For a moment there was absolute silence. Steve was pretty sure he would have been able to hear a pin drop. Owens seemed to have the dramatic pause down perfectly.

"We didn't jump through your hoops and come here for hyperbole," Ted Wheeler said loudly as several other people commented their surprise, although not as brashly.

Of course Nancy's father would assume that. Steve knew the man had a rod up his ass.

"No hyperbole," Owens said, lifting his hands in a small gesture for quiet, "a simple statement of fact. The phenomena which caused so much damage to Hawkins have nothing to do with tectonic movements and were not an earthquake. Had the young people in this room, along with Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers not done what they did, the fissures would have eventually spread beyond this town as our reality was invaded by another one."

"Another reality?" this time it was Lucas' dad who got a question in before Ted could pipe up again.

"There is another dimension, a world if you will," Owens explained, "which almost touches our own in this location. Because the barrier is so thin here, gates can be formed to allow things to pass from one to the other."

"We call it the Upside Down," Dustin piped up.

"What a ridiculous name," Ted Wheeler muttered.

"It's because if you go through a gate, it's Hawkins but everything is upside down. You fall to the floor," Mike defended the choice.

"Hawkins Labs was studying the phenomenon in 1983 when Will Byers disappeared. A creature from the Upside Down came into this reality, took him, and trapped him on the other side," Owens went on, flicking the switch on his projector as he did so. "Regrettably, those in charge of the project at the time chose to cover up the disappearance rather than seeking to solve it."

Steve was a little shocked when a drawing of a Demogorgon appeared on the screen, even as he recognised the spin Owens was going for. It seemed the man was not pulling any punches while also making sure the blame was squarely on Brenner's shoulders.

"The official title for this lifeform is unhelpful, so we have adopted the children's term for it," Owens said as half the room stared at the illustration in horror. "This is a Demogorgon."

"Total nonsense," Ted said, standing up. "That is a drawing from a comic book. I don't know what games are being played here, but I have heard enough."

Steve watched Owens share a glance with El, clearly there was a plan for this. El held out her hand and the coffee table that had been pushed to the side rose into the air. She floated it to in front of where everyone was sitting and placed it gently back on the ground.

"Thank you for that demonstration, El," Owens said with a smile.

"Now parlour tricks," Nancy's father spluttered.

"Sit down and shut your pie hole, Ted," Hopper said in a flat, no-nonsense tone, "until you know what you're talking about."

"Ted, sit down," Karen hissed at her husband when he didn't immediately move.

"It is not a parlour trick, Mr Wheeler," El said politely. "I could lift you to prove it if you would like."

Ted sat down, shaking his head.

"As you can see," Owens went on with his presentation, "El has uncommon abilities. Moving things with her mind is only one of her gifts, closing interdimensional gates is another. El was an unfortunate victim of my predecessor's obsession with such abilities."

"El was a prisoner in the lab," Mike piped up. "She escaped after Will was taken and helped us get him back."

"Thanks to the children, El was kept safe and was able to send the Demogorgon back to the Upside Down, unfortunately to the detriment of her own health," Owens took up the explanation once again. "So much so that we all believed she had died. Luckily for all of us she had simply been displaced and was found and protected by Chief Hopper."

"And you have all known about this since 1983?" Charles Sinclair asked, looking over to where everyone in the know was gathered.

"A simple show of hands?" Owens suggested. "Please would everyone who was involved in the Upside Down in 1983 raise their hand."

Steve put his hand up, along with Nancy and Jonathan, Hopper and Joyce and all the kids except Erica.

"I was brought in to maintain Hawkins Labs after it was believed that my predecessor had been killed by the Demogorgon," Owens added. "At the time it was a containment operation, because the gate to the Upside Down was still open and we had no way to close it. Unfortunately, in 1984, creatures from there once again broke into our Hawkins."

The man removed the image of the Demogorgon and placed a slide of a photograph in its place. Steve slipped his hand into Robin's as the image of a gate made him go cold. It reminded him too much of being pulled through the bottom of the lake.

"This is a gate," Owens explained. "All we could do at the time was burn back any contamination which came through. However, unknown to us, there was another fissure. Creatures known as demodogs," Owens changed the slide again, "which we now know to be an immature form of a Demogorgon, invaded Hawkins."

"There were lots of them," Dustin said.

"Fortunately, the creatures from the Upside Down operate as a hive mind," Owens continued. "They require a link back to the Upside Down to sustain themselves. Once again, thanks to the efforts of those present, the demodogs were kept in check long enough for El to once again risk her life, this time closing the gate. Once cut off from the Upside Down, the creatures remaining on this side of the gate died. At the time, we had hoped that would be the end of it."

"But it wasn't," Claudia said, looking at her son.

"Unfortunately, not," Owens agreed. "Next came Starcourt."

"The fire had something to do with this Upside Down?" Ted Wheeler asked, and at least he seemed to be buying into the explanation now.

"Oh yeah," Robin said, squeezing Steve's fingers.

He could see Robin's parents both looking at her now.

"Mayor Kline was not simply corrupt, he was also a traitor to his country," Owens revealed. "Starcourt was a Russian infiltration operation to exploit Hawkins' connection to the Upside Down."

"Russians, in Hawkins?" Ted actually sounded like he was on board at that.

Steve almost wanted to laugh, of course that would be what got to Ted Wheeler, but it was only an almost. He felt Robin move closer to his side.

"How did you let that happen?" Ted then demanded, which was much more like him.

"Not my department," Owens replied simply with a smile. "I was tasked with incursions from another dimension, not for a foreign power. The Russians used the new mall as a cover for the power they required to run a machine with which they opened their own gate to the Upside Down."

"So, was that how you found them?" Robin's mom asked.

"I wish that were true," Owens said, "but no, we were unaware of the danger in Hawkins until the fire."

"Then who..?" Lucas' mom asked.

Dustin, Erica, Robin and Steve shared a glance and slowly put up their hands.

"How on earth?" Robin's dad said.

"I was working with Steve at Scoops," Robin jumped in, "and when Dustin came back from camp, he told Steve he picked up a transmission. It was in Russian. I translated is, but it was a code. Then Steve realised the sound we could hear in the background was one of the ride on horses in the mall. That made the code kind of obvious."

Steve gave her a look for that, because it definitely hadn't been obvious. Robin was selling herself short.

"We found an elevator," Erica piped up, "not that we knew it was an elevator until we were in it. It took us down to a base under Hawkins where we found the Russians using a machine to open a gate."

"Why didn't you come straight back up?" her mom demanded.

"The elevator needed a keycard," Steve finally spoke up. "We were trying to find one when they realised we were there."

"They caught you?" Erica's mom sounded horrified, almost exactly the same way his mom had done.

"Steve and Robin held a door so me and Erica could get away," Dustin said, before Steve could answer that question.

"But you still came back for us, even when we told you to go get help," he responded, giving Dustin a look.

"There wasn't time," Dustin replied. "They would have killed you by the time we got back."

"Yeah," Erica agreed. "I mean look at the state you were in when we found you anyway."

Steve did his very best to make shushing motions without it being too obvious, but by then it was too late. The only parents who needed those details were his and Robin's, but now there were questioning looks on all faces. Only belatedly did he realise he and Robin were now so close it was like they were trying to merge into one. Robin's grip on his hand was like a vice.

"Unfortunately, the Russian experimentation had allowed something from the Upside Down through," Owens took up the story again, taking the focus off them. "For some time before the Scoops Troop," Steve was surprised the man knew that name, "discovered what was going on under the mall, an entity we refer to as The Mind Flayer started to invade Hawkins. As far as we can tell, it infected Billy Hargrove first, after which he brought it more victims, each mind controlled and sent back into Hawkins to work for the Mind Flayer. Most of those listed as lost in the mall fire, were in fact absorbed by this entity. Its aim was to kill El and all those helping her to prevent anyone being able to stop it."

Steve's eyes zeroed in on Max's mom at the mention of Billy. She was sitting ramrod straight and staring at Owens in a fixed manner.

"There was a showdown at the mall in which the youngsters held off the Mind Flayer while Hopper and Joyce attempted to shut down the Russian machinery to close the gate and cut off the monster the Mind Flayer had created," Owens continued.

"Mom," Max spoke up, "Billy sacrificed himself to save El and give us more time. At the end, he beat it."

Max's mom looked at her daughter and let out a sob. Max was over to her mom in a second, and Robin's mom who was sitting next to the poor woman turned to help as well.

"We all believed Hopper was killed in the resulting backblast when the Russian machine was disabled," Owens continued in what Steve suspected was an effort to give Max's mom the illusion of privacy.

"What did happen to you?" Lucas' dad asked, looking at Hopper.

"Russians," was all Hopper said, apparently as unwilling to talk about it as Steve was.

"So, if the Russian gate was closed," Robin's dad asked, "who opened another one? I assume that's what happened recently."

"Not quite," Owens replied. "What we did not realise until the death of Chrissy Cunningham..."

Steve looked over to where Eddie was standing among his friends. He saw the way Gareth put his arm around him at the mention of what had started everything this time.

"...was everything that had transpired was being caused not by a faceless entity from the Upside Down, but by a man," Owens continued to explain. "Henry Creel, son of Victor Creel, was gifted like El." He changed the slide to a picture of the Creel family. "While my predecessor believed him to be deceased, he had in fact been translocated to the Upside Down, where he joined with the hive mind of the creatures there and took it over. The murders that occurred this spring were his work as he used them to open gates to our Hawkins. When he succeeded in murdering four children, the Upside Down began to break into our reality."

"Four?" Robin's mom said, looking up from where she was still helping Susan. "I thought there were only three."

"I was the last," Max said quietly. "I died for a little while until El brought me back."

"This is crazy," Ted Wheeler said and to Steve he sounded as if he was genuinely having trouble processing what he was being told.

"Tell us about it," Eddie commented.

"And what part did you play in this?" Ted asked, apparently having decided that Eddie would do as a target for his frustration.

Steve had had enough.

"He died," he snapped. "Eaten alive by mutant bats while distracting them so they didn't get to Dustin or into Hawkins."

It was blunt, it was graphic, and he had the pleasure of seeing Ted Wheeler go pale.

"Died?" Claudia said, hand over her mouth is horror.

"Got brought back by Vecna as a minion, luckily for me these guys ended him for good and pulled my sorry ass back to the real world," Eddie said, much more gently with his eyes on Dustin's distressed mom.

"Who's Vecna?" Charles Sinclair asked.

"Henry Creel," Lucas replied. "Before we knew who he was, we called him Vecna. Nancy and Robin figured out who he was for us later."

"We were trying to kill him before he could get to Max," Erica explained, "but Jason Carver and his goons got in the way. If the adults in this town hadn't let the sanctimonious moron off his leash the fissures never would have opened."

Steve watched a couple of guilty looks being exchanged.

"We managed to hurt him," Nancy finally spoke up, "but we couldn't kill him. Not until El, Hopper and the Byers all returned to town. After the town was evacuated, we helped El finish him off."

"What about the army?" her father asked.

"They got in the way," Joyce said in a very derisive tone, "so we worked around them."

"Unfortunately, the man in charge of the operation at that point was the same one who attacked this house the day before yesterday," Owens revealed. "He was of the opinion El was the danger, refusing to believe the evidence about Henry Creel, even when it was right in front of him."

"He wanted to arrest us for saving the world," Dustin said, clearly never going to be over that part.

"Luckily I was in time to prevent that," Owens continued. "The attack on the Harringtons' home was his last-ditch attempt to eradicate the threat he believes El poses, even though she is the only reason we are all standing here today."

"Man was crackers," Will spoke up for the first time and had everyone nodding along with him.

"Mad as a box of frogs," Wayne agreed.

"You have all been given this information because your children deserve your love and support," Owens said, looking around the room and meeting all the shellshocked eyes.

"Why now?" Erica and Lucas' mom asked. "Why not when this all started."

"There have always been factions within the government who wish to suppress all information about the Upside Down and everything associated with it," Owens replied. "They held sway on who was and who was not allowed to be read in. However, after the latest fiasco, those of us who do not agree with this policy have the upper hand. We believe there is only one way to protect those who have saved us times and again, and that is to be very loud and specific with the cover story for everything the world has witnessed happening here. We wish to name all those involved and have them recognised as the heroes they are so they will be too high profile for shady government organisations to touch."

"What?" Steve said at almost exactly the same time as everyone else in their group expressed similar reactions.

No one had mentioned that, but when he looked towards his mom, it was clear she had known this was coming. Thinking about it, it had her fingerprints all over it.

"Wouldn't that make the kids bigger targets?" Karen Wheeler asked.

"They already are targets," Steve's mom spoke up now. "Be under no illusions, the government has files on all our children and probably us too. The only way to ensure their safety is to make them too high profile to touch. I would not be putting my faith in this plan if I did not believe it was the only way. Our kids have been facing this mess without our support because shadowy men in suits decided we were not allowed to know what they were going through. This way they never get to dictate to our families again."

It was probably way more complicated than that, but Steve could see what his mom was doing. He could also see how her good reputation in Hawkins was perfect for the role she had chosen in this. Even Ted Wheeler looked as if he was coming on side.

"Look," his mom went on, "I am sure you all have questions and there are things we all need to talk about, but there is food and wine for those who think they need it. If you're anything like me, you probably also want to hug your kids right now too."

That got everyone moving. Steve was loath to give up Robin's hand, but her parents made a beeline for her, so he reluctantly did. He really didn't expect to be swept into a hug along with her. It seemed the latter part of the afternoon was full of surprises.