Risky Business ｡ Stranger Things

36 : The Breakfast Club

The Owens siblings sat together, staring up at the back of Prue's bedroom door, engulfed with research. Some of the ripped edges of the pages fluttered in the cool air from a pedestal fan sweeping back and forth.

"This is―" Grey started, shoving a pencil down the side of his cast, trying to get an itch. The heavy cast was already decorated with the scripts of names and sweet message from his party of girls. Even Max had scribbled her name in red. It was rather early in the day, the sun ascending above the clouds. Prue had woke to the muffled sounds of an argument her parents were having in the master bedroom down the hallway, the closed door dampening their volume. Guilt lined Prue's skin like sweat from knowing she the catalyst for this particular argument. And while she wanted to apologise to her mother for lashing out, Mission Strange was seemingly more important to the teenage girl.

"Let me guess. Obsessive. Paranoid. Crazy," Prue guessed, chewing on a cold Pop-Tart, filling her stomach with sugar.

"I was gonna say impressive," Grey said, eyes soaking up every piece of evidence as he jiggled the pencil around. "Like some real detective crazy wall shit."

"So you do think I'm crazy," she muttered out, her shoulders lagging. While her dedication to getting answers about the Upside Down was as strong as stone, Prue would be lying if doubt wasn't weeding through the cracks in the granite of her mind. There was a tightrope's width between sanity and insanity, and lately, Prue couldn't be sure which side she was dancing on, not with her obsession with another dimension or the shadows that plagued her dreamscapes.

"No, not necessary," he rebutted quickly. "What's the red circle for?" he added, pointing towards the circle around Mirkwood forest on the map of Hawkins.

"It's the radius of where Nancy's portal was," she told Grey, brushing crumbs off from her red, white and mustard striped shirt with spaghetti straps.

"And you wanna find it and do what?" he pondered.

"Ideally, open it and travel through it," she announced, her voice incredibly even for a plan so reckless and stupid.

Grey's eyes shot wide. "I take it back, you are crazy!"

"Come on, don't you wanna see what it's like? Don't you wanna see another world?" she wondered, her voice turning with dark curiosity. She had only seen the Upside Down in her dreams, fabrications of her dreamy imagination and her curiosity demanded to know what it was really like.

"Not that world!" he snapped out, now forgetting about the pencil still stuck half-way down his cast.

She let out a sigh. "So you're not gonna help me?"

Grey made a sound in the back of his throat, riddled with hesitation and fear. "I didn't say that, but wh―what if something bad happens?"

"It won't. I have some safety precautions in place," she stated with conviction.

"Like what?" he asked, arching one eyebrow.

"Rope. Warning lights. And Walkie-talkies." She had already gathered some supplies, she even raided her mother's Christmas box up in the attic.

"You got Walkie-talkies? Why didn't you lead with that?" he squealed in delight, his doubt and hesitation fading rapidly.

Prue grinned like the Cheshire Cat. "And they're top-of-the-line!" She knew that would incite her baby brother; he had desperately wanted to use Walkie-talkies last year.

"But how are we gonna open the portal? It closed after Nancy came back through, right?" he questioned, his curiosity just as demanding.

"It did, yes. But I have a theory, once we find it out near Mirkwood, of course. I've been reading about interdimensional travel and the portals that the Demogorgon made were all temporary, but they were like wounds in the fabric of time and space. And not all wounds heal perfectly," she explained, eyes sparking.