They had all made it back to the Byers house, settling down a little after the horrific events that had just occurred. It had turned out that Joyce, Hopper, Chris, Mike, and Will were all inside the Demogorgon infested building and they all somehow managed to escape.

Well, not all of them.

Bob Newby, Joyce's boyfriend, was also there and he had died saving all of them in the lab. Beverly wasn't too familiar with the man, but she knew he must have been a good guy for risking his life for all of them.

Will was unconscious and they had placed him on the couch, where Jonathan was staying by his side the whole time. Nancy was next to Jonathan, trying to comfort him by rubbing his shoulders or whispering to him. Beverly noticed that Steve seemed to be sad as he watched them, and she pursed her lips as she watched him walk back into the room the kids were all in.

While Jonathan quietly spoke to Will to no avail, Hopper argued with someone on the phone to try and get help. "Sam Owens. Dr. Sam Owens," he said into the phone. "I don't know how many people are there! I don't know how many people are left alive!" he shouted, waiting for the person to say something. "I am the police! Chief Jim Hopper!" he exclaimed. "Yes, the number that I gave you, yes. 6767 — I will be here." He then angrily hung up the phone.

"They didn't believe you, did they?" Dustin guessed.

"We'll see," Hopper replied.

"'We'll see'?" Mike repeated. "We can't just sit here while those things are loose!"

"We stay here, and we wait for help," he sternly told the boy before he walked out of the room.

Beverly's eyes traveled over to Chris, who she hadn't seen since her last gym class. He was sorrowfully looking down at the ground, his hair messy with his arms crossed. He blinked slowly, not moving from where he stood against the wall. The Crawford girl wanted to say something, but she knew that now wasn't a good time.

She was just honestly glad that most of them were alright.

No one had talked or moved a muscle until Mike got up from his seat, walking into the other room. He picked up a puzzle game, examining it. "Did you guys know that Bob was the original founder of Hawkins AV?" Mike spoke up.

"Really?" Lucas asked.

Mike turned around to look at them all. "He petitioned the school to start it and everything. Then he had a fundraiser for equipment. Mr. Clarke learned everything from him. Pretty awesome, right?" he said as he walked back over.

"Yeah," Dustin and Lucas agreed.

"He sounded like a smart guy," Beverly whispered and Alicia nodded sadly, a lopsided frown on her face.

Mike placed the game on the table. "We can't let him die in vain."

"Well, what do you want to do, Mike? The Chief's right on this. We can't stop those Demodogs on our own," Dustin argued.

"Demodogs?" Max repeated in disbelief.

"Demogorgon dogs," Dustin said slowly before he put his hands together. "Demodogs. It's like a compound. It's like a play on words, you know?"

"Okay," Max said, giving him a wide eyed look.

"I mean, when it was just Dart, maybe..." the Henderson boy trailed off.

"But there's an army now," Lucas finished for him.

"Precisely."

"His army," Mike realized.

"What do you mean?" Steve asked.

"His army!" Mike repeated again.

"Explain, please," Chris begged his brother, speaking up for the first time that night.

"Maybe if we stop him, we can stop his army, too," Mike said, and it seemed like the younger boys understood what he meant.

"Who's this 'he' you're talking about?" Alicia quizzed and the older teens nodded.

"Follow me."

Everyone followed Mike into the other room, where he grabbed a drawing of a spider-monster looking thing. "The shadow monster," Dustin voiced.

"It got Will that day on the field. The doctor said it was like a virus, it infected him," Mike recalled.

"And so this virus, it's connecting him to the tunnels?" Max guessed.

"To the tunnels, monsters, the Upside Down, everything," Mike confirmed.

"Whoa. Slow down, slow down," Steve spoke up, wanting to make sure he heard everything correctly.

"Okay, so, the shadow monster's inside everything. And if the vines feel something like pain, then so does Will," Mike explained.

"And so does Dart," Lucas added.

"Yeah. It's like what Mr. Clarke taught us. The hive mind."

"Hive mind?" Beverly questioned.

"A collective consciousness. It's a super-organism," Dustin described.

"And this is the thing that controls everything. It's the brain," Mike pointed at the drawing.

"Like the Mind Flayer," Dustin realized.

"The what?" Max and Steve said at the same time.

"What is with all these names?" Beverly complained before the boys quickly grabbed a D&D book from one of the shelves in Will's room.

"At this point, I should just start playing this stupid game," Chris said and the older teens nodded in agreement, sucking in their breaths.

They then gathered everybody in the house into the kitchen to let them know their recent discovering, flipping to a page about this supposed Mind Flayer. "The Mind Flayer," Dustin began.

"What the hell is that?" Hopper asked.

"It's a monster from an unknown dimension. It's so ancient that it doesn't even know its true home. Okay, it enslaves races of other dimensions by taking over their brains using its highly-developed psionic powers," Dustin explained to all of them.

"Oh, my God, none of this is real. This is a kids' game," Hopper pointed out, getting annoyed.

"No, i-it's a manual. And it's not for kids," Dustin argued. "And unless you know something that we don't, this is the best metaphor—"

"Analogy," Lucas corrected his friend.

"Analogy? That's what you're worried about?" Dustin asked exasperatedly. "Fine, fine! An analogy for understanding what the hell this is."

"Okay, so this Mind Flamer thing—"

"Flayer. Mind Flayer," Dustin rectified Nancy.

Nancy sighed and asked, "What does it want?"

"To conquer us, basically. It believes it's the master race," Dustin answered.

"Oh, like the Germans?" Steve compared with a nod and Beverly let out a snort. "What?"

"I think you mean the Nazis," Beverly said, tilting her head at him.

Steve blinked. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Nazis," he agreed and she shook her head at him, a light smile on her lips for the first time that night because of Steve's stupidity.

"Uh...If the Nazis were from another dimension, t-totally. Um, it views other races, like us, as inferior to itself," Dustin continued.

"It wants to spread, and take over other dimensions," Mike added.

"We are talking about the destruction of our world as we know it," Lucas told them all.

"That's great. That's great. That's really great. Jesus!" Steve breathed out, walking away for a second.

"How is this a kids game?" Alicia muttered under her breath, narrowing her eyes and shaking her head.

Nancy grabbed the manual. "Okay, so if this thing is like a brain that's controlling everything, then if we kill it..." Nancy trailed off, looking down at the manual.

"We kill everything it controls," Mike finished.

"We win."

"Theoretically," Lucas added.

"Great. So how do you kill this thing? Shoot it with Fireballs or something?" Hopper asked, taking the manual out of Nancy's hands.

Dustin chuckled. "No. No, no Fire — No Fireballs. Uh, you summon an undead army, uh, because...because zombies, you know, they don't — they don't have brains, and the — the Mind Flayer, it...it...it likes brains," Dustin stammered and Hopper gave him a look. "It's just a game. It's a game."

"What the hell are we doing here?" Hopper questioned as he slammed the manual on the table.

"I thought we were waiting for your military backup," Dustin pointed out.

"We are!"

"But even if they come, how are they gonna stop this?" Mike asked. "You can't just shoot this with guns."

"You don't know that! We don't know anything!"

"We know it's already killed everybody in that lab!" Mike countered.

"And we know the monsters are gonna molt again," Lucas said.

"And we know that it's only a matter of time before those tunnels reach this town," Dustin added.

"They're right," Joyce said weakly, stepping out from her room that she had been hiding in ever since they got home. "We have to kill it. I want to kill it."

Hopper walked towards her. "Me, too. Me, too, Joyce, okay? But how do we do that? We don't exactly know what we're dealing with here."

"No. But he does," Mike said, walking over to Will. "If anyone knows how to destroy this thing, it's Will. He's connected to it. He'll know it's weakness."

"I thought we couldn't trust him anymore," Max recalled. "That he's a spy for the Mind Flayer now."

"Yeah, but he can't spy if he doesn't know where he is."