ain't it weird || stranger things x female reader (season 3)

seventeen - goodbye

Thursday, July 4, 1985

"The Mind Flayer," Mike explains as you all sit around to catch up on the latest tea. And boy, was it worse than you could imagine. "It built this monster in Hawkins, to stop El, to kill her and pave a way into our world."

"And it almost did," Nancy adds. "That was just one tiny piece of it."

"How big is this thing?" Hopper asks. He had not come here alone; Joyce was here as well, along with a middle-aged man with glasses and sass called Murray. You remember him being the detective Barbara's parents hired, and the guy Nancy and Jonathan went to last year to leak information about the laboratory.

"It's big," Jonathan informs. "Thirty feet at least."

"Yeah," Lucas grimaces, turning to Hopper. "It sorta destroyed your cabin. Sorry."

Hopper looks dead inside for a second before shrugging with a grunt.

"Okay," Steve pipes in, "so, just to be clear, this... this big fleshy spider thing that hurt El, it's some kind of gigantic... weapon?"

"Yes," Nancy nods.

"But instead of, like, screws and metal, the Mind Flayer made its weapon... with melted people."

"Yes, exactly."

"Yeah, okay. I- Yeah, I'm just making sure."

"Are we sure this thing is still out there, still alive?" Joyce questions.

"El beat the shit out of it," Max says, "but, yeah, it's still alive."

"But if we close the gate again-" Will starts.

"We cut the brain off from the body," Max continues.

"And kill it," Lucas completes. "Theoretically."

"Well that seems doable," you ironize, and everyone contemplates their options in search of a plan.

"Yoo-hoo!" You suddenly hear and turn to see Murray wave at you from the opposite side of the room, holding up several pieces of paper. "Yoo-hoo!"

"Hi!" Kazuo waves back, and Murray rolls his eyes.

"Oh my god, no. Come here!"

You shrug as Kazuo gives you a wounded gaze, hanging an arm around his neck to pull him with you as you all walk up to Murray, who slams his sheets of paper onto a table. On it was drawn some kind of rough plan on the Russian base, courtesy of Alexei, a scientist Joyce and Hopper captured on one of the Russians' sites in an abandoned farm in Hawkins and brought to Murray all the way to Illinois just so he could translate what Alexei said from Russian.

Fortunately, he was very cooperative and explained everything that was happening down there, from the gate to the Upside Down to the way to close it.

Unfortunately, he died as they made their way back to Hawkins in a hurry, as a big Russian Terminator had been chasing them from the very beginning. Hopper had fought with him, but he seemed to be relentlessly set on annihilating the chief of the police, and incidentally everyone that knew about the Russian underground base. Which was now a lot, with your group and considering Hopper had contacted the army to let Owens know about the Russian infiltration.

In other words, while you were trapped underground, everyone else had been busy as well.

"Okay, this is what Alexei called 'the hub'," Murray points to a sketch of a room on the plan. "Now, the hub takes us to the vault room."

"Okay, where's the gate?" Hopper goes straight to the point.

"Right here. I don't know the scale on this, but I think it's fairly close to the vault room, maybe 50 feet or so."