The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

I stood in the wrecked gym for another thirty seconds after Diane’s footsteps faded upstairs, her perfume still hanging in the air like a ghost that refused to leave when the party ended. The crater in the wall stared at me. The hole in the ceiling stared at me. The dead heavy bag on the floor looked like a body at a crime scene, and I was the murder weapon.

Right. Fix the wall. Order the bag. Sleep.

I had exactly zero experience with drywall repair.

The original Lukas had grown up in a mansion where things got fixed by calling someone. The transmigrant had grown up in an apartment where things got fixed by the landlord eventually, usually after the third email and a passive-aggressive note taped to the building entrance. Neither version of me had ever held a putty knife or knew what a lag bolt actually looked like outside of a hardware store commercial.

I pulled out my phone. One-twenty-two AM. YouTube existed. YouTube had to have something.

I typed "how to patch a hole in drywall" and got eleven million results, which was both encouraging and deeply depressing because it meant eleven million other people had also punched holes in walls and needed the internet to save them. The first video was a cheerful man in a clean workshop demonstrating a patch that looked nothing like the basketball-sized crater currently ventilating my gym into the wall cavity. His hole was the size of a golf ball. Cute. Next.

The second video featured a guy in a garage who sounded like he’d been patching drywall since birth and couldn’t understand why anyone found it difficult. He kept saying "just feather it out" like that phrase meant something to a eighteen-year-old whose primary skill set involved ghostly arms and making women lose their better judgment.

I closed YouTube.

I could buy new drywall. I could buy spackle. I could buy a putty knife and mesh tape and whatever else the repair demanded. What I could not buy was the knowledge of how to make the finished product look like anything other than a war crime against home improvement. Diane would notice. Diane noticed paint undertones. Diane had opinions about thread counts. A spackle job done by someone who’d never held the tool would register on her Read the Room ability before I finished putting the lid back on the bucket.

Plan B.

I opened my phone’s browser again and searched for emergency home repair services in Verano, California. Several results populated at the top. Twenty-four-hour contractors. Water damage specialists. One company whose entire tagline was "We Fix What You Broke" with a winking emoji that felt personally targeted.

Most of them wouldn’t pick up until morning. That was fine. Sloane trained at five-thirty, which gave me about four hours to figure something out. I bookmarked three companies, set an alarm for six AM, and went upstairs to shower the drywall dust off my skin before it cemented itself into my pores.

Sleep came faster than expected. Boundless Stamina had a way of making my body collapse into unconsciousness the moment I gave it permission, like a laptop with a full battery that had been waiting for me to close the lid. I dreamed about a heavy bag the size of a skyscraper falling from the sky while Diane stood below it holding a glass of sweet tea and telling me the insurance wouldn’t cover it. The bag never reached the ground. That was the whole dream.

The alarm screamed at six. I killed it, showered again because the drywall dust had somehow migrated to my pillow during the night, and dressed in joggers and a grey t-shirt that didn’t smell like destruction. Then I went downstairs.

Sloane was already in the kitchen. Pink hair up. Sports bra. Compression leggings. The standard morning war uniform. She stood at the counter eating a banana with the focused hostility of someone who had been awake for thirty minutes and had already decided that today would be somebody’s problem.

She looked at me. Looked at the banana. Took another bite.

"The gym smells like a construction site."

"I’m handling it."

"You better be, because I’m not running drills in a room that looks like someone drove a car through it."

"I said I’m handling it."

"You said that about the protein shake you spilled in the fridge last week too, and I found it three days later growing a civilization."

I poured coffee. Black. The machine had been programmed the night before, a small mercy from past-me who apparently still had the capacity for forward planning despite spending his evening destroying property.

Sloane finished her banana and tossed the peel into the compost bin with a flick that demonstrated exactly how little she cared about my morning stress levels.

"I’m running outside today. The trails behind Creston Heights park. Join me if you fix the gym before seven-thirty."

She left through the side door. The morning light caught her ponytail as it swung behind her, and then she was gone, leaving nothing but the faint smell of her shampoo and the absolute certainty that she would make my afternoon hell if the gym wasn’t operational by the time she wanted to train.

I drank my coffee. Called the first contractor on my list.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Voicemail. A man with a voice like sandpaper told me to leave a message and that they’d return my call during business hours, which started at eight. I left a message that sounded calm and professional and completely failed to convey the urgency of a teenager who needed a gym wall repaired before his explosive girlfriend reduced him to carbon.

Second contractor. Same story. Voicemail. Business hours. Please hold.

Third contractor picked up. A woman answered with a voice that sounded like she’d been awake for approximately forty-five seconds and was not thrilled about it.

"ProBuild Restorations, how can I help you?"

"Hi. I have a hole in my wall and ceiling that needs to be repaired today."

"What kind of hole?"

"A big one."

"Sir, I need specifics. Are we talking water damage, structural failure, impact damage?"

"Impact damage. Training mishap."

Silence. The woman on the other end of the line processed that sentence the way most people processed news about a tax audit.

"A training mishap," she repeated.

"Yeah."

"In your home."

"In the home gym, yeah. I have a ceiling mount that tore out of the beam, so there’s a hole up there about the size of a softball. And then the object that was hanging from the mount hit the wall on the opposite side of the room and made a hole about the size of a basketball. Maybe a little bigger."

"Sir, are you a licensed Hero or Aspect user?"

"I’m a student."

"Halloran?"

"Starting in nine days."

Her tone shifted. Not friendlier. More resigned. The specific resignation of someone who fielded calls from Aspect users on a regular basis and had long since stopped being surprised by the property damage.

"Okay. We can send someone out for an assessment. Earliest available is this afternoon between two and four. The assessment itself runs one-fifty."

"One hundred and fifty dollars just to look at it?"

"Aspect-adjacent damage requires specialized assessment to determine whether the structural integrity has been compromised. Standard residential rates don’t apply."

Of course they didn’t. Nothing standard ever applied to anything in my life.

"Fine. Book it."

She took my information. Address, phone number, description of damage, the works. I gave her Diane’s address and felt the specific guilt of scheduling a contractor to come fix property damage I’d inflicted on someone else’s house with a magical staff that existed inside my inventory.

At seven-fifteen, the first contractor called back. A man named Dale who sounded like he woke up at four every morning by choice and ate nails for breakfast.

"Got your message. Training mishap, huh?"

"Yeah."

"You an Aspect user?"

"Channeler type. Force manipulation."

"Uh huh. What’d you hit?"

"Heavy bag. Which then hit the wall."

"How big’s the damage?"

I described it. In detail. The crater. The hole in the ceiling. The hook embedded in the opposite wall. Dale listened without interrupting, which either meant he was taking notes or he’d fallen back asleep.

"I can come out this morning," he said. "Around nine. Take a look, give you an estimate."

"That would be great."

"Fair warning though, if it’s structural, you’re looking at a different price bracket. Aspect damage to load-bearing elements gets into the specialty territory."

"How much is the specialty territory?"

Dale quoted me a range. The low end of the range made my stomach tighten. The high end of the range made my stomach attempt to exit through my throat.

"Yeah yeah, so how much will that actually cost for you guys to do? Just the drywall and the ceiling mount. Nothing structural."

"Well, that depends on what I see when I get there. But patch work for two impact sites, reinstallation of a ceiling mount with proper anchoring, surface finishing, and paint match? You’re probably looking at somewhere between three and four thousand."

I blinked. The coffee cup in my hand felt very heavy all of a sudden.

"Three to four thousand."

"That’s if it’s clean. No beam damage, no stud replacement, no electrical behind the wall. If we get in there and the lag bolt stripped the beam or the impact cracked a stud, you’re adding another two grand easy for the structural work plus the inspection."

"So potentially six thousand dollars."

"Ballpark, yeah. Aspect damage ain’t cheap. Regular contractor’ll charge you less but they won’t warranty it for Aspect environments, which means your insurance won’t cover future incidents in the same space."

"Come on. Are we deadass right now?"