December 31st, 2022
Arya's POV:
I was prepared for school to go back to normal the following Monday, barring the new announcement that EAT students would have to hunt with one or more partner teams. I mean, what else was there to note?
Apparently, as I learned while waking up to Rex's ear-splitting scream about a half-hour before I usually got up, there was also the matter of Sid's public reanimation and re-hiring as a teacher at the DWMA.
I barely had time to jolt upright in bed before Rex burst into the room and hurled a newspaper in my face, babbling at a thousand miles per minute. Luckily, he still had enough reflexes in him to duck when my panicked nerves –which were already on a hair-trigger due to the scream– caused me to launch a fireball at the offending projectile. Newspaper being what it was, the fireball shot right through the flimsy sheet and splashed on the wall behind Rex as he ducked.
"WHAT THE FUCK-"
"SID IS BACK!" Rex cried, pointing at the mournful ashen heap on the ground between us as I clutched my chest and heaved.
"Dude, what the ever-loving fuck?!" I shouted back, before jabbing a finger behind him. "The wall's on fire!"
Rex turned, looked, and shrieked.
Some more panicked shouting and frantic splashes of water on our now-charred apartment hallway later, and I was blearily and murderously digging into my breakfast cereal as a chagrined Rex tried to scrape off some of the damaged plaster on the wall. I couldn't exactly blame him for being excited, seeing how much he looked up to Professor Sid and how devastated he had been when the man died, but I could certainly resent him for his inadvertent way of breaking the news.
Of course, Rex was all but bouncing in place as we made our way to the school, and he took the shining marble steps two at a time as he all but rocketed up the mountainous staircase. I, having much less to look forward to since I had known Sid was alive to begin with –conditionally speaking, anyways– took a more leisurely pace.
Excitement hummed throughout the classroom as we took our seats, reaching a fever pitch when the door finally opened and Sid stepped through. I half-expected there to be a cheer, but was distracted along with most of the rest of the class, my eyebrows arching up, when we saw our teacher.
It was weird to see Sid post-zombification.
He still had the tightly-braided cornrows in his black hair, and the headband and the swirling sleeve tattoos and the white basketball jersey and the blue jeans were all the same… but now there was a prominent hole in his forehead, right in the middle, a blank void that we were all trying very hard not to stare at. His healthy brown skin had also turned a fetching shade of stagnant-blood blue.
Possibly due to some kind of bloating or necrosis that had happened before Stein had turned him into a zombie –I hadn't gotten that far in the body decomp unit we were supposed to complete in science class– Sid was bulkier than he had been while he was alive, too, with his much-thicker jaw giving his face a blockier, flattened look. His blue-purple skin was sunken in below his cheekbones as well, making them appear weirdly prominent and drawing his lips back tightly to expose his teeth. His eyes were a milky white, without pupil or iris.
All in all, if I hadn't known him before, I'd have been screaming and throwing my textbooks at the zombie on our lecture hall floor before grabbing Rex and hauling ass for the exit. What was cartoonish in the anime was now terrifyingly unsettling as it translated to real life: Sid looked dead, but he was moving around completely normally as he walked into the room. No stiffness or locked muscles like in the movies, just a normal dude in purple bodypaint or something before you got to the face and suddenly all your instincts screamed wait sweet Christ this is a dead guy.
Rather than cheers, there was a stunned silence and several reflexive squeals of excitement, which withered and died as people happy to see Sid finally registered what he actually looked like now. Within seconds, the classroom was silent. Dead silent.
Sid picked up his clipboard from the desk, looked down at it, and arched a brow.
"All right, then. Let's do roll call." he said, apparently not noticing or not caring about the hypnotized silence of the classroom. "Arslan Anderson?"
"H-here…" the student in question weakly replied, drawn into the mundane routine without quite realizing what they had done or preparing themselves in any way. Sid made a mark.
"Okay. Next is…"
As he methodically went down the list and student after student shook off their stupor and participated, I indulged myself in a small grin. Only at the DWMA would the absurd become commonplace through sheer force of will. So we had a dead guy teaching our class now –so what? Papers wouldn't grade themselves.
Rex and I did our best over the next few days, visiting Maka in the library to try and cheer her up, going on runs with Blackstar, and so on. To the best of my knowledge, the next event that would actually have any effect on me was probably the school dance, which I distinctly remembered was in the spring. Since it was still November, that gave me and Rex a nice long cushion time to relax and get stronger.
Mostly get stronger.
After all, one Kishin a week was 52 in a year, and if we got more than one soul a week, like during our last mission?
I could probably breeze through this shit in less than six months. Of course, it was kinda unclear just how much individual souls boosted a Weapon's power until that final bottleneck-breaking Witch's soul, but at the very least, Rex and I would be getting a heck of a lot of valuable fighting experience that could potentially save both our skins down the road.
This being the DWMA, there were a lot of practical lessons in class, too, and Rex and I were slowly but surely eating up the distance between us and the rest of the other students. The semester had only started for a few months before we got into EAT –that helped a lot, too.
But amid all our science lessons and tests and practical exams, my eyes were still set firmly on the end of the week, and our next mission. You'd think that doubling up on missions would've made more available on the board, but nothing could be further from the truth. It was almost a solid wall of in-progresses that I checked on Wednesday, although I had a sneaking suspicion that the teachers were setting out fewer boards and upping their filters on the missions themselves. One accident was a tragedy, but two accidents would start rumors.
Didn't help me and Rex, though.
In fact, as I scanned and scanned and scanned, it only seemed like there was one mission left –luckily within our range, and no requirements beyond free time and the ability to speak English. Apparently, it was a missing person's case that had been called to the DWMA's attention by the local authorities, which meant that a Kishin Egg's involvement was only suspected, not a certainty. With so few missions on the board and the risk of putting forth a remedial's worth of effort for no soul at all, it seemed like a lot of people were content to wait until something meatier was posted.
I only considered it for about ten seconds before reaching for the board. Experience was experience, right, even if we didn't get a soul out of it?
My hand touched the board at the same time someone else's did. In a shojo manga, this would be my cue to look up in surprise with wide, soulful eyes, and then blush a little at the handsome man standing so close to me. Since this was unequivocally a shounen, however, I turned my head to glare at the other girl standing beside me, taller, with her brown hair cut spiky and short, as she narrowed her eyes back at me. The words step off, bitch seemed to float between us, rather than shojo sparkles, and a crackle of electricity connected our eyes.
"I saw it first." I said in the age-old tradition. "Dibs."
"You can't call dibs on a mission." she sneered back. "And besides, I know you."
Wait, fucking what? Since when did I have a reputation?!
"You're that girl that partnered with that useless buster-sword. Rex, or whatever." my opponent continued, oblivious to my little 'ah' of realization, and then scoffed. "As your senior in EAT, I have the right to this mission. The two of you can go track police rumors or whatever else you're qualified to do."
"Well, we need a partner team anyway." I said, resisting the urge to demonstrate to her that I was, in fact, very qualified to murder one of my fellow meisters. Especially after hearing her diss my dorky partner like that. I mean seriously, who was this much of a jerk in real life? "How about you? Or are you so very senior and experienced that you're willing to break the rules that say you need two teams for a mission now?"
She winced slightly, which told me two things. One, she hadn't been subsumed by the bully trope so much that she was willing to break school rules, and two, she was apparently insufferable enough that she didn't have a second team lined up ready to help her.
Heh.
Loser.
The other meister gave me a look sour enough to make lemons curl up in the corner and cry, and then sharply yanked the mission board away from my hand.
"Fine." she spat venomously. "We'll leave tomorrow. You aren't ready? Tough luck, we're leaving you behind."
She whipped around and flounced off towards the desk, and I indulged in a hearty and juvenile tongue-sticking out from behind her back, before strolling off to find Rex. We'd have to cut class on Thursday and probably Friday too, even if we solved it overnight, since this case was out northwest in Washington state, but that would be fine, we could catch up over the weekend itself if we made it back before Saturday.
I made a mental note to pack a rain jacket, though.
Good news, it wasn't raining when we got to the little remote town a few hours away from our airport, out in the thickly forested slopes.
Bad news, our partner team seemed bound and determined to leave Rex and me on the sidelines. The four of us were supposed to investigating a slew of disappearances in the town –mostly a few hikers, and one suburban van with a vacationing family– but every time we talked to witnesses, the queen bitch herself and her partner managed to shove me and Rex to the back of the room, or outside the office, or into the hall. Honestly, I'd be even madder if I wasn't so impressed at how they subtly managed to keep doing it.
Note to self, figure out how to do this. I thought as we were once again unceremoniously shunted to the side without anyone but ourselves taking offense. Even Rex, despite his temper being a lot easier than mine, was starting to get a little red in the face as we were so constantly dismissed throughout the day.
It wasn't hard to figure out what the other two were doing. There was likely only one Kishin Egg here, if there was one at all –the body count just wasn't high enough for two. Therefore, whichever team got furthest ahead in the mission and killed it would be the only team to have even a chance of actually getting anything out of our trip here. Sidelining us and snatching the soul for themselves would be the easiest way to crush our arrogant spirits and assert their dominance over me and Rex.
Still, despite their best efforts, our rather dickish partner team were unaware of a few crucial facts. The most currently crucial of these was the fact that I was trope-savvy, and that even when they conspired to keep us away from most of the interviews as we canvassed and cross-canvassed the town throughout the day, I was able to pick up some important details.
Like, how most of the disappearances had started in the same stretch of woods.
And there was a summer camp near those woods.
And one of the counselors in that camp had been a witness to one of the attacks.
We reconvened in our motel lobby after the duo were done interviewing, and both members of our partner team displayed all the classic signs of annoyed weariness as Rex and I stood and seethed by the wall, slumping in their armchairs, grumbling aimlessly, rubbing their feet. Keeping us out of the way and actually trying to do their job picking the local witnesses' brains for details was tiring work, after all.
"Ugh." the meister complained, kicking up both feet on the coffee table. Her roaming gaze drifted over our pile of witness reports, then the list of people we still had to talk to, and then fastened on me and Rex, who was fuming mutely at my side.
I crossed my fingers behind my back.
"You two." she said, picking up the scant list of remaining witnesses and spinning it across the table at us. "Take care of this, would ya?"
Rex growled under his breath and snatched up the single sheet of paper without even pretending to be polite about it. There was, as I expected, several names on it. There were also neat tick marks with their occupation/location after them:
Jenny Morrison –25, camp counselor at Camp Jasper Lake
Elaine Cowden –18, on retreat at Camp Jasper Lake
Jasmine Draper –18, on retreat at Camp Jasper Lake
Kristen Joyce –18, on retreat at Camp Jasper Lake
Tom Kranz –18, on retreat at Camp Jasper Lake
Kole Loman –18, on retreat at Camp Jasper Lake
Makala Patrick –18, on retreat at Camp Jasper Lake
Kevin Schmidt–18, on retreat at Camp Jasper Lake
I looked up from the list as the brunette meister continued, waving her hand dismissively.
"You saw us working-" She gained a smug smile there as Rex quivered in silent outrage beside me. "-so, like, just copy that and ask them some questions. The camp's pretty far out, so you can come back in the morning."
"You can't seriously-" Rex began as his rage finally started to bubble over, but I quietly moved to stamp on his foot, shutting him up.
"You want us to go visit this summer camp thing they've got up there?" I asked our partner team, as though clarifying.
"Yeah."
"This camp out in the backwoods? The one filled with a buncha mostly-unsupervised teenagers?"
"Yeah?"
It took some damn near heroic effort to keep a straight face. My lips quivered, but I remained firm.
"Snrk."
Nope, nope, couldn't do it. I turned my face to a side and gave a hasty cough, trying to hide my quick burst of laughter.
"Ah, ahem, um, anyway." I said as I turned back. "Isn't that a little-" Don't laugh don't laugh don't laugh "-u-unfair? I mean, we deserve a crack at getting the Kishin Egg too-"
"Yeah? And? We're not even sure there is a Kishin Egg here." the brunette replied, as insufferably smug as a cat being stroked in someone's lap for eating the canary. She gestured sharply at us, sitting up a little more. "Anyway, get moving. Its gonna take a while to get out there, and you're wasting daylight."
"You've got to be kidding me!" Rex snarled as he kicked a nearby dumpster with a booming clang, before pacing back and forth angrily in the parking lot of the gas station we'd been dumped at. Apparently, one of the park rangers would be out in the bit with a truck to take us out to the camp –the woods being a bit iffy on vehicles not built to handle all-terrain. "They're just- just-"
"An insufferable pair of assholes?" I asked absently, eyeing the display window. The raincoat I'd packed was garish and bright, so if they had a camouflage option in there, it'd be great. After all, there would almost certainly be a lot of running around in our near future.
"I can't believe this." Rex continued, still pacing angrily. The rural location and the recent spate of disappearances meant that we had the whole parking lot to ourselves, and probably would for the foreseeable future –no tourists coming in, and most of the locals weren't going to be on this road out of town anytime soon. "They're deliberately cutting us out, sidelining us just because they've been EAT students longer!"
"Mmm." I agreed, starting to rummage in my pocket for my wallet.
"I'm gonna tell Sid about this. I-I'll even tell Lord Death if I have to! It's unbelievable!"
"Yup." I said. "Keep an eye out for our truck, yeah? I just gotta pop in here real quick and buy some emergency supplies."
"Wh-" Rex half-turned, seeing me head into the store, and scuttled behind. "Now, hang on a second!"
The gas station we entered as a bell rang above the door was less like the candy-filled stores in more populated areas and more like a camping supply store. Oh, sure, there were racks and shelves full of brightly colored snacks, candies, jerky, and chips, but the wall of glass-doored refrigerators at the far end also had a cabinet full of live bait –Styrofoam tubs with sharpie-written words like worms and leeches on the lids– and there was all kinds of outdoorsy equipment scattered everywhere.
"Arya, I feel like you're not taking this seriously!" Rex spluttered as I paused near the entry, scanning the shelves.
"Of course I am." I replied, heading off down the aisle with him at my shoulder. I picked up a coil of rope and tugged at it, testing the strength, and then looked at the fathom length. "How good at you at tying knots?"
Rex made a highly aggravated sound and tugged at his hair under his hat.
"Look, Rex," I said as I finally took sympathy on him, glancing up from the rope. "I get it. They're being dicks, they're shunting us aside, and it feels awful. But I've got a plan."
Rex looked nervous as I slid the rope over my arm and we moved down the aisle.
"You're not gonna…" He looked around a few times as I picked up a bike lock and hefted it in my hands, testing if it would hold up against a strike from an axe or a machete. He looked back at me and drew a line across his throat with one finger.
"What, you mean-" I mimicked the movement back at him as I slid my thumb across my own throat, a bit more aggressively. "Nah. Nothing like that. Seriously, dude, do you think my answer to everything is-"
I made appropriately vague murderous gestures at him. Rex had the decency to at least look apologetic.
"Well, you know…your whole, uh, family business…"
"The family business is not murder." I told him flatly as we moved to another aisle, and I picked up a thick, solid roll of duct tape. "I'm not a Winchester."
"Who?"
"Don't worry about it."
My main concern here, as we rummaged through the store, was how in most of these stories the good guys/victims had a habit of conveniently losing or running out of one, very common, but suddenly-crucial item or material. Rope to climb down a cliff or tie someone up, duct tape to seal a room, a lock to keep the slasher trapped… heck, even a first aid kit. Something so ubiquitous in a cabin or a summer camp that you wouldn't even think about it, taking its presence for granted –until you realized that you were out, or it was gone, and everything started falling apart.
Well, not if I had anything to say about that.
"Trust me, Rex." I said as I brought my choices up to the counter. "We're going to have a much more exciting time than those two assholes."
My partner gave me an incredulous look, then jabbed a finger at the view of our transport vehicle through the glass window as it pulled into the gas station.
"Are you kidding me? Look at this!" Rex spluttered indignantly as the man behind the counter rang us up. "We're going to be heading to a summer camp out in the middle of the woods, in a creaky old truck that looks like it's going to fall to pieces right this second, to talk to a bunch of teenagers who've probably never even heard of these killings!"
"I know. Isn't it great?" I replied absentmindedly, fishing out my wallet and pulling it open. I started to flick through the bills.
"Great-?" Rex blinked at me for a second as I slid the right amount over and received a plastic bag full of goods in exchange. "I thought you wanted to get as many souls as we can as quickly as possible! It's obvious the other two are trying to get us out of the way!"
"Yup." I said as we headed out the door. "And in any other situation, I'd be as pissed as you. But alas for them, they forgot one small detail."
Rex gave me a wordless look, skepticism heavy in his eyes. Then, however, the wariness in his face slowly faded. After all, I'd proven myself to have an uncanny (trope-fed) knack for picking out solutions and scenarios. Maybe I was onto something.
"And what detail is that?" Rex asked at length, setting me up perfectly.
Satisfied with the haul I had, I tucked my wallet back into my jacket pocket and then slung an arm around Rex's shoulders.
"'They were warned…They are doomed…And on Friday the 13th, nothing will save them.'" I told him, giving a cheeky grin. "In other words, stranded in the middle of the woods with a bunch of teenagers is exactly where we want to be for this case."
Rex stared at me in blank, dumbfounded betrayal.
As the truck chugged and rattled –and rattled was definitely the operative term– up the steep slope of the road, Rex and I were thankfully too busy clinging to the overhead handles to exchange any words. The road itself was made of dirt, switchbacking through the thickly forested hills covered in pines and redwoods, and the suspension in our truck was… out of date, to say the least. Combine all these factors together, and even with our seat belts and vice-like grip on the handles, we were bouncing around the inside of the truck like two very disgruntled rubber balls.
Despite the loud, rumbling coughs and vibrations of the engine underneath us, and the way the cabin of the truck hummed and shook, I was liking what I saw outside the dancing windows. This part of the forest outside of town was hilly in the extreme –not quite mountains, but certainly rough terrain. The landscape dipped and rose around us on all sides, with fern-covered ravines plunging suddenly beneath the short bridges we rattled over and sheer cliffs thrusting up out of grassy swells.
Despite the fact that it was November, most of the ferns and shrubbery on the forest floor were only starting to wither into that brown-green I knew so well from my own autumns in Virginia, and almost all of the trees were still carrying green leaves. That felt a little odd, but… well, I'd never been to the Pacific Northwest before now, and maybe it didn't snow around here. Failing that, maybe it was a quirk of this world that things were a lot more temperate –the magnetic island north of Alaska had originally been green and almost jungle-y, after all.
Most importantly, though, this camp that we were headed to was isolated. It was about an hour trip by car from the town, through terrain that plunged and dipped and soared like an earthquake detection meter. While it didn't much matter in our truck, if you were –say– a comely and disheveled young coed fleeing frantically from the campsite, it might take you two or even three times as long to traverse this distance on foot –picking your way down and then climbing your way back up these dozens of deep gullies and sharp crests of hills. And that was assuming that you weren't already injured.
In other words, it would be prohibitively difficult to traverse this distance on foot, which meant that as night fell, we would be completely cut off from the outside world, sealed in an all-but-impenetrable bubble. Which, obviously, put another tick in the definitely-a-setup-for-a-slasher-movie column and almost cemented my belief that all the real action was going to take place around this camp. In fact, I was already fairly well convinced of three things, as our truck rattled and banged its way towards the resort location.
1. There was definitely, absolutely going to be a Kishin Egg around here somewhere.
2. We were going to find ourselves cut off from help sometime towards evening. (Although whether our truck would leave before then was unknown.)
3. Rex and I were going to have a hell of a time keeping the teenagers at said camp from dying –if they weren't already dead by the time we showed up.
My suspicions –if something so unshakeable could even be called that– were only confirmed as we reached a very long, somewhat narrow bridge that stretched across a huge gulf. Instead of being made of steel and concrete, it was wood, and creaked and groaned somewhat alarmingly under our tire treads as the truck rumbled its slow way across. If I were a betting person, I would've bet cash money that this bridge wouldn't survive past sundown –one way or another.
But we made it across this first time without incident, and the trees opened up around a wide space surrounded by cabins and a few long wooden buildings with green shingle roofs. The open space had a rough circle of gravel for cars, but the green and grassy center looked like it was used for various sporting activities, as well as a central firepit with felled logs for seats. In other words, very quaint, very charming, full of backwoodsy cheer and comfort.
I wondered if I'd brought enough ammunition. Slasher villains were notoriously hard to kill, and it wasn't implausible that my bullets would bounce right off.
Nevertheless, the truck soon rolled to a slow stop, and we crawled out, hobbling a little as we tried to regain feeling and mobility in our glutes.
"Well, thanks, man." I said, straightening up and smacking my hand against the driver's door. "Why don't you head on back to town, and we'll see ya again in the morning?"
"You sure 'bout that?" the ranger asked, leaning out of his open window slightly and peering down at us with a slight frown. "S'long way away from town, out here."
"Trust me, our partner team for this mission are insufferable." I said as Rex gave a vehement nod. "We'll be happy for the breathing space."
The ranger shrugged, and started up his truck again.
"Suit yourselves. I'll come back around noon tomorrow."
And with that, the truck chugged and rattled off as I let out a small sigh of relief. Not that I knew the ranger at all, but it was still reassuring to know that he was now going to be out of range of any of the murderous slasher nonsense that was about to go down at this camp. I mean, sure, going off on your own at the beginning was one of the easiest ways to get whacked during a horror movie, but I was betting on me and Rex being the inciting incident –not to mention, one of the most essential roles for the initial victim was to set up the dread and horror of the survivors.
If the ranger left, then none of us would be able to happen across his corpse and react with dramatic shock and tension, which would therefore remove the narrative purpose of killing him. He wouldn't be the sudden shock at the beginning of the movie that maybe-this-killer-nonsense-was-all-legit, he'd be the distant cavalry force that we'd have to hold out for. Sending him away subverted any of the usual slasher tropes and, hopefully, shifted his ultimate fate.
Given how much horror liked to break its own rules, though, I knew that this was not a foolproof strategy, but it was also the best I could do. Send the poor bastard away, and hope that he got out of range before the tropes really kicked into high gear. We had other business to attend to, and the sad fact of the matter was that even with Rex, I couldn't keep my eyes on everybody here. Between a single park ranger and a cabin full of mixed-gender teenagers, it was obvious who was more at risk.
As I dusted my hands off, Rex and I turned back towards the camp itself.
"The lady on the phone said that she'd be waiting in the dining hall." Rex suggested, and I nodded, picking up the plastic bag I had brought all the way from town.
"Well, let's get going, then." I said, starting forward. "You got your gun?"
Rex sighed, but tapped the shoulder holster I'd made him wear. Yup, he was armed –even if I was fairly confident that he wouldn't need it, what with his ability to partially transform and all. Still, in a slasher movie, most weapons tended to be melee, so Rex having a gun could really turn the tables.
I, of course, had my trusty Colt as always. I was starting to feel like a Western movie goon.
Still, distasteful movie genres aside, everything seemed fairly quiet as we made our way to the largest and longest of the three non-cabin buildings, which we both assumed was going to be the cafeteria. It wasn't –quite– an ominous silence, but rather the very peaceful and dreamy sort of quiet of a forest as it tended towards autumn and all the bugs died and the birds and beasts began snuggling in their burrows as mist drifted across the land. A cold and sleepy sort of quiet, like a very still lake.
Naturally, I wasn't fooled for a second. This was the deep breath before the plunge, and I kept half an eye on the trees, looking for anything even vaguely humanoid-shaped, as Rex and I made our way to the front door and knocked.
The lady that opened the front door was probably the Jenny Morrison we'd seen on the list –a slightly frazzled-looking, breathless mid-twenties woman wearing a green shirt and knee-length canvas shorts with a multitude of pockets. She had hiking boots and high socks, and her hair was done up in a sloppy bun.
"We're part of the, uh, group sent here by the DWMA?" I said, hesitating for a moment on group. It felt weird to say team, since there were two partner teams on the mission, and I couldn't say partners, either, for obvious reasons. "We came to talk to you about that thing you saw in the woods…?"
Her eyes widened slightly.
"Oh, of course! Come in, come in!" Jenny said, stepping aside and waving us in with somewhat agitated movements. Rex and I exchanged a glance and stepped into the building, which sure enough, turned out to be a dining hall. Wood predominated in the room: dark brown wooden walls, wooden beams overhead, polished wooden floor and a slight stage at the far end in a lighter golden-brown, and rows and rows of benches and wooden tables made of white peeled logs. There was a heavy scent of pine and varnish in the air –even when I knew that this was pretty standard cabin architecture, I made a mental note to avoid tossing any matches about.
"I didn't want to tell the kids about this, although we've naturally been on guard ever since the disappearances started." Jenny continued as she swept us towards one of the nearest tables and sat down. To give her credit, she did seem a bit shaken, with a pale face and slightly trembling hands that she cupped together on the table.
Rex and I exchanged another speaking look –neither of us had studied interrogating someone for information yet, but someone had to do it– before I hooked out the opposite bench with my foot and we both sat down.
"Why don't you tell us about the incident?" Rex said, striving to be polite as he folded his arms and leaned forward, resting them on the table.
Jenny swallowed.
"It was when I was doing one of the last lock-ups at the end of the night." she said, before broadly waving a hand at one of the nearby windows. "We always do it after the campers have gone to bed, making sure that nobody's going to sneak out or that the animals won't get into the food. I tell you, everyone worries about bears, but even the raccoons will make an unholy mess if those little beggars can get past the lids on the trash cans. I know this place might not look like much, but even though we get some fairly steady traffic, it's not enough to justify more than one counselor on-site per group, and it's a pain sometimes to try and clean up everything on your own."
"Mm-hm." I said, not entirely sure if this was relevant.
"So anyway, I'm doing one last sweep of the camp, making sure that everything's right and tight, and I see this… thing moving out in the woods."
Check for one of the most clichéd lines ever put to screen. Still, I couldn't help but feel a slight chill brush down my back. The unknown was still scary, and for all my savviness when it came down to the general tropes of the genre, the specifics of the slashers themselves was a bit more vague. All I really had going for me was the knowledge that the overwhelming majority of them were male, physically strong and well-built, and unstoppable in a way that could be anything from extremely good luck on their part to literal cartoon invulnerability.
Which was hopefully not the case here, come to think of it. I gulped.
"I mean, at first I didn't really think much of it, you know?" the counselor continued, smoothing a hand back over her hair nervously. "It was far off, moving steadily away, and nothing had been disturbed. I mean, I thought it could've been a bear, I guess. Bears're a lot more human than most people give them credit for, as far as the silhouette goes, especially if they're upright."
I shrugged.
"I mean, you tell me, Miss Camp Counselor." I said, still shrugging. "This is your neck of the woods."
Jenny flickered a brief smile at me and Rex.
"So, anyway, I didn't think much of it at first." she continued. "It was moving away from the cabins, it hadn't tipped over any bins –it was fine, right? But then I realized… well, it wasn't a bear. And I'm not too proud to admit, that freaked me out. Rangers, hikers, the usual folk wandering out in the woods… we don't get them this far out."
Rex and I both made interested, sympathetic, and somewhat nervous noises.
"I didn't call out to…whatever it was… because, well… I knew about all the stuff in town, see?"
I had to admit, that was an interesting…anthropological?… difference between this world and my own. In my world, the immediate civilian assumption on seeing a human-like figure was that it was another person –failing that, it was something cryptid-like that beckoned interest. In the world of Soul Eater, anything that was human-like that you couldn't immediately peg as another human was going to be a threat on the level of a live –and angry– rattlesnake. People here recognized that sort of thing intrinsically, whereas I was still the sort of person who'd automatically try to get such a creature's attention.
It was a weird feeling. I tried not to pay attention to it.
"S-so, you know, I didn't want to draw its attention towards me or the campers, so I just sort of… hid behind one of the cabin walls and turned off my flashlight." Jenny said, rubbing the back of her neck. "I watched it as it moved off, and then I waited a little while before creeping out to try and see where it was going and if there were any tracks. When it got to where… whatever it was…w as, I saw some scuff marks and some darks spots that might have been… blood… on the ground."
"And you called that in to the town, right?" Rex asked, ever-professional. "That's how you got added to our witness list."
Jenny nodded, and tapped her fingers anxiously against the table.
"Can you give us any specifics of the thing you saw, though?" I asked, stressing the word. "Y'know, height, shape, that sort of thing?"
"It was… big." Jenny said, her voice slow and thoughtful. "Big and bulky. Too far away to get a really clear view of anything, except that it looked human."
There was a creak from the door, and we all twitched around on a hair-trigger as I saw Rex's arm gleam. A somewhat bewildered-looking camper blinked back at us, blond and scraggly and with a cheesy long-sleeve shirt with a stenciled logo of the camp.
"Uh, Kole wanted me to tell you that we're ready to start the bonfire…?" he said, slowly lifting a thumb in direction of the camp outside.
"Oh, yes, of course." Jenny said, hastily getting to her feet. "Excuse me, you two. Please feel free to look around the camp, the keys are in a fuse box in the kitchen side of the hall. You can go anywhere you like."
With that, she hustled off.
"What do you think?" Rex asked me as we took a corner of the room, leaving the counselor to do her thing with the campers as the door of the dining hall swung shut behind her.
"Well, she definitely saw something." I said. I didn't have to feign engagement here, since I was keen to learn more about the enemy that we'd soon be facing. "And if you look at it one way, this camp is probably gonna be the Kishin Egg's next target."
Rex gave me a blank look.
"Yeah…?" he asked, and I put my arm around his shoulder again, gesturing widely towards the camp around us.
"Think about it." I said. "All the possible victims so far have vanished outside of town. They died and/or disappeared in the woods with no witnesses, which means if they did die, our Kishin Egg has been pretty careful picking off its victims so far."
Rex began to nod slowly.
"Careful enough to take them without witnesses, in rural backcountry that they might've just gotten lost in." he said, beginning to follow my lead. "This camp is pretty far outside of town… and Kishin Eggs get more and more unstable the more souls they eat. If there even is one out here at all, it's going to get less and less sneaky and more and more aggressive as time goes on. We need to get these guys back to town."
"Exactly." I patted his back. "Since we're both pretty sure there's a monster in them thar woods-"
"You really don't need to do the accent-"
"-we need to focus on collecting evidence that'll boot these guys back to town with us when the truck pulls in tomorrow morning." I finished proudly. "Y'know, something unshakeable that'll make them pack their bags and drive home, pronto."
Rex doffed his hat for a moment, scratching the back of his head.
"I don't know…" he began dubiously.
"Look, we'll just explore the camp and see if we can find any evidence that there's something scary out here." I said, using my most utterly reasonable tones. "We're not even gonna go into the trees that much, really. We're just looking around until the truck comes back tomorrow at noon. What's the harm? We can practice our clue-finding."
"Fine." Rex sighed, and I grinned. He watched as I did a little fist-pump, before going back to the plastic bag that I'd carried all the way here from the gas station. "What's in that, anyway?"
"Flashlights." I said, pulling one out and laying it on the table. "Two D-cell battery flashlights, metal casings, fresh batteries."
I picked the second one up and pushed the button, turning it on. The glow was pleasingly strong, but more importantly, as I hefted it, the flashlight itself was heavy. It was, after all, a solid piece of workmanship, with two blocky batteries wrapped in a metal shell about eight inches long. In a pinch, you could use this thing as a baton –which was exactly why I'd bought it.
"Here." I handed him the one I was holding, then stuck the other through my belt. "Don't lose that, by the way."
The initial moments of a slasher movie, I knew, were crucial. Heck, the initial moments of even a single scene usually set the tone for how the rest of it would go. And right now, we had a clear run. The premise was set, the movie opened, and unlike the rest of the frenetic, blood-filled evening, this right here was going to be the calm before the storm as we geared up and got ready to go face whatever it was that we'd be facing.
I, naturally, wanted to take every advantage of it that I could, which included divvying up the supplies I'd brought with now, rather than later, since I had no guarantee that we'd even be able to access the dining hall later.
Take nothing for granted in a slasher movie, especially accessibility.
Heavy-duty flashlights, suitable for shining light as well as emergency-bashing-someone's-head in, check. An emergency first aid kit with disinfectant, bandages, and needle and thread for each of us. One compass each. Two fifty-foot coils of light, but durable rope.
I distributed these effects with brisk efficiency, and Rex, although he eyed me with a certain amount of skepticism, took them without comment. Whether that was because we'd built up enough trust that he was willing to follow my actions –no matter how bizarre they seemed to him– or because he knew he wouldn't get a comprehensible answer out of me if he asked what we were doing, it was a bit hard to say, but I didn't precisely care. As long as we weren't arguing or tense, I was good.
We were both armed, too, even aside from the Weapon-meister thing. I had my Colt and my combat knife strapped to a thigh, and Rex had the shoulder-holster with his pistol, mostly hidden beneath his suit jacket that he'd still refused to shed even in the howling wilderness. Eh, I could respect choosing an aesthetic and sticking to it, particularly within the confines of an anime world.
In any case, we were (metaphorically) suited and booted and ready for action a brisk five minutes later, and I took a deep breath as I balled up the plastic bag and stuffed it in the trash can nearby. From here on out, any and all bets of safety were off: we were knowingly and deliberately taking a step into a horror movie.
"Right." I muttered to myself as we headed towards the front door. I pushed it open, and we stepped out into a rush of cool evening air –cool enough that I was glad we both had jackets, even if it still wasn't quite the cold you'd expect from November in the Pacific Northwest.
We stood there on the stoop for a moment as the door swung shut behind us, orientating ourselves to the cold and the dimming grey light. The cabins and the forest were as silent as ever, but to my ear, at least, the silence seemed a lot more ominous. The campers and Jenny were gathered around a campfire in the center of the green space, talking and chattering and passing marshmallows around.
"Are we splitting up?" Rex asked after a moment.
"Hah!" I laughed. "Yeah, no way. We're sticking together like glue, my dude. 'Sides, it's not like the camp's that big anyway."
Rex shrugged in philosophical agreement, and waited, apparently content to follow where I led.
To my embarrassment, I was then caught by the unexpected realization that I wasn't sure where to start. I knew that there'd be a killer slinking around here sooner or later, but so far I'd mostly been winging it by my knowledge of tropes and common story patterns: canvassing an area for clues was a lot less my speed. I mean, I knew a little –our DWMA classes weren't for nothing– but in that fatal moment of actually deciding where to start… I froze.
Good to know I was still new to this, I guess.
"I, uh, think we should look around the outside of the buildings, to begin with." I said, covering my moment of shaky hesitation with a cough. "You?"
"Sounds good." Rex said, and we went around the side of the dining hall first. Although I clicked my flashlight on and swept it all around –looking at the ground, the walls of the building, the roof, and the treeline some fifty feet distant– seeing Rex do the same thing behind me, I wasn't actually sure of what to look for. My plan, such as it was, was to wander around the grounds of the camp until the slasher showed up, at which point Rex and I could axe him. I was sure the Kishin Egg would show up, coming from the outside and not the inside, which was why I also felt safe enough to leave the campers as they were.
In theory, as the isolated couple wandering around, we'd be the ones hit first.
Unfortunately, my brilliant plan had at least one big gaping hole –what to do until that point. Wandering around and looking for evidence of a Kishin Egg, so that we could shoo the campers back to town in safety, was a good excuse, but I rather doubted we'd find anything. Slashers were not known for the forensic trail they left, after all.
Still, I lived in hope, or whatever the saying was. It wasn't impossible that we'd find something useful, especially since this world only sort of ran on the rail tracks of tropes. Just because X cliché was common in shounen anime didn't mean that it would always happen when the circumstances lined up –I didn't have the mathematical degree to calculate it, but my experiences so far led me to believe that the statistical probability was something in the general neighborhood of 70-90%. Overwhelmingly likely, but not a certain chance, and not something that would happen every time. There was still enough whimsy to keep this world from being eerily predictable, thank god.
In any case, even though I'd grown up on a retired farm on an entirely different coast, forests were still something I was fairly familiar with. This place was decently high up in semi-mountainous terrain, with plenty of deep ravines and gullies, but what was most important to us right now was the ground cover and lower branches of the trees. A good number of the trees were smooth-trunked (if you didn't count the moss and lichen) for a good ten feet above the ground, which meant that people traveling through wouldn't need to fight their way through branches, but the forest floor itself was covered in ferns and moss, which was objectively shit at holding marks.
Although you could push through all the bracken and fluffy plants with relative ease, they'd bounce back almost immediately, hiding your trail –I didn't doubt that the Kishin Egg was heavy enough to leave imprints in the moss, but first we'd have to push aside a metric ton of leafy branches just to find said footmarks, which wasn't something that appealed.
It only got harder as evening really started to fall, leaving the woods cloaked in darkness except for the slow panning of our flashlights. The campers had all long since bunked down for the night in their cabins, and we were coming up with a whole lot of nothing as we slowly wove through the camp. There were a few brief moments of excitement when we saw footprints, before we realized that the sneakered treads had almost certainly come from one of the kids or Jenny.
Once we'd figured out that there was nothing to find in the camp itself, we began circling around its rim, swinging our flashlights from the ground to the forest –nervously, on my part, although Rex seemed content to ignore the treeline as irrelevant. Shows what he knew.
"Arya… are you sure there's something out here?" he asked as we curved around the storage shed, which apparently held a plethora of supplies for various outdoor activities. "It's getting cold."
"I'm something in the range of 90% sure." I answered. "Just trust me, okay?"
"You know, you say that a lot."
Narrowing my eyes at his carefully noncommittal tone, I slowly swung my flashlight over to glare at him.
"Well, its proportional." I huffed, somewhat nettled. "You should trust me."
"Mm-hm." Rex's stare was deadpan as he looked across the dark space to me.
"Oh, shut up and look." I grumbled, glancing away.
Another not-quite-peaceable ten minutes followed as our flashlights swept the ground, and despite my reassurances to Rex, I felt myself getting nervous. I knew the setup for a slasher movie was as picture-perfect as it could get, so why wasn't anything happening? I hadn't miscalculated, had I? Was something going to happen to the campers we had left behind?
No, this was fine. It was totally fine. I reassured myself with a rattling list of all the tropes I knew about slasher horror and how effectively we were working to counteract them as Rex and I continued circling around, heading for the entrance to the camp.
"Um… Arya?"
The hesitancy in Rex's tone told me everything I needed to know, and I froze in place like my feet had been nailed to the ground. Without responding to him, carefully, deliberately, I swung my flashlight around the woods, searching for anything that might come at us once our backs were turned. Only when I was satisfied on that point did I turn to look –and saw, as expected, my partner aiming his flashlight at a slightly churned-up patch of ground, his face pale.
"You think that's… blood?" Rex gulped, looking at the dark, gleaming patch smeared over the dirt and pine needles. In this light, even with the flashlights, it was hard to tell what that substance was, but I was willing to bet dollars to donuts that it was nothing good.
"Keep an eye out." I told him, taking a knee beside it. Rex glanced up, his flashlight swinging over the trees around us. My flashlight raked the ground, trying to figure out the pattern of the disturbed soil and debris. Unlike in movies, it wasn't a simple set of deeply-etched footprints, but rather a chicken-scratched mess of nothing in particular. Still, even a novice like me could pick up a few things.
"Something came by here." I said. "Upright, bipedal. Probably still mostly-person-shaped, although it looks like they're getting pretty… big."
I glanced up slightly, the bright gleam of my flashlight slowly following the rough line of tracks.
"Looks like they were headed towards the bridge."
Marks ascertained to the best of my meager abilities, I picked up a slender twig and poked the unidentified substance on the ground. When the stick wasn't devoured by acid or otherwise damaged, I cautiously swiped a gloved finger through it and rubbed the damp, crumbling dirt between my fingertips.
"Not sticky enough for blood, recent or otherwise." I pronounced, somewhat surprised. Cautiously, I lifted my pinched fingers to my nose and took a delicate sniff. "Smells kinda like… gasoline."
Processing.
Realization.
"Oh, no."
Rex blinked and looked down at me.
"Arya? What's-" he began, only for an incredible explosion to cut him off. Light flared through the trees as there was a sudden wash of heat in the distance, and a low rumbling sound like thunder was quickly replaced by a crashing, groaning sound of falling –and probably burning– timber.
"That would be the bridge exploding." I said, my hand falling limply onto my knee. "Aaaand any hope of us getting back to civilization in a timely manner."
Damn. And I had really been expecting it to be something more mundane or subtle, like, say, the bridge conveniently washed out by rain or something. This was friggin' overt.
"C'mon!" Rex gasped, hooking his flashlight into his belt before dashing off towards the source of the explosion. I blinked.
"Hey, wait up!" I called, hastily scrambling to my feet and running after him. Bolting off alone was just about the stupidest thing you could do in a horror movie, even if your reasons for bolting were perfectly sound and logical. I also wasn't entirely sure if running towards the explosion and leaving the campers alone was a good idea, but between maybe exposing them to danger and letting my partner plant a whole forest of death flags in his own spine, the choice was clear.
I caught up fairly easily within a hundred yards, but when I grabbed his arm, Rex just transformed into buster sword form. Which, okay, I guess was helpful, but wasn't exactly what I wanted.
"Y'know, we've got to work on communicating better." I told him as I hefted the blunt edge up to rest against my shoulder like Rex was a musket, since there was no way I could run fast or accurately with a giant buster sword dangling from my hand –miraculous lightness or no.
"Then you've got to find a better way to communicate than saying 'just trust me' all the time." Rex shot back without hesitation.
"You should trust me!" I cried indignantly. "I was right about the Kishin Egg, wasn't I?!"
We both fell silent as I got closer to the now-burning bridge, however. Intense heat radiated through the air as I stopped about twenty feet away, making my body unconsciously ease a little at the rush of warmth against the cold November night. Bright flames flickered and danced on the few remaining wooden posts that stuck out like broken teeth from the nearest and farthest edges of the bridge. It was certainly too late to save, and the bright yellow glow of the flames made it easy to see that no one else was here.
"Well, that's a problem." I said, looking at the bridge. Hoping to draw out the Kishin Egg if they still lurked nearby by appearing oh-so-vulnerable, I approached the edge with all due and proper caution, keeping my back to both forest and road. I wanted to see if the burning remains that had dropped from the bridge and landed in the ravine would set the whole forest on fire, and so I approached from the side, avoiding the harsh smoke and smoldering wood.
It didn't look like the broken remains had set anything on fire: this late at night, it was more than dark enough that I could see the sullen, dying red of the coals way down at the remote bottom of the gorge. They weren't rising or getting brighter, and in their faint light, it seemed like most of the debris down at the bottom were ferns or weeds, small and juicy green things that would burn quick and shallow and leave little but ashes behind.
I relaxed a bit. Crazy slashers were one thing, forest fires were quite another.
"You know, I don't think we're getting back over this until help comes from town." I said aloud for Rex's benefit, and there was a slight vibration in the buster sword resting against my shoulder.
"Now what?" he asked. "If there really is a Kishin Egg out here, why blow up the bridge?"
"To trap us here, obviously." I said, stepping back from the edge and looking around. To my surprise, nothing was creeping up on us out of the shadows, and I shrugged a little and moseyed over to a brightly-colored streak of plastic that lay abandoned in another patch of weeds by the side of the road. Extending Rex and pushing the greenery aside, I saw one of those emergency plastic fuel tanks lying on its side, empty. "No way we're getting back to town anytime soon, so now we're stuck out here with him. It. Whichever."
A sense of alarm juddered down my outstretched arm like a static charge.
"We need to go warn the campers!" Rex gasped, and I winced a little at the small death flag he'd just planted square in the middle of their cabin.
"Yeah…"
9.12 AM, USA Central Time
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