He didn’t know what it meant. But Hendricks was opening the classroom door.

From his laptop’s tiny speakers, the Northwood High school bell rang. Clear. Perfect. But it was 2:00 AM. The house was asleep. The bell echoed through his room, then faded.

Then he heard it. A distant, muffled version of the same bell, coming from outside his window. From the direction of the school.

Not music, exactly. Leo loved the raw, unfiltered chaos of audio . The scream of a cartoon cat falling off a cliff. The boing of a spring. The thundering BWAAA of a cinematic trailer. A crowd of 80,000 people cheering. A single, perfect ding from a cash register. He collected these sounds like a dragon hoards gold, and his weapon of choice was the humble sound board—a grid of buttons that, when pressed, unleashed pure auditory dopamine.