Thursday, November 3rd - Hawkins High library
Free period. Their corner table at the back of the library, where the librarian couldn't see them, the radiator hissed, and the late afternoon light came in slanted through the high windows.
Chrissy was there before him. She had a paperback open and was actually reading it. He sat down across from her.
"Hey."
"Hi."
She marked her place with her finger. "How's your week."
"Long."
"You always say that."
"It's always true."
"I'm sorry I missed practice yesterday," she said. "Mom had a thing. I had to be at the thing."
"What kind of thing."
"The kind where she puts me in a dress and parades me at a chamber of commerce dinner because the mayor's son is single."
"That's a lot of words for a kidnapping."
She laughed once. "It wasn't kidnapping if I went voluntarily."
"Is that the legal definition?"
"It's the definition my mom uses."
She closed the paperback and set it on the table. The Bluest Eye. He hadn't pegged her for Toni Morrison. He didn't say anything about it. Chrissy reading on her own time wasn't a thing he wanted to interrupt with comments.
"Listen," she said. "I'm not going to tell you my whole life story today. I just wanted to ask you something."
"Ask."
"Are you okay?"
"What do you mean."
"You've been distracted for two weeks. Not in a bad way. Just like you have a lot to do and not enough hours in the day. I just wanted to check."
He looked at her. With Observe at LV 10 he could see the structure of the question. It wasn't manipulation, or fishing, or the kind of friendly probing that tried to get him to admit things. It was a girl asking a friend if they were okay because she'd noticed they might not be, and that was all of it.
"I'm okay," he said. "A lot on my plate. Thanks for asking."
"Sure." She picked the book back up. "Want to study or just sit?"
"Just sit. If that's okay."
"That's okay."
They sat. She read. He pulled out his physics homework and worked through a problem about momentum. The radiator hissed. After about ten minutes she reached across the table and bumped the back of his hand with two fingers.
"For the record," she said, not looking up from her book. "If something is wrong and you do want to talk, I'm a person who listens."
"I know."
"Just saying it." She turned a page. "We're friends now, I think. We can do that."
"Yeah. We can."
"Okay."
She kept reading. He kept working. The bell rang fifteen minutes later, and they walked out together as far as the science wing, where she peeled off toward the auditorium for cheer practice and he kept going toward the main building. At the corner she turned and walked backward two steps to wave at him, almost ran into a junior carrying a stack of textbooks. The junior glared. Chrissy laughed and kept walking.
He thought about her later. She volunteered to be one of the people he could leaned on. It was a new feeling. He hadn't known he wanted it until she'd offered it.
* * *
He hadn't planned to drive out to the Byers house, but Will had asked, when the others were already on their bikes heading home the day before, whether Ryan could swing by Thursday and help him fix the porch light that had been flickering for a week.
Ryan had said yes. He drove the car out to the east end of town, the one with the dirt road and the row of mailboxes leaning at angles and parked next to Joyce's Pinto.
Joyce was on the porch with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Hair pulled back with a clip that had been new sometime in the seventies. The porch light was off (broken, that was the point), and the only light came from the kitchen window behind her. She raised her free hand when she saw him.
"Will's inside," she said. "He's eating."
"He's always eating now."
"I know. I can't keep up. I went through three loaves of bread last week."
Ryan came up the porch steps. The light fixture hung above their heads, dead. The bulb had given up sometime that afternoon, Joyce had told him on the phone.
"I'll fix it before I go," he said.
"You're sixteen years old. You don't have to fix my porch light."
"I want to."
"That doesn't make it a thing you have to do."
"I know."
She studied him for a second. Joyce Byers had eyes that read people.
"You're a good kid, Ryan."
"Mrs. Byers."
"Joyce."
"Joyce."
"Tell me Will's eating because of you."
"He's eating because he wants to be strong."
"For what."
He held her eyes. She was asking a real question, with the gentleness of a woman who'd raised two boys without much help.
"He decided he wanted to grow up faster," Ryan said. "I told him eating well was part of that. He took it seriously."
"That's the only part?"
"He runs in the mornings. He does push-ups before bed."
"Push-ups."
"Yes."
She laughed, a short, startled laugh, like she hadn't believed him until he'd said something that small and specific.
"My son is doing push-ups before bed."
"Yes."
"Ryan." She set the coffee cup down on the porch rail. "Whatever you're doing with him. Don't stop. He has been a different kid for months. He laughs more. He sleeps. He doesn't look like he's about to disappear into himself anymore."
"He was always like that. He just needed a year that worked for him."
"Maybe." She took a drag on the cigarette. "But you're a piece of why this year is working. Don't argue."
"Yes ma'am."
"And don't call me ma'am."
"Yes Joyce."
She laughed again, the same short laugh.
Will came out a minute later with a sandwich in his hand and a smear of mustard at the corner of his mouth. He saw Ryan, said "Oh good," and went back inside without breaking stride.
"He's in a phase," Joyce said.
"He's in three phases."
"At least."
Ryan fixed the porch light. The wiring in the fixture was old and the connections had corroded, and he pulled the fixture down and re-stripped the wires and put it back up with a new bulb from the box he kept in the truck. Mana Crafting on the wires gave them another fifteen years of life. Joyce wouldn't know. The next time the fixture went out, it would be 1998 and she'd be in a different house anyway.
He came down the ladder. Tested the switch. The new bulb caught on the second flick. Joyce clapped once from inside the kitchen window like he'd just made a free throw.
"Stay for dinner," she called through the screen.
"I shouldn't."
"You absolutely should. I made enough lasagna for an army and Jonathan eats like one but not enough to finish it."
He went inside.
The Byers kitchen was small and warm. Two pans on the stove, one with the lasagna, one with green beans she'd been doing something to with garlic and lemon. Will had set the table without being asked. Four places.
Jonathan was at the counter pouring milk into glasses. He looked up when Ryan came in.
"Hey."
"Hey."
They'd met maybe four times. Jonathan was a junior, Ryan was a freshman, and the gap at Hawkins High between those two grades was wide enough that they'd never had a real conversation. What Ryan knew about Jonathan came from the show and from Will. He knew Jonathan worked weekends at Melvald's. He knew Jonathan took photographs and didn't show them to anyone he wasn't related to. He knew Jonathan loved his brother. He took his father's place and looked after him.
"Will says you've been teaching him to cook," Jonathan said.
"He's better than I am at the bread part. I'm better at the sauce."
"He made spaghetti last week. I almost cried."
"That bad?"
"That good."
Joyce laughed from the stove. "Don't oversell it. The garlic was raw."
"Mom."
"It was. I love you. The garlic was raw."
Will, at the table, said nothing. He took a piece of bread out of the basket and broke it in half and ate one half with his eyes on his plate, smiling.
They ate. The lasagna was actually very good, the kind of layered messy lasagna, the cheese caramelized at the edges where it had run over. Joyce ate half a piece and pushed her plate around for a while and asked Ryan about school. He answered. He asked her about work. She made a face.
"Melvald's wants me on doubles through Christmas. I don't know if I have the back for it."
"You should let me drive you on the late shifts, you will be very tired" Jonathan said.
"You have school."
"I can still help you..."
"You still have school."
This was an argument they'd had before. Jonathan would offer. Joyce would refuse. Jonathan would drive her anyway whenever she was too tired to drive. Joyce would pretend not to notice.
After dinner Ryan helped clear. Jonathan washed, Ryan dried, Joyce sat at the table with a cigarette and her shoes off, watching her sons and the neighbor kid clean her kitchen.
"This is the best night I've had in a month," she said.
"You should come over more," Jonathan said.
"I will"
When the dishes were done, Jonathan went to his room with his camera bag and Will walked Ryan out to the truck. The porch light worked now. It cast a clean yellow circle on the gravel where Ryan was parked.
"Thanks for staying," Will said.
"Thanks for the lasagna."
"It wasn't mine."
"You set the table."
"That's not the same."
"In this house it's pretty close."
Will stood at the bottom of the porch steps with his hands in his pockets. Cold breath. The kitchen window was a yellow square behind him. Inside, Joyce had put a record on.
"See you Sunday," Will said.
"Sunday."
Ryan drove home with the heater on low and the radio off.
He'd seen that family on the screen. Watching them survive, things no family should have to survive. He'd known the "shape" of them as characters before he'd ever met them in person.
The shape was wrong obviously…. The screen barely gives him the outlines. This night had given him the depth he'd been missing. Jonathan flicking water at his brother. Joyce calling out the raw garlic. Will smiled at his plate when his mom and his brother teased each other.
He was going to keep all of them alive. Whatever came on Sunday and whatever came after it, he was going to keep all of them alive.
That was the promise.
* * *
Nancy showed up at night with her textbook bag and a tin of cookies her mother had baked.
She set the cookies on the kitchen table. "Mom made these. Don't tell her I gave them to you. She made them for the Wheelers and I didn't ask permission."
"Tell her thanks."
"I will not. She'll start sending them every week and I'll have to keep being the courier."
"Tell her thanks when you forget you're not supposed to."
"That's how it'll happen."
She poured herself coffee. He drank water. They worked through her AP History reading for forty minutes, the chapter on Reconstruction. Nancy talked through her thesis paragraph while Ryan asked the questions her teacher would ask. She had the structure right. She always had the structure right. What she needed was someone to push back so she could find the holes before her teacher did.
Around seven thirty she put down her pen.
"Can I ask you something."
"Sure."
"Are you going to be at school tomorrow."
"Yeah. Why."
"Just checking. You missed yesterday afternoon. People noticed."
"I had a thing."
"That's what you say." She wasn't smiling. She was just looking at him over the rim of her coffee cup, and he knew that look. It meant she'd decided not to drop the subject.
"Nancy."
"Yeah."
"If I gave you a phone number, would you keep it somewhere you could find it at three in the morning."
She set the coffee down. "Okay."
"It's the property line. I'm here most nights. If anything weird happens, and you'll know what I mean if it happens, you call this number first. Even before your parents. Don't go anywhere alone if something feels off."
"Define off…. You are making me nervous"
"If you can't define it, that's the kind of weird I'm talking about. The kind where you're standing in your kitchen and you can't say what's wrong but you know something is."
She held his eyes for a long second. She didn't ask if he was joking. Nancy could read a room. She'd just been told by someone she trusted that strange things happened in Hawkins, and instead of asking further, she pulled her notebook closer.
"I won't ask," she said.
"I'll tell you eventually. I promise."
"Don't promise things you might not be able to keep."
"I'll try, then."
"That I'll take."
She finished her coffee and packed up her books. At the door she stopped.
"Please be safe..."
"I'll try."
She walked to her car and drove off down the access road. Ryan stood in the doorway and watched the taillights until they disappeared into the trees, then closed the door and locked it behind him.
* * *
Friday evening
He spent the evening on the runes.
The pre-skill notification had been sitting at the edge of his vision for two days. He'd cleared his schedule, brought a fresh batch of dimensional residue powder up from the workshop, and laid out the materials on the kitchen table.
The principle, as he understood from Mana Crafting, was a sigil drawn in the right material and the right pattern could hold a magical property the way an enchanted object held one. Except a sigil could be inscribed onto things. Or onto skin. Or onto walls.
He drew a small circle in residue paste on a piece of slate. Pushed a thread of mana into it. The paste glowed for half a second and absorbed the mana like dry earth absorbing rain.
He drew a slightly more complex symbol. Two crossed lines in a circle. Pushed mana into it. Same response. The system threw up a notification.
[New Skill Created: Runes (Active) - LV 1]Inscribe magical effects into surfaces using dimensionalresidue or compatible materials. Effects persist as longas the rune is intact.Current capability: Minor wards, simple property anchors,signal markers. Complex runes require higher levels.Starter pattern library: 6 patterns unlocked.Synergies: Mana Crafting, Enchanting, Dimensional Ward.
He blinked at the last line.
The system had given him a starter set. Six patterns appeared at the edge of his vision when he focused on the new skill, indexed and named. Alert. Reinforce. Anchor. Beacon. Deflect (Heat). Dampen (Sound). Each one came with a visual of the geometry and a rough sense of how the pattern wanted to be drawn.
The skill description hinted at the rest. Higher levels may unlock additional patterns or pattern combinations. Patterns may also be discovered through experimentation, observed in the field, or obtained from external sources.
External sources. He thought about that for a second. There were rune systems in this world's mythology, real ones. Norse runes. Celtic knotwork. Egyptian hieroglyphs. Chinese seal scripts. Anywhere ancient humans had carved geometric patterns into stone with the conviction that the patterns meant something, there might be a chance the conviction had been right. The system might recognize old human runes as functional patterns and accept them. Definitely worth testing…. but he should start with what he had.
He spent two hours after that drawing, pushing mana, reading the responses.
What he learned came in pieces.
A line of residue held mana in one direction. A circle held it in a closed loop. A spiral compounded it, drawing on itself the way a coil of wire amplified an electrical signal. The simplest functional rune was a circle with a single line bisecting it. The line gave the rune a direction and the circle gave it a boundary.
He learned that runes had to be drawn in one continuous motion. If you lifted the brush mid-line, the rune broke. He learned that the residue paste needed a binding agent for permanence, and that a fifty-fifty mix of residue and Mana Crafted clay gave him a paste that would hold its shape for months on a wall. He learned that a finished rune was invisible. The paste sank into the surface and disappeared, leaving the wood or the stone or the metal looking exactly as it had before. Only Mana Sense could find them. He could stand two feet from a wall covered in runes and see nothing but the wall.
That was useful. The guys could walk through the house every day for the next ten years and never know the place was wired.
He also learned the synergy.
A rune drawn on top of an Enchanted surface fed off the Enchantment instead of off ambient mana. A +Durability enchantment on a window pane provided enough background mana to power a permanent alert rune drawn on the same pane. The Enchantment didn't weaken. The rune got its draw for free. Two skills feeding each other.
A rune drawn on top of Mana Crafted material was even better. The compacted molecular grid carried mana more efficiently than untreated wood, which meant a rune on a Mana Crafted beam triggered faster and held its charge longer. The studs in his walls, every one of them Mana Crafted in August, were now anchor points for the entire rune network.
There was a question he'd been ignoring…... and the rune work brought it back.
Where did the ambient mana come from?
The Gamer system handled his own MP regen as a function of WIS and a few other stats. That was internal. What was less clear was where the mana came from when the system referred to ambient mana. The Ward lens drew on it. Enchantments leaked it back into the environment slowly. Now the runes were going to draw on it constantly.
He'd thought about it and assumed the answer was something like a global background field that all magical effects pulled from at a low rate. The Hawkins area had to have a higher concentration than most places because the membrane to the Upside Down was thin there, and the membrane was apparently where the energy came from in the first place. Bleed-through. The other side leaked into this side, and the leak was what made magic possible at all. Maybe there were other parallel worlds or planes that also bled mana into this one, but Ryan had no reference from the show to go on. The Duffer brothers did a pretty lousy job exploring the whole other-dimensions angle….
But the property had a higher concentration than the rest of Hawkins. He could feel it now, paying attention to it. Three months of Mana Crafting on every wall stud and floor joist, two months of Enchanting on weapons and windows, weeks of casting Ward and Heal and Telekinesis inside the same square thirty meters of land. The house had become a kind of magical sponge. Mana wanted to be near other mana. The more he'd put in, the more had pooled.
He didn't know if that was a system rule or a property of the world. Both possibilities had implications. If the field was building up at the property because of his use, then the longer he lived here, the more powerful every spell he cast inside the radius would be. If the membrane was the source and the property just happened to be a low spot the bleed-through pooled in, then the field would keep growing whether he kept working here or not, and the Upside Down was tied to his magic in a way he hadn't fully accepted.
Probably both were true.
The skill leveled twice during the session. By the time he stopped, he was at LV 3, his fingers were stained black with residue paste, and he had a working theory of what runes could do at his level.
The system pinged him again.
[Mana Crafting LV 10 → LV 11](Synergy with Runes detected. Threshold passed.)
[Enchanting LV 4 → LV 5](Synergy with Runes detected. Cross-skill resonance.)
He stopped and stared at the notifications. Two skills had leveled passively from his rune work, neither of them touched directly. The system was rewarding the fact that he was using all three together in the same session. Mana Crafting at 11 unlocked something it called deep restructuring, which he didn't fully understand yet. Enchanting at 5 added a fifth available property: Resonance, which the description said let an enchantment maintain itself indefinitely without ambient feed.
He grinned and kept pushing… there was end for The Gamer.
* * *
He'd designed a rune for the front door first. The Alert pattern from the starter library, sized to a six-inch circle, with the directional anchor pointed inward. He drew it on the inside of the door frame in residue paste, fed it twenty MP, and stood back.
The paste sank into the wood and disappeared. Nothing visible. No glow. The rune was just gone, except to his Mana Sense.
He opened the front door and walked through.
A soft chime pulsed against his psychic sense. The rune had flagged him as a living thing crossing the threshold.
He went outside, picked up a Demogorgon claw he'd left on the porch railing for testing, and walked back through the door holding it.
The chime was different. Like a different flavor of the same thing. The rune had recognized the dimensional residue in the claw as Upside Down material and flagged it accordingly. Two distinct alerts. One for normal living things and the other for things that came from the wrong side.
He could refine that distinction further with practice. For now, two categories were enough.
* * *
He spent the next four hours wiring the house.
Alert runes on every doorway and windowsill. Reinforcement runes on the load-bearing beams and the cellar ceiling, layered on top of the Mana Crafting already there, the two skills compounding to push the structural ratings past anything he'd been able to manage with either skill alone. Anchor runes for the three Dimensional Ward lenses, which let them draw from static sources instead of his MP. All three lenses stabilized completely.
Then he became creative.
The forge in the workshop had been running on a propane line he'd had Pete's plumber install in September. Functional, reliable, but the tank needed refilling every three weeks and the temperature was hard to regulate. He drew a Heat pattern on the inside of the forge wall, fed it sixty MP, and watched the chamber climb to two thousand degrees and held there. The propane line was now cosmetic. The forge would burn cold and hot on command, run on ambient mana indefinitely, and never need fuel again.
He ran a Cold pattern on the inside of the icebox in the kitchen, paired with a Heat pattern on the outside wall to dump the displaced energy. The icebox dropped to thirty-eight degrees and held there. He'd been running it on a compressor that woke him up some nights. Now it ran silent. He could probably do the whole house's heating and cooling the same way if he committed a weekend to it. Free climate control. No gas bill in winter. No electric bill from the window unit in summer. The house would just be the temperature he wanted it to be.
He thought about what else.
A drying rune for clothes, maybe, on the inside of the laundry hamper. A rust-prevention rune on the truck's undercarriage. A pest-deterrent on the eaves. A water-purification pattern on the kitchen tap. Anywhere he was using electricity or a chemical or a piece of consumable supply to get a result, he could replace the supply with a pattern and a steady draw on the field.
He didn't have time to do all of it tonight. He picked the priorities. The forge, the icebox, the truck enchantments. The rest could wait until next week.
* * *
He went out to the back yard before midnight and found the Stone Golem standing where he'd left it, patient, the cracks from this morning's Demogorgon fight already partly knitted back together.
He drew runes on it.
A reinforcement pattern across the chest where the Demogorgon claws had broken through. A Heat-deflection rune across the shoulders. A Sound-dampening rune on the soles of its feet. He drew them carefully, layering each one over the existing Mana Crafting that held the construct together.
When he finished, the Golem was different. Heavier in his Mana Sense. The construct had become not just a stone body animated by his will but a stone body wearing inscribed armor it could not lose.
He'd build a better Golem tomorrow. With the runes baked into the casting instead of drawn on after. He had the technique now. Give it some weapons, make it less of a giant ugly rock and more of something he wouldn't be embarrassed to call on.
The skill currently let him hold three active Golems at the same time, regardless of his MP pool. He'd been using one because one had been enough. With runes in play, three made sense. A combat Golem, bigger than this one, baked with reinforcement and heat-deflection and weapons mounts in the casting. A guardian Golem parked in the sub-cellar, smaller, faster, set to wake on the alert runes and respond to a breach. And a utility Golem for the property work he kept putting off because it took time he didn't have. Hauling. Lifting. Holding things steady while he Mana Crafted them.
He'd give them all decent finishes. The current Golem looked like a pile of rocks somebody had stacked in a hurry. The next ones would look like something you'd see in a museum if museums kept armored stone soldiers. Clean lines. Carved faces that wouldn't terrify the guys when they walked into the cellar. Maybe shields. Maybe a spear set into the right hand of the combat one. He had Demogorgon hide and Demodog fang and weeks of Mana Crafting practice. There was no reason his Golems had to be ugly.
That was enough for tonight.
He stood in the cold yard for another minute, looking at the property. The house with its rune-wired walls.
Calling it fortress was wrong. Bunker was also wrong. It was closer to a body, with the runes as its nervous system and the Mana Crafting as its bones and the Enchantments as its skin.
A living machine.
Sunday was two days away.
He went inside, washed the residue off his hands at the kitchen sink, and went up to bed.
He slept hard.
* * *
Saturday, November 5th - Pete's house
Pete made spaghetti. Sauce was Hunt's, the same brand he'd been buying for fifteen years. Noodles overcooked by three minutes, an improvement on the usual five. Salad was iceberg with bottled Italian dressing.
Ryan ate it without complaint. Pete's cooking had never been the point of dinner at Pete's.
"Took the job," Pete said.
"The foreman thing?"
"Permanent now. Mason left two weeks ago. They put me in interim. Friday they made it official."
"Congratulations."
"Don't congratulate me. They're paying me more to do the work I was already doing."
"Still."
Pete grunted. He ate a meatball. The radio played a Cardinals retrospective in the background, the sportscaster running through the season.
"You should come around more," Pete said. "Now that you're driving. You've come what, three Sundays in a row?"
"Four."
"Four. That's an improvement…..."
"I've been busy."
"Yeah, you've been busy. Doing what?"
"Working on the house. Working on the truck. Hanging out with the guys."
"Still seeing that Cunningham girl?"
"She's not that Cunningham girl. Her name's Chrissy."
"Still seeing Chrissy?"
"We're friends. We have lunch."
"You have lunch with a cheerleader four days a week."
"Three days a week. And like I told you, we're not always alone, my friends sit with us too."
"My mistake, only three days and your friends who can't read the room. With friends like that, who needs enemies."
Ryan stayed speechless for a moment, which was a first….
Pete had been doing this since school started. Asking about Chrissy without seeming to ask. Pete had liked Chrissy from the moment Ryan had mentioned her.
"She's just a friend, Pete."
"Mm."
"That's what people say when they actually mean she's just a friend."
"That's also what people say when they're not paying attention." Pete reached for the bread. "Three days a week is a lot of lunches. You don't sit three days a week with anyone you're not interested in. You don't sit three days a week with the guys, even."
"That's because the guys argue about D&D for the entire lunch period."
"Cheerleaders don't argue about D&D?"
"Cheerleaders argue about whether the math teacher is having an affair with the librarian."
"Well, that make me a cheerleader… because that's a much better lunch conversation than D&D."
"It's a different lunch conversation."
"It's better. I'm telling you. You stay close to that one."
Ryan stayed quiet. He went back to his meatball and let the conversation drop, which was Pete's version of a victory lap.
The Cardinals retrospective ended. A weather report came on. Light rain expected Monday through Wednesday. Pete reached over and turned the radio off.
Ryan ate another half-meatball. The kitchen was warm. The radiator hissed under the window the way it always hissed in November once the heat came on.
After dinner Ryan washed the dishes. Pete dried.
"You're a good kid, Ryan."
Ryan stopped, the dish in his hand under the running water.
Pete had said many things to him over the years. He had not said that one before. Not in those words.
"Where's that coming from."
"I don't know. I felt like saying it."
"Okay."
"That's all."
"Okay."
They finished the dishes. Pete dried his hands on the towel hanging from the oven handle and folded it, and walked Ryan to the door.
"Drive safe."
"I will."
"Come back next week."
"I will."
Ryan drove home with the heater on low and the windows cracked.
* * *
Sunday, November 6th - 5:47 PM
The guys arrived on bikes between five forty and six. Four of them, four bicycles leaning against the fence in a row, four backpacks on the porch.
Ryan cooked spaghetti. Fresh tomatoes, garlic, basil he'd dried in his own kitchen. The sauce simmered for forty minutes while the guys argued in the living room about what to watch.
"Empire," Lucas said.
"Seen it."
"We've seen everything. We own seven tapes."
"I brought Ghostbusters," Dustin said.
"Ghostbusters came out this year," Mike said. "How do you have it on tape."
"A gentleman doesn't reveal his sources."
"You taped it off someone's satellite."
"I received signal that was in public airspace."
Will was in the kitchen with Ryan, tearing bread for the garlic toast. He worked in silence for a minute, his hands steady.
"This is going to be fine," Will said.
"Yeah."
"You're worried."
"I'm prepared."
"You keep saying that." Will glanced sideways at him. "You ever think maybe people who say that a lot are saying it because if they say it enough, it'll be true?"
Ryan stopped stirring.
Will tore another piece of bread. "I'm not trying to be a smart-ass. I just notice things."
"I know you do."
"Whatever happens tonight, you don't have to do it alone. There's four of us here. We're not just packages you're protecting."
"I know."
"Okay."
He went back to tearing bread. Ryan stirred the sauce.
After a minute Ryan said, "Thanks."
"For what."
"For saying that."
"Anytime."
They ate at the kitchen table. Spaghetti, garlic bread, and a salad Dustin picked through, eating only the croutons.
Dustin chewed loudly to spite Lucas. Mike, who'd been quiet through dinner, finally spoke.
"What's the floor plan…. And are you sure today something is going to happen?"
"Pretty much… yeah. If it's not a hundred percent, it's at least ninety-five. As for the floor plan… Cellar door is locked from the inside," Ryan said. "Front door has the deadbolt. Back door has a deadbolt and the chain. All windows have the curtains drawn. If something happens, I'm outside. You four stay in. If I tell you to go to the cellar, go. If I tell you to take the tunnel, take it. Don't argue, don't look back. I'll find you."
"What if you don't come back," Dustin said.
The question dropped into the kitchen and sat there.
"Then take the tunnel," Ryan said. "Get to the road. Don't go home. Go to Hopper. Tell him everything. He'll believe you eventually."
"Hopper," Mike said.
"Chief Hopper. I've already left a letter for him."
"You wrote a letter."
"I wrote a letter."
"For tonight."
"For any night."
Mike chewed slowly. He nodded once, accepted the answer, and went back to his food.
After dinner they put on Empire Strikes Back over Lucas's protest that they'd seen it five times and Mike's argument that they hadn't seen it together in three months. The argument resolved when Will silently put the tape into the VCR while the others were still talking.
They spread out across the living room. Dustin took the couch. Lucas took the armchair. Mike on the floor with his back against the couch. Will at the far end of the rug with a pillow under his head.
Ryan watched the first ten minutes. The Hoth opening. The wampa scene. Then he got up and went to the kitchen and washed the dishes and listened to the movie through the doorway, the AT-AT walkers and the ion cannon and the slow grinding evacuation of Echo Base.
Will fell asleep before the carbon freezing scene. He always did.
Around ten thirty the others were yawning. Mike stretched out on the floor with a pillow he'd taken from the couch. Lucas reclined the armchair. Dustin pulled a blanket up to his chin and closed his eyes.
Ryan covered the others with a blanket. Walked through the house. Checked the deadbolts. Checked the runes. The alert runes were quiet, no Upside Down crossings on the property. The Dimensional Ward lens on the back porch glowed faintly under its tarp, drawing on its anchor rune, stable and self-sustaining.
He went to his desk. The plan was simple. The contingencies were laid out. The guys were here. Will was here. Pete was at home, two miles from the Lab, asleep. Chrissy was in her parents' house in the good part of town, asleep. Nancy was at home, awake probably, reading.
Ryan checked the Commodore. Lab traffic: elevated. Nine transmissions per hour. Not critical.
He checked Mana Sense. The dimensional resonance from the southeast had climbed all day. The membrane was thin. He could feel the Lab pushing from two miles away without trying. The barrier was about to give in. He didn't know exactly when. He knew it would.
He opened the status window for the last time before sleep.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: Apex Hunter
Class: The Gamer
Level: 26
HP: 930/930
MP: 2,100/2,100
STR: 37
VIT: 36
DEX: 36
INT: 92
WIS: 54
CHA: 10
LUK: 16
Skills: 66
Skill Points: 0
Sixty-six skills now. Runes had been the second-newest, picked up Friday. Telepathy had been the surprise, the system's gift from a month of Eleven brushing against his mind from the other side of town.
He turned the lamp off and went to the window.
Hawkins was a scatter of porch lights and streetlights against the black line of trees.
Ryan set his alarm for five. He was as ready as he was going to be.
If a Demogorgon came at the property tonight, he was going to kill it. He'd killed them already and the last one had taught him things the previous one hadn't. The Upside Down Demogorgon was probably smarter and a much faster learner, but he could still beat it.
The fight he was nervous about would be with something that surprised him. Whatever came through the dark in the next twelve hours, he had a plan for it.
The bigger threat was Vecna.
If Vecna 1.0 came tonight, he would still be at the start of his power curve. Three teenagers had almost put him down at the end of season 4.
Yes, those teenagers had circumstances. Yes, the music had helped. Yes, Eleven had been doing something on the other end. But at the end… a healthy fifteen-year-old with a bat could push back on Vecna at full power if they got fire. Tonight Ryan had fire, a base full of runes, a Golem and a property that ate dimensional rifts before they opened.
Vecna could only dream of taking someone under Ryan's care, in Ryan's house.
If he followed the series logic. Vecna habit had been to go after the youngest available. The show had been clear about that. Trauma, isolation, a teenager already half-broken. That was the type. The party was older here than they'd been in canon.
But if the plot logic wins the lore logic and the pattern held even a little, Vecna would come for Will or someone like Will and in his age group. Probably not for Nancy, Chrissy or Steve. Some changes had carried over, but the show's logic should have stayed at least partly intact.
He also didn't know which would come first or where it would come from. He didn't need to. The point of the night was to be in one place with everyone who mattered to him under one roof. He wasn't going to abandon his friends or his position to chase an unknown into the dark.
The worst case had its own answer. If some kid in town got taken instead of Will, then he had very talented girl who could help him. Find Eleven. Bring her here. Use what she could do to find whoever had been taken. Cross over if they had to.
He'd done the work. The plan was solid. If the plan failed, he had backups. If the backups failed, he had Eleven. If Eleven failed, he had himself.
He'd be fine.
His friends would be fine.
Will Byers was sleeping on his floor instead of riding a bike down a road.
He lay down and closed his eyes.
He didn't know exactly when sleep came. He just knew that when he opened his eyes again, it would be tomorrow, and tomorrow was the day everything started.
[A.N: 16,600+ words…. We've reached the point where calling these "chapters" feels like false advertising. These are episodes. These are arcs. These are limited series. Do you guys realize I broke WebNovel? Like literally broke it. The platform looked at this chapter, and said "no, sir, this is too much, please split it in two." When the website itself is staging an intervention, you know things have gotten out of hand. I have a problem and I'm not seeking help.
First thing, before anything else. Thank you to everyone who sent birthday wishes this weekend. I read every single one and they genuinely meant a lot. You guys made me feel pretty special. Really, thank you.
Now to the chapter itself. This was the last setup chapter before the plot officially kicks off, so I tried to pack as much groundwork into it as I could. The dimensional resonance climbing toward Sunday, the Dimensional Ward lenses anchored across the property, the rune system, the truck rebuild, the letter to Hopper, the emergency kits for the guys, the conversation with Will at the kitchen table, dinner at the Byers, the goodbye at Pete's, Eleven's deliberate contact and the Telepathy unlock. A lot of moving pieces, and every single one of them lands somewhere over the next few chapters.
The truck modification scene and the rune work were both reader suggestions. The rune idea came from Getryx, I remember that one clearly. Thanks for the push, it opened up a whole skill direction I hadn't fully considered before. The truck rebuild came from someone (or possibly a few people) in the comments a couple of chapters back, and I went looking through the threads to credit them properly and... I lost the names. The WebNovel comment app is genuinely brutal to navigate once a novel has hundreds of replies. So if you're the one who pushed for the truck upgrade, thank you, and please drop a comment so I can credit you properly in the next A.N.
Curious what you guys think about the Dustin and Honor moment. Did anyone catch the reference? I'm honestly on the fence about pushing it further. The whole Suzie thing in the show was hilarious but it came out of nowhere. If I'm going to do something similar for Dustin, I want to plant it now and let it grow naturally. Let me know in the comments where you stand on it.
I hope the last chapter answered the slice of life cravings most of you had. It was a monster on purpose. I crammed in as much as I could before the plot starts, because once Sunday hits, the pace changes and the breathing room shrinks fast.
Speaking of which, next chapter we're officially in Season 1. Wish me luck. Wish all of us luck. I've been planning this arc for months and I'm equally excited and terrified to actually starting it.
On the schedule, I have to be honest with you. I pushed hard to get this chapter out because I felt bad about last week's delay, and now I'm paying for it. My last midterm is on May 15, and university is genuinely crushing me until then. So fair warning, the next chapter is probably going to take at least a week and a half, after the 15th. I'll do what I can, but I can't promise faster than that. Sorry in advance.
Top 10 Power Stone legends, holding the line:
Psycho_Paradox, Yunos_Noor, Getryx, GODKINGASH, aXionPingu, XenonBlaster65, Xander1910, Piggy, SleepWalkingMan, Gustavo_Dias_4181. Absolute legends.
Top 100, the backbone of this fic:
Arthur25, this_your_bush, Mirksas, Corey_Hall_0942, DaoistStar, Dear_Lord, Dillmet_Singh_4812, Bam729, sdunn0404, mitch_mitch40, Daoist3tTlco, ChristiaanZA, LouCaz, Leylindd, Isabel_Cristina_0876, AlexPendragon, DontDon, Aaronzaid, Lolggloll_XD, iamaguynamedtre, Kilaske, GzeroX, heavenlydemon_, Mik_024, SteelWolves_1, blu3Jay, DaoistuhLIL5, Alternatif_OfMe, DocImagine, solo_leveling_god, corey_miller_0016, Shev, SCP_41, daviangarcia85, Chikary, Sad_Box, xNeke, KBG_Obsidian, GreatNovelLover, Tomik, DaoistoYcxBR, Gavin_Esteb, Maicros, Celestialicz, guardian252, BrunooT, SageOfSins, FOX_FIRE, jjtcaster, Williams1996, averagenarutofan, Yuri_Marinho, DRE_MCREED, A_Verdade, Bean_Man_7767, J2_illusion, hikigaya4103, The_lazy, Broccolitop, Abdullah_Ismail_0552, Makuraty, SnowMan, ChillPixel369, Quitetorchic, Arctic961, boris_mirovic, Werph, UchihaGod, Araragi_Koyomy, iansf, LightHollow, Shiakuma, Lalo, igniziouz, AkGreyback, Akira890, Charly_26r, TomTheReader, Wither_Kingzz, Max202_Solana, ModfeR217, Dark_Prince01, D1vineMonarch, siddhu, cruizgame34, Vasodeagua, Carl_0, Gabriel_andrino, Knowndevil, Kadiox.
And shoutout to all 226 of you supporting the story this week!!
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.]