The pain in Jenna's back was enough to stir her awake from what had to be one of the worst sleeps of her life. Of course, she wasn't in the comfort of her own bed (or Steve's, for that matter), but inside an elevator that wouldn't open up. Jenna wasn't sure how long they had been stuck there, but she was hoping that one of them would find a way out soon.

And it sounded like Dustin was already getting a head start.

"This is a code red, I repeat, code red. Does anyone copy?"

"Can someone shut him up?" Erica groaned as she turned over on her side and covered her ears.

"I'm on it," Steve said as he stood up and started climbing the boxes up to the opening, letting out grunts while doing so, then uttered some words to Dustin about taking it easy on the walkie-talkie or else the battery would die.

Jenna was about to tune out the bickering that followed and help the girls with figuring out the buttons on the door until she heard her name being dropped.

"All right, why are you such a cranky pants after getting to spend another night with Jenna?"

"Shh!" Steve hissed. "Jesus Christ, will you keep it down? And by the way, I am not a cranky pants."

"Uh, yeah, your pants are cranky. I can hear them."

Jenna grinned at the boy's remark.

"Well, maybe it's because me and Robin stayed up all night trying to figure out how to get the stupid door open," Steve explained.

"Oh, so it wasn't because you were watching Jenna sleep?"

"I wasn't watching her sleep, you weirdo."

Jenna playfully rolled her eyes, tuning out the rest of their conversation. Suddenly, she heard the sound of liquid hit against the stone wall, turning it dark in the process, and she quickly turned away when she took a whiff and realized that it was piss.

"Can you redirect your stream, please?" Robin called out in annoyance, letting out a scoff in disgust when the urine started going down the left side of the wall, creating a zigzag line.

Before the older girls could get back to looking at the buttons by the door, a banging sound erupted inside the elevator, making them jump a little. The three turned their heads to find Erica banging one of the glass containers against a barrel.

"Hey, hey! Careful, careful, careful!" Robin shouted, running over to grab the container from her. "We don't even know what that is."

"Exactly," Erica stated. "It could be useful."

"Useful how?"

"We can survive down here a long time without food, but if the human body doesn't get water, it will die."

"I hate to break it to you, but this is not water."

"No, but it's a liquid, and if it comes down to me drinking that shit or dying of thirst, I drink." Erica flashed her a closed smile.

Carlie glanced down at the green substance with detestation. "Gross," she said.

Erica snatched the container out of Robin's hand, but the blonde-haired girl didn't care, as the sound of electronic whirring was heard from a distance. She pressed the side of her head against the door, listening for a moment before her eyes widened.

"What is it?" Jenna asked.

"I think we've got company," she answered, rushing to climb up on the boxes to let the boys know, then she put her head back down in the elevator and motioned down at the girls to follow her.

So the other three hurried to get on top of the elevator before the door opened up, with Jenna being the last one and closing the door behind her, then taking a spot between Steve and Dustin. Once the door was open, two large figures entered the elevator, going back and forth in Russian while picking up some boxes to carry out. Steve brought a finger to his lips to signal everyone to stay quiet, then stared at the glass container in Erica's hand, furrowing his brows, as if a lightbulb had gone off in his head, which was something that didn't happen very often.

"I have an idea," he finally whispered.

"What exactly do you have in mind?" Carlie spoke up.

"I'm gonna need that," he told Erica, staring at the container, in which she reluctantly handed it to him. "Once they leave, I'll jump down and use this to block the door from closing all the way."

"You really think that's gonna hold it?" Robin inquired.

"It's worth a shot," he said. "Just follow my lead, okay?"

Jenna agreed with him on this one, as she didn't want to be stuck in the elevator anymore. She just hoped his plan would work.

Steve quietly started opening the door back inside, watching the two men exit the elevator for the last time, hearing what sounded like a cart start up. The others lined up behind Steve as he positioned himself, hearing the elevator door whirring to close again. He then jumped inside, grunting as he slid onto the floor and placed the container under the door before it could shut all the way. "Let's go!"

Erica threw her things down below, then hopped inside and started crawling to the other side of the elevator door.

"Go, go, go, go, go, go," Steve said in an urgent manner.

"I'm going!" Erica fussed.

Dustin was the next to go, then Robin, with Carlie following suit, then Jenna, who landed back inside the elevator with a thud, rolling on her ankle. She let out a cry of pain, moving at a slower pace, then noticing the container beginning to form cracks.

"Jenna!" Steve shouted, about to come and help her.

"I got it!" she yelled back, crawling across the floor until she was closer to the door, where she was able to push herself to the other side.

Steve then scrambled to get himself out before the container broke, the green substance sizzling as everyone hurried to stand up, watching as part of the floor began to melt.

"Jesus Christ," Steve muttered.

"What the hell?" Jenna mumbled next to him.

"You still wanna drink that?" Robin asked Erica.

The little girl shot a glare in response.

Jenna moved her ankle around in a circular motion, the pain being bearable enough that she could put weight on it.

"You okay?" Steve asked her with a hint of concern in his voice.

"Yeah, I'm okay," she assured him, nodding her head.

"Holy Mother of God," Dustin spoke up.

The others turned around to see a long hallway with no ending in sight.

"Well, hope you guys are in good shape," Steve stated. "Looking at you, Roast Beef," he added, lightly hitting Dustin on the chest while walking past him. "Let's go, come on."

Dustin gave Robin and Carlie a clueless look as they began to follow Steve. "Why me?"

Robin and Carlie merely shrugged in response.

Everyone started off pretty well when it came to walking, though they had lost track of how long they had been doing so. But it didn't matter, because from the looks of it, they were nowhere near the end of the hallway. Jenna's mind was focused on her ankle, wincing every now and then at the pain when it was more intense on some steps. Steve would glance at her to make sure she was still okay, and she would nod with assurance and keep going, not slowing down for a moment.

"Does anyone have a bad feeling about this?" Carlie broke the silence.

"Well, I don't think any of us are feeling rainbows and sunshine about it," Jenna retorted, trying to ignore the gut feeling that was coming onto her.

Carlie pressed her lips together and didn't reply as she continued walking.

"I mean, you have to admit, as a feat of engineering alone, this is impressive," Dustin commented.

Steve scoffed. "What are you talking about? It's a total fire hazard. There's no stairs, there's no exit, there's just an elevator that drops you halfway to hell."

"They're Commies," Erica said. "You don't pay people, they cut corners."

Steve furrowed his brows in confusion down at the young girl next to him.

"To be fair to our Russian comrades, I don't think this tunnel was designed for walking," Robin pointed out. "Think about it, they developed the perfect system for transporting that cargo."

"It all comes down to the mall like any old delivery," Dustin stated.

"And then they load it up onto those trucks and nobody's the wiser," Robin finished.

"You think they built this whole mall just so they could transport that green poison?" Steve questioned.

"I very seriously doubt it's something as boring as poison," Dustin replied. "It's gotta be more valuable, like promethium or something."

"What the hell is promethium?" Steve glanced over at Jenna. "You remember learning that in chemistry?"

"Do you think I remember anything from that class?" Jenna asked.

"It's what Victor Stone's dad used to make Cyborg's bionic and cybernetic components," Robin explained.

"And it probably made him one of the strongest superheroes, too," Carlie added.

Robin nodded her head in agreement, looking more intrigued. "Yeah, almost like he was some sort of weapon."

"Exactly," Carlie stated. "I can't imagine being seen as that to someone. It's just so inhumane."

Jenna felt the words hit too close to her as she did her best not to let her eyes water, hoping no one noticed the uneasy stance she was now holding with each step she took. Except of course, Steve and Dustin could tell something was off, in which the younger boy simply stared at her, while Steve lightly nudged his arm against Jenna's, along with a small nod, as his way to comfort her without words this time. She presented him with a sad smile in return, and the ache that was once in her heart was making its way out of her body. For a moment, Jenna thought the butterflies from before were coming back.

But Erica's repulsed expression broke the tension as her hands went to her stomach, looking like she was about to vomit. "You're all so nerdy, it makes me physically ill."

"No, no, no. No, don't lump me and Jenna in with them. We're not nerds, all right?" The defensiveness in Steve's voice was almost comical, in Jenna's opinion.

"Why so sensitive, Harrington?" Robin inquired almost in a teasing manner. "Afraid of losing cool points to a ten-year-old child?"

Jenna let out a laugh. "He stopped being cool a long time ago."

"He's not the only one," Dustin muttered, with Robin and Carlie snorting in amusement.

Jenna rolled her eyes, but didn't come up with a rebuttal, despite being a bit offended. Although she accepted the fact that the boy wasn't totally wrong.

"Look, I'm just saying that I don't know jack shit about Prometheus," Steve interjected. "And I doubt Jenna over here does, either."

"Way to call me out, Steve," she said, shoving him a little.

"It's actually promethium," Dustin corrected. "Prometheus is a Greek mythological figure, but whatever. All I'm saying is, it's probably being used to make something."

"Or power something," Robin added.

"But what, exactly?" Carlie spoke up.

"Like a nuclear weapon?" Dustin suggested.

"Totally," Robin said.

"Walking towards a nuclear weapon," Steve stated, scoffing a little. "That's great. That'd be great," he added, the sarcasm easily coming off his lips.

"But if they're building something, why here?" Robin questioned. "I mean, Hawkins. Seriously. Of all places. At the very best, we're a toilet stop on your way to Disneyland, but maybe that's it. Maybe it's our very..."

While Robin continued on with her rant as Carlie and Erica stayed beside her, Jenna, Steve and Dustin exchanged a mixture of curiosity and worry looks among them, stopping in their places, and

"You think the Russains know?" Dustin asked in a low voice.

"About--" Steve started to say.

"They could," Dustin cut him off.

"So it's connected?"

"Maybe."

"How?"

"I don't know, but it's..."

"Possible," Jenna finished for them. "I mean, with the Mind Flayer back--"

"Wait, the Mind Flayer's back?" Dustin intervened again, eyes wide. "And you guys didn't think to tell me this important piece of information?!"

"What, like it changes this entire mission?" Steve retorted.

"Exactly!"

"To be fair, Steve only found out last night," Jenna pointed out.

Dustin raised his eyebrows, giving the teenagers a toothless grin. "Oh, when you two were...?"

"Don't even start, Henderson," Steve warned him.

"I'm sorry, is there something you three would like to share with the class?" Robin called out.

The trio glanced at each other once more, waiting to see who would speak up first. Just when Steve was finally man enough to open his mouth to say something, the radio in Erica's backpack began to make a hissing noise due to the static, then a man speaking Russian was heard.

"Walkie," Steve and Dustin said in unison, rushing over to the girls, with Jenna following them.

Everyone crouched down to the floor as Erica pulled the radio out of her backpack and handed it to Robin, who was listening attentively to what the man was saying, then repeated the words along with him in perfect Russian. "It's the code," she said.

"The same one Dustin intercepted with his homemade radio?" Jenna asked.

Dustin nodded. "That's the one. Wherever that broadcast is coming from--"

"It's close," Robin stated. "And if there's one thing we know about that signal..."

"It can reach the surface."

A small grin of excitement formed across Robin's lips as she looked up at the ceiling, then back at the others. "Let's go."

So the group picked up the pace down the hall, the adrenaline starting to rush through their bodies. Steve took the role as leader, preparing for any surprises while keeping the others behind him. When they reached a row of vents, he led them through the small gap, but abruptly stopped at the sight of two Russian workers walking by the vents. Fortunately, neither one of them saw the kids and continued walking in the opposite direction, which was the signal for the group to keep moving.

"Okay, clear," Steve whispered, motioning them to follow him down another hall. "Clear, come on, let's go."

"Okay, that was close," Robin pointed out.

"Too close," Dustin emphasized.

"Relax," the older boy told them. "All right? Relax. Nobody saw..."

Suddenly, the group stopped at the sight of what they assumed was the headquarters of whatever operation the Russians were up to. On both levels, there were people ranging from mechanics, scientists, and soldiers going in different directions, whether they were walking or riding on one of the carts. It was surprising that no one spotted the kids with how much they stood out.

But that was short-lived when a guard with a foul expression on his face from the upper level glanced their way for a split second.

"Shit!" Steve hissed as he ducked to the side behind the small vent standing next to them. "Jesus!"

"Red Dawn," Dustin whispered.

"I saw it," Erica added. "First floor, northwest."

"The comms room!"

"You saw the comms room?"

"Correct!"

"Are you sure?" Dustin asked.

"Positive. The door was open for a second, and I saw a bunch of lights and machines and shit in there."

"That could be a hundred different things," Dustin told her.

"Well, it's the best chance we got," Jenna spoke up.

"Yeah, I'll take those odds," Robin chimed in.

"Me, too," Carlie said as well.

Steve, however, seemed to be the only one who was against the idea of breaking into the comms room. But instead of arguing about it, as they didn't have time for that, he simply let out a sigh and shook his head. He, along with the others, turned around and spotted the door in the northwest corner on the first floor, then back at each other.

"All right," Steve started in a hushed tone. "We're gonna move fast, we're gonna stay low. Okay?"

The anxiety inside Jenna only grew as Steve moved the group from one corner to another, getting closer to the door of the comms room. When the panel beeped and the door swung open, the group waited for a man in a white lab coat holding a manila folder to exit, then they made a dash for the door before it closed and they lost their chance. With no trouble, they made it inside the comms room, with Steve closing the door behind them. Just when the relief was about to enter their bodies, they turned around to find a Russian soldier sitting in front of the control panel, who quickly spun around in his chair and took his headset off, standing up and clearly shocked to see a group of kids standing there. He reached into his belt to grab something when Robin stuck her hand out to stop him and started speaking Russian, in which the man replied back in confusion.

"What the hell?" Jenna mumbled.

It appeared that the soldier had no idea what she was talking about, and continued to go for what was in his holster. As much as Jenna wasn't ready to let the other girls know about her powers, she reckoned now would have to be the time to reveal it to them.

Except that didn't happen, because before she could prepare herself to use them, Steve let out a yell and lunged after the soldier, pushing him against the panel behind him. The soldier retaliated by shoving Steve into the other dashboard to the right, where Steve managed to dodge a punch from the soldier, but not another ram in the panel. But as the soldier grabbed Steve by the neck of his sailor uniform, Steve was able to quickly gain control of the fight by elbowing the soldier's side, then picking up the radio's microphone and smashing it against the man's head, knocking him out on the floor.

While Steve was panting and moving his hair to the side, the rest of the group's eyes went back and forth between him and the soldier. Jenna was astonished that she just witnessed Steve actually win a fight. There was also a part of her that found it...attractive.

"Dude!" Dustin shouted with glee, in which Steve glanced over at him. "You did it! You won a fight!"

Steve looked back down at the soldier and let out a soft laugh while grinning. Even Jenna couldn't help but let out a chuckle, which he heard, causing him to look up at her. She felt her face get hot the longer they were staring at each other.

However, Dustin broke their concentration by walking past them, heading toward the soldier and grabbing his keycard from the front of his belt.

"What are you doing?" Erica asked in annoyance.

"Getting us our ticket out of here," he said.

"You want to walk all the way back?"

"Well, we can hang out for a little bit, relax, have a picnic maybe," Dustin replied in a sarcastic tone.

"Have a picnic? We came here for the radio!"

"This plan is way better. If I knew Steve could knock out a Russian, that would've been our plan in the first place."

While the two kids continued to bicker back and forth, Jenna noticed Robin heading up a set of stairs, and she was beginning to get curious, too, so she tuned out the arguing and followed Robin. She noticed a flashing blue light coming from the top, along with a low frequency pulsing and men speaking Russian. When Jenna made it to the window with Robin, her heart just about stopped at the sight, and without another thought, she opened the door and headed inside the room.

Through the long window, Jenna saw a small room with scientists standing around with their reports in hand and other workers controlling a panel board. Beyond that, men in red and gray lab suits surrounded a big, cylinder-shaped machine, placing the containers filled with the green substance from before inside it. The last thing she noticed was the blue light from earlier was coming from the machine, a laser beam shooting straight at the wall. Except when she instantly saw the vines, along with the opening done by the laser still crackling and getting stronger by the second, she knew exactly where it was the Russians were trying to get to.

The Upside Down.

"Holy shit," Dustin commented from behind her.

"What the hell is it?" Carlie asked from Jenna's right as she got a better look with the girls at the other window.

"The Gate," Steve and Dustin stated in unison, sharing expressions of concern.

Jenna kept staring at the Gate in disbelief, wondering if the Russians would actually succeed in opening it. She focused on the center of the Gate, trying to see if it was growing any wider, but it was impossible to tell with the purple, orange, and yellow colors blinking every second. But if they did manage to open the Gate, then things would be even worse than when it was opened last year, especially with the army the Mind Flayer was building with Billy, Heather, and possibly other Hawkins residents.

It was all connected, just like Jenna, Steve, and Dustin presumed.

"You okay over there, Howard?" Robin called out to her.

Jenna shook her head, not even glancing over at the girl. "I can't believe it's happening all over again," she muttered.

"What's happening all over again?" Erica spoke up this time.

Jenna eyed the boys, who exchanged their similar worried looks with her. Before they could explain anything, Dustin was the first to leave the room and rush back down the stairs, with Erica following, then the rest of the group.

"I don't understand," Robin said. "You've seen this before?"

"Not exactly," Steve replied.

"Then what, exactly?"

"All you need to know is it's bad," Dustin told her.

"It's really bad," Steve stressed.

"How bad are we talking?" Carlie questioned this time.

"Like, end-of-the-human-race-as-we-know-it kind of bad," Dustin answered in a very fast and troubled voice.

"And you know about this, how?" Robin inquired, sounding a mixture of confusion and urgency.

Jenna scoffed. "You don't wanna know," she chimed in.

Erica looked behind Steve with eyebrows raised. "Um, Steve? Where's your Russian friend?"

Steve and the others turned around only to find the soldier nowhere in sight, only blood from where he hit his head. All of a sudden, an alarm began to blare throughout the base, with blue and red lights flashing all around.

"Shit," Steve mumbled, heading to the door and opening it, though he only looked out for a few seconds before closing it fast and motioning the others to run back up the steps. "Go, go, go, go, go!"

The others didn't hesitate to rush upstairs and through the same room as before, with Dustin opening the next door and stopping when all of the scientists inside turned to look at the group in puzzlement. Dustin then led the others down the set of stairs to the left, taking them to where the men in the lab suits were on the walkway and all the way to the end, where they were stopped by the machine still running.

"Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!" Dustin kept repeating in a loud voice in front of Jenna, while the sound of people yelling in Russian were behind her.

It was only a matter of seconds before they would be caught, with the guards getting closer to the group, and the adrenaline was going into overdrive. The group had to do something fast.

"Guards!" Erica yelled.

"This way!" Steve shouted next as he fell front in line this time, taking the group down a different set of stairs, shoving a worker out of the way in the process. With more soldiers coming from all different directions, Steve pushed a few metal barrels on a couple coming from the right.

There was no hesitation as Jenna stopped in her tracks and waited for Carlie to run past her before getting into stance and holding up her hands in an attempt to hold off the soldiers.

"What are you doing?!" Carlie called out to her.

"Just get the others out of here!" she yelled back.

"Jenna, watch out!"

As she spun around to see what Carlie was warning her about, she felt something hard jab into her cheek, causing her to fall to the floor and hit the side of her head. Her ears began to ring, along with her vision becoming blurry and her head pounding. For a moment, Jenna was able to see figures heading her way and hear muffled cries of her friends shouting her name and men yelling in Russian before she no longer had the energy to keep her eyes open, feeling herself slip out of consciousness and everything going black around her.

~~~~~~~

A/N: Oop, well, looks like things are about to get real bad for Jenna (but you know, I added some little Stenna moments in there soooo...hehe).

What did you think?

Comment, vote, more to come soon!

-A