#forgottenrealm

Chapter One

-

“Mike?” One moment Holly was staring at her brother wreathed in sparks and burning up, the next there was a sudden rumbling, the moment after that she was stood in inky darkness next to him. “What’s going on?”

“The Mindflayer isn’t dead. Not fully. It’s still trying to reach Earth.”

“We have to stop it.”

“Yes. Hopper has blown the bridge.” Seeing her confused expression, he explained. “The Upside Down, the mirror Hawkins you saw when you escaped the first time. It’s a wormhole- a tesseract. Linking Earth to this dimension. Hopper has collapsed it.”

“We’re stuck here. We’re not going home after all.” She was too exhausted to cry. At least she was not stuck in the Abyss alone. She felt bad for finding that thought reassuring.

“Not exactly. When the bridge blew… Hawkins is coming here. We need you.”

“We?”

“I need you, and Will and El. The Mindflayer has been weakened for now, we have it mostly contained but we can’t be distracted. Holly, you have powers.”

“Like Henry?”

“Like El. Like Will. You can move things, with magic. And stop things moving. I believe in you.”

He began to dissolve into smoke. Instinctively Holly reached out with her awareness, but instead of finding her brother, she found-

Rocks falling. Vines, other objects. She felt herself grab them with her mind, holding them to protect the others. Distantly, she could feel herself rising.

-

Dr Kay had a headache coming on. Not that that was uncommon these days, with the incompetents she had been given charge of. That fool soldier should have told her they’d spotted the girl. Whatever the cause, she needed to re-

The was a rumble, the lights went dark, and she, along with everyone else in the town, crumpled to the floor unconscious.

-

Steve opened his eyes, to find himself lying in the middle of the road. He squinted. The sun looked wrong. The sky looked wrong. Were they trapped in another illusion? Had the plan failed?

“Steve! STEVE!” The wrong looking sky was blocked out by the sight of Dustin yelling. “You’re alive!”

“Yeah.” He pushed himself up, to a sitting position, to get a better view. It definitely looked like the right place, whatever the sky was doing. “What the hell happened? Are we in Hawkins? How did we get there?”

“Yes. The question you should be asking is, where is Hawkins? And did we go there, or did it come to us.”

He could think a little clearer now. “But the bridge was destroyed. Hawkins was pulled into the Abyss?”

“Seems so.” Hopper was on his feet already. “Which way?”

“It’s kind of hard to miss.” Robin was pointing over to where the corpse of the Mindflayer was lying in the middle of a field.

-

Holly. Nancy bolted awake with that thought. They’d just got her back, before everything went wrong again. The last she remembered, her brother was sparking and smoking. She couldn’t lose another sibling…

A glow caught her eye, and she turned to see her sister… floating. In the middle of the cavern tree mindflayer- whatever it was they were in. Glowing, too. Fortunately not smoking. Very different from the previous time she’d seen her suspended in the air. As Nancy watched, Holly gently lowered herself to the ground.

She ran over to her and embraced her tightly. “Mike-” She choked over the words. “Mike’s gone.”

Holly’s expression turned quizzical. “He just spoke to me. He said he was fighting the Mindflayer with Will and El. And something about Hawkins coming here. He can’t be gone.”

“Wait did you say Will and El are with him?” Joyce asked, hope and fear visible in her expression.

“I didn’t see them but he said they were. Mike said that the Mindflayer isn’t dead, but that they’ve weakened it. And then he said-” Holly’s explanation was interrupted by the arrival of the rest of the party.

“Where’s El?” Hopper demanded, looking around before catching Joyce’s face and sinking to his knees. “Oh.”

“She’s not… dead.” Holly spoke carefully, trying to find the right words. “Neither is Mike or Will. They’re fighting the Mindflayer… somewhere.”

“So they’re basically gods now.” The party turned to a grinning Dustin with a variety of looks on their faces, a mixture of eyerolls and shock at the apparent flippancy he held towards the situation.

Steve looked over at his friend. “Dude, what is wrong with you?”

“What they are is NOT HERE.” Hopper was shouting, as if volume alone would suffice to reach El wherever she had gone and persuade her to return.

“I don’t think they can come back.” Joyce was quiet, still trying to process the news. “Not if they’re fighting.”

The moment of silence to digest the implications was broken by the arrival of a group of soldiers, and the more immediate implications of the guns they held. Dr Kay looked around, oddly disinterested in being inside the corpse of the being that had been orchestrating events for decades. “Where is the girl?”

Hopper laughed, bitterly. “You think I’d tell you?”

“Perhaps someone else will be more obliging? Or are we going to have this do this in a more painful way.”

“She’s not here!” One of the kids, on the verge of crying, shouted.

Kay nodded to the soldiers around her. “Spread out and search for her, even with her powers she can’t have gone far. Meanwhile, maybe we can loosen the lips of her friends here.”

Damnit El if only you were here- Hopper’s thought was cut short by the soldiers dropping their now glowing red hot weapons and scrambling for cover.

-

“Why are they running? We only heated the guns so they’d drop them…”

“The guns are exploding.”

“This is why Nancy didn’t trust with you a proper gun, Mike.”

-

There was a bang.

Another bang, bangs, a flash of light, and then... shrapnel hanging in the air, before Holly opened her fist and let it fall to the ground. The soldiers stared up at her, in confusion at her looking very different from the girl they were supposed to be looking for. Kay’s look was somewhere between shock and predatory calculation, before Nancy’s words removed the look from her face.

“Murray, you have rope. Tie her up. Please.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Murray said, taking rope out of his bag. He looked at Dr Kay with the same slightly creepy smile he often wore. “If you would please turn around sweetums.”

“Nice trick with the guns. Even if they blew up.” Steve said, as their motley group, lead by Hopper and including soldiers (disarmed and ziptied, in full view of Holly to keep them fearful) and rescued children, made its way across town to the police station.

Holly frowned. “What do you mean? I didn’t blow them up.”

“That wasn’t you? Who else has powers?” Steve stopped, dread on his face. “Do all of you kids have powers now.” Twelve not-even-middle schoolers with powers... He shuddered.

“El.” Nancy fell in alongside them. “And Will.”

“And Mike.” Max, pushed by Lucas, joined their subgroup. “That is definitely a Mike thing to do.”