St. Mary's Church, Back Office — July 2010, Morning
The cot in the church back office had been designed for neither comfort nor sleep, but my body had overruled both objections somewhere around two AM and shut down with the graceless efficiency of a machine hitting its failsafe. Eric had found the cot in the storage closet, set it up in the parish office, and said "Stay here tonight, nobody'll care, the church is basically yours at this point" with the casual generosity of a man who solved problems by feeding them or housing them.
I'd slept for nine hours. Dreamless, total, the kind of sleep that arrives after sixty hours of consciousness and erases the debt in one brutal installment. My neck was stiff from the thin pillow. My back carried a crease from the cot's center bar. My suit, which I'd finally peeled off and draped over a chair, looked like it had lost a fight with a laundromat. The charcoal smell had achieved permanence.
The phone was glowing on the floor beside the cot. Not the ambient notification glow — something bigger. The screen filled edge to edge with a display I hadn't seen before: gold borders, expanded interface, the wrench icon spinning with what I could only describe as enthusiasm.
[RANK PROMOTION PROCESSING...]
[Overnight stat recalculation: Rest bonus applied (+1 to all stats for sustained engagement without system fatigue collapse). Genuine emotional connections during multi-day social engagement recognized.]
[Updated Stats: TST 15, CIN 13, SRE 19, CTM 11, PIN 10, SSY 8]
[New Average: 12.67]
[Threshold Required: ≥ 12.0]
[STATUS: ACHIEVED]
[RANK PROMOTION: F → E]
[Title: Junior Debugger]
[Welcome to the next tier, Patcher. Don't let it go to your head.]
The interface expanded. New panels slid into the dashboard like drawers opening in a desk I'd only seen the surface of. The Mission Log materialized as a tabbed section — three entries with timestamps, ratings, and debrief data I could now review. The Embarrassment Arsenal appeared as an empty database with a scanning animation, already cataloguing moments from the wake with the quiet diligence of a system that found human embarrassment professionally interesting. And at the top, the Skill Market tab now displayed two tiers instead of one.
[NEW ACCESS — RANK E:]
[— Mission Log (full debrief review)]
[— Embarrassment Arsenal (10-entry limit, basic recall, deployment suggestions)]
[— Skill Market Tier 1 (500-2,000 SP range)]
[— Failure Recursion awareness (glitch descriptions visible in interface)]
[— 1 retry per mission (unchanged from Rank F)]
[— Cooldown reduction: 0% (unchanged until Rank D)]
I sat on the edge of the cot with the phone in both hands and the specific vertigo of a man who'd been given a promotion at a job he still didn't fully understand. The Tier 1 market was the real prize — I scrolled through the offerings with the careful attention of someone shopping with a budget and a plan.
Tier 1 options included:
Good Cooking (Multiple Cuisines) — 800 SP. Home Renovation — 1,200 SP. Intermediate Instrument (specify) — 900 SP. Public Speaking — 1,000 SP. First Aid — 600 SP. Youth Sports Coaching — 750 SP.
The numbers were steeper but the skills were transformative. Youth Sports Coaching would be gold at the lakehouse — the movie had a basketball angle, and being able to coach the kids would embed me in the family dynamic. First Aid was practical insurance for a weekend involving rope swings, a lake, and children. Public Speaking would boost my SRE growth. Home Renovation was useless right now but filed for later.
But first: the guitar.
[Basic Guitar — Tier 0 — 400 SP]
[Proficiency: Campfire-level. 12 songs, 3 keys. Strumming patterns, basic fingerpicking. Equivalent: Someone who played casually for 2 years and never got serious but can hold a sing-along.]
I pressed PURCHASE.
The download lasted four minutes. Compressed hallucination: calloused fingertips on steel strings, the geometry of chord shapes, the muscle memory of transitions between C and G and D and Am. Twelve songs loaded like a playlist being installed directly into my motor cortex — folk standards, classic rock essentials, campfire staples. My left hand curled into a C chord position without my permission, fingers finding frets on invisible strings.
When it ended, my fingertips tingled and I had the strong urge to find a guitar.
[SKILL ACQUIRED: Basic Guitar — Tier 0]
[Integration period: 24 hours before next skill purchase.]
[Remaining SP: 10,600]
The Embarrassment Arsenal pinged while I was recovering from the download. Three entries had auto-populated, catalogued from the wake's social data:
Entry 1: Rob Hilliard — "It's Raining Men" Incident Severity: 3/10 | CTV (Comedic Timing Value): 6/10 Deployment Context: Group roast settings, especially when Rob acts tough or philosophical. Witnesses: Entire wake congregation. Counter-Risk: Low — Rob takes hits cheerfully.
Entry 2: Marcus Higgins — Moonwalk Co-Invention Claim Severity: 5/10 | CTV: 8/10 Deployment Context: When Marcus gets overly confident. Note: memory is fading from timeline correction — deploy soon or lose the reference. Witnesses: Eric, Kurt, Holden. Counter-Risk: Medium — Marcus doesn't remember clearly, may deny.
Entry 3: Eric Lamonsoff — Buffet Tray Tie Incident Severity: 2/10 | CTV: 4/10 Deployment Context: Low-stakes group banter, warming up for bigger material. Witnesses: Sally, Holden, two elderly mourners. Counter-Risk: Negligible — Eric will self-deprecate before you get the chance.
Three entries. Ten max at Rank E. A database of embarrassing moments I can deploy in group roast settings with system-assisted timing based on my CTM stat. This is either the most sophisticated social tool ever designed or the pettiest.
The answer was both. Roasting was currency in this friend group — Marcus and Kurt traded barbs like a stock exchange, Lenny refereed, Eric absorbed the hits, and Rob provided occasional accidental wisdom that doubled as the setup for someone else's punchline. If I couldn't roast, I couldn't belong. The Arsenal was a cheat sheet for a test I hadn't studied for.
I stood up from the cot. My knees protested — cot-sleep combined with five temporal deployments had aged my joints by approximately twenty years — but the rest had done its work. The headache was gone. The trembling was gone. The specific greyness of sixty-hour consciousness had lifted, replaced by something that felt, cautiously, like competence.
The church office had a mirror in the bathroom. Holden Lawson's face looked back at me — still unfamiliar, still someone else's features arranged around my expressions, but cleaner now. Less haunted. The suit was beyond saving, but the face was acceptable.
I need clothes. I need a bag for the lakehouse. I need money to buy both. I have no money.
The system's Cash Injection feature — described somewhere in the interface's help documentation — generated plausible deposits into the host's bank account after missions. I checked: a bank account existed under Holden Lawson's name. Balance: $2,847.32, accrued from three missions' worth of cash injections disguised as freelance payments and a contest winning.
Three thousand dollars from temporal repair work. That's probably not on any W-2.
The motel across town had a Goodwill next door. I could be dressed, packed, and presentable by afternoon. The families were gathering today for pre-lakehouse planning — Lenny's invitation from the parking lot was real, confirmed, and mine to lose. I needed to show up looking like a man who belonged on a family vacation, not like a man who'd been sleeping on a church cot in the same suit for four days.
I pocketed the phone. The Rank E interface hummed with new panels and possibilities and a guitar skill that itched in my fingertips. Ten thousand six hundred SP banked for whatever came next.
The church was quiet. Morning light through stained glass painted the empty pews in colored geometry. I passed the photo of Coach Buzzer on the easel — still there, not yet packed, the whistle around his neck catching a beam of blue light from the window. For one second I stopped and looked at the face of a man I'd met in 1978, a man who'd looked toward a vent in an equipment closet and squinted at something he couldn't see.
"Huh," he'd said. Just "Huh."
I walked out into the parking lot. The morning was bright, the air already warm, the specific optimism of a New England July day where everything ahead seemed possible and the past was a place I'd been five times and counting.
The Goodwill had a duffel bag for six dollars and clothes that fit a body I was starting to think of as mine.
To supporting Me in Pateron .
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
👉 Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!