I'm back, Jack!
I haven't updated this in a while simply because I couldn't think of any good urban legends/creepypastas/ghost stories to adapt. I'd either done them already, didn't think they were scary enough, or thought they were too icky to attempt. (The wendigo crossed my mind, but noooooo thank you!) I figured, hey, Sierra hasn't had a good scare in a while, and we've already seen the dire consequences of scaring Raf Esquivel, let's pick a different target for this chapter, eh?
So that Raf won't unleash the Kraken virus on my poor computer.
Takes place in an alternate Season 3 in which we got to see far more Predacons and the destruction of Jasper wasn't glossed over like it was in the show.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, a door.
"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension— a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Aspen Zone."
(Insert Twilight Zone theme)
"Look, I swear it'll be just this one time. Couple of flashlights, video camera, and we'll laugh about it later. If you get scared, we'll go home, I promise!"
Ah, adolescence. A time of learning, of bonding, and intense peer pressure. After the destruction of her hometown by a freak meteor shower, Sierra Cody has come to believe that her life is cursed. Living in a shanty-town outside of Jarbidge, Nevada hasn't been easy for any of the former residents of Jasper, many of whom lost everything they owned. Working in the back of a tiny gas station, Sierra has begun to hear strange rumors about the town of Jarbidge and the origins of its name.
"Camryn, you have got to be kidding me. With my luck, there'll actually turn out to be a monster in the caves and we'll all die a horrible death!" the redhead scowled and dumped the energy bars out of the packing box with a little more force than necessary. Despite her co-worker's repeated blandishments, Sierra could not help but feel that exploring the mountains to prove or disprove the eerie supposed origin of their name was a remarkably bad idea. It had begun when the older girl—somewhere in her college years—had approached the refugee with a friendly smile and asked if she'd ever heard the story of how Jarbidge got its name. Sierra actually hadn't been interested in finding out, but Camryn had insisted on telling her anyhow. "Supposedly," she'd said, leaning on the shelf, "It comes from the Shoshone word Tsawhawbitts, which means weird beastly creature or evil giant or something. Nobody really knows anymore."
Camryn was somewhat obsessed with the legends, always trying to drag someone or other into a conversation regarding the old caves up in the canyon. She'd been told not to disturb the customers anymore, making the new part-time employee the perfect target. Oh, they'd talked about other things besides ghost stories, and even met for some perfunctory girl-bonding, but Camryn Ross was chiefly interested in enlisting the help of whatever warm bodies she could wrangle in her great project: finding the Tsawhawbitts. As Sierra marched out of the back room with an armload of energy bars to put in the front of the tiny store, the older girl's lip curled. "You say no now, Sierra, but you'll give in eventually! It's too awesome to say no!"
Utterly determined to bring Ms. Cody along by hook or by crook, Ms. Ross eventually wears her quarry down with endless begging. Sierra hides her nerves as they drive out to the lonely canyons, but she knows all too well that the unexpected has a nasty way of popping up in...the Aspen Zone!
The beat-up Ford Ranger pulled to a stop with a soft squeal of the breaks at the edge of a small park. "We walk from here," Camryn announced, swinging a backpack onto her tanned shoulders. She handed a small video camera to Sierra and instructed her to keep it rolling at all costs. "Great," the younger girl muttered, "Blair Witch Project, anyone?" Camryn laughed. "That's sort of the idea. If we don't find anything, we can edit something in later and scare the heck out of your friends!" She strode ahead jauntily with a boom mic and another camera, leaving Sierra to lock the truck. In the daylight, the canyon was a beautiful place, dotted with bright shrubs and lines of dark evergreens that crept along the banks of the river. It was a good place for solitude and peace...when the sun shone. Now, the trees loomed like unfriendly giants, inky black against the indigo sky. The scrubland hissed and swished as the two girls trudged through it, and somewhere, something splashed in the river. Sierra shivered and hunched her shoulders. "Why do I let myself get talked into these things?" she wondered.
Ahead of her, Camryn was chattering excitedly into her camera, panning around. "It's 8:52 on a Friday night, date...ummm...redacted. In case they try to prove we were here." Sierra blinked and hurried to catch up. "Wait! I thought you said it was okay for us to be out here!" It would just figure that they were trespassing. She really did have the worst luck! Camryn ignored her and plowed ahead, narrating all the while. "My sources tell me that the cave we're heading to is the one in the legend!" Sierra's annoyed "what legend?!" only made Camryn grin wider. "The legend of the Tsawhawbitts! The story goes that Shoshone warriors chased a man-eating giant into the canyon, long ago." She paused to hop over a boulder and pointed out a dark opening in the rock. Sierra felt a shiver run down her spine. Was it her imagination, or were there lights in the cave? "The warriors trapped the Tsawhawbitts in that cave and blocked his escape with boulders, so they say," Camryn zoomed the camera in, then turned, making sure to catch her partner's uncomfortable appearance. It would add gravity to the finished product.
"Cam, I don't think we should be here," the highschooler gulped, peering into the gloom. "I don't like this place." Nothing she said would change the other girl's mind: Camryn was far too obsessed with the legend of the canyon to turn back. Laughing off her acquaintance's concerns, Camryn plowed ahead into the darkness, panning the camera back and forth. The wind began to moan through the gulch as the two stepped into the cavern, footsteps crunching in the pebbles. Common graffiti gave way to names scrawled in the '50s, scratched into the rock with pocketknives. "Hey, cool!" Sierra shone her flashlight onto some of the names. "Looks like somebody was an Elvis-fangirl, huh?" The chamber opened out into a larger cavern, halfway below the level of the ground outside. There were petroglyphs here, depictions of everyday life for the Shoshone hundreds of years ago. "Wow!" Camryn breathed, tracing her fingers over them. "Did you know they made these things with rocks and hammers? Look, here's a hunter." She pointed to a simple etching of a man on horseback, holding up a bow. Sierra assumed that the bunch of little lines between the figure and the thing that was probably a deer were meant to be arrows. A little ways off from the more peaceful drawings was a large, bipedal petroglyph with what looked like wings and horns. "That's..." Sierra trailed off, unsure of how to describe it.
"I think that's what we're looking for!" her companion exclaimed excitedly. She zoomed her camera in on it and began a monologue about the supposed monster from the story. "Right, okay," Sierra sighed, "I'm just going to check out the rest of the cave while you...talk to the wall." Flashlight in one hand, camera in the other, the highschooler trudged away, muttering under her breath about the foolishness of the excursion. If her parents realized she was missing, she would have more to worry about than man-eating giants! Something crunched under her foot as she neared the back of the chamber. Slowly, she panned the camera and the flashlight down, and her hair stood on end. Bones. Her boot had come down in the middle of a set of vertebrae that looked disturbingly close to human. "C-c-c-c" she tried to call out to Camryn, but couldn't form the words. Several skulls adorned the back wall on various ledges high above her head, and smaller shards of the brittle remains coated the uneven floor. There was no logical explanation for the height of the skulls on the wall, nor for the fact that they were definitely human. "Camryn!" Sierra finally squeaked. Ms. Ross turned and fixed her with a slightly annoyed look. "What is it, Sierra?" The obvious fear on the younger girl's face quickly caught her attention and soon she had joined Sierra in the back of the cave.
For once, Camryn Ross regretted her decision. "I...was not expecting this," she whispered, "We need to get the police out here." The college student looked around, shivering in the increasingly unpleasant atmosphere. "I'm going to go call the sheriff, you stay here and guard the evidence!" she blurted out, and darted out of the cave. "Wait, what? No! Don't leave me in...here..." the redhead bit her lip and furrowed her brow. For a long time she stood like that, frozen in place in the middle of the cave, unwilling to move. Suddenly, one of the skulls rattled. Sierra shrieked and aimed the beam of her light at it. What she had taken for rock shuddered beneath the bones and sent them tumbling to the floor as part of the wall pulled away and a thin, red line glowed in the gloom. The rocky look shimmered like a mirage and faded, revealing what looked to be a rhinocerous beetle the size of a minivan. Sierra sucked in a deep breath and watched with wide eyes, praying that it wouldn't see her. The long proboscis quivered, moving back and forth in the air. Then, with a sound like the scream of a horse, it changed. The giant beetle was suddenly a metallic, humanoid creature far far larger than a minivan. Sharp feelers twitched at the corners of its fanged mouth, and a scarlet optic band glowered down at the human. "Oh no," the girl gasped, "It's one of them."
The misshapen head snapped downwards and a grating, guttural approximation of a voice gurgled, "Meat!" Spotting an opening low in the cave wall, Sierra made a break for it, barely squeezing through before filthy talons closed on the space she had just occupied. She ran blindly through the maze of tunnels she found below the chamber, camera forgotten in her panic. At last, the paths ended in one wide cavern, filled with glowing blue stalagmites that looked like crystal. The slender girl hunched down behind one of the rocks, trying to stifle her terrified tears. If ever she survived this, she silently swore that she would never leave home again. It was not long before the bug/giant lumbered into the cave, hissing. Slowly, horrifically, the grotesque figure began to move towards her hiding place, drooling some oily substance. There was a sound like a fazer from Star Trek, and suddenly the monster went flying back into the wall with a terrific crash. "Got him!" a loud voice declared. Another metal giant, this one considerably more human-looking, sprinted into the chamber with some kind of cannons mounted on his wrists. A cocky grin lit his silvery face and even in the dust rising from the impact, his red, white, and blue paintjob gleamed.
"Finish the job, rookie, we've got a witness!" an older voice snarled. A third robot followed the second, sporting a very familiar shade of blue. He crouched next to Sierra's hiding place and frowned at her. "We just keep running into each other, don't we kid?" Ultra Magnus sighed. The girl shrieked and tried to press herself into the wall. "Hey, calm down!" Smokescreen laughed, standing on the decapitated corpse of the Insecticon, "We're the good guys!" Trembling, Sierra pointed at the dead creature. "That-that-that thing tried to eat me!" she cried. Both mechs reacted with disgust. "Barbarian!" Magnus grunted, aiming a kick at the severed helm. He bent down again. "It's Sierra, right? Listen, we want to help you, understand?" Shaken, she could do little else but nod. "Good. Now, you've seen us, and that's not a good thing." the huge red and blue Autobot spoke slowly, as if to a frightened animal. "We have to take you with us to be debriefed by your government concerning what you will and will not be allowed to do after this point." Sierra groaned and covered her eyes, flinching violently when the surprisingly warm metal hand lifted her from the cave floor. It was official: her life was ruined. "This isn't happening, this isn't happening, this isn't happening," she tried to repeat to herself, but it was no use lying to herself.
Life as she knew it had changed forever, but somehow, she wasn't as afraid anymore.
