Saturday, August 18, 1983 , Hawkins, Indiana
___________________________________________________________________________
Pete set the envelope on the kitchen table without ceremony, square to the edge, lined up with the napkin holder. County seal on the front. Ryan's name, Pete's name, technically, visible through the address window.
Ryan picked it up and slid his thumb under the flap. Inside was a single sheet of paper and a recorded deed for the Miller Property, filed with the Roane County Assessor's Office under Peter J. Reed. Legal and Stamped
He read it twice. The property description, the lot boundaries, the tax parcel number. All correct. The date of recording was August 14th, four days ago. The deed had been sitting in a mailbox while Ryan was killing Demodogs in a pocket dimension.
Pete was leaning against the counter with his coffee mug, watching Ryan read. His expression hadn't changed. It rarely did.
"You're moving out there," Pete said.
Pete had been watching Ryan sleep at the property three or four nights a week for the past month, coming back to do laundry and keep up appearances. It was obvious to anyone paying attention.
"Most of the time," Ryan said. "I'll still come by."
Pete nodded. Took a sip of coffee and then set the mug down.
"The house has running water?"
"Well pump works. I fixed the plumbing."
"Heat?"
"Space heaters. I bought two. And the fireplace works." The fireplace he'd built with Earth Shaping from fieldstone and chimney clay, but Pete didn't need to know that part.
"You're fifteen."
"Sixteen in three weeks."
Pete looked at the table. At Ryan's hands holding the deed. At the table again. He drank his coffee in the slow, like every sip required consideration.
"Your father left this house when he was seventeen," Pete said. "Moved to Hawkins with nothing. Built everything himself." He set the mug down. The ceramic clicked against the Formica. "I didn't think you'd leave this fast."
Ryan's throat tightened. Gamer's Mind smoothed the edges of the feeling but couldn't kill it. Pete had said more about emotion in the last ten seconds than he'd said in the three months since the awakening. In Pete-language, this was a 10 pages long speech.
"I'm not leaving, Uncle Pete. I'm a mile and a half down the road."
"I know where it is." Pete picked up the Hawkins Herald from the counter and opened it to the sports section. Conversation over.
Ryan stood up and tucked the deed into his back pocket. He was almost at the kitchen door when Pete spoke again, without looking up from the paper.
"Come for dinner Sundays. I'll make spaghetti."
"Your spaghetti is terrible."
"I know. Come anyway."
Ryan walked to the front door, got on his bike, and rode south on Route 7 with the deed against his hip and his throat still tight.
He hadn't expected the return to independence to hurt this much. Even with Gamer Mind sanding down the sharpest edges, the feelings kept leaking through.
But now he have his own house. Not Pete's spare bedroom or the Miller Property. His. And that just felt right.
But now he had his own house. Not Pete's spare bedroom. Not the Miller Hijacked property. His own. And that just felt right.
Also, what can he do?
He needed a private, legally separate space to push forward more radical changes…..
After all, how was he supposed to explain to Pete why there was a fucking sensory‑deprivation water tank being built in his backyard?
* * *
The next two weeks transformed the place from a renovation project into a home.
He had over $7,500 in Inventory and the Demodog Den was printing thousands more every week. The financial constraint that governed every other teenager's life simply didn't apply to him. He could walk into any store in Hawkins or Roane County, buy whatever he needed, and walk out without caring about the change.
It was a strange kind of freedom. He'd been a software engineer making a lot of money in his previous life, but felt richer now, at fifteen.
He could have done some of the work earlier, and in small ways he already had, but he hadn't wanted to change anything that truly mattered before the deed was in his hands.
He started with making sure the house wouldn't fall down if something hit it.
Two full days of walking the structure floor by floor, pressing his palms against every stud, joist, and support beam, feeding MP into the wood until it hardened past anything the lumber mill had ever produced. The old pine frame of the Miller Property quietly became stronger than steel. He did the foundation next, Earth Shaping the gaps between fieldstones into a continuous surface, then Mana Crafting the whole perimeter until it hummed faintly to his senses. Anything short of a direct artillery strike was going to bounce off this house.
A Demodog could ram the front wall at full speed and the Demodog would lose.
The roof was the one job he couldn't fake his way through with magic. And even if most people in Hawkins minded their own business, there was no reason to invite attention by giving them something to notice.
He hired Dale Kowalski from the hardware store, who moonlighted as a roofer, to tear off the old shingles and lay new ones. Four hundred dollars cash, a day and a half of work with Dale's nephew hauling bundles up the ladder.
The electrician cost $350 and two days. A guy named Phil from Roane who smelled like pipe tobacco and talked about the Colts nonstop while he rewired the second floor and installed a proper breaker panel. Ryan listened to Phil's opinions about the defensive line, nodded in the right places, and came away with code-compliant circuits, exterior floodlights on the front porch and back wall, and enough amperage to run everything he needed. He told Phil the floodlights were for raccoons. Phil said raccoons were getting bolder every year and didn't question it.
[A.N: Automatic motion‑sensor lights became commercially available in 1982.]
The plumbing was already functional from Ryan's earlier work, but he had Pete's plumber come out to install a proper shower upstairs. Hot water, good pressure. After three months of the garden hose and a bar of soap, the first real shower in his own house was better than leveling up, well… almost.
He stood under the water for nine minutes and thought about absolutely nothing, which was the longest he'd gone without thinking about November since May.
Then he furnished the place, and this was where it got fun.
The kitchen came first because the kitchen was the heart of the house and Ryan was, at this point, genuinely proud of his Cooking LV 6 and wanted equipment that matched it. A new gas range from the appliance store, cream-colored, four burners and an oven that actually held temperature. Cast iron skillet, stainless steel pots, a proper set of kitchen knives and a maple cutting board he Mana Crafted until it would outlast the house itself. Cabinets stocked deep enough to feed five teenagers three times a week without running out.
He got canned goods, dry pasta, rice, coffee, spices, everything needed.
The table stayed. It was the pine table he'd built by hand in July, slightly uneven, with a faint ring where Lucas had set a hot pan down without thinking. Ryan could have fixed both problems in ten seconds. He didn't want to. That table was the first piece of furniture he'd made in this life, and the ring and the wobble were part of it. He bought four solid oak chairs from the furniture store on Main to go around it, because the mismatched folding chairs had to go at some point.
The living room got a real couch, dark green, firm cushions, wide enough for three people or for Ryan to stretch out with a book. A coffee table he built from pine and Mana Crafted until the grain darkened to something that could pass for walnut. Two armchairs. And the bookshelves.
The bookshelves were the thing Ryan was quietly, privately, most proud of.
He'd built four of them from lumber, floor to ceiling along the east wall, and Mana Crafted them smooth. They were full. Close to a hundred books. Tolkien and Asimov and Clarke and Le Guin and Herbert and Bradbury.
He was still a nerd in a universe full of monsters and he wasn't apologizing for it.
Stephen King, which Will kept borrowing and returning. A used Britannica set, 1978 edition, twelve dollars at a yard sale and four trips to carry home. Physics textbooks, organic chemistry, college calculus, three volumes on electrical engineering, a geology survey, and anatomy. Military history. Wilderness survival. Metalworking. A book on edible plants of the Midwest that he'd actually used. The line between practical reference and personal pleasure had blurred to the point where Ryan wasn't sure which shelf was which, and he liked it that way.
Upstairs, the master bedroom was his. Full-size mattress on a frame he'd welded from angle iron, sanded and painted black. Proper sheets, two pillows, a desk against the south-facing window with a reading lamp and a cup full of pens. His personal bookshelf held whatever he was currently reading and the notebooks he rotated through. The window looked out over the tree line toward Hawkins Lab. He left the curtain open at night. Mana Sense tracked the ambient dimensional readings while he slept, a passive monitor that cost him nothing.
Three guest bedrooms, furnished for the guys.
The fourth bedroom was empty. Clean. Bed, dresser, small bookshelf. Nobody's yet. Ryan kept it ready without explaining why. In November, if things went the way he was planning, someone was going to need a safe place to sleep.
Outside, the property was becoming unrecognizable from what it had been in May.
Ryan had spent two evenings with Earth Shaping just on the yard. Leveling the grade, fixing the drainage, pulling rocks and roots out of the soil from underneath so the grass grew in even and clean.
The front lawn looked clean and lively now. The privet hedge was trimmed to a straight line. He'd planted young pines along the north property line, saplings from the garden center dropped into holes he Earth Shaped three feet deep. Give them two years and they'd be a solid privacy screen. A vegetable garden went in on the east side. With tomatoes, peppers, green beans, herbs. Cooking LV 6 had made him particular about ingredients, and by next summer the garden would supply most of what he needed.
The backyard was where the serious work lived. The old perimeter wall was rebuilt and reinforced, raised to eight feet, every stone Mana Crafted until the surface could stop a car. From outside it looked like a well-maintained fieldstone wall. From a structural engineering perspective it was a fortress wall wearing a costume. He'd cleared the scrub and dead trees from the back acre, leveled ground for outdoor training, and built a fire pit from stacked stone that already had scorch marks and a ring of flattened grass from three weeks of post-session arguing.
The porch was rebuilt with new boards and railing, Mana Crafted solid, with a bench along the back wall wide enough for three. This was where Ryan sat in the evenings with coffee, watching the stars come out over the tree line, listening to the generator hum in the new shed he'd built to house it. It was the closest thing to peace he had. A few minutes each night when the system wasn't pinging, nobody was in danger, and the only sound was crickets and the distant bark of someone's dog on Route 7.
Anyone driving past would see a clean property with a mowed lawn and a painted door and assume someone responsible lived there.
They wouldn't see the cellar. Ryan was putting a show on the front and conspiracy under.
The original cellar was the workshop level. Workbench, tools, bats on a rack by the stairs. The guys knew about this. They'd helped organize it, which meant Dustin had labeled every drawer and Lucas had rearranged the labels in an order that actually made sense.
What nobody knew about was underneath.
The concealed entrance was a stone slab in the cellar floor, shaped and Mana Crafted until the seam was invisible unless you knew exactly where to press. The slab swung up on a hinge of compressed clay stronger than steel.
Sub-Level 1 spread below the house's footprint and beyond it. Twenty-five hundred square feet, twelve-foot ceiling. The training arena filled most of the space: flat stone floor, smooth walls, room for full-speed combat without hitting anything. The armory lined the north wall, weapon racks and material storage and the forge where Ryan worked Demodog materials into equipment. The expanded workshop took the east side, proper workbench, tool storage, shelving for crafting supplies.
Sub-Level 2 was the contingency plan. Emergency bunker. Eight sleeping spots. Stockpiled food, some in Inventory for preservation, the rest sealed on shelves. Water, medical supplies, a communications hub Dustin would eventually build without knowing why Ryan had run the wiring for it. If November went sideways, eight people could live down here for a month. Even in the upside-down… which was the all point.
The escape tunnel ran a hundred feet southeast to an exit behind the tree line. Earth Shaped through clay and shale, reinforced with packed stone, wide enough for two persons at a time. Ryan had carved it over three nights while the golem hauled rubble and he told himself he was being paranoid and knew he wasn't.
Every surface in the hidden levels was Mana Crafted.
The Miller Property was a house on a county road in rural Indiana. It was also, quietly, the most fortified structure within fifty miles that wasn't run by the Department of Energy.
This was supposed to be his home base, the place where everything was under his control.
If he could also figure out how to block gates from opening inside it, it would become the safest zone in the world. The Demogorgons' ability to open gates wherever they wanted made almost any purely physical defense obsolete.
[A.N.: Okay… yes, I probably overdid it with the house. I spent a lot of words on it, but it was honestly fun to write. I also wanted him to start putting some of his plans into motion, and to have at least some kind of life outside the monsters and the constant danger.]
* * *
Saturday, September 3, 1983
Ryan turned sixteen on a Tuesday, but Pete drove him to the DMV in Roane the following Saturday because Pete didn't take weekdays off for anything short of a funeral.
The DMV was a flat brick building with fluorescent lights and a line that went out the door despite being open for only four hours. Pete parked the truck, killed the engine, and sat there for a moment.
"You studied?"
"I don't need to study."
"Everyone says that. Half of them fail."
Ryan didn't fail. The written test took nine minutes. Fifty questions, multiple choice, covering right-of-way rules and speed limits and what to do at a four-way stop. Previous life plus INT 56 meant the answers were obvious before he finished reading the questions. The woman administering the test looked at his score sheet, looked at him, and said, "Full marks. That doesn't happen much."
The driving test took twelve minutes. The examiner was a man named Gerald with a clipboard and a permanent squint who sat in the passenger seat of Pete's truck and directed Ryan through a neighborhood course. Left turns, right turns, parallel parking between two orange cones. At DEX 25 and his skills, the parallel parking was the easiest part. His spatial awareness was so precise that the truck slid into the space like it belonged there. Gerald made a note on his clipboard without commenting.
"You can pick up your license at the window," Gerald said when they got back. "You drive like you've been doing it for years."
"My uncle taught me young," Ryan said. It wasn't exactly a lie. Pete had let him steer the truck down the driveway when he was thirteen.
The rest was… well his memories and the absolutely most amazing thing in the world. His Gamer system.
The license had his photo, his name, and the address Pete had listed as the residence. Indiana. Class C. Ryan Reed. Born September 6, 1967. The photo showed a kid who looked older than sixteen. Broader, sharper-featured, with the kind of lean jaw that came from VIT 30 and three months of combat training. He barely recognized himself.
Pete signed the registration for the truck. A 1975 Ford F-150, rust on the wheel wells, AM radio, bench seat wide enough for three people. Ryan had bought it for $650 from a farmer in Kerley who was selling it because his wife wanted him to get something with power steering. The truck ran fine. It hauled supplies without complaint and had enough bed space for lumber and equipment.
The drive home was the first time Ryan was alone behind the wheel of his own vehicle.
He took the long way. West on Route 46, south past the old Brimborn Steel Works, then east on the county road that ran parallel to the state forest. The windows were down. The radio played "Every Breath You Take" by the Police, which had been inescapable all summer. The corn was tall on both sides of the road, eight feet high and rustling in a wind that smelled like heat and dirt and the faintest chemical tang from the fertilizer plant over in Kerley.
For thirty seconds, Ryan was just a kid driving a truck on a late summer afternoon.
Then his Minimap flickered. A cluster of dimensional energy readings pulsed from the southeast, from the direction of Hawkins Lab, and the readings were stronger than they'd been last week. The membrane was thinning faster.
He turned east toward home.
* * *
Thursday, August 22, 1983
Nancy drove out to the property on a Thursday afternoon. Ryan had suggested it at their last library session. "I've got a better setup for studying. More space, and nobody shushes you for talking above a whisper."
"You have a study space," she'd said, skeptical.
"I have a kitchen table and no librarian."
She'd agreed without much pushing. Of course she had. They'd been meeting twice a week for over a month and she still knew almost nothing about him beyond the fact that he could explain chemistry better than a college textbook. Nancy Wheeler didn't like not knowing things.
She pulled up in Mrs. Wheeler's station wagon at 3:15, parked on the gravel strip by the fence, and didn't get out right away.
Just sat there looking at the house through the windshield. Ryan watched from the kitchen window. She was taking her time, which made sense. She'd expected something, and whatever she was looking at wasn't it. The mowed lawn, the painted door, the truck in the driveway. Not the abandoned wreck that everyone in Hawkins still pictured when you said "the Miller place."
She got out, gathered her books against her chest, and walked up the porch steps. Blue polo shirt tucked into high-waisted jeans, and her hair pulled back with a clip. Ryan opened the door before she knocked.
"This is it?"
"This is it. Try not to look so surprised."
She stepped inside and stopped. Looked at the kitchen. The stove, the cabinets, the full spice rack, the oak chairs around the table. Dustin's radio on the counter. Her eyes went to the living room through the doorway. Couch, coffee table, the four bookshelves covering the east wall. Upstairs, through an open door, the edge of a bed, a desk, a lamp.
She turned back to him. "You live here."
"Since last week. Officially."
"You're sixteen."
"The deed is in my uncle's name. Legally, I'm house-sitting an asset my uncle owns. Which is technically true."
Nancy set her books on the kitchen table and walked straight into the living room without asking. Ryan didn't try to stop her. Trying to steer Nancy away from something only made her go harder at it.
She stopped at the bookshelves. Her head tilted to read the spines. Tolkien, Asimov, Clarke, Le Guin. Then the physics textbooks, the chemistry references, the engineering volumes, the Britannica set.
"You have more books than the school library," she said.
"The school library doesn't have Le Guin."
"The school library doesn't have a college-level calculus textbook either." She pulled it halfway out, checked the cover, slid it back. "Or Gray's Anatomy. Who are you studying anatomy for?"
"General knowledge."
"That's what people say when the real answer is complicated." She turned and leaned against the bookshelf, arms crossed. Her posture was casual. Her face wasn't. "Ryan. This house was abandoned for four years. You fixed it. You furnished it, and not with junk. Real expensive furniture. You even bought a truck. You have a library that would embarrass most adults." She paused. "I'm not trying to interrogate you. But I don't understand how this works for an underage teen."
Ryan pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. Gestured for her to sit. She did, after considering it.
"My parents are dead," he said. "You know that?"
"Mike mentioned it. A long time ago." Her voice lost the edge. "I'm sorry."
"Mom died when I was born. Dad was killed by a drunk driver when I was four. Uncle Pete raised me." He kept it flat, with no extra performance or unsolved drama. Just the facts. "My dad had life insurance. Not a fortune, but Pete put it in savings when I was a kid and never touched it. When I turned fifteen, he gave me access. Said my dad would've wanted me to have it."
He definitely needed to speak with Pete, to get their stories aligned and come up with a cover that would hold together.
"That's part of it," he said. "The rest is work. Repairs, construction, selling things I build. The table you're sitting at, I made that."
Nancy looked down at the table. Ran her palm across the surface.
"You made this."
"From scrap pine. It's not perfect. Wobbles if you lean on the left side."
She leaned on the left side. It wobbled. She almost smiled.
"And the bookshelves?"
"Built those too."
"They lean."
"I'm calling it character."
The almost-smile turned real for half a second. Nancy controlled it fast, but Ryan caught it.
"So your dad's insurance, plus handyman work, plus selling furniture." She looked around the kitchen. "That covers all of this?"
"Things are cheap in Hawkins. The property was under few thousands in back taxes. The county wanted it gone. Most of the furniture I built myself, the truck was six-fifty from a farmer who wanted power steering." He shrugged. "It adds up when you don't pay rent and your expenses are food and lumber."
She was trying to figure out if the numbers were adding up and the math was close enough to plausible.
The real answer of curse, about gaining thirteen thousand dollars from a pocket dimension full of monsters, was not on the table.
"Pete is okay with this?" she asked. "You being out here alone?"
"Pete raised me by leaving me alone. This is just more of that, with a longer driveway." He paused. "We have dinner on Sundays. I make spaghetti. His spaghetti is terrible, so it's better for everyone."
"You cook."
"I cook well. Don't sound so shocked."
"I'm not shocked. I'm just readjusting." She pulled her physics textbook from her bag and set it on the table, the shift from personal to academic as clean as turning a page. "Most boys our age can make cereal."
"Most boys our age don't have to figure out dinner for themselves."
That was a hit below the belt, far more brutal than he'd intended, and he felt it the moment the words left his mouth.
Nancy's expression changed.
She hadn't meant to hurt him, and she hadn't expected the counterattack. She caught a glimpse of a childhood shaped without much gentleness. But she didn't apologize again. Instead, she retreated into professionalism and opened the textbook.
"Electromagnetic waves. The book skips three steps between 'here's a differential equation' and 'therefore light exists.' There's a hole in the middle where the physics should be and the author just writes 'it can be shown that.'"
Classic Nancy. She cared, but she didn't know how to handle it. So… back to studying.
"'It can be shown that' is academic for 'I don't feel like explaining this.'"
"I knew it." She uncapped her pen. "Explain it…All the steps please"
They worked for two hours. Ryan built Maxwell's equations from the ground up, starting with what a changing electric field does to a magnetic field and letting the math come out of the physics instead of landing on top of it. Nancy filled pages, her handwriting getting smaller as she warmed up, her questions jumping past the material into territory the textbook wouldn't touch for another fifty pages.
She was better at physics than she'd been at chemistry. She grabbed spatial relationships and cause-and-effect chains fast, with a physical intuition that couldn't be taught. She didn't memorize formulas. She understood what they described and rebuilt them from the understanding when she needed them.
Ryan had worked with engineers in his previous life who couldn't do that. But he also had to admit that she wasn't a natural or instinctive talent like Dustin. What she lacked in raw affinity, she made up for with effort, and by actually studying with him and not making up with Steve, wait…. Did that mean he'd just accidentally sidelined Steve "the Babysitter" Harrington?
Oh well, Nancy is a beauty, what can he do?
Ryan actually liked the guy. Honestly, Steve Harrington had some of the best character development in the entire show. He had somehow pulled off one of the strongest redemption arcs. Went from "jerk with great hair" to genuinely decent human being. Hard not to respect that.
Somewhere in the second hour she got up to refill her water glass and paused at the window on the way back.
"You have a vegetable garden."
"Tomatoes, peppers, green beans."
"And a stone wall around the backyard."
"Privacy."
"And floodlights."
"Raccoons."
She looked at him for a beat. "You're the most unusual person I've ever met."
"In Hawkins, that's a low bar."
"It's not." She sat back down and picked up her pen. "It really isn't."
They finished the session. Nancy stacked her books, spines aligned, edges squared off. She zipped her bag and walked to the door.
"This place is impressive, Ryan." She stopped with her hand on the frame. Late afternoon light through the window caught her face, the sharp jaw, the strand of hair loose from the clip after two hours of leaning over equations. "Whatever else is going on with the money, and I know there's something else, just be careful."
"I'm always careful."
"No you're not. Careful people don't live alone in their teen years." She held his look. "But I trust you. So, I'll stop asking. For now."
"For now," Ryan said.
"Thursday. Library. This doesn't replace the library." She walked down the porch steps, got in the station wagon, and pulled onto the road without looking back.
Ryan stood on the porch watching the wagon disappear behind the corn. The sun was going down, turning the fields gold, and the air smelled like warm.
In three months she'd be in Jonathan Byers' living room with a revolver, demanding answers about a thing she'd seen in the woods. She wouldn't stop asking questions then either. But by then, Ryan would have answers worth giving.
He went inside and washed both glasses. Ninety seconds, spotless.
* * *
The Demodog Den consumed his afternoons.
Ryan ran it daily now. Three to four hours per session, roaming the full copy-world in the truck copy which appeared inside the ID and the engine turned over every time. He'd tested the boundaries. Five miles south and the Demodogs kept coming. Seven miles east and they were denser, clustering in packs of three near the copied version of the forest where the real Hawkins Lab sat behind its fences.
The kill efficiency at Level 14 and above was something that would have seemed impossible in June. Fifteen to twenty Demodogs per extended session. The rotation was clean, practiced, and varied enough to keep the system generating skill XP:
Mana Bolt at range for the opener. The skill had climbed to LV 9, the cost dropping to 8 MP per cast, and the impact hit hard enough to stagger a charging Demodog at thirty meters. He could fire four in the time it took one to close the distance.
Fire Bolt for the ones that flinched. LV 4 climbing to 6 over the three weeks, cost down to 12 MP at LV 6, and the Upside Down biology burned like dry paper. A single Fire Bolt to the flank sent a Demodog into a panicked spiral that usually ended with it running into a tree or a wall or another Demodog.
Telekinesis for the cheap shots. LV 4 climbing fast toward 7 from constant use, in combat and out of it. He pulled objects toward him across rooms, threw stones at Demodog heads for almost zero MP cost, caught projectiles mid-air, and used TK to yank the bat from one hand to the other when his grip slipped. At LV 7, the max weight hit 520 kilograms. He could pick up a motorcycle with his mind. Fine motor control was getting precise enough to turn a doorknob from across the room.
Mana Shield for the alpha strikes. LV 3 climbing to 5, the shield HP scaling with INT. When a Demodog got past his ranged attacks and committed to a charge, the shield absorbed the first hit while Ryan wound up the bat for a Power Strike that usually ended the fight.
Earth Shaping barriers for crowd control. LV 9 to 11 over the three weeks, the skill leveling from both combat use and daily construction work. He could raise eleven-foot walls in half a second now, channeling packs of Demodogs into single-file kill zones where they tripped over each other trying to reach him.
The Shadow Sap bat and Power Strike LV 9 pushing to 10 for the finishers. Close range, hard contact, the bat cracking skull and hide with a sound Ryan had learned not to flinch at.
The Detect Life skill was the quiet game-changer. It had started at LV 1 with a ten-meter range. After three weeks of constant activation, it sat at LV 3 and integrated with the Minimap. Living beings showed as colored dots on his HUD. At LV 3 the range was twenty meters, with species identification and approximate HP levels. He could see Demodogs through walls and terrain, which turned ambushes into something that happened to them instead of to him.
In-combat MP regen kept the machine running. WIS 34 at 0.2 MP per minute meant 6.8 MP/min in combat, plus twenty percent from Inner Calm pushed it to about 8 MP/min. Over a three-hour session, that was nearly 1,500 MP regenerated while fighting. Combined with his growing MP pool, he had over 2,400 MP available per session. At 8 MP per Mana Bolt, that was 300 casts. More than enough.
And the loot, oh the sweet sweet loot, came in waves.
Demodog Fangs stacked up ten to fifteen per session. Corrupted Hides, fifteen to twenty. Shadow Essence, three to five vials of the dark pulsing liquid that Ryan was learning to use in Alchemy. Cash averaged $350 to $500 per session at LUK 11 and climbing, somewhere between $25 and $35 per kill.
Stat crystals dropped every three or four sessions. Two in the first week, one in the second, one more in the third. All four went into physical stats, pushing gains that stacked on top of the training-based improvements.
Skill books appeared every four or five sessions. The first one changed everything.
He cracked it open on a Tuesday evening after a long run, sitting on the back porch with a glass of water.
[Skill Book consumed! New skill acquired:]
[Heal (Active) - LV 1]
Restores HP to self or target by touch.
Healing: INT × 2 + WIS × 1
MP Cost: 20
Real healing. This is pretty crazy stuff.
This is not the slow recovery of Basic First Aid, or the overnight reset of Gamer's Body. Touch someone, spend 20 MP, and watch skin knit closed in seconds. At his current stats, each cast restored over 140 HP. One touch could bring someone from the edge of death to complete recovery.
He tested it on a scratch from a Demodog. His forearm, a red line where a claw had caught him through a gap in the Mana Shield. He pressed his palm over the wound and activated the skill. Warmth flooded through his hand. The skin sealed. The red line faded to pink, then to nothing.
Ryan sat on the porch and stared at his arm for a long time.
If bringing someone back to full HP restored them completely… did that mean he could heal diseases at the root? Would it purge cancerous cells, erase damage that medicine could only slow?
The thought was unsettling and definitely tempting.
Maybe he should visit a hospital. Just to observe. To test, carefully. And even if he couldn't truly cure anyone, even if there were limits, he didn't yet understand… he could still give people time.
The second skill book was Mana Regeneration, a passive that added 5% to his regen rate and stacked with every other bonus. The compound effect with Inner Calm and his WIS base meant his pool refilled measurably faster between encounters.
He also levels up in record time.
Level 14 to 15. Three points into INT, two into LUK. INT 56 to 59. LUK 11 to 13. The LUK investment paying forward into every future kill.
Level 15 to 16 got the same split. INT 59 to 62. LUK 13 to 15.
LUK 15 was the target he'd been building toward. The difference was too much to pass. Rare items appeared regularly. Stat crystals dropped more often. Cash per kill averaged $30 to $40. The loot tables had shifted from okay to generous, and every kill felt like opening a present.
At level 16 to 17, another three INT, and two WIS. INT 62 to 65. WIS 34 to 36. Back to the long-term strategy now that LUK was where he wanted it.
Physical stats climbed from the dual pressure of morning training and daily combat. Past 25 in all three, the gains came every five or six days:
STR 25, 26, 27, 28. VIT 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. DEX 25, 26, 27, 28.
The visible changes had plateaued. Ryan had hit what he thought of as his combat build around STR and DEX 25, with perfect proportions body. Further gains improved performance without changing the way he looked. He was grateful for that.
The guys had finally stopped commenting on his size because there was nothing new to comment on.
Two weeks of running total: approximately $6,000 after removing costs. His cash reserves passed $14,000. More money than most adults in Hawkins made in months.
An achievement notification stacked during the third week, triggered by a kill count milestone he'd lost track of.
[Achievement Unlocked: "Demodog Slayer", Kill 200 Demodogs]
Reward: +2 Skill Points, +1 VIT (permanent)
Title upgrade: "Demodog Slayer" (+15% damage vs. Beast-type)
VIT 29 pushed to 30 from the permanent bonus, his HP climbed with it, the pool expanding as VIT and levels stacked.
Ryan invested both skill points into Telekinesis, jumping it from LV 7 to LV 9. The weight ceiling blew past a ton. The fine control let him manipulate six objects simultaneously. In the next Demodog run, he used TK to hurl a fifty-pound stone at a charging pack leader and caved its skull from twenty meters away without spending almost any points of MP.
* * *
Monday, August 29, 1983
Party training ran three times a week now. Monday, Wednesday, Saturday. The Miller Property, his property, as the home base. Solo sessions on the other days.
The guys showed up at two on Monday. Lucas was first, coasting in on his bike with his bat across the handlebars. Will came second, riding alongside Dustin, the two of them arguing about something Ryan caught the tail end of.
", and I'm telling you that frequency modulation beats amplitude modulation for signal clarity every single time,"
"And I'm telling you that AM has better range and you don't need clarity to pick up a signal at a hundred miles,"
"Dustin, you are scientifically wrong about this, and I can prove it with math"
"Will, you can't prove radio theory with math."
"Radio theory IS math."
They dropped their bikes against the fence, still arguing. Ryan was on the porch with a glass of water, waiting. Mike pulled up last, out of breath, sweat darkening his collar.
"Flat tire on Maple," Mike said. "Had to walk it for two blocks. I hate this bike."
"Buy a new one," Lucas said.
"With what money?"
"Get a job."
"I'm fifteen."
"And you will be sixteen this year."
"That doesn't help me today, Lucas."
Ryan waited until they were settled. Water bottles filled from the kitchen tap, bats grabbed from the rack. They moved through the preparations with the kind of unconscious coordination that came from doing the same thing three times a week for two weeks.
"Vine Crawlers," Ryan said. "Full house clear. Same rules. Stay in pairs. Call your targets."
They were getting genuinely good.
The Vine Crawler ID was routine now, the brown-black walls and sick green light and the smell of wet earth as familiar as the real kitchen.
Ryan pulled the combat in stages, drawing vine aggro while the guys worked through the rooms in pairs. Lucas and Will took the ground floor east side. Mike and Dustin took the west. Ryan floated between them, helping where the vine density thickened, but mostly watching.
Lucas killed vine clusters solo. He'd developed a style that was entirely his own, with aggressive commitment, full swings, and a willingness to take a hit on the backswing if it meant finishing the target. His physical stats were climbing from the combination of auto-allocated level-up points and the fact that he trained outside of sessions too, push-ups and sprints in his backyard, the pull-up bar he'd installed on the fence behind his house. At LV 5, his auto-allocated stats put him past what most adults in Hawkins could manage. STR 13, VIT 12, DEX 11.
Will was getting better. Not great, not yet, but better. He'd been the weakest fighter in the first session, hesitating on swings, flinching when vines dropped. Two weeks in, the flinching was mostly gone. He'd started paying attention to the walls and ceilings before entering rooms, checking for the dark patches that usually meant a cluster was anchored there. Sometimes he spotted them. Sometimes he didn't, and a vine caught his arm or his shoulder and he had to swing through the hit.
Will watched more than he fought, and when he noticed something, a vine shifting overhead, a floor tendril creeping toward Dustin's ankle, he said it fast and clear. It wasn't tactical genius. It was the habit of a kid who'd always been the observer in the group, the one who noticed things because he spent more time looking than talking. His WIS was climbing toward 14 from the auto-allocation, and Ryan thought the stat was making his natural attentiveness a little sharper, but it was still just attentiveness.
He wasn't a leader like Mike, but he could be his deputy, the scout who noticed things before they went sideways.
When something came at him directly, Will swung. His hits landed about half the time with real force. The other half glanced or missed the weak point, and he'd have to swing again. He didn't have Lucas's strength or commitment. But he kept swinging, and he got back up after a bad hit, and that counted for something.
Mike was trying to direct. He'd picked a spot in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room where he could see both rooms, and he called out what he saw. "Will, right side, two at the window. Lucas, hold." The calls were sometimes late, sometimes obvious, pointing out threats that Lucas had already spotted. But they were getting better. Mike's instinct for group coordination came from years of running D&D campaigns, knowing where every player was on the grid and what they could see from their position. That translated, imperfectly, to real combat. He missed things. He called a false alarm on a shadow that turned out to be a stain on the wall. But when his timing was right, it saved someone from a hit, and the group started to listen without questioning.
Dustin had refined his fire technique into something amazing.
The pump-sprayer backpack rig had a proper trigger handle now, the kind of mechanical improvement that Dustin made in his sleep. He'd also started building traps between sessions, like tripwires made from the Vine Fiber that Ryan provided, rigged to pull tight across doorways and catch vine clusters as they advanced along the floor. The traps weren't elegant or professional, but they worked most of the time.
After the session, they sat on the back porch drinking water. The August heat pressed down. Dustin had his shoes off, wiggling his toes in the dead grass.
"I want to try the Den," Dustin said.
Silence. The guys looked at each other. They'd been fighting vines for two weeks. The other layer, the one with the dog-things Ryan fought solo, was something they'd heard about but hadn't seen.
"No," Ryan said.
"Why not?"
"Because a Demodog will kill you. It moves twice as fast as a vine and hits four times as hard. I've been doing this longer than you and I'm stronger than you. That's not an insult, it's the difference between surviving and getting your throat ripped out."
Dustin opened his mouth to argue. Will spoke first. "He's right." Will was pulling at a thread on his sock, not looking at anyone. "We're not ready. But we should set a target. A date when we try."
Ryan looked at him. The matter‑of‑fact way Will said it caught him off guard.
This wasn't the quiet kid from the early days anymore. This was someone who'd spent two weeks fighting things that shouldn't exist, someone who'd changed. His confidence had spiked, and with it his willingness to speak up, to push, to be part of the conversation instead of hovering on its edge.
It reminded Ryan of that moment after Eleven broke with Mike, when Will had tried to force Mike and Lucas back into a D&D game, not because it was comfortable, but because he needed them together. Needed them moving forward …...Well. That was before his breakdown in that episode.
He liked this Will. He was unburdened now, no longer weighed down by "I am gay" big secret.
"Keep training," Ryan said. "Three sessions a week, plus whatever you're doing on your own. When I think you're ready, we'll talk about it."
"How long?" Lucas asked.
"Few more weeks. Depends on how fast you guys improve."
"So we keep at it," Lucas said.
"We keep at it."
Mike tapped his bat against the porch railing. "Three sessions a week. We could do four. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays."
"You'd miss the end of your summer," Ryan said.
"Summer's almost over anyway." Mike looked at the others. "I'd rather spend it here than watching TV."
Lucas shrugged. "I'm in."
"Obviously" Dustin said.
* * *
Small things mattered.
Ryan got a haircut at Sal's barbershop on Main Street. Short on the sides, a little longer on top, out of his eyes and off his ears. Practical. It took four minutes and cost three dollars, and when he looked in the mirror he saw someone who didn't look like a kid anymore.
The next Saturday, Lucas showed up with a similar cut. He didn't say anything about it. Just had the haircut.
Dustin got his the following Monday. His curls didn't cooperate with the style Ryan and Lucas had gone with, so he went shorter overall, a trim that made his face look thinner and his jawline sharper.
Mike argued about it for a week. "I'm not cutting my hair because everyone else is cutting their hair." This lasted until Wednesday, when he walked into the property with his hair visibly shorter and pretended nobody noticed.
Will trimmed his but kept a little more length. The hair was one of the few things about his appearance that Will controlled completely, and Ryan understood the instinct to hold onto that.
They looked different. Entering tenth grade as Sophmore in September, they would look like an all-different group than the one that had left ninth grade in June. Fitter and sharper. With matching short haircuts that made them look like a team.
Because they were. And fuck the haters!
* * *
Thursday, September 6, 1983
The session went sideways in the last five minutes.
A vine cluster they'd missed behind the bathroom door caught Will across the forearm as he walked past. The vine whipped out fast, wrapped twice, and squeezed before Will yanked free and Lucas crushed it with a backhand swing. Standard stuff. But the welt on Will's arm was red and raised and already bruising at the edges, a thick band across the inside of his forearm that looked exactly like what it was. Something had grabbed him hard.
"Joyce is going to lose her mind," Dustin said, looking at it.
Will held his arm against his chest. "I'll wear long sleeves."
"It's September. In Indiana. Your mom is going to ask why you're wearing long sleeves."
"I'll tell her I fell off my bike."
"That doesn't look like a bike fall. That looks like someone grabbed you."
Will's face tightened. He knew Dustin was right. His mother noticed everything about her kids, especially Will, especially marks on skin that looked like someone had hurt him.
Ryan made a decision he'd been planning to make slowly. Just not today. But the situation was here and the timing was close enough.
"Let me see," he said.
Will held out his arm. Ryan wrapped his hand around the welt, palm flat against the bruised skin.
"What are you…"
Ryan pushed. Twenty MP, a pulse of warmth that flowed from his palm into Will's arm. The redness faded like someone was erasing it. The swelling flattened. The bruise, already forming purple at the edges, dissolved back into normal skin tone. Three seconds. Will's forearm looked like nothing had ever touched it.
Nobody spoke.
Dustin's mouth was open. Actually open, jaw dropped, the full cartoon version.
Lucas took a step closer and grabbed Will's arm, turning it over, running his thumb across the skin where the welt had been. "It's gone," he said. "It's actually gone. The skin is…." He pressed harder. "Does that hurt?"
"No," Will said. He was staring at his own arm like it belonged to someone else.
"What the hell was that?" Dustin's voice came out about an octave higher than normal. "Ryan. What the hell was that. You just…. your hand went warm and his arm just…. what was that?"
"I can heal," Ryan said. "Different kinds of injuries. Cuts, bruises, welts. It's something I figured out how to do a few weeks ago."
"You figured out how to heal people," Lucas said. He let go of Will's arm. "Like you figured out how to open the doorway."
"Same kind of thing. Different application."
"How?" Dustin was almost vibrating. Not scared. Excited. The same frequency he ran at when he found a new radio band or solved a wiring problem. "Is it connected to the portal? Is it the same energy? Does it drain you? Can you feel it leaving your body? Can you heal anything? Could you fix a broken bone? What about…"
"Dustin."
"…. internal injuries? What about diseases? Can you…."
"Dustin. Breathe."
Dustin breathed. It didn't slow him down much. "Can you do it again? On someone else? Right now?"
Lucas held up his hand. He had a shallow scratch on his knuckle from a vine he'd punched through earlier, barely bleeding, the kind of thing he would have ignored until it scabbed over. "Try me."
Ryan took his hand and pushed. Same warmth, same pulse. The scratch sealed and disappeared.
Lucas pulled his hand back and flexed it. Opened and closed his fist. Rubbed his thumb across the knuckle. His expression was hard to read, he was trying to reclassify Ryan in his head.
"Does it hurt you?" Will asked. He was quiet again, but not the old quiet. Thoughtful tough. "When you do it. You said it costs something."
"It uses energy. Like a battery draining. I can only do it so many times before I need to recharge."
"How many times?" Dustin asked immediately.
"Enough. Not unlimited."
"That's not a number, Ryan."
"It's the number you're getting."
Mike hadn't said anything. He was leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed, watching the exchange, watching Ryan.
"What else?" Mike said.
"What else what?"
"What else can you do? The doorway, that was one thing. Healing is another. You're stronger than you should be, faster than you should be." Mike's voice was steady. He wasn't accusing him, but he was curious. "You've been showing us pieces. So what else is there?"
Ryan looked at him. Mike Wheeler, the kid who would hide a telekinetic girl in his basement without blinking. The kid who believed first and asked questions after. He was completely unphased by any answer Ryan would give.
"A few combat things," Ryan said. "Ways, I can fight that go beyond the bat."
"Like what?" Lucas said.
"I'll show you when the time is right."
"Why not now?" Dustin asked.
"Because showing you one thing at a time is how I make sure you actually understand each thing instead of getting overwhelmed and freaking out."
"I'm not freaking out."
"Dustin, your voice has been an octave higher for the last two minutes."
"That's excitement, not freaking out. There's a clinical difference."
"He's right," Will said. "He's excited. When Dustin freaks out, he talks faster. Right now he's just louder."
"Thank you, Will."
"You're welcome."
Ryan looked at Mike. Mike looked back. The question was still there, but so was something else.
"When you're ready," Mike said. "But don't wait too long. We're in this with you. Whatever this is."
"I know," Ryan said. "That's why I'm telling you at all."
* * *
September 7th, the Saturday before school starts. The guys had all gone home for dinner. The house was quiet.
Ryan stood at the kitchen counter chopping potatoes for hash. The knife work was automatic at this point, Cooking LV 6 guiding his hands through movements that would have taken conscious effort three months ago. He had a steak under the broiler, green beans in a pan, and the radio playing low.
Bruce Springsteen. "Born in the U.S.A" hadn't come out yet but "Nebraska" was still in rotation on the album rock station out of Indianapolis, and the stripped-down guitar filled the kitchen with something that felt like autumn coming.
Through the kitchen window, the perimeter wall was a dark line against the sky. Stars were coming out, more than you'd ever see in a city, the Midwest sky doing what it did best.
The phone rang. Landline installed last week, the number unlisted and known only to Pete and the guys. Ryan picked up with his left hand while his right kept chopping.
"Hey." Dustin. "Is the new antenna config pulling shortwave? Because I ran the numbers on the 20-meter band and we should be getting Europe after sunset."
"Check the 20-meter band. I adjusted the impedance matching this morning."
"You adjusted, Ryan, I spent three hours calibrating that impedance."
"And it was too tight by about 15 ohms. I loosened it. Try it tonight."
Dustin made a noise that was half frustration and half excitement.
He knew he'd been wrong about a technical problem but couldn't decide whether to be annoyed or grateful. "Fine. I'll try it. But if you broke my antenna, I'm billing you for parts."
"You installed the antenna with parts I paid for."
"That is not the point."
Ryan hung up. Washed the dishes. Ninety seconds, spotless, Dishwashing LV 7.
He went to the cellar. He sat at the workbench and picked up the arm guards he'd been working on. Corrupted Hide, cut into strips, sewn onto a denim sleeve lining with Mana Crafting active through every stitch. Will's set. The kid took more hits than anyone because his instinct was to watch and call out threats instead of taking cover, and the split-second before he swung was the split-second a vine could catch his arms.
The Mana Crafting at LV 7 made the hide supple, dark, and nearly weightless. The finished product would absorb impacts that would bruise normal skin. Will would wear them under his jacket and nobody would know they were there.
Below his feet, in the sub-cellar, the Golem worked. It had been running for nine hours. Stone feet on stone floor, the scraping rhythm so constant it had become background noise, like a heartbeat behind the walls. Ryan's regen covered the sustain cost with margin to spare. The Golem was expanding the training arena by another ten feet on the south side, following mental commands Ryan had given it that morning and forgotten about since.
He finished Will's arm guards. Set them aside for Saturday. Picked up the Demodog Fang knife and ran a whetstone along the edge, more out of habit than necessity. The fang didn't dull. Upside Down materials held their edge.
The radio had switched to Fleetwood Mac. Stevie Nicks singing about a landslide, the acoustic guitar clean and simple in the quiet kitchen.
The September sky was probably dark now. Stars and fireflies and the distant glow of Hawkins to the north, a town sleeping through its last normal months.
He turned off the radio, climbed the stairs, and went to bed.
[A.N: Well, I did it again. 9,600+ words. I might be losing my mind. I could have split this into two chapters but honestly, I don't like cutting a chapter mid-vision. When I see how a chapter should flow, I'd rather deliver it whole than chop it in half for the word count.
I know this one was heavy on slice of life. I had a feeling the story needed more depth at this point, more time with the characters just being people before things start escalating. Hope it landed for you. There were a lot of social interactions and a little more Nancy screen time. I've noticed a lot of you pushing for her in the romance department. I see you. But I still haven't decided, so tough luck for all of us 😄
And before anyone comes at me about the ages again. As I've said before, Ryan is almost 16. He's one of the older kids in his grade, born early in the year, while the others are a bit younger in the same class. Ages are shifted up from the original show. I feel this fits the direction I'm taking the story.
We also got another reveal with the healing skill. At this point I hope you realize that Ryan can't just stop using his abilities every time his friends are nearby. That would put both him and them at risk. He needs his powers and pretending they don't exist isn't an option. So instead, he's going to expose them gradually, one ability at a time, in ways that make sense. It's going to be slow. Really slow. But it'll get there. He will never tell them about the system, so calm down and trust the process.
Also, the sharp-eyed readers among you might have noticed that I completely skipped over Ryan's birthday celebration with the boys. And you'd be right. I genuinely missed it while planning the chapter and didn't build that scene in. That's on me. I might push in later with made out excuses, but for now just roll with it. Even authors miss things sometimes 😅
Next chapter. We are back to school, more fun interactions, and more grinding. Don't expect it before Monday or Tuesday though. I genuinely pushed everything aside to get this chapter out for you guys, so I need to catch up on real life for a bit!
Huge thanks to all 60 Power Stone contributors this week! The list keeps growing and I love it:
Psycho_Paradox, Yunos_Noor, Getryx, XenonBlaster65, Aaronzaid, Dear_Lord, heavenlydemon_, Dillmet_Singh_4812, Daoist3tTlco, Alternatif_OfMe, GzeroX, Gustavo_Dias_4181, Gavin_Esteb, Arthur25, Xander_Hartig, Bean_Man_7767, this_your_bush, Chikary, UchihaGod, Lalo, AkGreyback, Akira890, Charly_26r, TomTheReader, Wither_Kingzz, siddhu, Mirksas, DaoistuhLIL5, k_l_4014, Raymond33, Maicros, daviangarcia85, GODKINGASH, guardian252, jjtcaster, KBG_Obsidian, LouCaz, Xplizit, origin_of_power, GreatNovelLover, Piggy, Kauak, Bakr24, ENELSON_RODRI, Makuraty, Shev, Venkata_Narendra, Gabriel_andrino, DaoistJTE1Za, corey_miller_0016, Kadiox, vis_g_s_4628, MMBarqawi, Demonilusion, Kranox, Greenmatsui, Gorinjou, Diosazura599, and StormKing1.
Every single stone matters. I see all of you and I appreciate it.
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.]