You sat on the cracked, metal stool that leans against the far wall of the WSQK Squawk Radio Tower’s little‑used control room, the humming of the old transmitter a low thrum under the night’s chill.

The glow of the flickering console light painted a pale rectangle on the concrete floor, and the only window offered a view of the town’s rooftops, a quilt of dark silhouettes against the waning moon.

Dustin Henderson leaned over the table, his curly brown hair a wild halo that seems to bounce with each animated gesture. He slid a makeshift schematic of the plan across the polished steel, the paper crammed with arrows, circles, and words that look like they belong in a chemistry textbook rather than a teenage boy’s notebook.

“You see, the thing is—” he started, his voice a rapid cascade of equations and acronyms, “—the temporospatial resonance field we’ll generate with the modified EM coil has to be synchronized with the quantum destabilizer. If we can create a phase‑locked loop at 3.14 megahertz, the vortex in the Abyss will collapse in under thirty seconds. That gives us a clean window to—”

You stared at the page, eyes tracing the lines of ink, but the words dissolve into a blur of symbols. Resonance field… quantum destabilizer… phase‑locked loop?

You bit the corner of your lower lip and tried to pull the meaning out, but it slipped like water through a cracked faucet. Your mind wandered to the way Dustin’s eyebrows knit together when he was thinking, the way his hands fidget with the spare screwdriver he kept in his pocket, the way his laughter always felt like a secret you were not quite allowed to hear.

He didn't notice the vacancy in your gaze. For the next few minutes he rattled off the steps like a lab partner reciting a dangerous experiment to a class full of skeptics.

Your thoughts drifted back to the night when the group first gathered around the old oak table in Mike’s basement. You remember yourself, how you had stared at Dustin, heart thudding in your chest, trying not to look away when his eyes flickered with a seriousness you’d never seen before. You both had been twelve, clumsy and still learning the shape of your own feelings.

You blinked, forcing yourself back to the present. The paper in front of you was a tangle of diagrams you couldn't parse, but the urgency in Dustin’s voice was clear.

“—and then we need a charge. I’ve jury‑riggered a plasma capacitor from the old generator in the basement, so when we fire the destabilizer, the overload will create a cascade—”

Dustin stopped pacing when he saw you staring past the paper. “Hey,” He tilted his head, suddenly quieter. “You still with me?”