Most high schools are more or less the same once you get beyond things like which mascot is on the wall and how strict they are with their rules.
Gossip is one of those near-constants. The current rumor spreading around is that there is a real ghost that wanders along a certain stretch of bike path in a state park, some evenings.
"My dad actually hired her once," one girl claims, "She used to be Terrana Hastings, that healer person. How creepy is that?"
That would take her back across the stream, unfortunately.
That's east along the stream.
The thing follows. It makes faces at her, moving its 'hands'. They seem to really be bundles of tentacles.
She seems to get away from it eventually. The unnatural fog is thinning out and she can hear birds and stuff again.
Yeah she's not trusting that any farther than she can throw it she'll just keep running until it's been a while.
...Since when did that river lead to a cliff and waterfall? She might want to look at her map. If she does, she finds that she's somehow on the northern edge of the park, over twenty miles away from where she's supposed to be. And into deep mountain territory.
She doesn't need to look, she memorised it.
Goddamnit.
Okay where does she go from here that's not "back the way she came"?
West. There's supposed to be a trail that eventually leads to a big highway a few miles that way.
It starts raining.
She comes across a fallen tree. On that tree is a strange beetle.
Very strange. It looks related to tree beetles she knows - but the color is off, and it has a tall horn, and it's on a different kind of tree than the other one.
"Luck. Right," she murmurs to herself, and sighs. Okay, she knows how to catch a beetle, she has a net, here beetle beetle beetle...
She can successfully catch a beetle!
Good! Proper science procedure would have pictures and samples involved but she can do that later. Now she's going to go find that stupid genie.
It's a bit of a walk. Probably an 'until after dark' walk. This is not really a small national park.
It's still raining.
She hears something that sounds a lot like a woman screaming in the distance sometime in the night.
It goes on for about thirty seconds and stops suddenly, cut off.
...fuck that shit. She is staying in.
........
..................
Okay goddamnit can she figure out where it was coming from?
Towards the north somewhere.
In a few minutes it does. The exact same scream, cut off at the same second. From closer.
Hard to tell. Maybe half a mile closer, and off to the left a bit.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
