Chương 1: Thanksgiving

Alex rubbed his hands over his nose as he tried to ignore the annoyance directed at him by his fellow bus rider sitting by the window. Alex, being a 6'3" dude weighing close to 300 lbs of pure muscle, knew that sitting on a bus was just as annoying for everyone else as it would be for any other 300 lb person. He knew he was taking up his seat and a little more, but that was the price of being a top-class powerlifter. He didn't think she would care that much, even if she knew what he did on his downtime.

The big box sitting on his lap, close to touching her, probably wasn't helping his case either. He'd wrapped it twice in butcher paper before leaving his apartment, careful with it in a way that didn't match the rest of him. Maybe he should have just rented a car for the trip home instead, something with actual legroom for once, but his bank account had a different opinion on that.

Between groceries and the absurd amount of chicken breast he went through every week, there hadn't been much left over by the time Thanksgiving rolled around. Refocusing on the thing he'd been doing for the past forty minutes of this bus ride, Alex continued his calligraphy, well aware of how surprising it was that a 6'3" bear of a man spent his spare time writing.

The brush pen in his hand looked almost comically small between his fingers, but his strokes were steady, deliberate, nothing like the rest of him crammed into an economy bus seat built for someone half his size. The ink had a faint, almost metallic smell to it, the kind that stuck to the back of his throat if he leaned over the page too long, and the paper had that particular give under the nib that told him he'd pressed just hard enough and not a stroke harder.

People never expected someone of his stature to be interested in what they'd call "fancy handwriting," but Alex didn't care. He loved it. He'd started with English calligraphy and worked his way up to Chinese calligraphy, which was a lot harder, but it had also gotten him into learning new languages. He was at seven now. Closing his book, he tucked his pen away and felt his knees knock against the back of whoever's seat was in front of him, for what had to be the hundredth time this ride.

The air in here stunk, too, too many people crammed into too small a space. Alex thought about the reason he was putting up with any of it. His family took Thanksgiving a little too seriously, and missing one would have gotten him a lot of grief from his mom and sister. His dad wouldn't have said anything, but the glare alone would've sent him into a guilt spiral for a week. Not that Alex minded coming home for Thanksgiving.

All the extended family came back to Hegewisch in Chicago, right by the coast, to celebrate together, and that part he actually looked forward to. Alex looked out the window and saw he was getting close to his stop. He smiled at the green fields rolling past and got off the bus. The other passengers didn't seem too torn up about losing his company; a few groaned in relief as he gathered his things, but nobody said anything, because he was, after all, a fairly towering figure. Not that he didn't notice.

He cared a little, but not enough to lose the smile on his way out the door. Alex stepped off the bus with a radiant smile on his face. He missed home. He wasn't usually the expressive type, but he was happy to be back. It had been a couple of months since he'd seen his grandparents and the rest of the family, thanks to college being a massive pain in the butt. He didn't even want to think about school right now. He picked up his pace, and before long, he was standing in front of his family's house.

This had been his home for as long as he could remember, and being the biggest house among the extended family, it was always where they hosted the gathering. The porch light was already on despite the sun still being up, a habit Grandpa had never broken since the kids were small enough to wander off.

Before he could even reach the front door, he heard his sister's kids, Jake and John, because his sister was apparently incapable of creativity when it came to naming twins, come barreling around the side of the house, mid-sword-fight with a pair of sticks. Alex remembered the good old days when he used to join in on that kind of thing, but he always ended up breaking something whenever he did. Hope they don't break anything. Spotting him, the twins lit up and came running over, grinning.

Jake was the taller of the two, around nine years old, while John was the stockier-looking one. Both boys leapt at him at once, and Alex scooped them up and spun them around. Building strong relationships within the family was something Grandpa had always emphasized, and he'd practiced what he preached by having ten kids. The one mercy in that was that Grandpa had had all ten with the same woman: Grandma. On the front steps stood his sister Ace and her husband Jeremy, both waving at him with wide smiles.

Jeremy ducked back inside while Ace came down the steps, telling the boys to head in and get ready for dinner as she ushered Alex toward the house.

"Well, would you look at that," she said, a playful jab in her tone.

"Almost thought you'd never make it."

"You know I wouldn't miss it for the world." Alex shot her a grin.

"Although if you knew the difficulty of taking the bus, you wouldn't be complaining about me being late, your highness." Ace closed the distance and pulled him into a hug.

"Didn't miss you one bit," she said into his shoulder.

"Forgot you even existed," Alex shot back, every bit the good brother, even though the two of them hadn't gone a single week without calling. As they started walking toward the house, Alex asked the question that had been on his mind the whole ride over.

"Did everyone make it?" Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. He wanted to see his whole family together, and even though everyone always tried, there was usually someone who missed the gathering. Last time it had been Ace, some medical emergency she'd never wanted to talk about. Being a doctor took its toll on her like that.

"Surprisingly, everyone's here," Ace said.

"You were the last one to show up." Alex felt a grin spread across his face. Everyone, all at once, meant today was going to be loud in the best possible way. Walking inside, he was hit with a wall of noise, kids screaming from every corner of the house, and a few neighbors mixed into the crowd. He made his way through, greeting people as he went, until he found his dad and pulled him into a hug.

His mom looked like she was about to start pouting about being skipped, so he grabbed her too and folded her into the same hug. Being his size came with perks like that. His heart was fine, as far as he knew; he hadn't actually gotten it checked by a doctor, but he believed it to be true, because anything else would just be a doctor telling him to cut down on the muscle, and that was never going to happen. Releasing his parents from the hug, Alex caught up with them for a few minutes.

His mom was, as usual, mildly concerned about how big he kept getting. It had started back in high school, when he'd joined the football team, already pretty buff thanks to good genetics, and then gotten properly into lifting. Turned out he loved it: not just the process of moving progressively heavier weights, but the feeling of breaking his own limits, of getting as close to superhuman as a person could get.

He looked at his mom, the woman who'd cooked every single piece of chicken it took to build him into what he was now, and smiled. He knew she worried, but muscles were cool, and he wasn't going to hear otherwise. She gave up arguing, the same way she always did, knowing full well this wasn't the first or last time they'd have this exact conversation. With a nod to his dad, Alex made a beeline for the food table.

The whole length of it was buried under aluminum trays, mashed potatoes still steaming, a turkey that had clearly lost a fight with someone's carving knife, three different kinds of stuffing because nobody in this family could agree on what stuffing was supposed to taste like. He grabbed a plate roughly the size of a hubcap and started loading it with whatever he could reach. Fueling 300 lbs of muscle wasn't easy, and he ate a lot, which worked out fine, since he also just really liked eating. Win-win.

One bite of the chicken told him Aunt Becky had made it again, the same dry rub she always used, and judging by the sheer volume of it stacked at the end of the table, probably with him specifically in mind. Last time they'd all gathered, he might have eaten a little too much of it, and a few people hadn't gotten any. Nobody had let him forget it since. He found a spot near the wall, away from the worst of the noise, and worked through the plate methodically, the way he approached most things he cared about.

He was halfway through zoning out over his food when a hand tapped his shoulder, light, but firm enough that he felt it through all that muscle.

"You really love food, don't you?" Grandpa. Eighty-five years old, with a head of white hair that refused to thin out and forearms that still looked like they belonged to a man half his age. He stood a full foot shorter than Alex but somehow never seemed smaller in a room, the kind of presence that came from being the reason ten kids and their families existed in the first place. Alex couldn't answer; his mouth was full of chicken thigh. Grandpa just kept going, settling into the chair beside him with a grunt.

"It's fine, don't hurt yourself, eat slowly. I miss when I was your age. Wasn't as big as you, but I'd still be able to wrestle you down." Alex doubted that very much, but he wasn't about to say so. He remembered wrestling with Grandpa as a kid, how much fun it used to be. He also remembered Grandpa being the one who'd first shown him the stars, out in the fields near the house, pointing out constellations, naming them one by one. That was the reason Alex was studying astrophysics now.

Funny how a life could pivot on one night and one old man pointing at the sky. He swallowed the last of the chicken, still not full, but enough to actually hold a conversation, and opened his mouth to answer Grandpa. That was when he heard it. A low groan from somewhere deep in the house's foundation, the kind of sound a building wasn't supposed to make. The chandelier above the dining table gave a single, sharp rattle.

For half a second, nobody moved, the whole room caught in that strange pause where everyone is waiting to find out if they imagined something. They hadn't. The floor lurched, hard enough that a glass on the table tipped over and rolled off the edge. Grandpa staggered sideways, his cane skidding out from under him on the hardwood. Alex's hand shot out and caught his arm before he could think about it, grip locking tight around the old man's elbow to keep him upright.

Somewhere behind him, one of the twins shrieked, more excitement than fear, and a string of dishes crashed in the kitchen. It wasn't like any earthquake Alex had ever felt, not that he'd felt many growing up in Chicago. This one had a rhythm to it, almost deliberate, like the ground itself was breathing. Before he could process anything else, a notification snapped into the air in front of his eyes, hanging there in his vision as it belonged. Initiating planet... What the… Planet scan complete. A grade potential.

Welcome, denizen of planet Earth, to the multiverse. Transporting denizen to tutorial zone. The edges of the dining room had already started to blur, color leaching out of the walls like someone had turned down a dial. Alex's grip tightened around Grandpa's arm on instinct, like he could anchor the old man here through sheer force.

"Grandpa, can you see that?" Before he could answer, everything went white.