Thursday.
The gym opened at six. He was there when the doors unlocked, and the student worker who scanned his ID barely looked up.
Four days had a shape to them, once you decided to use them properly. Elijah moved through the weight room with no program, no performance — just load the bar to something reasonable and work, feel the unfamiliar body finding its edges, catalog what it could and couldn't do. The previous Elijah had been active but not trained. There was a baseline of fitness there, the loose functional strength of someone who walked everywhere and occasionally ran to catch buses, but no muscle memory for anything structured. That was fine. Fine meant room to build.
[Physical Activity logged. MIG: 10.0 → 10.1. AGI: 10.0 → 10.1. +12 EXP.]
The numbers were almost insulting. He'd done an hour of work for a fraction of a fraction of a stat point, which confirmed what the system documentation had told him about Level 1 mundane training: effective over months, not days. Not the point of the four days, then. The point was something else.
The point was: he needed his head to stop spinning.
Physical work was the only thing that reliably stopped him from running the same calculations in circles. He knew that about himself from his previous life — the post-lecture anxiety that would drive him to walk four miles in the dark just to exhaust the restless part of his brain. The body was different but the mechanism held. By the time he hit the showers Thursday morning, the churning had settled into something more like structured problem assessment.
Friday.
The library had a room in the basement — Special Collections — that required academic ID to enter and smelled like old paper and very poor humidity control. He spent six hours there with the Pale Rider primary sources, taking notes that served double duty: thesis material for Kaplan, and a working mythology profile for the system. The EXP trickled in steadily. Small amounts, consistent. Like interest on a deposit he hadn't known he was making.
The previous Elijah's notes had identified a 1743 pamphlet — a colonial-era political broadside, barely four pages — that described a figure on a pale horse appearing at the site of a merchant's execution to prevent a mob lynching. The figure's face wasn't described. Only the horse, pale as bone, and the voice, "carrying the weight of every god the city had forgotten."
He photographed all thirty-two pages and added them to the thesis folder.
[Persona-Relevant Research: Pale Rider archetype. Source depth tier: Primary. +85 EXP.]
That was more than a day of gym work. He noted that and kept reading.
Saturday.
The drama department ran an open acting workshop on Saturday afternoons, attached to the university's community education program, which meant it didn't require him to be enrolled in the course. He showed up, sat in the back, and watched for forty minutes before the instructor — a tall woman named Patterson who moved like someone who had done stage combat professionally — pulled him into an exercise.
He was better at this than he'd expected to be.
Or rather: the previous Elijah had done drama in high school, which he'd found in a box of old programs in the dorm closet, and the muscle memory for performance was there in the body even if the mind was new. When Patterson asked him to deliver a line with authority, something in the chest cavity settled into a different register and the words came out with weight he hadn't consciously applied.
Patterson raised an eyebrow. "Again," she said. "But like you mean it."
He meant it.
[PRS Activity logged. PRS: 10.0 → 10.1. +18 EXP.]
He signed up for the Thursday-Saturday series. Kaplan had told him to round out his departmental hours. That would do.
Sunday.
The morning went to Robinson Hall.
Elijah walked in at 10 AM, when the lecture theater was empty and unlocked, and spent two hours doing what looked like a student familiarizing himself with the space and was actually a systematic vulnerability assessment. He started at the back of the theater and worked toward the stage, noting the row count (twelve), the exit configuration (two sets of doors at the rear, one stage-left door near the podium, emergency bar exit on the north wall behind a folding partition), and the ventilation grilles — four large units set high in the side walls, plus two ceiling ducts visible through the overhead lighting rigs.
He crouched next to one of the side vents and held his palm near the grille.
Positive pressure. Air flowing in from outside.
Crane would need to put the compound in the intake, he thought. Or in a device on-stage with enough dispersal range to seed the initial panic before the ventilation takes over.
The science building was four minutes at a normal walk, seven if he was guiding people who didn't know the route and were scared. The building had sealed laboratory spaces on the second floor — positive-pressure rooms, self-contained filtration, designed for hazardous material work. If the toxin dropped during the lecture, a group moving fast enough could shelter there before the compound built to full effect.
He timed the route three times with his phone stopwatch, varying the pace. Best case: four minutes eleven seconds. Worst case, factoring for crowds at the bottleneck corner: eight minutes forty.
He needed something to protect him during those eight minutes.
The army surplus store in the Narrows was the kind of place that occupied a specific ecological niche in Gotham's economy — not a hardware store, not a weapons dealer, not quite either. It sold military-adjacent equipment to the category of people who wanted practical gear and didn't have either the money for specialty retailers or the clearance for institutional suppliers. The proprietor was a man in his sixties who'd watched Elijah examine four different respirator models for twenty minutes without saying a word, then handed him a fifth.
"Israeli civilian issue," he said. "NBC-rated. Better seal than the other four. Sixty bucks."
He paid sixty bucks.
That night, in the dorm room, he put the mask on and sat on the floor and breathed for three minutes to get used to the weight and the peripheral vision restriction and the faint chemical smell of the filters. The seal was good. The straps adjusted properly. He could put it on in under fifteen seconds, which wasn't great but was workable.
He took it off and sat with it in his hands.
The dead man's text messages were still open on the phone from earlier — he'd been looking for something in the contacts and ended up reading without meaning to. Mom and Dad as contacts with (DECEASED) in the notes, and then below them: three people from what looked like a previous school year, occasional two-word exchanges, plans that got cancelled, silence that stretched into months. Not malice. Just the quiet way people drift from someone who doesn't push back against the drifting.
Elijah Green was a person, he thought. He existed. He had a thesis and a gym habit and a drama teacher's phone number saved from 2021 and he died.
He didn't know how the original Elijah had died. The medical examiner's report, if there was one, wasn't in the email inbox. No notifications about a death certificate, no condolence emails from the university administration. Just absence where a person should have been, and then his presence.
He put the phone face-down on the desk.
The gas mask went into the backpack. Bottom layer, under the textbooks — heavier than it looked, occupying real weight, pulling the bag's center of gravity down and back. He rearranged the textbooks twice to make the weight distribution feel natural rather than conspicuous. Then he set the bag by the door.
Tuesday morning. Crane's lecture, 10 AM, Robinson Hall.
He didn't know for certain it would be the night. It was possible this was Crane playing a normal visiting lecturer role and the toxin attack came weeks later, in a different venue, to a different audience. It was possible that this version of Crane never deployed at the university at all.
Possible, he thought. But you recognized the name before your coffee was cold.
The four days had done what they were supposed to do. He had a baseline of physical data about what this body could handle. He had a working map of the campus's emergency routes. He had a gas mask and sixty seconds of practice putting it on. He had a rough EXP count and the knowledge that the thesis work was generating system currency whether Kaplan knew it or not.
He had eight days of knowing something and not being able to stop it with anything except preparation.
He turned off the desk lamp and sat in the dark for a while, not sleeping, just letting Tuesday be Tuesday-from-now instead of Tuesday-in-eight-days.
[Stats Updated: MIG 10.2 / AGI 10.1 / VIT 10.0 / INT 10.3 / WIL 10.1 / PRS 10.1. System Level: 1. EXP: 847/1000. Recommendation: Milestone approaching.]
The HUD went quiet.
Outside, Gotham was doing what Gotham did at midnight — sirens, somewhere, and the distant sound of something that might have been a grappling hook or might have been a cable car, and the absolute dark of the Bat-Signal housing sitting unused above GCPD Central.
He opened his phone and checked the flyer photo again.
Dr. Jonathan Crane, PhD. September 23.
He locked the screen and put the phone in his jacket pocket and stood up. The backpack sat by the door, heavy with textbooks and the weight of everything under them.
He picked it up and slung it over one shoulder, and the gas mask settled against the small of his back like it had always been there.
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