly easy to do. Except he didn't like to do it. He almost always became bored in class, and eventually would come up with an idea or two for a new invention. That's what he wanted to do when he graduated. Inventing and innovating. As a boy, he would always get really antsy in church and ask his mother for a pen, which he proceeded to repeatedly take apart and put back together, only to recieve a scolding from her because she feared he would break it, or worse, lose a piece. He was always looking around him, surveying his surroundings for what he could create or make better. 

All of this wasn't without distractions, though. His younger self loved to read, and he learned a great many things from this. But, as time went on, he grew apart from his books and became more interested in computers and the internet, more specifically, the things he found on them. He eventually would find himself spending countless hours watching YouTube, Netflix, or God knows what else.  He had a great aptitude when it came to computers, especially when it came to repairing them. He built and rebuilt many of them, eventually working in the computer repair room at his high school his juniour year. He learned the inner workings of them and got to the point that he could almost completely take one apart and put it back together, blindfolded. 

One of the biggest distractions, and by far the scariest of all, was friends. Rather, his attempt to make them. He made many freinds throughout the years, yet they always ended up moving away, or worse, moving on. Social awkardness made this pursuit very difficult for him. The fact that many thoguht he was an ass didn't help this, either. He even referred to himself on occasion as a "sadistic asshole." He had a few girlfriends, none of them seemingly successful, marked by the fact that the relationships had all ended. He had numerous love interests, some of which ripped out his heart and others that had simply faded with time.  Each one he had, though, made him yearn ever more so for them. His constant desire for companionship often kept him from focusing on what he knew to be his ultimate goal. He was by no means "normal," so he should not seek the life of such an individual. 

His education was seemingly intersting enough, even though he didn't always think much of it. He oft took accelerated programs, he was now in calculus his senior year, he might have tried for higher but it was the highest his school offered. His physics class was interesting enough, regardless of the fact that he barely did his work, scraped by on tests, and his teacher was one of the few that treated him like what he usually was, an asshole. His favourite class of all, surprisingly enough was his "English" class, which wasn't really an English class. It was called "Literature of the Bible." It took an intersting, areligious look at the Bible, and allowed for more thorough examination of it outside the constant "Praise Jesus!" one might hear among Christendom. His teacher was rather ecclectic, yet in a humourous way, the primary reason he took this class. Well, that and he needed another English credit to graduate. He enjoyed this class because of the thought provokingness of it, the fact that it got him to more than just read and repeat, or learn and regurgitate. His most despised class was Art History. He found the majority of it incredibly dull, and was surrounded by no intellectual peers, especially considering the class was 85% freshmen. He did appreciate the fact that they all awed him and his intellect, yet he found their sophmoric immaturity annoying. 

Lastly, he was in a program that took up four credit hours of his eight credit hour schedule, it was called GO CAPS. He found this class to be, by far, the most helpful of them all. It permitted him to learn and understand what actual engineers do and how they do it. He had worked on a project for John Deere, which had a remanufacturing plant nearby. A five month ordeal that eventually had tracked all of the major parts and how they moved throughout the facility, and the result was a rather aestheticly appealing process flowchart. At the moment, he was working on a project for 3M. He had helped a three man team to write a sort of instruction manual for how work orders flowed through their maintenance department, which would be implemented at all of the 3M plants. His next job was to collect data about different parts that they had kept in storage and create 3D models out of them, which was the thing about engineering he was best at, in order for them to not have as many parts in storage and just 3D print them as needed. 

His family was rather curious. His mother and father had divorced when he was 6, driving him into borderline suicidal depression until he was about 12. He was the youngest of three, with a brother at the helm and a sister between them. His brother had recently married and now was living in the hometown of his wife. His sister, who ran away from home with her boyfriend three years ago was getting married in a couple of months, to the same man, to his astonishment. His father remarried first, eventually moving to the west end of Nebraska. His mother remained single for a few years more, remarrying and staying in the town that her children had been raised in, a town she lived in for over 20 years. He was now practically alone in the four bedroom house he came to call home. It was just himself and his mother, along with his stepfather. He loved them both very much but he and the man he calls "Dad" had grown distant, and so he made an attempt to reconnect with his real father that he had pushed away for many years. While he felt that he had been mistreated, he came to understand that his father did what he firmly believed to be right. It was mostly just himself and his mother, anymore. The primary binding unit of the house, church, had not been a part of his stepfather's life for a few years now, and that only drove the wedge between them deeper, for Richard was a very religious man.