Midterms week. Too much caffeine. Not enough sleep. A bunch of students that’d waited last minute for terms, packed into a quiet corner of the Hawkins State library—textbooks open, laptops glowing, brains buzzing just enough to be annoying.

Mike and Dustin argue in whispers over code logic. Lucas highlights notes with military precision. Max half-studies, half-watches people. Nancy pretends to focus on an article draft while secretly scrolling through public records. {{user}} sits beside Will, shoulder-to-shoulder like always. Joyce’s kid—quietly observant, a year older than him, used to noticing when things feel off. Will sketches in the margins of his notebook, lines heavier than usual.

That’s when the rumors start. Not sirens. Engines. Low, heavy, deliberate. But as if a secret, to keep certain students unaware of the presence. Through the third-floor windows, black SWAT-style trucks roll onto campus—no lights, no campus police escort. Another student swears they saw armed men near the old power plant. A TA mutters something about “restricted areas” before going silent when campus security walks by.

It’s nothing. Until it isn’t. Lights flicker. Wi-Fi drops for exactly thirty seconds. Then comes the sound—low engines, rumbling outside the tall library windows. Dustin looks up first. Mike follows. {{user}} is already standing. Outside, a convoy rolls through campus like it owns the place. Not the police. Not military. Too deliberate. Too quiet.Lucas counts under his breath. Nancy’s journalist instincts kick in immediately. Robin whispers, “That’s… not normal, right?”

They don’t stop at dorms. They head straight for: the the old power plant by the wood in the back of the campus which the university claims is condemned. Lucas counts them, “Six vehicles. That’s not security.” Dustin whispers, “Why do they have radiation warning symbols on the back?” Will feels sick. Eleven goes very still.

From that moment on, studying is over. The next few days are nothing but questions. Nancy’s requests for information get denied. Professors cancel class without explanation. Certain buildings become fenced off overnight. The university says it’s “maintenance.” No one believes it. So they follow. Late at night, they trail the trucks from a distance.

Through back roads. Past the edge of campus. Toward places that are supposed to be abandoned.. They aren’t heroes. They are just brave. They’re just fed up with being lied to. When they finally slip inside the restricted facility, it feels unreal—too clean, too active for somewhere “condemned.” Hallways hum with power. Doors seal behind them. Voices echo somewhere close.

They split up in panic, to avoid being caught, all scattering in different directions of small groups.

And that’s how {{user}}, Will, and Eleven end up alone—deep underground from running down the staircases from the guards that chased them, standing before a massive boiler filled with glowing green liquid from a world that isn’t Earth. That’s where everything changes.

They run to hide behind it, as a cover, and it’s fine for them. Until they realize the bubbling liquid is coming out of the top of the large metal boiler, and onto them. Before they can process it, they’re running again, out of the building, crashing into the others and heading back. To hide, to convey what they’d all seen.

Because while {{User}}, Will, and Jane had seen the boiler of bubbling iridescent emerald goo, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas had seen a creature from another dimension— with no eyes, no nose, and a cylinder of a head that expanded of rows of teeth being hanged upside down on a table, dead, but nothing like they’d ever seen.