BILLIE JEAN ( eddie munson.. ) ✔

020. Can't Get No Satisfaction..

Sam spread a map of Hawkins on the ground for all the grown ups to watch him explain away the logic behind his claim. With a red marker in hand, he started marking spots, the places where Vecna had killed people. With a green marker, he pinned the spots where his attacks failed and with a black one, where the demon's been appearing. For the first five minutes in which Sam refused to speak, it looked like he was just a kid full of energy, scribbling away, reason why Phil and Cal tried to see which of the camera footage made it out of the flood, for whatever reason.

Eventually, Sam finished drawing, threw the last marker away and sighed his way to straightening up, "Hawkins is a battleground right now and we're not going to win unless we know our enemy and their motives."

"Yeah, no shit," Max sighed, leaving one ear of hers free of the headphones blasting Kate Bush through on loop for hours now. She was taking no chances while the Carter's were around. "Tell us something we don't know, genius, like for example your idea about how to beat Vecna that you made us sit around your giant map for."

"Patience," Sam raised his hand solemnly. "I'm getting there too," he added much softer. "We want to focus on Vecna, so what do we know?"

"He killed the Creel's all those years ago," Nancy stated.

"He's from the Upside Down?" Steve tried to bring something too.

Sam loved it so he pointed towards Steve, "Exactly. We know the origin of the attacks. So what else do we know about the Upside Down?"

No one volunteered to answer at first, not until Dustin's face cleared in realization and he raised his eyebrows. He was starting to like having someone on par with him. "It has a hive mind!"

"Controlled by...," Sam pried along, grinning.

"The Mind Flayer!" Lucas exclaimed.

Billie, arms crossed at her chest, narrowed her eyes, "I don't think I follow."

"Well, the definition of a hive mind is that every single organism part of it, living within it, shares emotions, thoughts, memories, even goals," Sam explained. "So take the ants, but add in the complex nervous system of the octopus and the social amoeba aggregation into a multicellular structure and you get the Upside Down, controlled by the central consciousness of the Mind Flayer, who's goal... What was it again?"

"To infest and destroy our world," Max gasped quietly.

"But he's in another dimension," Sam agitated the conversation to continue developing. There was no way he could make them understand his idea better than by having them follow his thought process first.

"His goal would be opening up gates between our worlds again," Nancy added thoughtfully.

"To cause a fissure in the fabric between dimensions you need a huge amount of energy," Billie added, at last following along with the strand of normalcy, of commodity in herself. Even if she liked it or not, years of following her father's rules made her find comfort between formulas, numbers and odd scientific facts, all somehow more suitable for a girl than an electric guitar if Anthony was to be inquired about it.

"How much?" Sam turned his gaze to Billie. She paused, not exactly understanding if her brother really wanted her to pull out a piece of paper and start drawing out the problem mathematically. "Say, and please correct me if my math is wrong, if we add together the energy Vecna uses to curse and torment people from across dimensions, without passing physically into our world, with the kinetic and potential energy of canceling gravity for his victim and breaking their bones all at once, wouldn't that equal somewhere close to the needed amount to form a small gate?"