Series
The Comprehension
by Sal Vasquez · 5 of 5 books
Books in this series
Book 1
My World Got A System
LitRPG / System Apocalypse / Cozy Fantasy / Progression Fantasy
# Chapter 1: The Second Read I was standing in a trench, a shovel in my hand. The morning was cold but not unpleasant. The kind of cold that comes off concrete in March — present, unhurried, willing to wait. Above me the sky was the pale white-gray that meant the sun was up there somewhere but had decided not to commit. Somewhere two blocks over a truck was backing up, the beep steady and methodical, the way those things are when nobody is in a rush. I had been down here since seven. The drain had been backing up for three weeks, which meant it had been on the work order for two and a half, which meant I had been thinking about it for two. The blockage was about four feet down, where the old clay pipe met the newer PVC. The joint was the problem. It was always the joint. Two different materials, two different eras, two different ideas about how water should move through the ground, forced together with a rubber coupling and a prayer. The coupling had shifted. Sediment and root matter had packed into the gap like it had been invited. I had known before I started digging exactly what I would find. There was something satisfying about that. About being right in the quiet way, where nobody knew you had predicted it and nobody was going to hand you a certificate. You just looked at the ground, and the ground told you what was under it, and you went down there and confirmed it. Thirty years of that. The confirmation was the reward. The air in the trench smelled like wet clay and old iron. The walls were clean — I had cut them straight, the way my father taught me, because a…
Book 2
Page Forty-Eight
LitRPG / System Apocalypse / Cozy Fantasy / Progression Fantasy
# Chapter 1: The Marsh Road Catch Basin The catch basin on Marsh Road had silted up again. Not badly. Not the way it had been forty-five days ago, when the whole drain field behind it had backed up after three days of rain and I had spent four hours clearing compacted clay and root mass out of a pipe that should have been replaced in 2019. This was maintenance silt. The kind that accumulates in any catch basin that sits at the low point of a road with no curb repair and a gravel shoulder that sheds aggregate every time a truck takes the corner too fast. I had been standing in the trench for twenty minutes. The morning was raw, not cold enough to see my breath, but close. A March morning where the ground remembers February better than the sky does. The clay walls of the excavation were damp and dark, and the smell coming off them was the mineral smell of earth that hasn't dried out since November. Somewhere overhead a crow was working the power line, its weight making the cable bounce in a rhythm I could feel through the shovel handle when I leaned it against the pole. My shovel hit the grate frame. I cleared the last inch of silt away from the inlet with the flat of the blade, then scraped the edges clean with my fingers and checked the flow channel with my hand. Clean. The water was moving the way it should, slow but unobstructed, finding its grade the way water does when nobody has gotten in its way. A thin sheet of it ran over my knuckles, cold enough to tighten the skin but not cold enough to sting. I stood up and looked at it. The grate was…
Book 3
The Second Notebook
LitRPG / System Apocalypse / Cozy Fantasy / Progression Fantasy
# Chapter 1: The Envelope on the Kitchen Table The kitchen smelled like coffee and cantaloupe. Carmen was at the counter with the cutting board and the good knife, the one with the wooden handle that had gone dark from twenty years of her grip. She cut the melon in half, then quarters, then worked the blade along the rind in that steady curve she had never taught me and I had never learned. The seeds went into the bowl she kept for compost. The slices went onto the blue plate. Saturday morning. Day 105, though I had stopped counting days the way other people counted them. For me it was simpler than that. It was the first Saturday in June, warm enough that we had left the kitchen window cracked overnight, and the air coming through it carried the smell of the neighbor's jasmine and something else underneath, wet concrete from the city crew that had been patching the sidewalk on the next block over since Thursday. The mail was on the table. Carmen had brought it in when she came back from the porch, where she checked the planters every morning before the coffee finished. She set it in front of my spot without sorting it, the way she always did on Saturdays. During the week I was gone before the carrier came. Saturdays the mail was mine to open. I picked up the cup first. The coffee was good. It was always good. Carmen bought the same brand from Rosa's grocery, the dark roast in the red bag, and she made it the same way every morning, strong enough to hold a spoon, she said once, though that was not literally true. I drank half the cup before I touched the stack. Electric bill. A flyer from…
Book 4
The Manual
LitRPG / System Apocalypse / Cozy Fantasy / Progression Fantasy
# Chapter 1: The Second Notebook on a Saturday Morning The kitchen window was open. It had been open since Carmen got up, which was before I did, which was the way Saturday mornings worked. She liked the early air. Said it smelled different from the weekday air, which I had never been able to confirm with any instrument but which I had stopped questioning around year eight of the marriage. That was seventeen years ago. The cilantro was in a colander in the sink. Carmen was washing it in slow handfuls, running each bunch under the tap and shaking it twice before setting it on the towel she had laid out on the counter. The smell came in layers, the green sharp edge of the cilantro on top, the coffee underneath, and below both of those the warmth of early summer air moving through a screen that needed replacing. I had noted the screen two weeks ago. It was on the list. Beto was under the table, pressed against my left foot. He was asleep. He slept most of the time now. Thirteen years old, which is old for a dog his size, and he had found the spot under the kitchen table where the morning sun hit the linoleum and claimed it the way a man claims a pension, slowly, then completely. His breathing was even. Every few minutes his back leg twitched against my ankle. The second notebook was open in front of me. It sat on the table between my coffee mug and the salt shaker Carmen kept to the left of the napkin holder. The cover had a slight bow to it, a curve that came from months of riding in my breast pocket. Tanaka had given me this notebook in the middle of Book…
Book 5
The Architecture
LitRPG / System Apocalypse / Cozy Fantasy / Progression Fantasy
# Chapter 1: The Council Convenes The basil smelled like August. Carmen had been clipping it since before I woke up. The cuttings sat in a colander by the sink, dark green and still wet, and the kitchen held that particular warmth that comes from a window open to late summer and a stove that has been on and off since dawn. The coffee was made. The pot was half full, which meant Carmen had already had her first cup and was working on her second. Through the window over the sink, the light came in low and golden, angled the way it angles when the season has started to turn, a half hour later than it had in June, hitting the far wall instead of the table. I was at the table. The fourth notebook was open in front of me. Black ballpoint to the right, cap off. The notebook was one-third full, which I could feel in the weight of it, the written pages thicker than the blank ones, the ink adding something you wouldn't think paper could carry. The first page had a slight curl at the top corner where Carmen's pencil line still held from Day 213. *He read it through.* Her handwriting, not mine. I had not written over it. I had not asked her about it. It was the first line in the notebook and it was hers. Beto was under the table by my left foot. He was asleep. His breathing was slow and even, the rhythm of a dog who has been old long enough to be good at sleeping. His fur was warm against my ankle. He did not stir when I turned pages. Friday mornings were for reading. The pattern had shifted since the first weeks, what had been a…