Monday, May 16, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
The library opened at nine on weekdays.
Ryan got there at 9:04, even though he'd already been up since five. Two miles of running along the same route as yesterday, south on Maple, past the Byers house, along the dirt road and back. His stamina held better this time. Physical Endurance was doing its job, the two percent efficiency gain barely noticeable in isolation but enough that he pushed another three minutes before the tank started scraping bottom.
No stat gains from the run. He hadn't expected any. VIT 11 was still in the range where daily training could trigger a point, but the system tracked cumulative effort, and one extra run wasn't enough to tip the needle. He'd need to push harder. Longer distances, steeper hills, something that made the system register a new level of stress.
After the run, he'd done Power Strikes against a different tree on the away. ten hits before his MP emptied. The barks were holding up worse than his knuckles.
Then five minutes of Meditation on his bedroom floor, refilling the pool from zero to about hundred while Pete's alarm clock buzzed through the wall and the percolator coughed to life downstairs. Cereal. A wave to Pete. Out the door.
Now he stood in front of the Hawkins Public Library, locking his bike to the rack, and thought about what he was about to attempt.
Books.
In the manhwa, Jee-Han had learned skills from books. Not just any reading, but focused, intentional study with the system engaged. You read a martial arts manual with the conscious intent to learn combat techniques, and the system could crystallize that knowledge into a skill. The quality of the book was important. And presumably the INT stat mattered too, since INT governed learning speed. This of course is for regular books… if he manages to find skill books from loot this it will be very different.
Ryan's INT was 14. Highest stat on his sheet by a wide margin. If the system rewarded intensive studying the way it rewarded intensive running, a library full of books was basically a free skill factory.
If.
He pushed through the front door. The librarian, the same woman from Sunday with the glasses on a chain, looked up from her desk and gave him a nod. The library smelled like old paper and floor polish. Two floors, mostly empty at nine on a Monday morning. A man in a flannel shirt reading the newspaper at one of the tables. A woman reshelving books in the back.
Ryan walked past the fiction section, past the children's area with its low shelves and bean bag chairs and found the nonfiction stacks on the second floor.
He started with the health section. Ran his finger along the spines until he found what he was looking for.
The American Red Cross Standard First Aid and Personal Safety. Third edition. A thick paperback with a red cross on the cover.
Ryan pulled it off the shelf, sat down at the nearest table, and opened it to the first chapter.
He read differently now than he had in either of his previous lives. Before the system, reading was passive. You absorbed information at whatever rate your brain felt like processing. Now, with Gamer's Mind keeping his focus locked and INT 14 pushing his comprehension speed, he could feel the difference. The words came in faster. Connections formed quicker. He read a paragraph about controlling bleeding with direct pressure and his brain was already linking it to the next paragraph about tourniquet application before his eyes got there.
He read with intent to absorb and understand for real what needs to be done. That was the part that mattered. He wasn't skimming for entertainment or studying for a test. He was reading this book with the specific, conscious goal of learning first aid through the Gamer system. Every chapter, every diagram, every bulleted list about bandaging techniques and splinting broken bones and recognizing shock, he processed with the same focus he'd used when channeling MP into his fist for Power Strike.
He finished the book in two hours and Fifteen minutes.
The notification appeared before he closed the back cover.
[Through focused study of a specialized text, a skill has been created!]
[Basic First Aid (Active) - LV 1]
Apply emergency medical treatment to stabilize injuries.
Increases natural healing rate of target by 20% for 1 hour.
MP Cost: 5 | Cooldown: None
Note: This is a mundane medical skill enhanced by the Gamer system. Does not magically heal wounds. Improves the effectiveness of conventional first aid techniques.
Ryan stared at the blue window hovering above page 340 of the Red Cross manual. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.
It worked.
Two hours of reading a book he could've checked out from any public library in America, and the system had handed him a skill. A real, quantified, levelable skill. The description was clear about its limits. This wasn't magical healing. It was regular first aid but performed with system enhanced precision and a minor buff to natural recovery. At level 1, it was barely better than what any trained EMT could do. But skills leveled up, and his mental imagination library in his head, assembled from years of reading LitRPG novels, told him that first aid skills were precursors. You started with bandages and ended with glowing hands that closed wounds.
He looked around the library. The man with the newspaper hadn't moved. The woman reshelving books was on the other side of the floor. Nobody was paying attention to the Fifteen-year-old who'd just spent two hours reading a first aid manual.
Ryan stood up, put the book back, and went hunting.
* * *
The martial arts section was disappointing. Hawkins Public Library wasn't exactly a comprehensive repository of combat knowledge. He found three books that were relevant. Two were about karate, clearly aimed at beginners, with photographs of middle-aged men in white gis performing stances that looked stiff and posed. The third was better. A book on judo and self-defense from the mid-seventies, written by someone who'd actually competed. Throws, joint manipulation, ground work, and a chapter on striking that was more practical than the karate guides combined.
He read all three. Took him about three hours total. The karate books were thin on substance and heavy on philosophy. The judo book had real technique.
Halfway through the judo book, the notification came.
[Through focused study of specialized texts, a skill has been created!]
[Unarmed Combat (Passive) - LV 1]
Increases unarmed damage, speed, and technique.
Base unarmed damage: STR + STR × 0.5. Each level adds +1%.
A passive skill. That meant it applied automatically whenever he fought without a weapon. His current STR was 8, which put his base unarmed damage at 4. Terrible. A wet noodle thrown at a concrete wall. But the percentage scaling was what mattered. At level 50, that bonus would be fifty percent on top of whatever his STR was by then.
The book learning wasn't the same as actual practice. He knew that. Reading about a hip throw and executing hip throw were completely different things. But the system had given him the direction he should go. The next step was physical training, putting the book knowledge into his muscles, and the skill would level from there.
He put the martial arts books back and moved to the next section.
* * *
By one o'clock he'd burned through the first aid manual, the martial arts books, and was forty pages into a wilderness survival guide called Staying Alive: The Complete Guide to Outdoor Survival. The book covered shelter construction, water purification, fire-starting without matches, navigation by stars and landmarks, edible plants of the Midwest, and basic trapping. Written by a former Army Ranger who'd moved to Montana and started teaching courses to civilians.
Ryan ate the sandwich he'd packed, peanut butter on white bread with a bruised apple from Pete's kitchen, while reading about how to build a debris shelter in freezing conditions. The book was good. Practical, specific, written by someone who'd experience in the field.
The survival skill notification appeared around page 180, right in the middle of a chapter about reading animal tracks.
[Through focused study of a specialized text, a skill has been created!]
[Survival (Passive) - LV 1]
Improves ability to navigate, find resources, and endure in wilderness conditions.
+2% effectiveness to all outdoor survival activities per level.
Three skills from books in a single day. Three skills he hadn't had that morning, all of them acquired for the price of a library card and six hours of reading.
Ryan sat back and did the math. The library had roughly 22,000 volumes, according to the Observe he'd run on it Sunday. Not all of them were useful. Fiction wouldn't generate skills. Kids' books wouldn't generate skills. But the nonfiction sections covered first aid, martial arts, survival, chemistry, physics, biology, mechanical repair, woodworking, cooking, history, psychology. Every technical book was a potential skill waiting to be extracted.
He wasn't going to learn everything. That was greedy thinking, the kind of optimization mania that made you spend six months in a library instead of actually training. But targeted reading, two or three books a week in areas that supported his build? That was efficient. That was free stats and free skills while his body recovered between physical training sessions.
He checked out the survival guide, a chemistry textbook that caught his eye on the way down the stairs, and a book on basic carpentry. The librarian stamped his card without comment.
Ryan rode home with three books in his backpack, and the afternoon sun was warm on his arms, and he was grinning like a kid who'd found a cheat code. Which, in a sense, he had.
* * *
The chemistry textbook didn't generate a skill.
He spent two hours on it that evening, after Pete went to the living room with his beer and his TV. Ryan sat at his desk with the textbook open, reading about atomic structure and chemical bonds and the periodic table. He read with intent, the same focused engagement that had worked for first aid and martial arts and survival.
Nothing happened.
He thought about why. The first aid book had a clear practical application. The martial arts books taught physical techniques. The survival guide was about doing specific things in specific conditions. Chemistry, at the introductory level, was abstract. Theoretical. The system couldn't map it to a skill because there was no actionable behavior to crystallize. Knowing that sodium has eleven electrons wasn't a thing Ryan could do. It was just information.
But the reading wasn't wasted. He could feel it, a faint warmth in his head that he was starting to associate with INT- related processing. The system was logging the study time. Absorbing the information. Using it to build something, even if that something wasn't a named skill.
He kept reading. If nothing else, understanding chemistry would help when he started experimenting with alchemy later. The Gamer system had an alchemy tree in the manhwa. Monster drops combined with natural materials to create potions and consumables. Having a baseline in chemistry couldn't hurt.
He read until ten o'clock. The house was quiet. Pete had gone to bed an hour ago.
Ryan closed the textbook, pulled up his status window, and stared.
[Through intensive study, INT has increased by 1!]
INT: 14 → 15
There it was. Six hours of focused reading across four subjects, and the system had awarded him a point. INT training worked the same as physical training, cumulative effort measured against his current stat level. At INT 14, intensive studying was still novel enough to push the needle. The gains would slow down as the number climbed, same as VIT and DEX, but right now he was in the golden window.
A library card and a teenager's summer schedule. That was all he needed.
Ryan closed the window, set his alarm for five, and went to sleep.
* * *
Tuesday, May 17
He ran three miles. Unfortunately there is no stat gain, but the run felt smoother.
After the run, he did push-ups in the backyard until his arms gave out. Thirty-seven. His previous best in this body was somewhere around twenty-five, and the extra twelve came from VIT 11 and whatever invisible support Physical Endurance provided. The last five were ugly, his form collapsing, elbows flaring, face an inch from the grass. But the system tracked effort, and ugly reps still counted.
Then Power Strikes against a tree. Another 10 hits today. He spread the impacts across different sections of trunk, rotating the tree's circumference like he was working a heavy bag. The bark was wrecked. Several patches of pale wood showed through where the outer layer had blown off.
[Skill "Power Strike" has leveled up! LV 2 → LV 3]
After only about another ten sessions of use. Early levels came fast, then slower, then glacial.
Five minutes of Meditation in his room. MP refilled from 0 to about 100.
Then school.
Monday had been a holiday, Memorial Day approaching, some schedule adjustment. But Tuesday was a full school day, and Ryan walked into Hawkins High at 7:45 with his backpack over one shoulder, wearing jeans and a plain gray t-shirt, looking like every other freshman in the building.
He Observed everything.
The front doors. The hallway. The row of lockers along the east wall. A crumpled flyer for the spring dance that had happened two weeks ago. A janitor pushing a mop bucket. Three sophomore girls walking in a cluster, talking about someone named Tricia.
He'd been Observe-spamming since Sunday, hitting everything he could with the skill whenever he remembered. Objects, buildings, people, animals, trees, cars. The MP cost was 5 per use, which meant he could only do twenty casts before emptying his pool, but the Power Strikes skill proved that skill usage was the path to leveling, and Observe was the one skill he could practice anywhere without anyone noticing.
The hallway was loud. Sneakers on linoleum, locker doors slamming, conversations overlapping. It smelled like cafeteria cooking and whatever body spray the senior boys were using too much of. A group of girls pushed past him. Someone yelled across the hall. A teacher stood in a doorway with a coffee mug, looking like she'd rather be somewhere else.
He Observed a locker. A water fountain. The teacher with the coffee mug.
[Mrs. Patterson - LV 2]
HP: 140/140
Age: 44
Status: Healthy. Mildly caffeinated.
He walked to first period. Algebra with Mr. Henshaw, a man who taught mathematics thoroughly, and without any visible enthusiasm. Ryan sat in his seat, second row from the window, and let the lesson wash over him.
The quadratic formula. He'd known since seventh grade in his previous life. The adult engineer sitting in a ninth-grader's desk could solve every problem on the board before Henshaw finished writing them. The challenge was not solving them too fast.
He answered two questions when called on. Got them right. Answered a third one wrong on purpose. Doodled in the margins of his notebook, which was what the other Ryan used to do. Kept his head down.
Between classes, he Observed more. The hallway trophy case. The gym door. Lucas, who he passed near the science wing.
[Lucas Sinclair - LV 1]
HP: 85/85
Age: 15
Status: Healthy. Annoyed (math homework).
Same info as last time. The skill wasn't high enough to show him anything he didn't already know about his friends. But every cast was a rep, and reps built toward level-ups.
"You look like you didn't sleep," Lucas said.
"I slept fine." Ryan had slept perfectly. Gamer's Body guaranteed it. But he'd been up since five and hadn't bothered to check a mirror before leaving. "Bad hair day."
Lucas squinted at him. "You've been weird lately."
"I've always been weird."
"Weirder. You keep staring at things. Like, really staring." Lucas made an exaggerated version of Ryan's Observe face, eyes slightly unfocused, head tilted. It was uncomfortably accurate.
Ryan made himself laugh. "I'm tired. It's May. I'm thinking about summer."
Lucas shrugged and let it go. That was one of the things Ryan appreciated about Lucas. The kid noticed everything, and brought it up exactly once.
Ryan needed to be more careful with the Observe face, not that anyone could even imagine what the hell he was doing.
* * *
Wednesday, May 18 - Mike's Basement
"Roll initiative."
Mike's voice had the particular authority of a Fifteen-year-old who took his role of Dungeon Master more seriously than any actual authority figure in his life. He sat behind the DM screen, binder open, pencil behind his ear, looking at the four of them like a judge about to hand down sentences.
Ryan rolled his d20. Fifteen. He wrote it on his character sheet next to Garrett's other stats.
Dustin rolled a three.
"Oh, COME ON." Dustin threw his hands up. "This die is cursed. I'm using a different one."
"You can't switch dice mid-combat," Mike said.
"Says who?"
"Says the DM."
"The DM is a tyrant."
"The DM is always a tyrant. That's the job." Mike tapped the screen with his pencil. "You rolled a three. Your halfling is last in initiative. Accept your fate."
Will rolled an eighteen and smiled. Lucas rolled a twelve and immediately started arguing about bonuses.
The table wobbled every time someone leaned on it. Outside, the late afternoon sun came through the window wells and made little rectangles of light on the concrete walls.
Ryan played the game. He moved Garrett through the dungeon, fought the encounters Mike had prepared, made decisions that were good but not suspiciously good. He let Dustin's halfling find the hidden door. He let Will's wizard solve the puzzle. He took a hit from an ogre that he could have avoided because Garrett's AC was only 16 and the ogre rolled a 17, and that was the kind of thing that happened to fighters with mediocre armor.
And in between turns, when Dustin was arguing with Mike about whether a halfling could ride a war dog, Ryan's brain was running numbers.
The daily training regimen.
It had appeared that morning, right after he finished his run. A system notification he'd been hoping for but wasn't sure would come.
[Repeatable Quest: "Daily Training Regimen"]
Complete your daily physical training routine.
Requirements: Sustained cardiovascular exercise (20+ min), strength exercise (50+ reps combined), skill practice (3+ uses of any combat skill).
Reward: 25 XP
Resets daily at midnight.
Twenty-five XP per day. Every day. That was 175 XP per week, 750 per month. He needed 200 more XP to hit Level 2, which meant at this rate he'd level up in eight days just from the daily quest. Add in whatever XP the system awarded for skill creation, Observe grinding, and any other quests that popped up, and he was looking at Level 2 inside a week.
The math was good. The math was very good. And sitting in Mike's basement, rolling dice and eating chips, with Dustin yelling and Lucas sighing and Will quietly observing everyone, Ryan's thoughts kept drifting to what he could do better.
If I spend mornings on physical training and combat skills, that covers the daily quest by ten AM. Library from ten to two, that's four hours of book study per session. Three sessions a week minimum. Observe practice all day, every day, every time I look at something. Meditation when I can for MP cycling. Power Strike practice after every Meditation session to spend the pool. And school somewhere between everything.
"Ryan."
He blinked. Mike was staring at him.
"It's your turn. The ogre is dead. There's a corridor going north and a door to the east. What does Garrett do?"
Ryan looked at the map. The corridor probably led deeper into the dungeon. The door was Mike's trap, or Mike's treasure, depending on how generous he was feeling.
"I check the door for traps."
"Roll perception."
He rolled a fifteen. Mike consulted his notes, ran his finger down a column, and nodded. "You notice scratch marks around the door handle. Like something clawed at it from the other side."
Dustin looked at Lucas. Lucas looked at Will. Will looked at Ryan.
This was how it worked now. The group looked at Ryan when the decision mattered.
His instincts were better now. Terrifyingly better. Because Ryan wasn't guessing. He was reading Mike's tells, analyzing the dungeon structure, estimating the encounter design based on the party's level and what Mike had thrown at them so far. He was running the encounter design algorithm in his head, the same way he'd debug a program.
"We go north," Ryan said. "The door's bait. Mike wants us to open it and fight whatever's in there, but we're low on spell slots and Dustin's halfling has twelve hit points left. We clear the corridor, rest, and come back for the door when we're full."
Mike's jaw tightened. Ryan had read it right.
"Fine. You go north. The corridor stretches thirty feet and opens into a chamber with-"
Ryan settled into the game. Rolled dice. Made tactical calls. Laughed when Dustin's halfling fell into a pit again and Lucas threatened to leave him there.
He was here. With his friends. Playing a game about pretend monsters while real monsters grew in a dimension pressed against the underside of this town like a tongue against a closed mouth.
He pushed the thought away. D&D was Wednesday. Wednesday was for being a kid again, he missed it.
* * *
Thursday through Sunday
The days blurred into a routine.
In five AM he wake up, already feeling like he'd slept twelve hours because he had, functionally, in every way that mattered. Run for thirty minutes. The routes expanded. He mapped new paths through the residential grid, out along farm roads, once all the way to the railroad tracks that ran west of town. His minimap filled in steadily, gray patches turning solid as he covered ground.
After running, he is doing push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups on a tree branch behind Pete's shed. The numbers climbed. Forty-two push-ups by Thursday. Forty-eight by Saturday. His body didn't hurt afterward. Gamer's Body converted the fatigue into clean stamina drain, and the recovery was fast enough that by the time he'd showered and eaten breakfast, the tank was full again.
[Through intense training, STR has increased by 1!]
STR: 8 → 9
That came Friday morning, after a set of push-ups that went to fifty-one. The STR gain triggered right at the point of failure, when his arms were locked at the bottom of rep fifty-two and refused to push. The system awarded him a point just on time.
STR 9. Still below average for an adult, but respectable for a teenager. His punches hit a little harder. Power Strike scaled off STR, which meant even a single point had downstream effects on his damage output.
After physical training he did some Power Strike practice against trees. He'd started hitting different trees now, spreading the damage. There was a row of oaks along the fence at the edge of the Henderson property, and as long as he got there before sunrise, nobody saw him punching bark off a tree like a lunatic. Eight to ten strikes per session, draining his MP pool, then Meditation to refill.
[Skill "Meditation" has leveled up! LV 1 → LV 2]
Saturday morning. The MP regen multiplier while meditating ticked up from x2 to something slightly better x2.2. He could feel the difference, a faster pulse of warmth returning to the pool in his chest, the recovery time between empty and half-full dropping by a few seconds.
Library visits on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. He read the carpentry book, which gave him nothing because the system apparently didn't consider reading about woodworking the same as actually doing woodworking. He read a biology textbook for three hours and got no skill, same as chemistry, but the sustained intellectual effort was probably building toward another INT point.
He Observed everything. People on the street. Bikes in racks. Houses. Dogs. The fire hydrant on the corner of Maple and Elm. The checkout counter at Melvald's where Joyce Byers worked behind the register, looking tired and distracted and completely unaware that her younger son had six months of normal life left.
He Observed Joyce from across the street while pretending to tie his shoe. Felt like a creep and did it anyway. She looked completely like her actor Winona Ryder, maybe even younger version of her than the show.
[Joyce Byers - LV 2]
HP: 130/130
Age: 38
Status: Healthy. Stressed (financial).
Level 2. Same as Pete and Mrs. Patterson. Normal adult range. The financial stress wasn't a surprise. Lonnie Byers had left his family with debts and bitterness, and Joyce worked retail to keep two kids fed. In the show, she'd been scraping by long before Will vanished.
Ryan pocketed the information and kept walking. Maybe he could help them.
By Sunday evening, one week after his awakening, the Observe counter in his head had somewhere north of a hundred and sixty uses. The system had been tracking every single one.
[Skill "Observe" has leveled up! LV 1 → LV 2]
That came Wednesday evening. And then on Saturday afternoon, while he was Observing a squirrel in the park near the school:
[Skill "Observe" has leveled up! LV 2 → LV 3]
LV 3 Observe was different. The text windows had more lines. Objects showed condition percentages instead of vague descriptors. People displayed their emotional state in more specific terms. And there was a new element. When he Observed a person, he got a faint read on their general disposition toward him.
He tested it on Dustin at lunch on Friday.
[Dustin Henderson - LV 1]
HP: 75/75
Age: 15
Status: Healthy. Excited (new comic book).
Disposition toward you: Friendly.
Friendly. Good. And expected. But seeing it quantified was strange. Dustin was his friend because years of shared history made them friends, not because a system window said so. The number underneath the word, whatever algorithm the system used to calculate it, was just data. But it was useful data. When he eventually met people he couldn't trust, like Brenner's agents or the Russians or whoever else the timeline threw at him, that disposition line could be the difference between walking into a trap and walking away from one.
* * *
Sunday, May 29 - Pete's House
Two weeks after the awakening. Ryan sat at his desk with the status window open and did inventory.
The daily quest had been paying out reliably. Twenty-five XP every day for thirteen days. That was 325 XP. Add in the 100 he'd had from the Welcome to Hawkins quest, plus small amounts from skill creation events that the system awarded as bonus XP, things like 10 XP for creating Unarmed Combat, 10 for Basic First Aid, 10 for Survival. His total accumulated XP had crossed 400 a few days ago.
Level 2 required 300 XP. He'd hit it last Wednesday, six days after starting the daily quest.
[Level Up! Level 1 → Level 2]
[You have gained 5 stat points!]
[You have gained 1 skill point!]
[HP and MP have been fully restored.]
Five stat points. He'd been thinking about where to put them since before the level-up happened, running the numbers in his head while riding his bike.
The temptation was to dump everything into STR or DEX, pump his physical stats to make the early grind faster. But that was short-term thinking. The biggest bottleneck in his build wasn't physical power, it was MP. His pool was tiny. A hundred points. Ten Power Strikes and he was empty. And everyone knows that Eleven is far stronger and more effective than Hopper when facing monsters, so in this world, magic clearly outclasses physical power.
He needed INT and WIS. INT expanded the pool. WIS improved regen. Together they'd let him train longer, fight harder, and sustain more skills without running dry.
He put three points into INT and two into WIS.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 2
XP: 155/600
HP: 180/180
MP: 145/145
STR: 9
VIT: 12
DEX: 10
INT: 18 (+3 from level, +1 from reading)
WIS: 14 (+2 from level)
CHA: 7
LUK: 5
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 1
MP 145. Forty-five points more than last week. That was four extra Power Strikes per training session, or nearly a full extra Meditation cycle's worth of breathing room. WIS 14 meant faster regen too. The warmth in his chest refilled a little quicker between sessions, the pulse of recovery slightly stronger.
And VIT had ticked up to 12, from another training gain after a particularly brutal run on Thursday. His HP reflected it. 180 was more than double what Will had, more than double what any of his friends had. If he got into a fight with a normal person, he'd walk through their punches. If he got into a fight with something from the Upside Down, he'd survive at least two hits instead of just one, before things got critical.
The skill point he saved. He wasn't sure what skill points distribution he wanted yet. In the manhwa, they could boost skills or unlock new ones. He'd experiment later.
Ryan scrolled to his skill list.
Skills:
- Gamer's Mind (Passive) - MAX
- Gamer's Body (Passive) - MAX
- Observe (Active) - LV 3
- Physical Endurance (Passive) - LV 2
- Power Strike (Active) - LV 3
- Meditation (Active) - LV 2
- Mapping (Passive) - LV 1
- Basic First Aid (Active) - LV 1
- Unarmed Combat (Passive) - LV 1
- Survival (Passive) - LV 1
Ten skills. Two weeks ago, he had three. The library gambit alone had given him three new skills in a single day. Physical training had leveled his combat abilities. Observe was climbing from sheer volume of use.
He was building something. Slowly, brick by brick, stat point by stat point. Level 2 wasn't going to scare a Demogorgon. But if he maintained this pace, by the time November came around, he'd be strong enough to face what was coming with more than just foreknowledge and hope. Unless it was Vecna…. In that case, he'd only be strong enough to run away, also Vecna doesn't run, he just does that creepy slow chase thing. Besides, November Vecna is basically Version 1.0. No muscles, no upgrades, definitely not the bulk Vecna.
He closed the status window and looked out the window. Pete's backyard. The maple tree with its scarred trunk. The shed at the back corner, padlocked and forgotten.
The shed.
It wasn't big. Eight by ten, maybe. Plywood walls, corrugated metal roof, a concrete pad floor. Pete kept a lawnmower in there and some tools. He hadn't opened it in months.
But Ryan had been thinking about space. About where to train where nobody could see him. About where to store the things he'd eventually start collecting from dungeon runs and loot drops and crafting experiments. His bedroom was ten by twelve with thin walls and a nosy uncle on the other side. The backyard was open to every neighbor's window. The library was public.
Pete's shed was a start. But it was too small and too close to the house.
There was a better option. He'd noticed it during his runs, on the dirt road south of the residential grid. An old property at the edge of town, where the houses gave way to farmland and trees. The house itself was abandoned, had been for years judging by the broken windows and the waist-high grass.
He'd Observed it from the road on Thursday.
[Abandoned Miller Property]
Former owner: Harold Miller
Status: Foreclosed. County-held (tax-delinquent, foreclosed 1979). No active buyers.
Condition: Structurally sound. Needs electrical, plumbing repair. Roof leak in northeast corner.
Estimated Value: $4,200
4,200 dollars is dirty cheap. More than dirty cheap it was a complete joke of a price, maybe the house was also hunted? This is definitely a house to buy.
Also, Tax-delinquent. Foreclosed. Owned by the county, meant nobody was using it, nobody was checking on it, and nobody would notice if a kid started fixing it up.
It needed work. A lock he could pick or replace. Cleaning. Maybe some basic repairs. But the bones were there. He got himself private space, far enough from neighbors that he could train without worrying about noise.
That was next week's project. Along with figuring out money, because fixing up this house and buying supplies cost more than what his forty-dollar lawn-mowing fund could cover.
Ryan made a mental list. Physical training in the mornings. Library visits three times a week. Start scoping the Miller property for real. Look into odd jobs, lawn work, anything that paid cash to a kid with no work permit and a bicycle.
Ryan closed the window. Downstairs, Pete was watching TV. The laugh track bled through the floor, faint and tinny and weirdly comforting.
He reached over and set his alarm for five AM.
[A.N: Yes, I know $4,200 is ridiculously cheap, like "Is this house haunted or did the county misprint a zero?" cheap. But honestly, that felt about right for a small, economically stagnant town in 1983. Did I research real estate prices? Absolutely not. I went with my gut, which is powered entirely by vibes and questionable confidence.]