Saturday, August 6, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
___________________________________________________________________________
[A.N: A heads up before you start reading. As some of you guessed from the last few chapters, this is where Ryan brings the Party into the fold. I know this is a sensitive topic in Gamer fics and some of you might feel like this isn't the direction you wanted. If you're thinking about dropping the story because of this, I'm asking you to at least read this chapter first and then decide.
This was honestly one of the hardest chapters to write. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this the right way and rewrote the chapter several times before I was happy with the final version.
As I've mentioned in the comments and in previous author's notes, I'm handling this as cleanly as possible. Ryan's friends will NOT learn about the Gamer system. No stats, no levels, no skill windows, no game mechanics. What they will know is that Ryan has a specific power: the ability to open gates to pocket dimensions. That's it. As the story progresses they'll see a few more abilities, but everything is framed as superpowers, not a game system. This fits naturally into the Stranger Things world where powers like Eleven's already exist. When she eventually shows up, the concept won't feel out of place at all.
Ryan isn't going solo forever. The threats ahead are too big for that, and his friends were always going to be involved once things start going down. This is about preparing them the right way.
Alright, enjoy!]
The Palace Arcade had been open for nine days, and the line was still wrapped around the parking lot.
Ryan locked his bike next to Lucas's and watched the crowd. Mostly kids their age, a few older teenagers leaning against the brick wall with cigarettes looking bored. The neon sign above the entrance buzzed in broad daylight, red and yellow letters spelling out PALACE ARCADE against the white clapboard.
The smell drift out through the open door. Pizza grease and carpet cleaner. And underneath all of it, the electronic heartbeat of forty arcade cabinets playing attract modes at once.
Dustin had already disappeared inside.
"He's been talking about this place since the sign went up," Lucas said, pulling his bandana tighter. The August heat was brutal, the kind that turned asphalt soft and made the air shimmer above every parked car. "I give it twenty minutes before he's out of quarters."
"Fifteen," Mike said.
Will had stopped at the entrance.
Ryan glanced at him. He was stronger than he'd been in May, and his posture was better. Next year, this arcade was the beginning of the Mind Flayer events, Ryan really hoped to change things up and save him.
They went inside.
The amount of noise was insane.
Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Dig Dug, Defender, and a dozen others Ryan half-recognized all competing for attention at maximum volume. The carpet was dark red and already sticky from spilled soda. Fluorescent lights overhead fought against the glow of the screens and lost.
Dustin was already at Dig Dug, hunched over the controls with his hat backwards and his tongue pressing against his upper lip. He'd found his spot. Lucas walked past the shooting games, paused at Missile Command, then kept going to the back corner where Asteroids sat alone by the bathrooms. He slid a quarter and started playing.
Mike stopped at the Pac-Man cabinet and studied the leaderboard. His eyes moved down the list of initials and scores. He was looking for repetitions. Which scores clustered together. Whether anyone had broken fifty thousand. After thirty seconds of analysis, he deposited his quarter and started playing.
Will found Dragon's Lair.
The laserdisc game was running it attract sequence, Dirk the Daring stumbling through animated corridors while the cabinet speakers played the orchestral score. Will stood in front of it and watched it.
Ryan fed two quarters into Galaga and let his hands settle on the controls.
The game was simple at a mechanical level. Fixed shooter, wave-based, predictable enemy patterns. The aliens dove in formation, peeled off to attack, circled back. At human reaction speeds, the patterns required memorization and fast hands. At DEX 23 and with Gamer's Mind keeping his focus locked, Ryan's hands moved before the enemies completed their attack. The gap between seeing a dive pattern begin and responding was measured in frames. His ship slid between bullet streams, fired upward in bursts that cleared columns of aliens, and the score counter climbed in jumps.
He hit twenty thousand in four minutes. Thirty thousand in seven. The high score on the machine was forty-two thousand, posted by someone with the initials TJH. Ryan passed it at the eleven-minute mark and kept going.
"Holy shit."
The voice came from behind him, to his right. But Ryan didn't turn. His ship was threading a double-dive pattern and the timing window was tight.
"That's a new record. That's a new record on day nine."
He finished the wave, lost his last spare ship to a mistake he made on purpose because the score was already ridiculous, and stepped back.
A kid was standing three feet away. Not a kid actually. Seventeen, lean and rangy, with dark curly hair that went in every direction and a denim vest covered in patches: Dio, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath. He had a can of Mountain Dew in one hand, and his eyes were fixed on the Galaga screen where Ryan's score blinked in the number-one slot.
Ryan used Observed on him.
[Eddie Munson - LV 2]
HP: 145/145
Age: 18
Status: Healthy. Impressed.
Background: Hellfire Club DM. Repeating senior year.
Lives with uncle. Outsider.
Disposition: Curious.
LV 2 was higher than most people in Hawkins. Ryan had scanned dozens of adults, teachers, shop owners, and the majority sat at LV 1. Eddie Munson, at seventeen, already had whatever quality the system measured as a level above baseline. Grit, probably. The kind of internal steel that came from growing up hard and choosing to stay open anyway.
Eddie Munson would die in the Upside Down playing guitar to draw away Demobats. Twenty years old, running instead of hiding, choosing to fight when every survival instinct told him to run.
Ryan thought it was good to be a hero, but he also believed Eddie could have done things differently, without sacrificing himself. And if he was being honest, most of the group's decisions were questionable at best, if not outright stupid.
"I've been working on that score for a week," Eddie said. "Six days. Burned through ten bucks in quarters." He gestured at the screen with his Mountain Dew. "You did it in one run."
"Fast reflexes," Ryan said.
Eddie looked at him. His eyebrows moving, mouth shifting between expressions, the gears turning visibly.
"Okay, you look pretty athletic, so I'm guessing the answer is probably no… but you also seem like a cool guy. So, do you play D&D?
"Don't judge a dude by the muscles, I'm at the table every Wednesday."
"Who's your DM?"
"Mike Wheeler." Ryan tilted his head toward the Pac-Man cabinet where Mike was in a focused trance, elbows out, the poster tube leaning against the side of the machine.
"Wheeler. Baby Wheeler runs a table?" Eddie's grin was wide and genuine.
"He is."
"I run Hellfire Club. High school D&D. Upperclassmen, mostly." Eddie fixed his vest. "Different kind of game than what Wheeler probably runs. Darker, with probably more gore." He said " gore" the way some people said "holy."
"We might take you up on that."
"Room 203. Wednesdays after school, once it starts back up." Eddie pointed at him with the Mountain Dew can. "Bring Wheeler. I want to see what he does with a campaign he doesn't control."
Dustin appeared on Ryan's shoulder. Ryan hadn't heard him approach over the arcade noise.
Dustin looked at Eddie. Eddie looked at Dustin. Some kind of mutual recognition passed between them, two people who operated at the same frequency, loud and enthusiastic and completely unwilling to pretend they were too cool for the things they loved.
"Is that a Dio patch?" Dustin said. "The Holy Diver one?"
"Original pressing. Got it at a swap meet in Indianapolis."
"That's the album where he fights the dragon on the cover."
"He IS the dragon. Metaphorically. It's about transformation."
"I thought it was about scuba diving."
Eddie stared at Dustin for two seconds. Then he laughed, a big barking sound that turned heads from three cabinets away. "I like this kid. Who is this kid?"
"Dustin Henderson," Dustin said, and stuck out his hand like he was meeting a business associate.
Eddie shook it. "Eddie Munson. You play?"
"D&D? Since I was eleven. I'm currently running a half-elf bard with sixteen charisma and a homebrew spell that lets me…"
"Half-elf bard." Eddie released Dustin's hand and stepped back in theatrical disbelief. "You went BARD? In Baby Wheeler's campaign?"
"Bards are the most versatile class in the--"
"You're insane. And I love it. Come to Hellfire. Both of you."
Eddie left ten minutes later with a two-finger salute and a promise to blow Mike's mind. Dustin watched him go with the expression of someone who had just discovered a new species.
"I like him," Dustin said.
"Yeah," Ryan said. "Me too."
Eddie was definitely the easiest one to save, so Ryan wasn't about to waste that opportunity. And honestly? Eddie was just the kind of guy you wanted around. Fun, chaotic in a good way, zero judgment, full acceptance, and somehow always helping you figure out who you are… usually while doing something extremely questionable.
* * *
Wednesday. Mike's house. Ryan walked in through the kitchen.
Nancy was at the table with her chemistry textbook, two empty Tab cans, and a legal pad covered in electron configurations. Her hair was pulled up with a pencil stuck through the bun, and she was tapping her pen against the page.
"Gibbs free energy," she said without looking up, "is going to make me commit arson."
"You can't commit arson on a textbook."
"I can if I use enough lighter fluid."
Ryan pulled out the chair across from her and sat. The problem was on the page between her elbows, a thermodynamics equation where she'd gotten the sign wrong on the entropy term. He could see it from across the table.
"Your delta S is negative," he said. "The reaction creates more order, not less. Flip the sign and the whole thing resolves."
Nancy looked at where he was pointing. Her pen stopped. She crossed out the negative, wrote a positive, and worked through the remaining algebra in about twenty seconds. The answer came out clean.
"How do you see that from over there?"
"The negative was in red ink. Everything else was blue."
She almost smiled. "Thursday, the library. Don't forget."
"I won't."
Mike came up from the basement. He stopped at the kitchen doorway and looked at the two of them, Nancy bent over her textbook, Ryan leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed. Mike's expression went through several phases in about two seconds.
"Since when do you two..." He waved a hand vaguely between them.
"He caught a sign error," Nancy said, still writing. "Five seconds. Saved me an hour."
"Ryan is tutoring you. In chemistry."
"He's better at explaining it than Pauling."
Mike turned to Ryan with a look that mixed confusion with something territorial, like finding out your dog preferred someone else's treats. Lucas came in through the back door, sweaty from the bike ride, and read the room in one glance.
"Is Ryan dating your sister?"
"He is NOT--"
"I'm helping with AP Chem," Ryan said. "That's it."
Nancy looked up. She studied Lucas for a moment, then Mike, then went back to her notebook. "I wouldn't date a freshman." She said it flat. Matter of fact.
Dustin's voice carried from the front hallway before the screen door finished closing. "WHY IS EVERYONE IN THE KITCHEN? The campaign materials are in the basement. The basement is downstairs. I don't understand what's happening up here."
"Chemistry," Nancy said.
"Is that code for something?"
"Go downstairs, Dustin."
They went downstairs. Nancy caught Ryan's eye as he stood up. A brief look, one he'd started to recognize. Whatever this connection was, the tutoring, the conversations, it had crossed some line from casual help into something she was starting to count on.
Ryan followed the guys down to the basement and very deliberately did not think about the fact that Nancy Wheeler had said she didn't date freshmen and hadn't shot the idea down instantly.
He was absolutely not overthinking it.
* * *
Saturday, August 13, 1983
The five of them were in the Miller property kitchen after the afternoon training session. The table was covered with water bottles and the remains of the sandwiches Ryan had made. Lucas was sitting on the counter, legs dangling. Mike had a chair tipped back on two legs. Dustin was finishing his third sandwich. Will stood at the window.
Ryan had been carrying this for three months. He'd thought about the words, the framing, the order of information. How much to tell. How much to hold back. He'd even rehearsed it in the Empty ID.
But the dimensional readings had been getting worse. Mana Sense at LV 3 could track the ambient energy that bled from the direction of Hawkins Lab, and over the past two weeks the frequency had shifted. Much higher. Like a string being tuned past its safe range. The membrane between Hawkins and the other side was thinning, Papa is pushing Eleven hard and Ryan couldn't be the only person ready when it tore.
"I need to show you something," he said. "All of you."
The chewing stopped. Dustin's hand froze with the sandwich halfway to his mouth. Lucas straightened on the counter. Mike's chair legs came down to the floor with a thud. And Will turned from the window.
"I need you to hear the whole thing before you react. Can you do that?"
Mike looked at Lucas. Lucas looked at Ryan. The room had gone very quiet.
"Go ahead," Mike said.
Ryan put his hands on the table. "A few months ago I discovered I can do something. I don't know why. I don't know where it comes from. But it's real, and I'm going to show you." He paused. Let the weight of that settle. "I can open doorways to a copy of the world. An exact duplicate. Same buildings, same roads, same everything. But no people. The copy is empty."
Dustin set the sandwich down.
"There are things in there, though. Creatures. Like monsters from a game. They attack, and you can fight them, and when you beat them they disappear." He saw the disbelief forming and pushed through it. "I've been going in alone for weeks. Fighting them and trying to figure things up. That's why I started training us. That's why I pushed the workouts and built this place. Because I knew we'd need to be ready."
Silence. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked.
Mike leaned forward. "Ready for what?"
"I don't know exactly." Ryan had practiced this part. The lie that was closest to the truth. "Something's changing in Hawkins. I can feel it. Like pressure building up underground. The same energy that lets me open the doorway, I can sense it in the world around us. And it's getting stronger. Coming from the east." He didn't say Hawkins Lab. They all knew what was east of town.
"You're saying something bad is coming," Lucas said.
"I'm saying something is shifting, and I want us to be ready. All of us. Together."
"Like a quest," Will said from the window.
Everyone looked at him. Will's voice was calm, almost distant.
"The DM doesn't just build the dungeon," Will said. "He builds it months before the campaign starts. Designs the monsters, places the traps. The players don't know any of it until the first session. But the dungeon is already there. Waiting." He turned and looked at Ryan. "You found the dungeon."
The room was quiet again. Will had given them something they understood. And they took that much better than Ryan expects them.
"Yeah," Ryan said. "I found the dungeon. And I've been running it solo for two months. But solo players die in the hard campaigns."
"You need a party," Mike said. The words came out with another surprise for Ryan. Mike wasn't skeptical. Mike was the kid who'd sheltered a girl with telekinesis in his basement, who'd believed in the impossible before anyone else did. He the Party's emotional core, the gravity that held the group together.
"I need this party," Ryan said. "But first you need to understand something. If anyone finds out about this, the wrong people will come for us. A kid who can open portals to another dimension? Think about what that means. If the government knew. If anyone with power knew. We'd disappear. All of us. Our families too."
Lucas's jaw tightened. He is already trying to process the powers thing now he also needs to process the dangers.
"How do you hide it?" Lucas asked. "The doorway. Does it leave traces? Can someone detect it?"
"Not as far as I can tell. When I close it, everything goes back to normal. No marks or residue, there is no evidence."
"But you said you can sense the energy. Someone else might be able to sense it too."
Ryan paused. Lucas had jumped three steps ahead of where most people would be. "That's possible. I don't know. I haven't detected anyone else with this kind of ability."
"What about the creatures?" Dustin asked. His voice was pitched higher than normal, the way it got when his brain was processing faster than his mouth could handle. "You said they're in the copy world. Can they come out? Through the doorway?"
"No. When I close the door, everything inside stays inside. The creatures, the environment, all of it. Sealed."
"But the energy is leaking," Lucas said. "You just said you can feel it getting stronger."
"The energy comes from somewhere else. Not from my doorway. Think of it like... I built a window. I can look through it, step through it, come back. But there's a crack in the wall next to the window. A natural crack. And whatever's on the other side is pushing against it."
"That's terrifying," Dustin said. "That is objectively terrifying information. I want you to acknowledge that."
"It is terrifying," Ryan said. "That's why I'm telling you."
Mike stood up and looked at Ryan and said, "Show us."
"Nobody can know," Ryan said. "Not Pete. Not your parents. Nobody outside this room. I need to hear each of you say it."
"I won't tell anyone," Mike said.
"Nobody," Lucas said.
"My lips are surgically sealed," Dustin said.
Will was quiet for a beat. "I can keep a secret."
Ryan stood up. He focused on the skill, the MP draining through channels he'd worn smooth with hundreds of uses. ID Create. Empty ID.
The world changed.
Color drained from the kitchen in a wave that started at the ceiling and washed down to the floor. The afternoon light through the window went from gold to gray in half a second. The sounds all died. The well pump, the wind in the hedge, all of it snuffed out. The walls faded to the colorless nothing of the Empty ID, every surface preserved in perfect detail but stripped of life.
Dustin screamed.
It was a short scream, more shock than fear, cut off when he clapped both hands over his mouth. He backed into the counter and knocked a water bottle onto the floor. The bottle hit the copied linoleum, and the sound was flat and muffled.
Lucas grabbed the counter edge with both hands. His eyes swept the room, checking the exits, the windows, the back door. His body instantly shift from casual to alert.
Mike didn't move. He sat in his chair and looked at the gray kitchen. His mouth was open, his hands flat on the table, and his eyes moved across every surface.
"This is real," Mike said. His voice cracked on the second word.
Will looked through the window. The copied yard was visible through the glass, gray grass under a dead white sky, the hedge reduced to a dark skeleton. Will pressed his palm against the windowpane.
"It's cold," he said.
"The copy doesn't retain heat the same way," Ryan said. "The physics are close but not perfect."
"It's real," Will said. Confirming it for himself.
Dustin took his hands off his mouth. "What. The. Actual. Hell." Each word separated, spaced. He looked at the ceiling. Looked at the floor. Looked at Ryan. "You can DO this? You've been doing this? How long? How is this possible? What are we looking at? Is this another dimension? Is this--"
"Dustin." Ryan held up a hand. "One at a time."
"I have eight hundred questions."
"Pick three."
"Three? You just ripped reality open in front of me and I get THREE questions?"
"For now."
Dustin wrestled with the constraint for a full second. "Fine. One. Is this dangerous?"
"The copy is safe. Nothing lives in this version. The creatures are in a different layer. I control which layer we enter."
"Two. How long have you been doing this?"
"Since late June."
"Late June. You've been opening portals to mirror dimensions for six weeks and you didn't TELL--"
"That's a statement, not a question. Three?"
Dustin looked at the gray ceiling. At the gray floor. At the water bottle lying on its side in a puddle that looked like mercury.
"Can we explore?"
Lucas was already moving. He stepped off the counter and walked to the back door, opened it, and looked out at the gray world. The property stretched to a fog boundary about a quarter mile in every direction.
"There's some kind of fog wall," Lucas said. "Three or four hundred meters. You can't see anything past that point."
"The copy only extends so far from where I open it," Ryan said. "The range gets bigger the more I explore."
Lucas walked outside. He tested the porch railing. He picked up a handful of gray dirt and let it fall through his fingers. He walked the fence line, checked the gate latch, and looked south along the road.
When he came back in, he already had an assessment ready. "There's really no life out there, at least nothing that I could see within the fog boundary. Can anything come in from outside it?"
"Nothing comes from outside it in this layer," Ryan said.
"In this layer" Lucas repeated.
Dustin was in the yard, picking up rocks and throwing them. Gravity worked. Mass was conserved. He dropped a stone from shoulder height and counted the fall time under his breath. "Less than a second. That's correct for one meter. Gravity probably matches Earth standard." He was grinning, the fear already being devoured by curiosity. "This is the coolest thing that has ever happened to anyone."
Mike was inside. Ryan found him in the workshop, standing in front of the tools on the workbench. He picked up the hammer, tested its weight.
"Everything in here is a copy," Mike said. "Right? Not real. Just a duplicate."
"Right. You can't take anything out of the copy. What comes in with you goes back out. Everything else stays here and disappears when I close the door."
"So the copies are useless."
"As objects, yes. But the experience is real. What you learn in here, you keep. Any practice, fighting or training will transfer."
Mike put the hammer down. He looked at Ryan with an expression that had nothing suspicious in it. What Ryan saw was something he hadn't expected, almost a relief. Like Mike had been waiting for an explanation that made the last few months make sense, and now he had one. The workouts. The property. Ryan's impossible competence.
"You've been training us for this," Mike said.
"I've been training us for whatever's coming."
"And you couldn't do it alone."
"Nobody can do it alone. That's the whole point of a party."
Well, Ryan could probably do it alone… but he wasn't willing to take any chance that his friends might die because of it.
Mike almost smiled. It got halfway there before it turned into something more serious. "I would have come if you'd told me before."
"I know. I wasn't ready then."
They regrouped in the kitchen.
Will was sitting at the copied table, hands flat on the surface, fingers spread.
"The table's the same," Will said. "Every scratch. The nick from where Dustin dropped the screwdriver last week." He traced a small gouge in the tabletop. "Exact copy."
"Down to individual scratches," Ryan confirmed.
"Are you ready to see the other layer?" Ryan asked.
Four answers, none of them identical. Dustin said "Born ready." Lucas said "Let's go." Mike said "Yes." Will stood up from the table and picked up the bat from the rack by the door without a word.
Ryan activated the Party System. They wouldn't see anything.
[Party formed: "The Hawkins Party"]
Members: Ryan Reed (Leader), Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson,
Lucas Sinclair, Will Byers
XP share: 30% (base).
HP bars appeared at the edge of his vision. Four new readouts, small and steady.
Mike: 90. Dustin: 80. Lucas: 95. Will: 78.
Will's number. Better than the 70 he'd read back in May. Still the lowest in the group. Ryan had spent the whole summer trying to push that number higher, and eight points was what he'd gotten.
He dismissed the Empty ID, let the real world slam back into focus, the color, the heat, the distant hawk calling, and immediately activated ID Create again. Vine Crawlers.
The kitchen went dark.
Not gray this time. Brown-black walls, sick green light filtering through the windows, and the floor already splitting as dark tendrils pushed through the seams between boards. The air tasted like wet soil and something chemical.
"Oh my God," Dustin whispered.
"Bats up," Ryan said. "Stay behind me. Hit anything that moves."
He walked through the kitchen doorway into the living room. The guys followed, bats raised, footsteps careful on the vine-cracked floor.
A ceiling cluster dropped.
Ryan sidestepped and swung the Louisville Slugger in a flat arc that connected with the vine mass at the point where the tendrils were thickest. The impact blew the cluster apart. Dark liquid sprayed across the wall. Two floor vines lunged for his ankles and he stamped on one, kicked the other hard enough to rip it from its root base.
He can't use magic or any visible powers beyond the portal itself. So, it was just Ryan swinging a bat harder than any fifteen-year-old should be able to, moving faster than they could track, killing things that shouldn't exist.
Behind him, Lucas reacted first. A tendril reached from behind the door frame and Lucas was already swinging, the bat connecting with a crack that echoed through the dead house. The vine snapped in half. Lucas stared at the twitching stump for one second, then swung again and killed it.
"I just hit that," Lucas said. He sounded surprised by his own calm. "That thing moved and I hit it."
"Keep going," Ryan said. "There are more."
Dustin had his bat in one hand and the Zippo in the other. This kid got some brain… even Ryan took his time to use fire against the monster.
He flicked the lighter, held the flame to a vine cluster creeping along the baseboard, and the whole mass erupted in orange fire.
"CROWD CONTROL!" Dustin yelled, backing up as the flames spread along the vine network. "Oh man. Oh man, that works."
Mike planted himself in the kitchen doorway and watched everyone. He held the bat in a guard position. When Lucas pushed into the dining room and two ceiling vines started their drop, Mike called it before they fell.
"Lucas, left! Two on the ceiling! Will, watch the window!"
Lucas pivoted and caught the first vine mid-drop. The second hit the floor and Ryan crushed it under his boot.
The window. A vine punched through the kitchen glass, shards scattering, tendrils reaching for Mike's back. Will was there. He swung the bat in a flat horizontal arc that caught the vine six inches from Mike's shoulder. The hit was clean and the vine tore loose from the window frame and fell to the floor.
Mike spun. Looked at the vine and saw Will standing over it.
"Good catch," Mike said.
"We must be careful, the vines are everywhere" Will said. His hands were tight on the bat handle, knuckles white, but his feet were set and his eyes were already scanning for the next threat.
They cleared the ground floor in twenty minutes. Ryan handled eighty percent of the combat, swinging the bat with a force of raw strength. He moved through the rooms ahead of them, drawing vine aggression, pulling clusters away from the group, absorbing hits that would have sent any of them to the floor.
Their coordination wasn't practiced, but somehow, they still moved with this weird group instinct
Three months of Saturday training, obstacle courses, sparring, running through the woods, D&D sessions where they'd learned to think as a unit. Lucas covered the front. Dustin handled crowd control with fire. Mike directed. Will watched the gaps.
Ryan called the escape. The ID dissolved and color crashed back. Warm air, birdsong, the smell of cut grass.
The guys stood in the real kitchen, breathing hard. Their bats dripped with dark residue that was already evaporating in the sunlight through the window. Dustin's hands still shook around the Zippo.
Ryan checked the party notifications.
[Party XP distributed]
Mike Wheeler: LV 1 → LV 2
(Auto-allocation: INT +2, CHA +2, WIS +1)
Dustin Henderson: LV 1 → LV 2
(INT +3, WIS +2)
Lucas Sinclair: LV 1 → LV 2
(STR +2, VIT +2, DEX +1)
Will Byers: LV 1 → LV 2
(WIS +2, INT +2, DEX +1)
The system had pushed each of them in the direction they were already meant to grow.
Mike got intelligence and charisma. Dustin got brainpower. Lucas got the physical stats of a fighter. Will got wisdom and perception. And they all got their HP and MP bars refilled by the level up.
They didn't see any of this of course, they just felt different.
"I feel weird," Dustin said. He flexed his hands, rolled his shoulders. "Good weird. Like I just had the best nap of my life."
"That's the portal effect," Ryan said.
"My arms don't hurt," Will said. He'd been swinging hard enough to bruise, but his forearms showed no strain. "They should hurt."
"Adrenaline probably" Mike said. He was looking at his own hands, opening and closing his fists, testing them.
Lucas held his bat across his thighs, watching the last dark stain evaporate from the wood. His face was calm.
"When do we go again?" Lucas asked.
"Tomorrow," Ryan said. "If you want."
"We want," Lucas said.
Dustin was already talking, words spilling out about vine biology and fire propagation rates and whether the creatures had a circulatory system. Mike asked about the fog boundary and whether the combat layer extended farther than the empty one.
* * *
That evening, alone at the Miller property, Ryan sat in the cellar workshop and opened his notification backlog.
The afternoon's combat had generated a standard batch of XP and loot. The loot had materialized after each kill, visible only to him, pulled into Inventory with a thought while the guys were focused on the fight. Vine Fiber bundles, Shadow Sap vials, crumpled bills. They hadn't seen any of it. The system's drops existed in a layer of reality that only he could access.
Underneath the session notifications, three older alerts were waiting. The system had been tracking kill milestones in the background, and the achievement totals had crossed their thresholds during the past week of solo Den runs.
[Achievement Unlocked: "Vine Slayer" - Kill 300 Shadow Vines]
Reward: +1 Skill Point
Title available: "Vine Slayer" (+5% damage vs. Plant-type)
[Achievement Unlocked: "Demodog Hunter" - Kill 100 Demodogs]
Reward: +2 Skill Points, +1 STR (permanent)
Title available: "Demodog Hunter" (+10% damage vs. Beast-type)
[Achievement Unlocked: "Dungeon Delver I" - Clear 200 dungeon instances]
Reward: +1 Skill Point, +100 XP bonus
Three achievements. The permanent STR bonus from Demodog Hunter applied immediately.
[STR: 23 → 24]
Four skill points total. He invested two into Physical Resistance (LV 5 to LV 7, damage reduction at 3.5%) and two into Mana Sense (LV 1 to LV 3, detection range expanding to 15 meters with the ability to distinguish between mana types).
The level-up came three days later, during a solo Demodog Den run.
[Level Up! Level 12 → Level 13]
[You have gained 5 stat points!]
[You have gained 1 skill point!]
[HP and MP have been fully restored.]
Three into INT. INT: 50 to 53. Two into LUK. LUK: 7 to 9.
The physical stats kept climbing from training. DEX crossed 24 on a Tuesday. STR hit 25 four days later.
The threshold triggered mid-swing. He was in the Demodog Den, clearing a pair of LV 15s near the creek bed. The bat connected with a Demodog's skull and the creature didn't stagger. It flew. Five feet sideways, airborne, hitting a copied tree trunk hard enough to crack bone.
[STR has reached 25!]
[Threshold Bonus Unlocked: Iron Body]
[+10% melee damage. Enhanced physical durability.]
DEX crossed 25 two days after STR, during the second group session. A ceiling vine dropped and Ryan's body moved in a way that surprised him. Not a step or a lean. A shift, a smooth lateral redirection that covered two feet in less time than he could consciously process.
[DEX has reached 25!]
[Threshold Bonus Unlocked: Iron Reflex]
[+10% dodge chance. Reaction time tripled versus normal human.]
All three physical stats at Iron tier. STR 25, VIT 25, DEX 25. In the Demodog Den, fights that had taken fifteen seconds now ended in eight.
Level 14 arrived on a Saturday morning.
[Level Up! Level 13 → Level 14]
[You have gained 5 stat points!]
[You have gained 1 skill point!]
Three into INT. INT: 53 to 56. Two into LUK. LUK: 9 to 11.
LUK 11 changed completely his loot economy. His next Den run produced a stat crystal, a skill book, and cash averaging forty dollars per Demodog. The rare drop rate felt like a different game.
The golem became a permanent presence at the property cellar. Golem Creation had climbed to LV 3 from daily sustained use. Duration: eight hours. Sustain cost: six MP per minute. With Meditation active during golem operation, he was MP-positive. The golem could run indefinitely.
The construct worked the cellar expansion. A stone golem was sturdier than a dirt one. Fieldstone constructs measured STR 11 and VIT 14. Not a fighter. But at LV 5, the system would let him assign simple combat skills.
The guys came back four more times in the two weeks after the reveal.
Each session ran longer. Will developed a method for reading vine ambush positions by the discoloration on walls and ceilings. Dustin refined the fire technique into a system of choke points and kill zones. Mike sharpened his callouts, directing with confidence that grew every session. Lucas got quieter with each run, and his kills got cleaner. One swing each, placed at the vine's weakest point.
After the third session, Will asked Ryan to stay behind when the others left. They sat on the back porch, the real one, warm wood under their legs and the evening light going orange across the field.
Will didn't talk right away. He was picking at a splinter on the railing, working it loose with his thumbnail.
"How many layers are there?" Will asked.
"What do you mean?"
"You said the empty one is one layer. The vine one is another. Are there more?"
Ryan considered how much to share. "Yes. The layers get harder. Stronger creatures, and much more of them."
"Have you been in the harder ones?"
"Yeah."
"Alone?"
"Yeah."
Will got the splinter loose and flicked it into the yard. "What's in them?"
"Animals. Predators. Faster than the vines, smarter. They hunt in packs." Ryan kept it vague. Describing Demodogs to Will Byers felt wrong in ways he couldn't explain out loud.
"Do they look like anything real? Like, are they based on actual animals, or are they completely new?"
"Completely new. Nothing you'd recognize from a biology textbook."
Will was quiet for a moment but then he stood up, brushed off his jeans, and grabbed his bike from where it leaned against the porch rail. "See you Saturday," he said, and pedaled down the dirt road toward home.
Ryan sat on the porch and listened to the bike tires fade on gravel. By the fourth group session, they were all LV 3. Their HP had climbed. Their reflexes had sharpened. They moved faster, took fewer hits. They thought it was practice.
* * *
The skills leveled fast from daily combat and constant use. Telekinesis went from LV 1 to LV 4, used out of sight for pulling objects and assisting with construction. Mana Bolt climbed to LV 7, cost dropping to 10 MP per cast. Fire Bolt reached LV 4 at 14 MP. Mana Shield hit LV 3. Earth Shaping pushed to LV 9. Mana Crafting reached LV 5, the durability bonus at fifty percent.
Cooking hit LV 5. Dishwashing reached LV 6. Power Strike sat at LV 9. Blunt Weapon Mastery at LV 4.
His cash reserves passed five thousand dollars. ID Create reached LV 13. MP cost: 24. Cooldown: twenty-two minutes.
Friday evening. August 17th.
The property was quiet. The golem was in the cellar, stone feet scraping in a rhythm Ryan could hear through the floorboards.
He sat at the kitchen table with eggs and toast, reading some random book when he pulled up the status window.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 14
HP: 510/510
MP: 920/920
STR: 25 (Iron Body)
VIT: 26
DEX: 25 (Iron Reflex)
INT: 56 (Sharp Mind + Brilliant Intellect)
WIS: 34 (Inner Calm)
CHA: 8
LUK: 11
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 3
Skills: 42
Party: Mike Wheeler (LV 3), Dustin Henderson (LV 3),
Lucas Sinclair (LV 3), Will Byers (LV 3)
The party was definitely a game changer. Even if they weren't going to get skills or superpowers, they were already becoming far stronger than any baseline human.
The date was getting closer, and Ryan needed to figure out the exact timeline of the first episode's events.
[A.N: And that's the end of Chapter 9! Another long one at 6,500 words. Hope you enjoyed it.
On romance front. I'll be honest, I haven't decided yet. Not who, not how many, not even what form it takes. The characters currently on my radar are Chrissy, Nancy, Max, and Eleven. I'm genuinely debating whether to go with a single clean romance, develop connections with all of them, or something in between. This is still very much an open question and I'm figuring it out as the characters grow. If you have strong opinions, let me know in the comments 😄
On the Party System! As I mentioned at the start of the chapter, I know this is a controversial topic in Gamer fics. I hope the way I handled it felt clean enough and made sense within the story. I put a lot of thought into how Ryan would approach this, and I'd love to hear what you guys think about how it played out.
Quick note, I wasn't 100% sure about the exact opening date of the Palace Arcade in the Stranger Things timeline, so I took some creative liberty with the timing. Flow with it 😄
Massive shoutout to all 49 Power Stone contributors! You guys are amazing:
Psycho_Paradox, Yunos_Noor, XenonBlaster65, Aaronzaid, Getryx, heavenlydemon_, Dear_Lord, Dillmet_Singh_4812, Gavin_Esteb, Arthur25, Xander_Hartig, Daoist3tTlco, Gustavo_Dias_4181, Chikary, UchihaGod, Lalo, AkGreyback, Alternatif_OfMe, Charly_26r, TomTheReader, GzeroX, Wither_Kingzz, siddhu, Bean_Man_7767, k_l_4014, Raymond33, this_your_bush, daviangarcia85, guardian252, KBG_Obsidian, Xplizit, origin_of_power, ENELSON_RODRI, jjtcaster, DaoistJTE1Za, corey_miller_0016, Kauak, Kadiox, vis_g_s_4628, MMBarqawi, Makuraty, Maicros, Demonilusion, Kranox, Greenmatsui, Gorinjou, Diosazura599, and StormKing1.
Every single stone counts and I see every one of you. Thank you!
Please don't forget to keep commenting, reviewing and, if you can, send some Power Stones to help bump the fic up the rankings, it really makes a difference! As always, if you catch any inconsistencies, plot holes, or typos, please tell me so I can patch them before they grow into a huge mess.]