Risky Business ｡ Stranger Things

32 : Weird Science

Sleep was a stranger to Prue Owens that night but it didn't leave her tossing and turning. She stayed still, her sheet twisted around her ankles as her spinning fan did little to cool her body. She spent her long night lost in the polaroid of the Upside Down's glowing red heart, and by morning, the image was pressed to the inside of her eyelids. Whenever she blinked, she saw the thick black webbing and the glossy and fluid-like membrane covering the entrance of the portal to the other dimension parallel to their own. But it wasn't just the Upside Down consuming her mind but what was in Morgantown that required her father's presence.

Shadows hugged her eyes but energy fuelled Prue forward and she had a plan to seek answers, even if part of her brain was telling her to drop it, to leave it alone: she ignored that voice that sounded so much like her father and Grey. For Prue's curiosity was stronger than her fear.

"You didn't have nightmares last night," Grey stated, looking across the car to his older sister. Sunlight penetrated the windscreen as they waited at the traffic lights on Oak Street. He had asked Prue for a ride over to Cynthia's house (they had been preparing for a water battle for days now and he had a bucket of huge water balloons balanced on his lap; they jiggled and bounced whenever Prue hit the breaks) and she had agreed, saying she was already heading out anyway.

"Nope," Prue confirmed bluntly.

"That's good!" he claimed, holding onto his bucket of ammo tighter. "Maybe you're getting better," he added and the hope in his voice hit Prue like a bullet to the chest.

She sucked in her bottom lip. "Maybe." She didn't want to tell her baby brother that the reason why her nightmares had been absent last night was because she hadn't slept a wink. She wanted to leave him is hope, his optimism, and let him believe that they could heal from their strange trauma. Grey didn't ask what she was doing that day and she didn't tell him either, but she wanted too. She desperately wanted to tell him about what she had found in the basement, she had even considered leaving the polaroid in his room for him to find but decided against it. Instead, she decided to gather more intel and evidence and then plan what she was going to do with it later. But her heart was conflicted: one beating side of her heart wanted to dig up the answers she sought about her father and the Upside Down, but the other side wanted to find nothing.

The local library was silent and cool and had a calming atmosphere that almost settled Prue's torn heart. Almost but not quite. She decided to figure out what was happing in Morgantown first—and why someone there would be communicating with her father—which led to her a map of the country. The trouble was that were ten places in the United States of America named Morgantown, so she went by distance from Hawkins. The first Morgantown was actually in Indiana and she spent a solid hour reading through old newspapers on the microfilm reader at the back of the library that hummed and rattled around, skimming through articles for anything remotely strange or anything related to the Department of Energy in the last two years. She spotted nothing but a random UFO sighting by a bunch of teenagers, claiming the dancing lights were trying to talk to them. She moved on to the next closest Morgantown which was in West Virginia. The glowing screen of the microfilm reader and the constant scroll and sweep of black and white words were starting to pain Prue's tired eyes when an article of interest filled the screen. It was a profile on the National Energy Technology Lab that first opened in 1910. Prue scooted closer to the screen, eyes pouring of the tiny letters and a pixilated photograph of the lab. It was a fluff piece, Prue could tell that much, and only written to ensure the community of Morgantown, West Virginia that the lab wasn't doing anything dangerous. The article was all good public relations and public image, but the last paragraph was by far the most telling. While the lab worked mainly on engineering boilers and turbines and researching fuel cells and other power systems, it had also recently opened up a new division: the experimentation and production of material for extreme environments. To the regular joe, that probably meant nothing, but to Prue that seemed suspicious, for the article gave no indication on what sort of extreme environments the lab was making material for. The fact that Sam Owens was communicating with another National Laboratory seemed to be strikingly true, and add in the boxes of research and the polaroids of the Upside Down in their basement, and Prue's mind was screaming. And the Upside Down was the most extreme environment that the brunette teenager could think of. She pulled out her notebook and wrote down all of her findings, the ink smudging across the page slightly with how fast she was writing.