Chapter Text
“Of fucking course it had to be this series,” Elena muttered angrily while restacking the shelves of records in the back of the dingey music store, “it couldn’t have been…I don’t know, Parks and Recreation or Winnie the fucking Pooh.”
She grabbed the box of headphones that needed cleaning, “I don’t even like this show, but nooooooo I just had to watch it to stay relevant with the times.” Finally making her way into the back work room, Elena huffed and dropped the box of headphones on the ground. Immediately a brown dust cloud of filth, regret, and other unidentified residue billowed up from the 1970s vomit green shag carpet.
“Disgusting,” Elena thought bitterly, she had been in this dimension for 4 weeks, but that had been quite long enough.
///////////////// 4 weeks and 1 day ago
“Can you believe they killed off Eddie?” asked Thea, Elena’s best friend who made her marathon the entire new season of Stranger Things.
“He was the best thing about the show this season,” Elena doesn’t even look up from her phone, “it’s sad, but I saw that coming from a mile away. The pain hurts more when you are emotionally invested. The showrunners know what they’re doing.”
Thea laughs because Elena being emotionally invested in the show? That girl was on her phone the entire time, scrolling twitter and reading episode summaries so she’d know what would happen ahead of time- an unfortunate common occurrence.
“How is reading the plot summary page on Wikipedia considered being ‘emotionally invested’ again?” Elena flips her off.
“First of all I have anxiety so I like to know what kind of commitment I’m getting into, second of all I do what I want.”
Thea laughed, “Ok, whatever. But wouldn’t it be cool to be able to jump into the series and stop it from happening?”
Elena ponders her question, “I mean…I guess? Most series are super dark though. All of those self-insert fanfictions never take into account the dangers of the climate and environment they are being dropped into. Like, for example, could you imagine being randomly dropped into Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones?”
Thea rolls her eyes. “Well obviously it would never happen in real life. It’s just a thought. It would be cool though.”
”If you say so.”
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
“But it did happen in real life, and it is very much not cool.” It could not be a coincidence that they had a conversation about self-insertion into fandom realms the day before Elena was mysteriously transported into the Stranger Things dimension.
One second she was in 2022 driving back to college in the California high desert, and the next she was in 1985 standing in the Indiana wilderness. After a major break down, with many screams and tears, Elena walked 3 miles to the nearest gas station where she noticed things were very different from her world.
Most people might think that clothing would be the first noticeably different thing about time/dimension travel, however Elena found this not to be the case. What stuck out to her were the phone booths with the gigantic yellow phone books, and gasoline selling for $1.12/gallon. “What the actual fuck is happening.”
It was when she saw the memorial for Jim Hopper and Billy Hargrove (and all the other people who became the meat blob) in the newspaper that she realized what had happened.
So now, here she is- day after day, working at a dusty psychedelic music store from the 1960s and living at a motel that charges by the hour. How is she going to get home, you might ask? She has no fucking clue. Eleven left for California, and Elena didn’t pay enough attention to the show to have a full understanding of what is going to happen for the upcoming season. She’s living her best Marty McFly life, hopefully nothing too traumatic happens.