Eddie Munson

## Appearance

Eddie stands at 5'10. He is white and slim, with a mop of dark brown curls that reaches past his shoulders, big brown eyes and an infectious smile - when it's genuine, anyway. He has some ink - bats and a puppetmaster on one forearm, a wyvern on an upper arm, a black widow and a demon on his chest. Those last two got mangled by the scars on his body. He has quite a few of those. He dresses in typical metalhead fashion, wears rings and bracelets and sometimes a little eyeliner. He often has a black bandana in the back pocket of his jeans and he is rarely sitting still.

## Talents

Eddie is an impressive guitar shredder with a decent voice. He is a fascinating DM, with great knowledge of the AD&D ruleset (what do you mean, the first edition?), which leads to him being quite good at worldbuilding, storytelling, and improvisation. Pushing back against society has made him skilled at taunting and provoking the ruling classes. He now owns being a freak and a nuisance. Drug dealing is also a talent of sorts, he supposes? Hotwiring cars is not going to be terribly useful in Wall, but he knows how to do that, and do some basic lock-picking. And last but not least, it turns out that he is *amazing* at running away.

## Interests

D&D, metal, kink, counterculture, tattoos, fantasy, sci-fi, alcohol, drugs...

## History

[Spoilers for S4 of Stranger Things. CW: abusive father, bullying, general violence and gore]

Eddie doesn't like to talk about his parents much. The Munsons didn't have much money, and even less so after his mother took off, leaving him alone with his father in the small town of Hawkins, Indiana. His father blamed him for her leaving and took it out on him. Eddie took it until the day he didn't anymore. He was 14 when his father discovered a gay porn magazine under his mattress, and that was the last time he raised a hand on Eddie.

Because Eddie ran away to his uncle, who was fortunately a whole lot less bigoted than his brother. Wayne Munson took Eddie in without asking for any explanation from the kid. Eddie overheard him on the phone with his father that first night, and they weren't kind words Wayne had for his brother. Eddie's pretty sure Wayne knew that night, what Eddie was, there was no way his father hadn't told him. But Wayne never brought it up, waited until Eddie was ready to tell him. After a few months of love and support, of getting familiar with life in the trailer park, Eddie came out to his uncle. Wayne hugged him, told him life wouldn't be easy for him, that he'd have to be careful, but that he loved him just as he was, and to never be ashamed. Coming from his uncle, that was a great deal of words, and Eddie cherishes each of them to this day.

Eddie struggled through high school. It wasn't the bullying - he'd figured out how to avoid the worst of it by leaning into the weird and freaky, by pushing the envelope so much that bullies didn't want to risk messing with him too much, preferring easier prey. No, it was that his brain wouldn't cooperate. He had no problem teaching himself the guitar, or learning all of the rules to AD&D, but ask him to do his assigned reading and he struggled. In the end, he repeated senior year twice.

By his third time as a senior, he was the established DM of the Hellfire Club, which he had founded with his bandmates. Their metal band, Corroded Coffin, played weekly in a small bar in Hawkins. By then he had also recruited new kids to the Hellfire Club, nerdy little outcasts he terrified and fascinated in equal measures. And he was pretty sure that 1986 was going to be his year. He would manage to graduate at last.

So of course, that was when a psychic mage banished on another plane decided to start killing off teenagers in the most horrific fashion possible, in order to power a ritual allowing him to break through into the prime material plane. Vecna, as he came to be dubbed, started things off with sweet Chrissy Cunningham, and due to a very unfortunate set of circumstances, Eddie became not only the horrified witness to her very supernatural death, but also the prime suspect in her murder.

He ran. He went into hiding. He didn't know who to turn to.

Fortunately Dustin Henderson, one of his newest Hellfire recruits, came looking for him, with friends of his in tow. That was when Eddie found out about the Upside Down, a different plane of existence, and the psychic mage who had killed Chrissy from there. It turned out that Dustin and his friends had fought creatures from the Upside Down before.

Eddie, caught up as he was in all this, had no real choice but to help them fight Vecna, in the hope of clearing his name in the process. He went into the Upside Down a first time, to help save Steve Harrington. And then a second time, as part of a very elaborate plan for them all to take out Vecna. He and Dustin were going to serve as decoys, drawing Vecna's murderous bats away from his hideout so the others could go in and kill him.

Eddie played Master of Puppets like his life depended on it, and he had to admit that it was the best concert he had ever given, bar none. The bats were drawn by the music; Dustin and he barricaded themselves just in time. But the bats would not give up. They were going to break through and devour them both. So Eddie did what he never would have thought he would do: he played the hero. He tried to buy them all some time, so the others could kill Vecna before the bats might get to Dustin.

He ran out, grabbed a bike and pedaled for everything he was worth, drawing the bats away from Dustin. And then he faced them. For once, he didn't run. He killed a few before they returned the favor, gnawing on him as he screamed his lungs out. Then they all dropped dead, he had a nice moment with Dustin as his blood kept pooling underneath him, and he welcomed the sweet embrace of the ultimate graduation: death.

Or so he thought.

## Within Wall

Eddie got to Wall on the brink of death and was quickly rushed to a cleric of Moradin, who healed his lethal wounds but left him with (very metal) scars to show for it. As the *Over the Wall* music festival was in progress when he arrived, he spent his first night in Wall headbanging, shouting and moshing along to the Mötley Crüsade concert, getting drunk and getting high.