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Remember when Eddie said he'd rather have nightmares than deal with his weird vampiric second puberty?
What he hadn't meant was both at the same time.
That's just objectively kind of a little bit much, actually, but at least Vecna going back to his unsubtle ways is more familiar. He seems to have realized the use that can be found in dreams, where the unconscious mind just kind of accepts radical shifts in who's there or what's happening at any given time, so it's easy for him to shift from making Eddie watch Wayne grieve him to Eddie stepping foot into public and being swarmed by people calling him a murderer to Eddie as a kid watching his dad get arrested again to Eddie biting Steve and not stopping, never stopping, Steve going pale and weak and fighting against him until he's stopped moving entirely. Fucking bastard. He needs him out of his head, needs to shut off the link the way he can with the others, but part of Vecna's new Vampire skill-set seems to be more control over Eddie's mind, his body, enough to make him doubt his sanity, enough to make him afraid of what'll happen if he stays close to his friends for any longer.
He asks Max about it, as vaguely as he can, and she just looks down, nodding. "...Yeah, it's....it's a lot like it was before. When he was trying to kill me."
"Except this time he wants something different." Eddie murmurs.
They know they all need to do something, but decision-making is stagnating because half of them think they need to go back down to fight again, and the other half think that hand-delivering them to Vecna is likely a terrible idea. El can't piggyback in their minds to find him if he only causes hallucinations while they're asleep, though, which is by design, so they need to figure something out, and fast. Eddie feels himself getting more irritable again, keeping his distance from Steve out of the fear that he'll hurt him again, which Max is doing with Lucas, who sticks by her side regardless, unwaveringly loyal.
Will tries to find Eddie to talk to him alone, but every single time he does it's to bring up his vampire request, which is also undoubtedly Vecna-influenced.
Steve does what he can to try and keep Eddie's spirit's up, enduring endless episodes of The Young Ones and endless rewatches of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which everybody in the house is beginning to be able to quote by heart. They all try and help like they usually do, particularly Robin, who's always willing to ramble about nothing some more if Eddie needs it (and who, impressively, never runs out of nothing to ramble about).
They also continue with D&D, which feels ridiculous given the overwhelming doom and gloom and general sense of an impending meteor that's going to destroy them like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs, but it is nice to have something to focus on.
Eddie's been slowly building up this campaign, introducing a homebrewed Ancient Void Dragon for them to fight that had earned him a degree of notoriety in the Bloomington D&D circuit a few years back, which he definitely doesn't bring up every ten minutes to remind what's left of Hellfire that they're playing with a certified genius DM and that part of the reason he'd failed his first senior year was because of the time he'd spent working on this campaign.
He starts the session revved up, getting up on the table multiple times to monologue and set up the confrontation, which is taking place in the Plane of Shadow. He lowers his voice, intensely serious, as he looks in each of their eyes individually. "The shadow moves, and you see that it is not a shadow at all but a being, a colossal creature of both physical and non-physical constitution. It's like space itself has taken a physical form, massive and vacuous and glimmering strangely as it shifts, almost like a film of reflective oil. As they turn their massive head towards you, eyes that glow a deep maroon fall upon you, radiating psionic energy the likes of which you've never felt—"
