The burrito was cold by the time Ryan left the office.
He'd meant to eat it at his desk around one, but then Jenkins pushed a hotfix to production without running the test suite, and the next three hours turned into the kind of debugging session that made him seriously consider a career change. Plumbing, maybe.
He walked down Seventh Street with his earbuds in, half-listening to a podcast about some Netflix show he hadn't started yet, half-thinking about the work he still needed to review before tomorrow. The burrito sat in his backpack like a sad little brick. He'd eat it when he got home. Microwave it for ninety seconds, pretend that it counted as dinner.
Twenty-four years old. Software engineer at a mid-size firm that made inventory management software for restaurant chains. It paid well enough for a one-bedroom in a building where the elevator worked most days. His apartment had two monitors, a wall of bookshelves he was genuinely proud of, and a couch that had survived three moves. No girlfriend. A few work friends he grabbed beers with on Fridays. His parents were gone before he could remember them, foster care until he was eighteen, then college on scholarships and stubbornness.
It was a fine life. He'd built it from nothing, and it worked. Some nights, lying on that couch watching something meaningless, he wondered if working was all it would ever do.
Currently deep in a Stranger Things rewatch. Fourth time through. He was in the middle of a Reddit argument about whether the Duffer Brothers had planned the Vecna reveal from the beginning or if they'd retrofitted it. His position was that the 1979 lab massacre was always in their back pocket, but the specific Henry-is-One connection got bolted on around Season 3 development. Nobody online cared of course, but he cared, and that was enough.
The crosswalk light turned green. Ryan stepped off the curb, thinking about nothing in particular.
Suddenly he saw a girl walking on the far side of the intersection.
She was five, maybe six. Pink jacket, light-up sneakers, a stuffed rabbit in one hand. She'd wandered off the sidewalk, chasing something he couldn't see. A ball, maybe. Whatever it was had bounced into the street.
The delivery truck was coming from his left. Big white panel van, moving fast for a city street. The driver was checking his mirror, not looking ahead.
Ryan's brain did the math without processing the obvious and ironic consequences. Distance. Speed. Time. The driver wasn't going to see her. Not on time.
He ran.
Not really a decision or choice. His legs moved and the rest of him went along for the ride. Three steps, four, and he was across the lane, hands reaching for the girl, and he shoved her hard enough that she tumbled back onto the sidewalk with a scream that meant she was alive, she was going to cry and her mom would scoop her up and she'd be okay.
Ryan felt the impact.
Unlike his expectation the pain was not the main theme. More like the world got replaced by something else for a second. Pressure, noise and fracturing lights. Then the pressure was gone and he was on his back, looking at the sky. It was very blue. Late afternoon blue, the kind you only notice when you're not in a hurry.
He couldn't feel his legs. Somewhere far away, someone was screaming. The little girl was crying on the sidewalk, and a woman was sprinting toward her.
Good. That was good.
His last thoughts were not the kind that made it into movies. He thought: God my The Stranger Things rewatch.
The blue sky went dark.
Like someone had turned off the projector.
He floated in it for a while. Could have been seconds. Could have been years. There was no way to tell and nothing to tell it with.
Then, light. Like sunlight, coming through a window with thin curtains that had little sailboats printed on them.
A radio was playing music somewhere in the house. And his body didn't feel right. Too small and too light.
Ryan opened his eyes.
The memories came all at once, and they came hard.
Fifteen years of a life he'd lived hit him like a wall of water. Not a gentle trickle or a highlight reel. Everything. All of it, crashing into the space behind his eyes while he gripped the bed sheets and tried to breathe.
Born in 1968. His mother died in childbirth. His father, Tom Reed, made it four years before a drunk driver on Route 37 took care of the rest. Uncle Pete took him in because there was nobody else. Pete Reed, who worked the floor at the auto parts factory six days a week and came home smelling like machine oil and smoke. Not warm but also not cold. Just a man doing what he thought was right with tools he have.
Elementary school. Middle school. Riding bikes through neighborhoods where every house looked pretty much the same. Playing in the woods behind Randolph Lane until the streetlights came on. Mike Wheeler's basement, where the carpet smelled like spilled Coke and the overhead light buzzed.
Rolling dice. D&D every weekend for two years. Mike running the campaigns like a tiny dictator, arguing about rules with anyone who'd argue back. Dustin laughing so hard he choked on chips. Lucas calling everyone idiots with a grin that took the sting out. Will drawing maps on graph paper, always the last one to pack up and go home.
Troy Walsh shoving Dustin into a locker in seventh grade. Ryan stepping between them. Not throwing a punch, just standing there, looking at Troy until Troy decided he had somewhere else to be.
Fifteen years of a real life. His life. But also not his life at all, because underneath it, like a hard drive with a second operating system, there was everything else. Twenty-four years in a different world. College. Code. Apartments. A killer truck.
Ryan sat up in bed. His hands were shaking. They were small. A kid's hands, with bitten nails and a scab on the right knuckle from God knows what.
He looked around the room. Star Wars poster on the wall, the original trilogy, creased at the corners from being taken down and put back up. Indiana Jones next to it. A bookshelf crammed with D&D manuals, a stack of comics, and a dog-eared copy of The Hobbit. Desk with school notebooks. Clothes on the floor. Baseball gloves in the corner.
He knew this room. He'd slept in it for years.
And he'd never seen it before in his life.
Ryan got out of bed and walked to the bathroom. Linoleum floor, cold on his bare feet. He turned on the light, looked in the mirror.
A Fifteen-year-old kid stared back. Dark brown hair, a little too long on top, shorter on the sides. Gray-green eyes. Strong jaw for his age. A small scar cutting through his left eyebrow from a bike crash when he was nine. Both Ryans remembered that.
He gripped the edge of the sink. The porcelain was cool under his fingers.
Two lives. Both complete. Both his. The teenager who grew up in this house, and the programmer who died on a city street saving a kid in light-up sneakers.
He stared at his reflection and waited for the panic to hit. The kind of full-body, screaming terror that should come with realizing you died and woke up as a child in a different decade. He could feel it building in his chest, pressing against his ribs, trying to climb up his throat.
But it didn't reach his head. It pushed and pushed, and something held. Like an invisible wall.
His breathing stayed steady. His hands stopped shaking. The fear was real, and alive somewhere in his gut, but it couldn't get to the place where it would actually shut him down.
That was weird. That was very weird.
The second realization was also settling in now, and this one was worse than the first.
Hawkins, Indiana.
Mike Wheeler.
Dustin Henderson.
Lucas Sinclair.
Will Byers.
Not common names, definitely not all of them together. There is no away this is f**king coincidence.
He knew these names from two places. Years of friendship, and five seasons of a TV show he'd watched so many times he could quote the dialogue.
Ryan looked at the kid in the mirror. The kid looked back.
He was in Stranger Things.
His brain tried to reject it. This was a dream, a coma fantasy, a dying hallucination on a city street while paramedics worked on his body. But the counter felt real. The cold floor felt real. The Fifteen years of memories in this place, riding bikes and rolling dice and eating Uncle Pete's terrible spaghetti, those felt real too. He doesn't have this much mental capacity to imagine all of this.
He went through its piece by piece.
Hawkins, Indiana. May 1983. He knew the date from the calendar on the kitchen wall downstairs, the one Uncle Pete got free from the hardware store every December.
November 1983. That's when Will disappears. When the Lab opens the gate. When the Demogorgon comes through and everything in this quiet town goes wrong.
Six months. He had six months.
His first clear thought. Get out. Leave Hawkins immediately. Take a bus to Chicago, to Indianapolis, to literally anywhere that isn't the epicenter of an interdimensional disaster. He knew what was coming. Demogorgons. Mind Flayers. Government experiments. Russians. A psychic serial killer who used to be a lab rat. People died here. A lot of people.
He was already thinking about routes. Pete would barely notice if he was gone for a few days. He had maybe forty dollars saved up from mowing lawns. He could go to anyw…
A blue window appeared in front of his face.
Ryan flinched hard.
The window hung in the air, translucent, glowing faintly. It wasn't in the mirror. It wasn't projected from anywhere. It was just there, floating in his field of vision like the world's most aggressive pop-up advertisement notification.
[The Gamer System has been activated.]
[Synchronizing with host... Complete.]
[Welcome, Player.]
[Tutorial Quest available.]
Ryan stared at it. He reached out and his finger passed straight through. Not a physical object. Something in his head, overlaid on his vision like a HUD in a video game.
He knew what this was. He'd read "The Gamer." He'd read dozens of LitRPG novels. He'd spent entire weekends arguing with people on forums about optimal Gamer builds and whether Han Jee-Han was an idiot for not leveling WIS faster.
He was standing in a bathroom in Hawkins, Indiana, in 1983, looking at a literal game system interface.
"Status window," he said. His voice cracked. Puberty, that just Great.
The window shifted, expanded.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 1
HP: 150/150
MP: 100/100
STR: 8
VIT: 10
DEX: 9
INT: 14
WIS: 12
CHA: 7
LUK: 5
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 0
Ryan read it twice.
INT was his highest stat. Made sense. He'd always been smart guy. The system was reading something from his old life, translating it. CHA 7 tracked too. He'd never been great at parties. LUK 5 was almost insulting, but then again, he'd gotten hit by a truck, so the numbers weren't lying.
STR 8 was average for a Fifteen-year-old boy. VIT 10, DEX 9, both reasonable. He played sports, kept in shape, nothing special.
He swiped mentally and found his skills.
[Skills]
Gamer's Mind (Passive) - MAX
Gamer's Body (Passive) - MAX
Observe - LV 1
Gamer's Mind. That explained the wall. The panic he'd felt, the terror that should have buried him, it was still there. He could feel it right now, a cold weight in his stomach. But it couldn't reach his ability to think. Couldn't overwhelm him. Couldn't shut him down. Like a surge protector between his emotions and his brain.
He wasn't calm because he wasn't scared. He was calm because the system wouldn't let the fear take over.
Gamer's Body. His HP was 150. His body ran on game logic now. Sleep would restore health. Damage wouldn't slow him down until he hit zero.
Observe. He looked at the towel hanging on the rack and focused.
[Bath Towel]
A faded blue bath towel. Cotton blend.
Condition: Well-used. Fraying edges.
Value: $2
Ryan exhaled. He looked at his toothbrush.
[Toothbrush]
A red plastic toothbrush. Soft bristles.
Condition: Needs replacing.
Value: $0.50
He laughed. Short, sharp, a little unhinged. He was standing in a bathroom in his underwear, reading item descriptions for toiletries, and he had a game system in his head, and outside this house was a town sitting on top of a dimensional time bomb.
The escape plan died right there at the sink.
If he left Hawkins, he would stay at low levels. But if he stayed, the Upside Down was the biggest source of experience points on the planet. Every creature down there probably has level, hit points, loot. The whole Stranger Things timeline was a quest chain waiting to be completed.
And there was ID Create. If Instant Dungeons worked like they did in the manhwa, he could grind in pocket dimensions without anyone knowing. Train, level up, get stronger, all while the rest of Hawkins went about its business.
Running meant his friends could died and he stayed weak. Staying meant he could get strong enough to actually change things.
Mike. Dustin. Lucas. Will. He had Fifteen years of memories with them. Real memories. They were real people, not characters on a screen. Will suppose to disappeared in November. Barb died at a pool party. Bob got torn apart by Demodogs. Eddie bled out in the Upside Down playing guitar to buy everyone else time.
He knew all of it. Every death, every loss, every terrible thing that was coming for the people in this town.
Ryan closed the status window. Splashed cold water on his face. Looked at the kid in the mirror one more time.
Six months.
He'd better get to work.
Uncle Pete was already gone when Ryan came downstairs. Saturday shift. There was a note on the kitchen counter in Pete's slanted handwriting: Cereal in the cabinet. Back by 8.
The house was small. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with avocado-green appliances that had been old when Pete bought the place. A living room with a couch, a TV on a stand, and a recliner that Pete had basically fused with over the years. It was clean enough tough.
Ryan ate cereal, and sat at the kitchen table and chewed and thought about his future plans.
He needed space. Somewhere to train, to plan, to store whatever loot started dropping from dungeon mobs. This house wasn't going to cut it. His bedroom was ten feet by twelve, and Pete's bedroom was right next door. Hard to explain midnight training sessions or a pile of monster parts in the closet.
That was problem for later. For now, he had more things to verify.
He went outside. May in Hawkins was warm, the kind of soft Midwestern warmth that made everything look like a postcard. Green lawns, clean sidewalks, big trees just hitting full leaf. A neighbor was mowing grass two houses down. A car rolled past, slow, with no hurry.
Ryan walked down the sidewalk and Observed everything he could. A mailbox. A parked Ford pickup. A golden retriever sleeping on someone's porch.
[Mailbox]
Standard USPS residential mailbox. Metal.
Owner: The Henderson Family.
Condition: Good. Minor surface rust.
[1978 Ford F-150]
Light blue pickup truck. V8 engine.
Owner: Gerald Perkins.
Condition: Fair. Oil change overdue.
Mileage: 87,342
[Golden Retriever — LV 2]
Name: Biscuit
HP: 45/45
A friendly and well-fed dog.
Status: Sleeping. Content.
Even the dog had a level. Ryan shook his head and kept walking.
A notification pinged in his vision.
[Quest: "Welcome to Hawkins"]
Objective: Explore Hawkins and visit 5 notable locations.
Reward: 100 XP, Local Map (Minimap feature)
Time Limit: None
He accepted it. Free XP was free XP. He could knock this out on his bike later.
But first, he had somewhere to be.
The Wheeler house looked exactly the way his memories said it should and exactly the way he remembered from the show. Split-level, white siding, nice lawn. Upper-middle-class suburban, the kind of house where the fridge was always full and nobody talked about feelings at dinner.
Ryan parked his bike on the lawn next to three others and walked inside without knocking. Nobody knocked. That was the rule. The Wheelers' front door was basically a public entrance for anyone under sixteen.
He went down to the basement. The stairs creaked on the third step. The carpet smelled exactly like his memories and the overhead light did actually buzz.
They were already there. All four of them, arranged around the folding table like they'd been there for hours, which they probably had.
Mike Wheeler sat at the head of the table, DM screen up, binder open, that look on his face that meant he'd spent all week planning something horrible for their characters. Dark hair falling in his eyes. Thin, angular, all elbows and intensity. He was arguing with Dustin about something, hands moving while he talked, and Ryan could see the exact moment he lost patience because his jaw tightened and his voice went up.
Ryan Observed him, quick, subtle, just a glance.
[Mike Wheeler — LV 1]
HP: 80/80
Age: 15
Status: Healthy. Annoyed (ongoing rules dispute).
Level 1. Eighty hit points. A normal kid.
Dustin Henderson was across from Mike, grinning, clearly enjoying the argument more than the game. Curly hair barely contained by a trucker cap, blue eyes bright with the pleasure of being technically correct about something. He had a bag of chips open next to his character sheet and was eating them one at a time between sentences. Stocky, round-faced, wearing a t-shirt with a faded NASA logo.
[Dustin Henderson — LV 1]
HP: 75/75
Age: 15
Status: Healthy. Pleased (winning an argument).
Lucas Sinclair leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed, watching the argument with an expression that said he'd heard this exact fight before and was waiting for it to end. Short hair, dark eyes, a face that defaulted to skeptical. He wore a camo bandana around his head like a headband, army-surplus style. Of all of them, Lucas looked the most like he was ready for something, even if he didn't know what.
[Lucas Sinclair — LV 1]
HP: 85/85
Age: 15
Status: Healthy. Bored (wants to start playing).
And Will. Will Byers sat at the far end of the table, slightly apart from the argument, sketching something in the margin of his character sheet. Light brown hair, soft features, smaller than the rest of them. He looked up when the argument got loud, half smiled, then went back to drawing. There was something about Will that had always been like that, even in Ryan's memories here. Not withdrawn, exactly. Just quiet and very comfortable in the background. The kind of kid you forgot was there until he said something smart and everyone looked at him.
[Will Byers — LV 1]
HP: 70/70
Age: 15
Status: Healthy.
Seventy HP. The lowest of the group. And in six months, he'd be trapped alone in a dimension that wanted to eat him alive.
"Dude, you're late." Dustin pointed a chip at Ryan. "We're doing Tomb of Horrors."
"I overslept," Ryan said. The lie came easy. Both versions of him were decent liars when they needed to be.
"Grab your sheet. Mike's been on a power trip since nine o'clock." Lucas jerked his thumb at Mike, who looked offended.
"I have NOT been on a power trip. I've been explaining the RULES, which some people" Mike pointed at Dustin "refuse to accept."
"The rules are wrong," Dustin said. "A halfling should absolutely be able to dual-wield hand crossbows. It's in the Unearthed Arcana."
"Unearthed Arcana is not official!"
[A.N: Actually, the Unearthed Arcana the original book was published on 1985, but flow with me]
Ryan sat down. He grabbed his character sheet from the pile. Ryan-of-this-world played a human fighter named Garrett. The character sheet was filled out in his own handwriting, a version of his handwriting that was messier and more rushed than the programmer's had ever been.
He settled in. Let Mike run the game. Let Dustin argue. Let Lucas complain that the dungeon was unfair when his character triggered the second trap in five minutes. Watched Will draw a map of the tomb on graph paper, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth, completely absorbed.
They played for three hours. Ryan made the right choices in the dungeon because he'd read about the Tomb of Horrors in his old life and knew where the traps were, but he got a few wrong on purpose so it wouldn't seem weird. Dustin's halfling fell into a pit. Lucas's ranger nearly got dissolved by acid. Will's wizard found a hidden room that Mike hadn't expected anyone to find, and the look on Mike's face, half-annoyed, half-impressed, was exactly the kind of thing that didn't translate through a screen.
These were his friends. Not in a dramatic, I-will-protect-you-with-my-life way. Just group of kids he'd grown up with, sitting in a basement that smelled bad, arguing about rules that didn't matter, and it was good. It was the kind of good that Ryan's old life had never quite managed to achieved.
Will caught his eye across the table at one point. Just a look, a small smile, the kind of thing Will did when the others were being loud and he wanted someone to share the joke with. Ryan smiled back.
Six months, he thought. He is not going to let anything happen to him.
"Ryan." Mike's voice. DM voice. "Your fighter enters the corridor. There's a green devil face on the wall at the end. What do you do?"
Ryan looked at the map. Looked at Mike. Looked at the green devil face, which in the Tomb of Horrors was a sphere of annihilation disguised as a decoration. Anything that went into its mouth was destroyed. Gone. No saving throw.
"I throw a rock into it," Ryan said.
The rock vanished. Mike described it with obvious glee.
"Cool," Ryan said. "I go around it."
Dustin groaned. "How did you KNOW that?"
Ryan shrugged. "Bad feeling about green devil faces."
The game went on.
He rode home as the sun dropped behind the trees. The air was warm and smelled like cut grass and somebody's backyard grill. Hawkins in the golden hour, all long shadows and soft light, the kind of evening where nothing bad could possibly happen.
Ryan pedaled slowly while thinking.
He was Level 1 with garbage stats, no useful skills, and a body that couldn't bench press its own weight. In November, a creature from another dimension was going to rip a hole in reality and start hunting people. After that, things got worse. The Mind Flayer. The Russians. Vecna.
He needed a plan. Not a vague plan. A real one, with steps.
Step one: grind. ID Create unlocked at Level 5, if the system followed the manhwa's logic. He needed to get there fast. That meant XP from quests, from training, from whatever the system would give him for pushing himself.
Step two: physical training. The Gamer system let you earn stat points from actual exercise. Running, lifting, fighting. Real effort for real gains, separate from level-up points. He'd start tomorrow. Five AM. Running until his lungs burned, then push-ups, then whatever else he could do without equipment. A teenager working out wouldn't raise flags. Hawkins kids played sports. It was normal.
Step three: money and a base. He needed somewhere to work that wasn't Pete's house. Loot from dungeons might solve the money problem once he could actually run dungeons, but that was weeks away at least. For now he'd figure something out.
Step four: A cover. A kid who suddenly started acting like a supersoldier would attract exactly the kind of attention he couldn't afford. Hawkins Lab was up the road. Brenner was still running experiments on children with abilities. The last thing Ryan needed was to end up on a gurney next to Eleven.
Step five: Will's disappearance. The Demogorgon. And Eleven, somewhere in that lab right now, probably scared, probably alone, probably being told to call her torturer "Papa."
He'd find her. When she escaped, he'd be there. Not Mike, not Dustin, not Lucas. Him. Because he knew what she needed, and he knew what was coming, and he was the only person in this entire town who could actually protect her.
Ryan pulled into Uncle Pete's driveway. The house was dark. Pete wouldn't be home for another two hours.
He went to his room. Sat on the bed. Opened the status window one more time.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 1
HP: 150/150
MP: 100/100
STR: 8
VIT: 10
DEX: 9
INT: 14
WIS: 12
CHA: 7
LUK: 5
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 0
He still can't believe it, a f**king Gamer system in God dame Hawkins
Ryan closed the window. Set his alarm clock for five AM, plastic buttons clicked under his fingers.
Tomorrow he'd start running. The day after that, he'd run farther. And he'd keep going until the numbers changed, until the system gave him what he needed, until he was strong enough to stand between his friends and the things in the dark.
He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.
[A.N:
- Remember, I am newbie author, show mercy!
- Yes, technically he could run away and level up slowly, but where is the fun in that? Also, his friends could possibly die from butterfly effect.]