Monday, October 3, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
______________________________________________________________________
[A.N: I know I am late but this one is very long.... Also it's true. I forgot about his birthday and tried to make it up.]
Ryan's birthday had been September 6th. Pete drove him to the DMV. That was mostly the end of it. With no cake, no candles, no anything.
At the time Ryan hadn't cared. The guys hadn't known, because he hadn't told them.
Boys being boys, some of them probably didn't even know their friends' full names, only the nicknames. Birthdays were definitely out.
And telling people it was your birthday felt like begging for attention and Ryan had never been that kind of kid in either of his lives.
Nearly a month later, with the kitchen operational and enough cooking experience to trust his hands, he decided to fix that. To just do something about it for himself and invite the close group.
Saturday, October 1st. He'd called them Thursday and kept it simple. "Dinner at my place Saturday. Six o'clock. Come hungry."
"How hungry?" Dustin had asked.
"Steak hungry."
"Plural steak?"
"Plural steak."
"I'll skip lunch."
"You'll skip lunch and also not fill up on gas station snacks on the ride over, Dustin. I want you at the table with actual room in your stomach."
"That's a specific demand."
"Last time I made chili you'd already eaten half a bag of Funyuns, and you ate two spoonfuls and said you were full. Never again."
"Okay, that's fair."
None of them asked what the dinner was about. Teenagers, offered free steak, don't ask follow-up questions.
He spent Saturday afternoon in the kitchen. Cooking LV 7 made the work pretty easy. It gave him instincts about timing and temperature that he couldn't have explained if someone asked.
He seared steaks in butter with garlic and rosemary, the cast iron smoking hot before the meat hit the pan. Mashed potatoes whipped until they were smooth with butter and salt and a splash of milk. Green beans sautéed with chopped bacon until they were tender and salty and just starting to brown at the edges. Cornbread from a Southern recipe he'd found at the library, the batter thick with buttermilk and honey.
The cake was chocolate. Birthday signature is chocolate cake, even if nobody but Ryan knew that's what this was yet.
The guys arrived together. Four bikes against the fence, four sets of footsteps on the porch.
Dustin smelled the kitchen from the doorway and stopped walking. "Did you hire a chef?"
"I am the chef."
"Since when the hell do you cook?"
"Since forever. Sit down before it gets cold."
"Forever means what, like a week?"
"Sit down, Dustin."
They sat. The steaks went on plates with the potatoes and beans and cornbread on the side.
Dustin ate three pieces of cornbread. He didn't even talk between bites. Lucas went back for more potatoes, scraping the pot with the serving spoon until he got the last of it. Will ate the green beans first, all of them, then the steak, then the cornbread, and when he finished he sat back in his chair and said, "Those green beans were better than anything at the Wheeler house." He looked at Mike. "No offense."
"None taken," Mike said. "My mom makes green beans from a can."
"These weren't from a can?"
"These were from the produce section at Donaldson's. Forty cents a pound. I sautéed them with bacon."
"Sautéed," Dustin repeated. "He sautéed."
"It means cooked in a pan with fat."
"I know what sautéed means, Ryan. I'm just in shock of you saying it."
Mike had been quiet through most of dinner, eating steadily without commenting. He cleaned his plate, set down his fork, and looked at Ryan. "This is really good. All of it."
"Happy birthday to me," Ryan said.
Four heads turned. Four expressions did the same thing in the same half-second, the slow, sinking look of boys realizing they'd forgotten something important.
"Oh, shit," Dustin said.
"Your birthday was…"
"September sixth," Ryan said.
"That was almost a month ago."
"Almost a month," Ryan agreed.
Lucas set his fork down. "Dude. You didn't say anything."
"It's a number. I turned sixteen, I got my license, life went on. I didn't need a party."
"You're cooking us a birthday dinner a month late because you didn't want a party?" Dustin was pointing at him with a piece of cornbread. "That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."
"It's not sad, it's me."
"We didn't…" Will started. "We didn't get you anything. Nothing."
"You're here. That's the present." They don't realize it, Ryan thought. But for a fan like me, they really are the gift.
"No, it's not," Mike said. "We owe you one. A real one."
"Mike. Eat your cake."
"I'm eating the cake, I'm just also saying we owe you a real present."
Dustin reached for the last piece of cornbread in the silence that followed.
After dinner they moved to the living room. Ryan had bought a television, a 19-inch Zenith color set from the electronics store in Roane, for $380. The VCR sat on top of it, a brick of black plastic connected by cables that Dustin had helped route behind the TV stand. They watched Raiders of the Lost Ark on a tape Dustin brought.
Mike obviously argued about whether the boulder scene was physically possible. He said the boulder accelerated too fast for its apparent mass. Lucas said it was a movie. Mike said that wasn't an argument. Lucas said it was the best argument because the point of watching a movie was to watch the movie, not to calculate the physics of the movie.
"The boulder would have crushed him in the first two seconds," Mike said. "The temple corridor is maybe fifteen feet wide. The boulder fills it. He's running at full sprint. There's no way…"
"He's Indiana Jones," Lucas said. "He's supposed to outrun the boulder."
"I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's not possible."
"Those are the same thing when you say them."
Will was sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, his legs stretched out. He'd been watching the movie with his chin propped on his knee but his eyes had drifted closed during the last twenty minutes. His breathing was even. He'd fallen asleep.
Dustin pointed at him. "He does this every time."
"Let him sleep," Ryan said.
"I'm not stopping him. I'm just saying. Every movie. He makes it to the middle and then he's gone."
"He ran this morning," Lucas said. "Before any of us were awake, my father told me he saw him."
Ryan looked at Will, asleep on the floor of his living room, completely relaxed. Will had been quieter than usual today, not withdrawn, just settled. He'd helped Ryan set the table, washed his own plate after dinner, and refilled Lucas's water when he noticed the glass was empty. The kind of things you did when you were comfortable somewhere.
The movie ended. Dustin rewound the tape. Mike argued about random thing in it for another five minutes with no one in particular. Lucas told him to shut up. Will slept through all of it.
Five teenagers in the living room on a Saturday night. Normal.
After the guys left, Ryan stood in the kitchen with the radio on low and a sink full of dishes, and the notification slid into the corner of his vision.
[CHA training gain detected. +1 CHA (CHA: 8 → 9)]
He actually laughed. Hosting dinner. That's what got him a point. Not the Demogorgon-tier monster he'd been prepping to fight, not the Mana Crafting thresholds, not any of the shit he'd been grinding for months. Six months into this rodeo and the system had finally registered that he was capable of making people feel welcome in a room. CHA had been a rounding error on his character sheet since May, and it turned out the fix was steak and cornbread.
He dried a plate. Slotted it into the rack. Thought about how absurd it was that the Gamer system, cosmic engine of a million LitRPG isekai, apparently also ran on hospitality. Like some D&D DM who'd decided bonding XP was a legitimate reward structure.
Fine by him. He'd take the point.
* * *
Will showed up alone that week after school.
This was unusual. The guys almost always traveled in pairs or groups, the buddy system hardwired from months of training. But Will rode up on his bike solo, parked it against the fence, and walked up the porch steps with a grocery bag in one hand.
"I want to learn how to cook," he said.
Ryan let him in. "Why?"
"Because my mom works doubles three nights a week and Jonathan can do exactly two things. Scrambled eggs and toast. Sometimes he makes them both at the same time and calls it dinner."
"Scrambled eggs on toast isn't bad."
"It's not bad the first twenty times. We're past twenty." Will set the bag on the counter. "I brought stuff. I didn't know what to buy so I got chicken and rice and a green pepper because it was cheap."
Ryan looked in the bag. Chicken thighs, still cold. A box of Minute Rice. One green bell pepper, slightly bruised on one side.
"We can work with this. Wash your hands."
He taught Will how to break down chicken thighs, separating the meat from the bone with a paring knife. Will's hands were careful, his cuts precise as he can and paid attention to the small things. He didn't rush. He even asked questions when he didn't understand a step.
"You're cutting against the grain," Ryan said.
"I know. I can see the fibers." Will held up a piece and turned it in the light. "They run diagonal on thighs. On breast meat they're straighter."
"How do you know that?"
"I watched you cut the extra steaks on Saturday." He went back to cutting. "I pay attention to how things are put together."
They made a stir-fry. Oil in the pan until it shimmered, chicken in pieces, green pepper in strips, rice on the side. Ryan showed him how to control heat, when to flip, how to tell doneness by pressing the meat with a finger instead of cutting it open. The Cooking skill hummed faintly in the background, but Ryan kept it suppressed. This was about Will learning, not about the system doing the work.
Will ate his portion standing at the counter. "This is good."
"You made it."
"You told me what to do."
"That's how cooking works. Someone shows you, you do it, eventually you don't need the someone." Ryan started washing the pan. "Come back next week if you want. I'll show you how to make soup. Soup is cheap and lasts four days."
"Friday works." Will scraped his plate clean and brought it to the sink. He stood there for a second, watching the water run, and said something that caught Ryan off guard. "Do you ever get tired of being the one who knows everything?"
"I don't know everything."
"You know more than us. About everything. The training, the cooking, the fighting, whatever else you haven't told us yet." Will turned off the tap. "I'm not asking what you're hiding. I'm asking if it's heavy."
Ryan looked at him. Will Byers, the boy-who-lived, asked the one question nobody else had thought to ask.
"Sometimes," Ryan said.
Will nodded. He didn't push for more. He dried his hands on the towel, grabbed his bike, and rode home before dark.
* * *
The house grew more teeth every day that pass.
The Commodore 64 that Ryan bought from an ad in the Herald for $650 with a monitor and disk drive. Dustin had made a sound when he saw it that wasn't quite human, a high wheeze followed by a scramble across the living room floor on his hands and knees to get closer. He spent the first hour loading programs from disk and talking to the machine like it could hear him.
The weight set went upstairs in the training room, a barbell and dumbbells and a bench from a gym that was closing in Roane. Two hundred dollars for equipment that would have cost eight hundred new. The guys used it during warmups before sessions.
The kitchen got a proper coffee maker, thirty dollars, because Nancy could drink at least three cups every time she came over and Ryan was tired of boiling water on the stove.
But underneath the house, where nobody went except Ryan, the base was becoming more and more stocked.
Ryan got him self a f***cking forge. He built it from fieldstone and firebrick along the north wall of Sub-Level 1, connecting the chimney to the house's main fireplace flue through a concealed duct. From outside, it looked like normal fireplace smoke. The coal forge itself came from a retiring farrier in Kerley, a man named Briggs who sold Ryan the whole setup for $120 and the anvil for $90 and offered to teach him blacksmithing if he ever wanted to learn. Ryan took the equipment and thanked him and drove home with 300 pounds of iron in the truck bed.
The metal lathe came from a machinist who was upgrading. Four hundred dollars. Ryan bolted it to the workbench and spent an evening reading the manual and then spent the next morning turning steel rod on it, watching the metal peel away in bright curls under the cutting tool while Mana Crafting fed steadily into every piece he made.
He researched weapon designs at the library. Books on medieval arms, spearheads, sword construction, axes and crossbow mechanisms. Mrs. Marissa at the checkout desk said he had "eclectic taste" when she scanned a book on Japanese bladesmithing next to a cookbook and a psychology text.
His metalwork was imperfect, the product of study and practice and a system that compensated for gaps in technique with skills. But functional was what mattered. Three steel-tipped spears with wooden shafts, Mana Crafted during assembly so the joints would hold under impact. A short sword forged from steel bar stock, quenched and tempered, not elegant but sharp and balanced and reinforced at the molecular level by Mana Crafting LV 9. A crossbow built from a kit design in one of the library books, the trigger mechanism machined on the lathe, functional at sixty feet.
He made a fourth spear. For himself.
This one was different. The first three had been built for Lucas and for the armory rack, balanced for a teenager's reach and weight. His own spear he forged heavier, the head a hand span longer and shaped with a reinforced spine that would punch through Demodogs hide without folding. Seven feet of ash wood for the shaft, harvested from a tree he'd taken down himself on the property's back line, dried for a week and then shaped on the lathe until the grip section sat perfectly in his palm. The socket where the head met the shaft was layered Mana Crafting, six passes, until the seam wasn't a seam anymore.
The thinking behind it was simple. The Demogorgon he'd been preparing to fight had teeth. Lots of them. A bat worked great against Demodogs because a Demodog was the size of a large dog. A Demogorgon was eight feet tall and hit like a freight train, and the smart move was to not let it close the distance. A spear kept the teeth farther away from the face.
Also, and he'd cop to this one privately, it looked cool. Ryan had spent an entire previous life reading fantasy novels where heroes fought dragons with spears. Current life, he got to fight the extradimensional dragon equivalent with an actual spear he'd forged himself. If the past-him could see current-him he'd either faint or try to punch him from jealousy. Probably both.
He practiced with it in the Empty ID for three hours that weekend. The weight was different from a bat. The motion was different. Thrust, recover, thrust. He burned through his first bout of muscle memory and built a new one.
Enchanting was a surprise.
His INT had been above 60 for months. Mana Crafting at LV 9 had taught him how to push MP into materials during construction. But some of the effects were always temporary or random.
He tried three times to make it permanent by purpose. The first two failed. He infused a finished steel knife with MP and watched the glow fade over minutes, the energy leaking out like heat from a cooling pan. The system didn't generate a notification either time.
On the third attempt, he changed the approach. Instead of pushing MP into the material, he treated the finished knife as a container and wrote the effect into its crystalline structure.
The knife glowed and the desired notification finally appeared.
[Enchanting (Active) - LV 1 CREATED]
Apply specific and permanent magical properties to items.
Requires crafted item + MP investment.
MP Cost: 100+ (depends on enchantment complexity)
Cooldown: 1 hour
Available enchantments (LV 1): +Durability, +Sharpness, Minor Temperature Regulation
At LV 1 the effects were modest. A knife that held its edge twice as long. A jacket that retained warmth in cold weather. He enchanted the party's Corrupted Hide arm guards with Durability. The difference wasn't so dramatic, but the leather that was already tough became noticeably harder to cut. Dustin noticed it a week later. "These things are weirdly indestructible." Ryan said it was the curing process.
Mana Crafting crested LV 10 during the second week of October. The threshold notification came while he was reinforcing the crossbow's steel prod, the system recognizing a qualitative shift in what the skill could do.
Items crafted at LV 10 gained persistent magical properties. Minor self-repair, environmental resistance, weight distribution that adjusted to the user. The crossbow bolts he made after the threshold felt different in his hands, balanced in a way that went past physics and into something the word "enchanted" was probably invented for. The line between Mana Crafting and Enchanting was blurring at the edges. And he'd only just gotten Enchanting, so he wasn't sure whether to push that too or stay focused on Mana Crafting.
The retractable antenna was Dustin's baby. He'd been talking about it since September, sketching designs on notebook paper during lunch, calculating wind loads and signal propagation and standing wave ratios.
Ryan built the hardware. A telescoping mast on the roof, the base section permanently mounted, upper sections extending via a hand-cranked mechanism he machined on the lathe. Mana Crafted and Enchanting steel joints at every connection point, strong enough to handle wind loads that would bend normal construction. Dustin designed the antenna elements and the matching network. Will helped with the ground plane calculations, spending an afternoon with a borrowed engineering reference book working through the math while Dustin argued with him about propagation angles.
"The ground radials need to be a quarter wavelength," Will said. "Not an eighth."
"Quarter wave for 20 meters is sixteen feet per radial. We'd need four of those. That's sixty-four feet of wire."
"So we use sixty-four feet of wire."
"That's a lot of wire, Will."
"Wire costs three cents a foot. That's less than two dollars."
Dustin stared at him. "When did you learn to do antenna math?"
"Ryan's bookshelf has an ARRL handbook. I read it last week."
"You read an amateur radio handbook. For fun. That's supposed to be my thing."
"It has good diagrams. And we all picked up new things this summer."
They installed the mast on a Saturday morning. At full extension, the antenna rose from fifteen feet to forty, the upper sections cranking up on a mechanism that Ryan had designed to lock at each stage. The reception range opened up like someone had pulled a curtain off the sky.
At full height, they picked up shortwave from Australia, Japan, and military frequencies from bases across the Midwest. Dustin nearly fell off the porch when Radio Japan came through clean on the 15-meter band. More importantly, the antenna could monitor Hawkins Lab's radio traffic. Encrypted, but the transmission patterns told Ryan when activity spiked. Frequency, duration, timing. The Lab had been getting busier since September.
Maybe he should write a decryption program for it.
* * *
The training sessions were running hot.
The five of them in the Demodog Den, the copied world gray and sick around them. The formation was tight now, months of practice compressed into instinct.
Lucas had developed a thing with the spear. Ryan had made it for him, steel-tipped, balanced for thrust, and Lucas handled it like he'd been born holding one. His reach advantage kept Demodogs at distance, and when they tried to close past the point, he transitioned to the bat on his hip without dropping the spear. Two weapons, two ranges. He'd figured that out himself.
Dustin's fire was a precision tool now. He didn't spray wildly anymore. Short, controlled bursts aimed at the ground in front of charging Demodogs, creating a line of flame they wouldn't cross. He'd also gotten better at reading the Demodogs' hesitation, the half-second pause when fire appeared, and he used that pause to set up kills for Lucas or Ryan.
Mike was fighting and not just calling shots. He'd positioned himself between Will and the nearest doorway, bat up, weight forward, and when a Demodog came through the copied window to his left he swung without waiting for someone to tell him to. The hit wasn't pretty. The bat caught the Demodog's shoulder instead of its skull and the thing stumbled sideways. But Mike followed up, stepping forward, swinging again, harder, and the second hit connected clean.
"Nice," Lucas said without looking over.
"Don't patronize me."
"I'm not. That was actually nice."
Will had the back. A Demodog dropped from the second-floor staircase above Dustin's head and Will yelled "DOWN" before anyone else saw it. Dustin dropped flat. Ryan hit the Demodog with his bat mid-fall and slammed it into the wall, but Will's call was the reason Dustin had time to drop.
"I owe you a Coke," Dustin said from the floor.
"You already owe me a Coke from the radio bet."
"I owe you two Cokes."
After the session, Ryan healed the scrapes and bruises while they sat on the back porch cooling down. Lucas had a welt on his forearm from a tail whip. Mike had a bruise blooming on his left shoulder from the Demodog he'd fought. Will had nothing. He'd gotten through the whole session untouched.
"Zero hits," Dustin said, pointing at Will. "How do you do that?"
Will shrugged. "I just watch."
"I watch too. I still get hit."
"You watch the thing in front of you. I watch everything else."
Dustin considered this. "That's annoyingly wise."
"Thanks."
"It wasn't a compliment."
"I'm taking it as one."
* * *
Wednesday. Room 203. After school.
Eddie Munson was standing on a chair when they walked in, holding a twenty-sided die above his head like it was the Olympic torch. He had on a Dio shirt that was two sizes too big and ripped jeans and rings on four fingers, and his grin when he saw them arrive could have powered the hallway lights.
"Henderson! Baby Wheeler! And the Galaga King!" He jumped down. "Three fresh.."
"Sophomores," Mike said.
"Three sophomores walk into Hellfire. Sounds like the setup to a joke." Eddie swept an arm toward the table where four other students were already seated. "Sit. Prepare to have your minds destroyed."
Ryan had brought Dustin and Mike. Lucas had a thing with his dad. Will had passed, said he needed to stay home with Jonathan that night.
Eddie's DMing was everything Ryan had expected and more. Theatrical, mean, brilliant. He voiced every NPC differently, accents shifting between characters with the ease of someone who'd been doing this since he could talk. He killed a senior's dwarf fighter in the first encounter and narrated the death with enough dramatic conviction that the senior actually put his head in his hands. A real tragedy this one…
When Dustin's bard talked his way past a guard using a homebrew charm spell that wasn't in any rulebook, Eddie stood on the table and slow-clapped.
"Henderson. You magnificent bastard. That's not how charm works in any edition I've ever read, and I'm allowing it because it was beautiful."
Dustin didn't just glow. He levitated. Finaly someone had acknowledged his spell and appreciated the efforts.
Mike played differently here than he played in his own campaigns. He wasn't the DM. He was a player, and he went at Eddie's puzzles with a focused mind, enjoying the challenge of a brain that worked differently from his own.
He found a solution to a trap Eddie had designed to be unsolvable. Eddie stared at him for five full seconds.
"Baby Wheeler. You're the real deal. Come back next week or I'll hunt you down and bring you by force."
Mike's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile but very very close.
After the session, Ryan and Eddie walked out together. The hallway was empty and the lights already dimmed for the custodian's evening shift.
"Your friends are good people, Reed," Eddie said. "Henderson's got energy that could power a city. Wheeler's got a brain that scares me a little."
"What about me?"
Eddie looked at him sideways. "You're the one who watches everything. You barely talked the whole session. But every time someone was about to make a stupid move, you gave them a look and they didn't make it."
"I'm the strategist."
"That's a weird thing for a sophomore to be."
"I'm a weird sophomore."
Eddie laughed, the sound loud and genuine, bouncing off the empty lockers. "Room 203. Every Wednesday. Don't be a stranger, Galaga King."
* * *
Jonathan Byers picked Will up from the property on a Saturday afternoon. He pulled up in Joyce's sedan, the exhaust pipe rattling, and waited by the car while Will grabbed his stuff from inside.
Ryan walked out with him. Will jogged down the porch steps, laughing at something Dustin had yelled from the kitchen window. Jonathan watched his brother. The laugh, the jog, the way Will moved without hunching.
"He talks about you," Jonathan said when Will was in the car with the door shut. "A lot. More than he talks about anyone."
"We have fun together."
" Mom couldn't believe how much he'd changed." Jonathan paused. He had careful eyes, photographer's eyes, the kind that noticed light and shadow and the space between things. "He was different last year, much quieter and less confident. Like he was folding in on himself, and this summer reversed everything."
Ryan knew what Will was carrying. Will was a shy kid from a home with an absent father and financial pressure, and he was growing up gay in rural Indiana in 1983, which meant he was growing up feeling different with no safety to understand why. The summer had given him structure, confidence and physical proof that his body could do things he didn't think it could. And that's what Jonathan saw.
"He works harder than anyone in the group," Ryan said. "Shows up, does the work, goes home. Doesn't complain about any of it."
"That sounds like Will." Jonathan opened the car door. Stopped. "Thank you. For whatever you're doing for him."
"He's doing it for himself. I just gave him a place."
He drove away. Jonathan Byers, alone in the rain, looking for his brother with a camera and a gun. That search was going to end differently this time. Shit… that search won't even happen now. No creepier, perv Jonathan sneaking photos of a naked Nancy and completely missing Barbara's abduction. He is going to push Will into empty ID and wait for the night to pass. Let's see if Vecna could open a gate through his own ID dimension. See who the real master was.
* * *
Nancy's sessions had shifted.
She came to the house twice a week now. She had a spot at the kitchen table, a Tab always stocked in the fridge, her books spread in the same pattern every time with textbook open, notebook to the right, pencil case at ten o'clock. The tutoring had moved past sciences.
Now Gatsby took the show. She was writing about unreliable narrators and wanted Ryan's perspective on whether Nick Carraway was trustworthy. Ryan's take, pulled from a previous life of reading and the fact that his INT is almost NZT48, was that Nick told you exactly what happened and lied about what it meant.
Nancy stopped writing. "That's better than anything in my secondary sources."
"I read a lot."
"You read like someone who's been doing it for thirty years." She said it casually. Nancy is smart… nobody can take it from her.
"Fast learner." He took a sip of coffee. Fast learner didn't cover it. At this point he didn't really recall things. He queried them. Any book he'd ever read showed up when he reached for it, clean and indexed, with the relevant passages already surfaced. Gatsby he'd read in tenth grade the first time around, again in college, and a third time at twenty-six because he'd been bored on a flight. The system had apparently pulled all three reads into one coherent reference file. Answering Nancy's thesis questions was closer to looking something up than thinking about it.
They also moved to AP History. Containment doctrine, the Kennan telegram, the Truman Doctrine. Ryan explained the actual historical context instead of the textbook's simplified version. Nancy wrote so fast her pen skidded sideways and left a blue streak across the page.
Between subjects, she asked about him. The questions moved from small talk to someone who wanted to know a person.
"What do you do for fun? Besides training and studying and cooking."
"I read. I build things. Fix things. Sometimes I sit on the porch and just listen to music."
"That's an old man's answer."
"I'm an old soul."
"You're sixteen, don't joke with me."
He cooked for her that night. Chicken piccata with lemon and capers over angel hair pasta, adapted from an Italian cookbook. Nancy ate in the kind of silence that meant she was concentrating on the food, which was its own compliment.
"Where did you learn to cook like this?"
"Cookbooks. Practice. Same as chemistry. Follow the process, adjust for variables."
"This is not following a process. This is talent."
"It is practice…. but you could probably say I have some talent too." Cooking LV 7 did most of the heavy lifting, but she didn't need to know that.
The most obvious little shifts started around last month.
Really small things. The kind of things someone with Observe LV 8 catches immediately but that a normal person might miss for weeks. Nancy showed up on Thursday with her hair down instead of pulled back, which she never did for school. She wore a pale blue sweater Ryan hadn't seen before, the kind of sweater that looked casual but that somebody had picked out with thought, soft material and a neckline that sat a little lower than her usual crewnecks. She had a touch of lip gloss on that wasn't there on the day at school.
She came in, set her books down, and pretended she'd always looked like this on tutoring days.
Ryan poured her a Tab and acted like he hadn't noticed.
The whole situation was doing weird things to his head, though. This was Nancy Wheeler. She was acting like her version he remembered from Season 1, the one that was hung up on Steve Harrington. Not a little hung up. Hung up enough to do things teenagers did when they thought they were in love with the coolest guy in school. And here she was, in his kitchen, wearing a cloth just for him. Show-Nancy wouldn't have looked twice at a sophomore. Show-Nancy was busy falling for the hair-flip guy with the BMW.
Butterfly effect, he thought. Change enough variables early and the whole plot diverges. Apparently giving her two hours of decent tutoring a week was enough to pull her off her canonical track. Well, he also had the looks, there was no way around it. If someone with the Gamer system couldn't even manage that much, they should just die of shame. Maybe he should really put more points into CHA though.
They got through forty minutes of Gatsby analysis. She was good. She was always good. But there was a new thing happening in the rhythm of her questions, longer pauses after his answers, a habit of looking at him for a beat after he finished a sentence, like she was checking something other than whether he was right.
"You have chicken again?" she asked, around six.
"I was going to make pasta. You staying?"
"I told my mom I'd be back by seven thirty. So… yes."
She didn't need to add yes. She could have said her mom was expecting her and left at six fifteen like a normal tutoring session. But she stayed. She stayed the next time too.
The third session that week she brought him a book.
"I saw this at the used bookstore in Roane and thought you'd like it." She handed over a battered copy of The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. "It's about engineers building a computer. It won a Pulitzer last year. I figured..." She shrugged, a little too carefully. "Figured it was up your alley."
"Thank you." Ryan turned the book over. SHE was shopping in a bookstore, looking for a book she thought he'd like. "Really. Thank you."
"It's only few dollars, Ryan."
"It doesn't matter, it's the intention that counts and a book I wouldn't have known about."
Her cheeks went pink. Not much. A small shade, that was mostly gone before he could be sure he'd seen it.
But his dear and most reliable friend Observe took care of that.
Her disposition line had shifted from Skeptical (curious, academic interest) to Warm (genuine personal interest, aware of age gap, conflicted). She was a senior and he was a sophomore, and the gap felt bigger in high school than it would anywhere else. She wasn't going to act on it yet. He could see the conflict written and her voice at a normal pitch when other people were around.
But at the same time, the looks lasted longer. The questions got more personal. Her voice dropped half a register when they talked one-on-one. She touched her hair more. She laughed at jokes that weren't that funny.
Ryan noticed because the system gave him no choice. He was not sure what to think about it yet, for now it felt a little bit weird…
Mentally he was twenty-four. She was seventeen. That wasn't a complicated calculation. Plus there was a future coming in November that he couldn't explain to her, and he didn't know yet what he wanted to do with any of this.
Nancy Wheeler, in canon, ended up with Jonathan Byers after a season and a half of Steve drama. The whole arc had been a thing in fandom forums his previous self had occasionally scrolled through at work when he should have been writing unit tests. Now that arc was unrecognizable. Jonathan wasn't going to be sneaking around. Steve wasn't going to be climbing through her window. What was left of her story without those two men driving it was anybody's guess, and Ryan was apparently one of the men now, which was not a thought he'd planned to have on this evening… or did he?
But then she laughed at something dumb he said about the Gatsby essay, a real laugh, and for three seconds she looked like a seventeen-year-old girl who had forgotten she was supposed to be serious, and Ryan kept the image away in the part of his brain he tried not to visit too often and changed the subject back to Jay Gatsby's green light.
* * *
Three books were waiting in the corner of Clarke's desk when Ryan walked in, a yellow Post-it stuck to the top one.
For Ryan. Give these a shot. Come find me if you want to talk.
He picked them up before the bell. Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. A brick of a graduate electromagnetic theory textbook out of MIT Press. And Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Clarke had handpicked these. The man had probably spent a whole lunch period pulling them off his shelf and debating which ones to leave.
Ryan read the Feynman that night in one sitting.
Five hours, a pot of coffee, the kitchen radio playing something mellow in the background. That was it. His brain at INT 71 didn't move through pages like normal brains did. His eyes swept down and the content just copied itself into his mind, not as sentences to decode but as structure, path integrals slotting into place next to remembered fragments from a previous life.
He wasn't struggling with the material. He was enjoying it. Feynman had a voice worth slowing down for, so Ryan took notes by hand just to drag it out a little. It was like eating something really good and making yourself chew slower.
Shannon went down the next evening. It wasn't really a book. It was a 1948 paper that had gotten fat enough to pretend it was one, and at his current stats with Programming feeding him context from his old life, reading it felt almost personal. Information theory. Channel capacity. Entropy as uncertainty. The skeleton of every computer he'd ever touched, sketched out thirty years before anyone had the hardware to run it. He finished before ten and sat on the back porch with the October air cold on his face, thinking about how ridiculous his life was. A sophomore in Indiana reading the foundations of communications engineering for fun.
The EM textbook took longer. Four days. Because the math was deep enough that even his brain had to actually run the numbers, and running numbers took the time it took. Two hours a night at the kitchen table, pencil moving through derivations, checking his answers against the key only when something felt off. He liked this one the most, honestly. The other two had been gifts to his curiosity. This one made him work. INT climbed a training point on Thursday, the little notification sliding across his vision while he was mid-derivation of Gauss's law.
He smiled at that. The system rewarded sweat more than talent. Made sense.
He found Clarke on Friday morning before homeroom. Clarke was at his desk grading quizzes, coffee mug in hand, glasses down on his nose.
"Hey, Mr. Clarke. I finished them."
Clarke looked up. "Finished… which one?"
"All three."
Clarke put his pen down. He had a pretty good poker face most of the time, but it cracked for specific things, and this was one. "Ryan. It's been a week."
"I know."
"The EM book has problem sets."
"I did most of them. Skipped a couple in chapter seven because they were just applications of chapter six and I wanted to keep going."
Silence. Clarke took a slow sip of coffee. Set the mug down. "Okay."
"You can quiz me if you want," Ryan said.
He hadn't planned that. It just came out. Ryan figured it was easier to just close the gap than let the man spend his weekend wondering if he'd been lied to.
Clarke asked about path integrals. Ryan walked him through Feynman's formulation, why it was more general than Schrödinger's equation, why Feynman had used it as his entry point for teaching non-physicists. Clarke asked about Shannon. Ryan explained entropy in information theory, then explained why the link to thermodynamic entropy wasn't just a cute analogy. Clarke asked about Maxwell's equations. Ryan got up and wrote them on the chalkboard from memory, walked through the relationship between the curl of E and the time derivative of B without having to stop once to think.
It went on for twenty minutes. Clarke asked less and less. By the end he was mostly nodding along, he had probably hoped to be the one explaining and instead found himself being explained to.
"I don't have anything else at this level," Clarke said finally. He shuffled papers that were already in a neat stack. "I can put in interlibrary loans with the university in Bloomington. Might take a couple weeks."
"That'd be great. Thanks."
Clarke hesitated. "Ryan. Have you thought about college? Early admission programs? There are a couple of schools that-"
"I'm staying in Hawkins." Ryan softened it with a half-smile. "But thank you, Mr. Clarke. Really."
Clarke nodded. He didn't push.
* * *
Chrissy found him in the hallway between third and fourth period with Tina and another girl Ryan didn't recognize flanking her.
"Hey, Smart Boy."
"Hey, Chrissy."
Tina looked at Ryan. Looked at him again, slower, she defiantly wanted to see more of him. She leaned toward her friend and said something that wasn't quiet enough. "Who IS that?"
"Ryan," Chrissy said. "He reads psychology textbooks for fun."
"He can read me a textbook whenever he wants," Tina said.
Chrissy rolled her eyes. But she was smiling. A real one. "How's the adapting-versus-faking research going?"
"I finished the book. The conclusion is that everyone's doing both."
"Groundbreaking work, Doctor Reed. Really pushing the field forward."
He laughed. She laughed. Tina and the other girl stared at them like they were watching a conversation in a language they both don't know. Chrissy got pulled toward class. Over her shoulder: "Next OTA meeting you better bring those snacks."
Ryan stood there for a second after they'd turned the corner. He didn't have to be stat buff to hear what was happening fifteen feet down the hall.
"Okay, explain," Tina was hissing. "Since when? Since when, Chrissy?"
"Since nothing. We just study together."
"You study together. With a sophomore."
"He's smart. He helps me with an essay."
" Chrissy, that Ryan guy has the body of a literal Greek god. He is hot. Like, objectively hot"
"Tina. Oh my god, leave it…"
"I'm just saying. That's not a sophomore's body. That's some hot grown-up body. Does he have a brother?"
"He does not have a brother."
"A cousin? Older cousin visiting from anywhere?"
"Goodbye, Tina."
Ryan walked to class with a small and very private smile on his face.
The next week shifted how it worked between them. The library meetings stayed. But lunch became a thing too.
It started without planning. Ryan was eating alone during the lunch period the guys didn't share, and Chrissy sat down across from him without asking.
"Is this seat taken?"
"It is now."
She opened a paper bag. Carrot sticks and a juice box. Observe read her nutritional status as borderline healthy. Her mother controlled her diet. Ryan had read enough psychology by now to understand what that meant, what a controlling parent did to a teenager's relationship with food.
"That's your lunch?"
"I'm not hungry."
Ryan pushed half his sandwich across the table. Ham and cheese on sourdough, mustard he made from scratch because the store-bought kind tasted like paint. "I made too much."
She looked at the sandwich. Looked at him and then took it. Ate it in four bites, fast, like she was afraid someone would watch her.
"If you tell anyone I ate that…"
"Tell anyone what?"
She smiled without any performance behind it.
Ryan caught the side-eye from two tables over before Chrissy did. A group of juniors, girls he didn't know by name, had stopped mid-conversation and were staring at their table with the specific laser focus of teenagers witnessing a social tectonic event in real time. Behind them, a table of jocks had also noticed. One of them elbowed another. Heads turned. The cafeteria noise didn't drop, exactly, but there was a ripple in its pattern, a pocket of attention pointed at the corner table where Chrissy Cunningham was sitting across from a sophomore nobody knows.
Chrissy felt it a beat later. Her shoulders did a small, careful thing, settling half an inch lower. She didn't look around. She didn't have to.
"Everyone's looking at us," she said, without moving her head.
"Yeah."
"They don't get it."
"They don't have to."
"They're going to talk."
"They were already talking. You have better things to worry about than what some people think."
Her mouth twitched. She reached for the juice box, stabbed the straw in, and took a sip like the stares weren't happening.
They talked for twenty minutes. A movie she'd seen. A teacher they both thought was boring. Whether the cafeteria pizza qualified as food. She was funnier than the show had suggested, sharp and dry, matching Ryan's rhythm without trying. He made her laugh three times in twenty minutes, and each one sounded less rehearsed than the last.
When the bell rang she gathered her stuff, said see you, and left before Ryan could get a word in. He watched her go. The performance clicked back on around her spine somewhere between the cafeteria doors and the hallway, posture straightening, smile rising to the wattage the rest of the school expected from Chrissy Cunningham.
Two days later was Thursday. Free period, the library, their usual back table.
She had her notebook out, but she wasn't writing. She was staring at the table.
"Bad day?" Ryan asked.
"My mom measured my waist this morning." A fact delivered flat. "With a tape measure. While I was getting ready for school."
Ryan's hands tightened under the table. Not from Gamer's Mind. From anger. A mother putting a measuring tape around her teenage daughter's waist before school. The clinical violence of it. She was reducing her own daughter to a number. Maybe she could work with Papa…
"That's not okay," he said.
"I know." She spoke quietly. Like she'd been saying it to herself for years and nothing had changed.
"Your waist is fine. Your body is fine. You're beautiful, Chrissy. The problem isn't you."
Her ears went pink first. Then her cheeks, a slow climb. She dropped her eyes to her notebook and opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again, and when her voice came back it had the careful, flimsy edge.
"Oh, so you think I'm pretty now?"
"I think you've been pretty the whole time I've known you. That's not the part I'm making up."
"Rude of you to tell me this over library fluorescents."
"I'll tell you again by better lighting if it helps."
"It doesn't. Probably. Maybe." She almost smiled. "You're supposed to be the smart one, Smart Boy. Don't you know you can't just say stuff like that to girls? We get ideas."
"By any standard there is, Chrissy, you're beautiful. That isn't opinion. Ask any boy in this building, he'll tell you the same. Eating a whole sandwich for lunch isn't going to change it. Eating two sandwiches isn't going to change it. The only thing that changes when you eat is that you stop being hungry."
She looked down at her hands. They were folded on the notebook and the knuckles had gone white and then relaxed again.
"You don't talk like a sophomore."
"People keep telling me that."
"It's annoying."
"I've been told that too."
She pulled in a long breath. Let it out. "You can eat lunch at my table whenever you want," Ryan said, softer now. "I'll make you a sandwich. Nobody's measuring anything."
"You cook?"
"I cook."
"Like… well?"
"Come by sometime. I'll make whatever you want."
She looked at him for four seconds. "Ok Smart Boy. You're weird, but you're good weird."
"I get that a lot."
* * *
A Thursday afternoon. Nancy at the kitchen table. Ryan making coffee.
A knock at the back door. He opened it. Chrissy was on the porch holding a copy of Man's Search for Meaning that Ryan had lent her the previous week.
"Returning this," she said. Then she saw Nancy and stopped.
Nancy looked up from her notes. Looked at Chrissy. Looked at Ryan. Looked at Chrissy again.
"Hey," Nancy said.
"Hey," Chrissy said. "You're Nancy Wheeler."
"And you're Chrissy Cunningham."
Ryan stood in the doorway between them, holding a coffee pot, feeling like the punchline of a joke nobody had told yet.
"She's studying," he said. "I'm making coffee. You want some?"
"I don't drink coffee."
"I have juice."
"Sure."
Chrissy sat down. Nancy moved her books. They regarded each other with the polite caution of two girls who'd never spoken. The social layout of Hawkins High had put them in separate buildings.
"He lent you Frankl?" Nancy said, looking at the book.
"He said it was about finding meaning in suffering."
"It's about finding meaning despite suffering. There's a difference."
"That's what he said too." Chrissy looked at Ryan. "Do you two rehearse?"
"She's just smarter than I gave her credit for," Ryan said.
Nancy almost smiled. "Flatterer."
They sat in his kitchen for fifteen minutes. Nancy studied. Chrissy paged through another book from Ryan's shelf. Ryan made coffee and juice and kept his mouth shut.
When Chrissy left, Nancy watched her walk down the porch steps.
"She's not okay, is she?" Nancy said.
"No."
"Is she in trouble?"
"Not the kind you can fix with a phone call."
Nancy looked at him. "You're collecting people, aren't you? People who need help."
"I'm just making coffee."
"You're doing more than making coffee, Ryan."
He didn't answer that. He washed the mugs and dried them and put them back in the cabinet and let the silence say what it needed to say.
After she left, the notification slid in.
[CHA training gain detected. +1 CHA (CHA: 9 → 10)]
Two points in two weeks. If he kept hosting dinners and letting girls sit at his kitchen table, he'd hit CHA 15 by Christmas at this rate. There had to be a diminishing returns curve somewhere, but for now the system was handing out points like candy for a stat he'd written off. He'd take it.
* * *
The Gym. Two weeks after Tommy's hallway embarrassment.
Ryan and Steve ended up on the same team for a pickup scrimmage. They won. Steve passed well, Ryan finished under the basket.
After, Steve caught him by the bleachers. He had a Gatorade in each hand and held one out.
"Tommy was out of line," Steve said. "That thing in the hallway. I heard everything."
"You don't have to…"
"Yeah, I do. He tried to push you around and you just stood there. He's my friend, but he's an idiot. I told him to stay away from you."
"Appreciate it."
"You're a good player, Reed. You should come up to Varsity next year."
"Maybe."
Steve walked away. Ryan drank the Gatorade and thought about Steve Harrington with a nail bat, fighting Demodogs in the Byers house. The man was a serious fighter and really good friend. The Steve everyone liked was already there. Only Steve himself didn't know it yet.
* * *
A Demodog got past the group's formation during a Wednesday session and lunged at Dustin from his blind side.
Ryan was fifteen feet away. Too far for a spear, but not too far for TK.
He threw his hand out and the Demodog stopped in midair. Just stopped. Legs still churning, mouth open, held in place by nothing visible. Then Ryan slammed it sideways into the copied kitchen wall.
Silence.
"WHAT," Dustin said.
"Telekinesis." Ryan lowered his hand. "I can move things with my mind."
"How long have you been able to do that?!"
"A while."
"You can move things with your mind and you didn't TELL US?"
"I'm telling you now."
Mike was looking at the dent in the wall. "How much can you move?"
"A lot."
"How much is a lot?"
Ryan looked at the kitchen table. Sixty pounds, give or take. He lifted it off the ground with TK, held it at head height for three seconds, and set it back down without a sound.
"Okay," Mike said. "That's... okay."
Will was looking at his own hands. Turning them over, flexing his fingers, like he was testing whether something had changed in them too. He caught Ryan watching and dropped his hands to his sides. Holy shit….. If something moved with Will's tries, he was going to lose it in front of his friends and start screaming.
"You ever wonder why you can do all this?" Will asked.
"Every day."
"Maybe someday you'll figure it out and make us join you." Will picked up his bat. "Come on. We have four more of those things out there."
Lucas hadn't said anything through any of it. He was standing by the door, arms folded, his expression flat.
"What else?" Lucas said.
"Heal. The doorway. This. Some other things."
"You're going to show us the rest eventually."
"When it matters."
Lucas held his look for a beat, then nodded. "When it matters." He unfolded his arms and picked up his bat. "Let's go."
* * *
The solo grinding continued in the spaces between everything else. Ryan drove the copied truck through the infinite ID landscape, hunting Demodogs and Demobats in alternation. ID Create pushed past LV 18, then 19.
The TK experiment happened during one of the afternoon sessions. He was out past the copied Byers property in the Demodog Den, a pack of four hunting him across the open field south of the house. He'd already dropped two with Mana Bolts, MP still comfortable, and the third was closing at full charge when a thought he'd been kicking around for a week finally clicked into place.
He'd been using TK like a hand. Grab things, throw things, push things. The weight ceiling at LV 11 was past a ton but he'd been applying it like a forklift. A forklift was fine. A forklift was useful. But a forklift wasn't all TK was.
What if he didn't grab the Demodog? What if he grabbed its skull?
He held out his left hand at the charging one, picked the cranial vault between the eye ridges, and squeezed.
The Demodog's head collapsed inward like a dropped melon.
The body kept running for maybe two full strides before the lack of a functional brain registered. Then it tumbled, legs tangling, and hit the ground in a heap twenty feet from him. Wet noise. Steam rising from what used to be a skull. The petal-mouth was still open, teeth still bared, but there was nothing behind it anymore.
"Holy shit," Ryan said to no one.
The fourth Demodog came at him from the left. He did it again, picked the skull, squeezed. Same result. The thing dropped mid-stride like someone had cut the wires.
[Telekinesis skill gained new technique: Focused Pressure]\
[Targeted compression of localized area. MP cost scales with material density and volume.]
Ryan stood in the gray field with four dead Demodogs scattered around him and stared at his own hand. He'd just killed two apex predators from across a field directly.
He walked to the nearest corpse and crouched next to it. The skull was fully caved, the cranium folded in on itself in a way that wasn't survivable for any living thing. The geometry of the compression was clean, almost surgical. He hadn't crushed the whole skull. He'd compressed a three-inch sphere inside it, turning the brain cavity into paste while leaving the jaw and teeth intact.
The fan of the show, the one who'd watched Demodogs slaughter people in Hawkins next month, felt a satisfaction he hadn't known he needed.
He spent the next hour testing the technique. Range limits. He could reach about forty meters comfortably, past that the MP cost spiked and the precision dropped. Target size mattered too. The smaller the focal point, the lower the cost, but the higher the skill demand. Soft tissue was trivial. Bone was harder but still inside budget. Armored skulls would be a problem, but Demogorgon-grade armor hadn't shown up in the Demodog tier.
Also, not every kill should be this. If he habitualized TK head-crushing, his MP was going to run dry real quick. It was a lot more demanding than his other mana skills.
Still. A new option in the toolkit. A quiet one, with no flash or sound.
He drove home with listening to Dustin on the radio asking about dinner.
* * *
At LV 20, a new notification appeared.
[ID Create LV 20 - New tier unlocked: Demogorgon Hunt]
Enemies: Demogorgon (LV 25-30). Single elite boss creature.
Warning: EXTREME DANGER.
He spent two days preparing. Checked his equipment. Ran the numbers. Built a battle plan, with contingencies and fallback states and clear abort conditions.
The Demogorgon was everything the show had promised and worse.
Eight to nine feet tall, dense with muscle under pale ridged skin, the petal-mouth opening into a flower of teeth that was as wide as Ryan's torso. It moved with a speed that shouldn't have belonged to something that large, covering thirty feet in two seconds, the ground shaking under its feet.
The fight lasted six minutes.
Ryan opened with Fireball, a new skill he'd created during Demobats farming sessions earlier that week. Fire Bolt had been a single-target tool. Fireball was area denial, a sphere of compressed flame that detonated on impact with a three-meter blast radius.
[Fireball (Active) - LV 1]
Concentrated fire sphere, detonates on impact. AoE 3m.
Damage: INT × 1.5 fire damage. MP Cost: 35. Range: 40m.
The first Fireball caught the Demogorgon in the chest and bought him three seconds of panicked thrashing. The Golem, stone and brainless, stepped in as a tank, absorbing a hit that would have pulped a human being. The construct cracked but held. Ryan circled, throwing TK boulders and Mana Bolts, managing distance, watching the Demogorgon's attack patterns.
The kill came when the petal-mouth opened for a roar and Ryan put a Fireball straight down its throat.
The creature collapsed. The ground shook when it hit.
[Demogorgon (LV 28) defeated!]
[+4,200 XP]
Loot: Demogorgon Hide (×1, Rare), Demogorgon Claw (×1, Rare),
Dimensional Residue (×1, Rare), $450
1 Stat Crystal (+2 STR), 1 Skill Book: Dimensional Anchor
[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Demogorgon Slayer" - Kill 1 Demogorgon]
Reward: +3 Skill Points, +1 VIT (permanent)
Title: "Demogorgon Slayer" (+20% damage vs. Elite-type)
Ryan sat down on the ID grass next to the corpse and breathed. His MP was at 12%. The Golem was rubble. His hands were shaking, which Gamer's Mind didn't prevent because the shaking wasn't from fear. It was from the adrenaline of fighting something that could have killed him and slaughter an entire military base on season 5.
He opened the skill book.
[Dimensional Anchor (Active) - LV 1]
Locks a target in the physical dimension for 10 seconds. Prevents phasing.
MP Cost: 40. Cooldown: 30 seconds.
He stared at the description for a long time. A skill that prevented dimensional phasing. Which meant a skill designed for creatures that could phase between dimensions. Which meant it was designed for exactly what he was going to be fighting in November. And beyond.
Marksmanship also got created, earlier that same week, during a Demobat session. Two hours of throwing stones at flying targets with TK, the constant tracking and leading and adjusting finally crossing whatever threshold the system needed.
[Marksmanship (Passive) - LV 1 CREATED]
Increases accuracy, damage, and effective range with all ranged attacks.
+1% accuracy per level.
Constant use put it at LV 4 by Demobat volume alone.
The levels came fast. Three in two weeks, each one fed by the Demogorgon fight and the constant Demodog farming. Same allocation every time. Three INT, two WIS.
Level 20: INT 71 to 74, WIS 40 to 42.
Level 21: INT 74 to 77, WIS 42 to 44.
Level 22: INT 77 to 80, WIS 44 to 46.
Physical stats climbed from training and crystals. STR hit 34. VIT pushed to 33 from the Demogorgon achievement bonus plus daily work. DEX reached 33.
The party hit LV 9. Three sessions a week, Demodogs competent now, the coordination built over months of practice. Dustin's fire created the opening. Lucas and Will hit the weak points Ryan had told them about. Mike called shots and fought, and his timing on both was getting better with every session. They were teenagers who'd learned to fight together and knew it, and the confidence showed.
Their stats showed it too. Lucas's auto-allocated gains favored the physical, STR climbing past 15, his hits landing with the force of someone twice his age. Will's WIS sat at 16, his perception sharp enough to notice threats before they developed, and his VIT had climbed to 11 with real muscle definition in his arms and shoulders. Mike balanced out across everything, INT and CHA high from natural talent, but even his physical stats benefited from months of leveling. Dustin's INT topped the group at 16, his tactics evolving faster than his body, though even he'd dropped weight and could run without wheezing now.
* * *
The repair business expanded without effort. Ryan was known around Hawkins now as "the Reed kid who can fix anything." He'd repaired fences, a car radiator, radios, a water heater, a broken porch, and a barn door. Word of mouth in a town of thirty thousand moved fast. Jobs came without advertising. He charged fair prices and the work was flawless at his skill levels. Cash reserves pushed past $24,000.
But money wasn't the point. The paper trail was. Every job was a witness, a handshake, a receipt, a piece of the cover story that made Ryan Reed a kid with a talent for fixing things instead of a kid with no explanation for where his money came from.
One Wednesday night, Hellfire ran late. Eddie had killed Mike's ranger in a boss fight that went sideways, and Mike had taken it personally enough to stay thirty minutes after the session arguing about the encounter. Eddie loved every second of it.
Ryan drove home with the windows down. The October air was cold enough to need a jacket and warm enough to not zip it. The radio was playing something by the Eagles that Ryan's previous-life self would have skipped, but his current self let it play.
He parked in the gravel strip and sat in the cab for a minute. The house was dark except for the kitchen light he'd left on. The antenna mast was a thin line against the stars.
He went inside, heated leftover stew on the stove, and ate it standing up while he updated his notebook. Equipment lists. Route maps. Contingencies for who goes where, when the gate opens.
The phone rang. Will.
"I made the soup," Will said. "The potato one you showed me."
"How'd it turn out?"
"Jonathan ate three bowls. He asked where I learned to cook. I told him I taught myself from a library book."
"Close enough."
"Mom tried it when she got home from her shift. She cried a little. I think she was just tired, but she said the soup was really good."
"It was the butter. People underestimate butter."
"Ryan." A pause. "Thanks for showing me."
"Anytime."
He hung up. Washed his bowl. Turned off the kitchen light.
On the way upstairs, he stopped at the desk and opened the status window one more time.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: Demogorgon Slayer
Level: 22
HP: 790/790
MP: 1,550/1,550
STR: 34
VIT: 33
DEX: 33
INT: 80
WIS: 46
CHA: 10
LUK: 15
Skills: 58
Party: All LV 9.
God bless the system.
[A.N:
I am crazy little shit… 11,200+ words. I know. I have a problem. This is becoming a routine and I need to stop immediately because I have a pile of university assignments that are not going to complete themselves.
This was a weird chapter to write but one I felt was necessary. It was really important to me to build real connections between Ryan and the people around him, to bring genuine emotion into it instead of having him stand on the sidelines observing everything from a distance. The result is a bit of a mash-up chapter between different things I was trying to accomplish. Not my strongest structurally, but it contains some key developments.
Shoutout to Broccolitop who left a great comment about needing more slice of life. With Season One almost here, I wanted more moments with different characters before everything goes sideways. This chapter is basically all the scenes I had in my head that needed to happen before November 6th.
On the romance front. I still haven't decided on pairings, how many, or what form it takes. But did I push the Nancy thing too much? Maybe. The Chrissy angle too. As I mentioned before, we don't know exactly what Vecna found in Chrissy's mind in the show, so I took some creative liberty there. Nothing is happening on the romance front before the plot kicks off, so you can all breathe. Did you like the push on both fronts or was it too much? Let me know.
The CHA point? You can thank yourselves for that one. Enough of you kept telling me in the comments to invest some points there, so I listened. Same thing with the spear, Williams1996 was the main advocate for that, and bob685014 pushed for the axe. As I mentioned in previous notes, I write chapters ahead of what I publish because of the translation and editing process, but when I see good ideas in the comments I try to blend them in without causing long-term continuity issues. And as most of you can see, I try to respond to your comments too, not all of them but most. I pay attention.
We got some Eddie time with D&D this chapter.
I genuinely got goosebumps writing this line: "He is going to push Will into empty ID and wait for the night to pass. Let's see if Vecna could open a gate through his own ID dimension. See who the real master was." I hope you felt that moment as much as I did writing it.
And finally, the Demogorgon fight is coming. For the next chapter, I need some time. This one took a LOT out of me. I'll aim for Monday or Tuesday but can't promise.
Today is my last day on the 30-day Power Stone ranking list, so it would be amazing to get some extra juice from you guys to push the story higher before the reset.
Top 10 Power Stone contributors, you absolute legends:
Psycho_Paradox, Yunos_Noor, Getryx, GODKINGASH, XenonBlaster65, aXionPingu, Dear_Lord, Gustavo_Dias_4181, this_your_bush, and Xander1910.
You guys are carrying this story on the rankings and I see every single stone.
And massive thanks to all 132 contributors this week:
Dillmet_Singh_4812, Piggy, Daoist3tTlco, Aaronzaid, ChristiaanZA, Mirksas, Arthur25, mitch_mitch40, heavenlydemon_, SleepWalkingMan, Chikary, LouCaz, Alternatif_OfMe, GzeroX, AlexPendragon, Gavin_Esteb, DontDon, SageOfSins, Yuri_Marinho, Bean_Man_7767, Maicros, iamaguynamedtre, Werph, UchihaGod, KBG_Obsidian, Lalo, AkGreyback, Akira890, Charly_26r, TomTheReader, Wither_Kingzz, Shev, Max202_Solana, Dark_Prince01, guardian252, jjtcaster, siddhu, Gabriel_andrino, DaoistoYcxBR, Lolggloll_XD, Makuraty, Williams1996, DaoistuhLIL5, DRE_MCREED, Black_Incindiere, solo_leveling_god, corey_miller_0016, k_l_4014, The_lazy, Broccolitop, vis_g_s_4628, SteelWolves_1, Raymond33, DaoistbpwiMZ, ChillPixel369, Leylindd, Bam729, barry_afolabi, SCP_41, daviangarcia85, Billy_Theboyz, Alex_Vizio, Sad_Box, xNeke, KingSavage20, D1vineMonarch, Xplizit, LightHollow, String11ni, origin_of_power, GreatNovelLover, igniziouz, Yoxiria, Xdd_0162, Carl_0, Consort_of_Ranni, Nicola_Lacey, A_Verdade, hyperlevin, Kauak, Oladimeji_Daniel, Josh_Balbarona, Bakr24, ENELSON_RODRI, Dany_Baca, Celestialicz, GrimDaddy, ExoTic_, balistic757, StormKing1, RSMoran, Venkata_Narendra, Death_St0rm, alessio_gentile, William_Von_Blum, Bonni_Clyde, pingpongddads, Mattia_Lisco, krishnanaunni_j, Himjim, DaoistJTE1Za, Kono_Dilda, Kadiox, Mik_024, bob685014, f3rnand0, MMBarqawi, noname4545, Ahmed_Riaz, Demonilusion, Zerty9, lerkew, Kranox, Greenmatsui, Luiz_Felipe_5654, ReaderAffermative, AlMutairy, Gorinjou, Matteo_De_Santis, Diosazura599, and Tomik.
132 people. That number is insane. Every stone counts and I appreciate every single one of you.
Please don't forget to keep commenting, reviewing, and if you can, send some Power Stones to help push the fic up the rankings. It really makes a difference! And as always, if you spot any inconsistencies, plot holes, or typos, let me know so I can fix them before they snowball into something bigger.]