number 6 is straight up gamer bait and I am 100 percent taking said bait!
6! Steve Harrington was raised on games.
This is a not-quite The Inheritance Games AU, but I wanted a similar premise with Steve's entire family being very cloak and dagger, old money game-focused rich dicks--with the slowly unveiling twist that they've been involved with the Hawkins Lab the whole time.
Snippet:
"You know better than to interrupt game night--" Steve started, attention on the game he'd abandoned rather than the door.
"Steve." Dustin pleaded, hair drenched from the rain and looking all too like a drowned rat, a vice like grip on Eddie's arm as the other shook behind him. "I need you."
That got his attention.
Steve's eyes swept form him to Munson, taking in the others vacant, shocked stare.
Knew immediately that the Upside Down was at it again.
"Get in here." He commanded, backing away from the door as Dustin huddled Eddie inside. "and start talking."
He closed the door behind him, before beelining for the kitchen table, where he'd been bent over his cousins ridiculous puzzle.
"We have a code red." Dustin said, right as Steve's eye caught the addition his grandfather had added.
It spelled out Owens full name.
'Dammit.' He thought, but moved to get towels anyway.
A code red took precedent over whatever meddling his family was doing--even if it was looking more and more related to the Hawkins lab.
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👀👀👀 I am staring directly at your tags on traumatized Tim Drake post mmmmm Tim associating touch/comfort with death has me MMMMMMM
okay no because originally i had that idea tangled up in a civilian tim au i had and its only your ask that made me realise that i can just,, use it whenever and oh its so much more mmmmmm with robin tim with like,,
the red robin run with him, pru, owens and z being ambushed by the widower in the desert and then the ras stuff,,,, steph "dying",, seeing his dad in a coma,, him picking the only non-deadly weapon lady shiva had, that time the joker nearly killed him, his first (?) girlfriend, ariana dzerchenkas (did i spell that right?) uncle trying to choke him, his girlfriend darla dying in his arms in a gang war and oh yeah also her coming back as warlocks daughter and that whole mess, everything with captain boomerang,, damian trying to fucking kill him, the cloning of superboy thing with cassie kissing him which many thoughts,,,, then jason, everything with jason from titans tower to battle for the cowl
theres so much and i feel like a rabid fox tearing holes into bin bags over and over and over again, like a radioactive monkey tearing a lab apart to get to all the chemicals, like a lab rat they gave pcp to,,, like the chimpanzee that didnt kill steven yeum in nope but its round two and im fucking eating that shoe this time
...i know what im going to be thinking of as i go to sleep tonight shdjskx
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more thoughts on Hawkins Lab / memory alteration / NINA / the rainbow rooms / Kali / Henry / El / Terry
(of possible interest to laozuspo and aemiron-main bc of that other HNL post / possible implications for Henry. no pressure tho you guys are both way ahead of me on this investigation)
Owens implies that he developed the NINA program only since El's power loss in case she ever needed it restored, but I have very strong doubts.
how does Owens know that NINA could bring El's powers back stronger than before unless this technique has already been used? best-case-scenario, tested on someone during recent development to make sure it works for El, but worst-case and more probable scenario, used to psychologically manipulate or bring out powers in the lab kids, maybe even El herself, in the past. maybe even Terry Ives (Becky specifically mentioned Terry doing sensory deprivation tank experiments, which is a component of NINA).
HNL has need to alter potentially all the kids' memories, not just Henry
the lab wants all those kids uniform and tractable, so they'll make good little lab rats / spies / assassins, right?
the lab-born kids like El would be relatively easy to mold, because the lab is all they know. but what about Kali, Henry, and any other kids who were wild-caught old enough to remember their former lives? you'd think even remembering the fact that there IS a world outside the lab would make them harder to control. don't they need to be wiped of their memories of their past lives and stripped of individuality, identity?
you would probably also want to wipe any kid after sending them on psionic spying / assassination missions so they don't retain classified info or gain too much knowledge of the outside world, lest they become an escape risk.
I think there's a strong possibility that NINA or equivalent was already used throughout the HNL program for this purpose.
I don't know how you straight up delete memories, but it's easy to see how NINA could be used to plant fabricated replacement memories. add a dash of brainwashing and presto.
Kali tells a little of her life after the lab, but I don't remember her saying anything about before it. all our knowledge about her kidnapping comes from that newspaper clipping, right? do you think she remembers her former life?
Henry is the only other kid we know is wild-caught, and he still has his pre-lab memories, but maybe that doesn't matter in his case because he's uniquely kept in line with soteria.
Two - Eighteen have to be free to use their powers for experimentation, so the lab can't soteria them, they have to be controlled a different way. the most secure way to keep someone imprisoned isn't with strong locks, it's for them not to fully realize they are imprisoned or that escape is even an option. I doubt any of the kids like the lab, but they probably have a limited awareness that there is any other place.
Henry's pre-lab memories could also have been made safe for him to keep (tampered with). we know Virginia was in cahoots with Brenner before Henry even went to the lab, and I wouldn't put it past her to cooperate with the creation of staged footage of Henry's home life to NINA him with. possibly even Alice, unwittingly. not Victor.
now let's talk about the rainbow room(s)
Kali and El both refer to a "rainbow room" in season 2, but the room we see in Terry's memories bears basically no resemblance to the season 4 one.
the areas Terry is seen searching look reasonably like a 70's hospital, and the rainbow room looks like be a small exam-room type area. but season 4's rainbow room is big, with tiled halls, heavy metal doors, high security, the whole works.
these definitely can't be the same room, but I've always wondered whether we're supposed to just fudge it and consider them to be the same?
did the lab retool and get a high-security makeover after the Terry incident, or did both places exist the whole time?
I haven't scoured every frame of the show so tell me if I'm off, but I think I'm deciding that no, the two rainbow rooms aren't supposed to be the same, and that HNL has always had both a publicly presentable hospital area (where the s2 rainbow room is), and a more intense locked-down lab/prison area (where the s4 rainbow room is). they serve the same purpose, just with different security levels.
the lab isn't the mid-70's hospital area made-over because for one thing, they still have a hospital area when Will is a patient there in 1984. this doesn't look like Terry's exact hallway, but note those wood-veneer doors and square plated handles.
HNL has always been both a "hospital" and a prison.
from the path we see Hopper take in 1x5, it would appear that the tiled hallway familiar to us from s1, El's room, etc, is on the ground floor, just beyond a keycard security access point. we see him get in the elevator and go down to the water tank / mothergate floor. he later describes this to Joyce as "upstairs vs downstairs".
but the lab is at least a handful of stories tall. so I feel like the hospital area must be on the second floor or up.
we aren't shown the path that Terry Ives takes to locate her rainbow room, but we do see her come walking from the direction of what looks like elevators just before she finds it, opposite bright windows, which I'm taking to mean that the Terry rainbow room was on an upper floor. not on the same floor as the s4 rainbow room.
tangent: is the hospital where Sara died supposed to also be Hawkins Lab? I thought that was in New York? this looks like a different landing in the same stairwell. I'm confused about the Hopper lore because I think some of it comes from the novels I haven't read and idk whether we accept that as canon. please advise?
anyway, idea: were the lab kids not numbered, not officially program subjects, from birth?
little Kali and El have long hair and seem allowed to wear fairly normal clothes during their free time. the tattoos go on left wrists and I don't think I see one on baby El, not that we're given a very good look.
the lab kids seem to be roughly a year apart each, but they don't go all the way down to babies. the youngest (Eighteen)'s actor was probably 7 or 8 at the time of filming. so there is such a thing as a minimum age for the program.
It can't be that they didn't start numbering the kids until after the Terry memory, because we saw Henry get tattooed in '59 or '60, very possibly before Two was even born.
I'm now chewing on a scenario where maybe young prospective lab kids were kept in a lesser-security area to be evaluated, and officially made test subjects only once they demonstrated powers.
after all, Brenner took newborn El because he expected Terry's abilities to be passed down, but you can't ask a baby to do telekinesis for you. it'll be a while before you get proof. and the lab can't be handing out number tattoos too hastily and wasting resources on some kids for years only to find they show no promise.
we know that didn't happen because there are no numbers 001-018 unaccounted for. no failed discarded subjects.
if not all people have equal latent potential, you can't pick all winners from the getgo, and if you also don't discard any failed numbers, that means you'd have to evaluate a bunch of kids, keep the best for the program, and discard the others before they ever become numbers. and if you do that (without just killing them), you probably wanna wipe their memories first so they don't go around telling what you're up to. this avenue of thought may be of interest to Will-as-a-lab-kid truthers (doesn't this require Will to be missing from home for a chunk of his childhood? explain to me please).
a program intake system like this could help explain how all the kids can be numbered neatly in order of age despite the ages of wild-caught kids being impossible to anticipate, which has bothered me for a long time. edit: I may have misjudged Kali's age, although if any other kids were wild caught I guess the question still bears asking
I hc this memory to have occurred during that preliminary observation time, unless they just didn't start shaving heads until the mid 70's. electric shock seems overboard for standard kid misbehavior. Kali must have already demonstrated psychic potential in order to be kidnapped in the first place, so I imagine this was probably disciplinary action for refusing to use her powers for them.
now let's look at El's and Kali's memories:
what event is this describing? if Kali escaped before El, how was Kali the one who found El gone?
could this be when El disappeared from rainbow room 1 and taken to rainbow room 2? did Kali ever see rainbow room 2?
or was El just in sick bay or isolation or something, and Kali thought she was gone-gone?
Henry corroborates Kali's escape being prior to El's. this puts Kali's escape after - what, say 73? 74? but before 79.
El apparently has no memory of Kali except for the one she got from Terry. did El lose her Kali memories (along with pre-massacre memories in general) from the coma, or did the lab wipe/brainwash her after Kali's escape, not wanting her to remember her at all?
because it's funny that even during the scene where Henry is jogging El's memory about Terry's visit, that same Kali rainbow room footage all we see. I know the scene was about her remembering Terry, not Kali, but it makes me wonder if she remembered that scene by way of her 1986 knowledge, or if that's also all 1979 El remembered about Kali?
El is struggling with the cognitive dissonance here - she insists that Mama died making her, even though she also does successfully recall the memory Henry is describing, and it upsets her. again, I imagine NINA is a lot better at restoring or implanting memories than at deleting them, so you'd have to rely heavily on old fashioned brainwashing to try to cover up an event like this. until Henry brought it up in 1979, El probably believed she had imagined it.
WHY does Kali pause like that before calling the Terry/rainbow room footage a "memory"? it makes me feel like she questions its veracity. either Kali was given different information about how kids enter the program, or she knows that isn't really how El's situation went down. or something. I'm suspicious of ALL lab related memories, even from the good guys.
flies in my ointment:
if Kali finding El gone is describing a time when El was taken out of my theoretical observation area and locked fully into the program, before Kali, you'd think she would have a lower number
if Kali escaped the observation area before she ever made it into the program proper, how was she already known as Eight? unless they were all numbered unofficially before that and just not tattooed yet, and if you gotta discard a kid you recycle their number
if you don't earn your number/tattoo/spot in the program until you're at least something years old, I wonder if El wasn't called Eleven as a toddler? Kali asks her name, she says Jane, and then Kali checks her wrist for the tattoo. I can't actually recall any proof that Kali remembers El as Eleven.
spinning my propeller hat and honking my clown nose:
HNL has high security and Terry already shot a guy on her way in. she had to have already had some idea of where to look in order to find El before the guards got to her. somebody told her where. hint: Henry somehow
did Henry lie and tell Kali that El was gone to prompt Kali's escape?
did Henry think he was telling the truth when he told Kali that El was gone, but really Brenner fed him that?
Kali seems less empathetic than El, do you think Henry would've had a similar alliance with her? why would he choose her to help escape. or did she not need help escaping?
why don't these people just ask each other the most obvious questions in the world AAAAAAHHH
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