••••• "Don't don't you want me? / You know I can't believe it when you say that you don't need me" •••••
"This might be the stupidest thing I've ever gotten myself involved in, but I'm in."
In which Steve Harrington and Kimberly Henderson go from be...
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Once the kids had reunited with the adults, Mike started to explain what had been happening above the Russian facility. "The Mind Flayer, it built this monster in Hawkins, to stop El, to kill her and pave a way into our world."
"And it almost did," Max added. "That was just one tiny piece of it."
"How big is this thing?" Hopper asked, his arm wrapped protectively around El.
"It's big. Thirty feet, at least." Jonathan answered.
"Yeah, it sorta destroyed your cabin. Sorry," Lucas apologized awkwardly.
"Okay, so, just to be clear," Steve started to ask. "This big fleshy spider thing that hurt El, it's some kind of gigantic weapon?"
"Yes," Nancy nodded.
"But instead of, like, screws and metal, the Mind Flayer made its weapon with melted people?" Kim asked, her nose wrinkled in disgust.
"Yes, exactly," Nancy nodded again.
Kim and Steve exchanged a look. "Cool, just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page," Kim muttered. She tried not to think about how the people inside that thing had had lives at one point; that she might have even knew them. "We get trapped underground for like a day and everything goes to shit."
"What we sure this thing is still out there, still alive?" Joyce asked.
"El beat the shit out of it, but yeah, it's still alive," Max sighed, running a hand over her braided hair.
"But if we close the gate again-" Will started.
"We cut the brain off from the body," Max went on.
"And kill it," Lucas concluded. "Theoretically."
"Yoo-hoo!" Murray called. Kim hadn't known the man for more than ten minutes, but he already seemed strange and overly extravagant to her. He set down a stack of papers. "Okay, this is what Alexei called 'the hub.' Now, the hub takes us to the vault room."
"Okay, where's the gate?" Hopper asked, looking at the map over Murray's shoulder.
"Right here," he pointed. "I don't know the scale on this, but I think it's fairly close to the vault room, maybe 50 feet or so."
Kim scoffed, her sore feeting knowing just how wrong he was.
"More like 5000," Erica spoke up, sassy as ever. "What, you're just gonna waltz in there like it's commie Disneyland or something?"
"I'm sorry, who are you?" Murray asked, eye's narrowed in annoyance at the young girl.
"Erica Sincalir," she placed her hands on her hips and gave Murray her most judgy look. "Who are you?"
Her extreme sass seemed to throw him off balance. "Murray Bauman."
"Listen, Mr. Bunman, I'm not trying to tell you how to do things, but I've been down in that shithole for 24 hours," she turned to Joyce and Hopper. "And with all due respect, you do what this man tells you, you're all gonna die."
