Shadows Over Camp Darkness

Snakes and Ladders

A moving target is so much harder to hit than one that is stationary; a simple rule of physics that helped to keep Gideon pretty much always moving around. It wasn’t that she couldn’t keep still, given a need she’s a very patient and thus very stationary hunter, but if there was an option Gids always felt better to be moving. That natural inclination to shift locations frequently often made people assume that she was a sneak who needed to continually pace around. The truth was far stranger, she moved because a part of her would always watch a space and calculate where the best vantage point would be in a crowd. And since a crowd was always moving, and people always moved within in, Gideon always moved. Her actions were a reflection of the herd she watched. Having an enforced curfew and being compelled to stay inside at night was going to quickly rub her patience raw. It was necessary and Gideon would have been staying in the Intake House regardless, but being told to sit and stay was making it altogether too tempting to break the rules and go run amok. She’d wanted to take the Siren out into the back woods so that the poor girl could let loose her Song where nothing viable would hear it. That wasn’t an option now.

Despite the burns on her arms making her mood feel foul, Gideon kept a smile on her face. Hasselberry had taken the Intake for the afternoon while Gids was patched up and then confronted with the Dragon. Everyone probably expected Gideon to sleep in her assigned room, it was a logical choice and safest for all currently. So of course Gids was on the mantel of Intake 1’s fireplace again, contemplating the new group plans she’d have to come up with. With two raw and screamingly painful arms, there were a few ideas that had to be scrapped entirely and Gideon disliked having to plan on the fly so she wanted to tackle the problems now when she had time to think them out.

The Nightmare was hyper focused on her right now, wanting Gideon to be her method of suicide. But the little filly might lose that focus and start looking out at other Intakes. It would take quite a strong Portentum to kill even the young Nightmare, but that might not be entirely necessary here. There were just so MANY of them, that the right tag team could make all of Mardrom’s suicidal dreams come true. Something that Gideon wanted to avoid at all costs. So Gids needed a game plan that didn’t actually bring her Intake into too much contact with the others, but without giving anyone the sense that she was isolating them. And without actually isolating them because the next time there was an attack, there really was safety in numbers.

Hantu came shuffling into the lounge room and silently sat on the couch. He had to know Gideon was there, she wasn’t exactly trying to hide, but the goblin seemed oblivious to her. His eyes were open and he was shovelling chips from a bag into his mouth without rush. And yet he didn’t at all acknowledge her presence as he chomped away. It was a blatant reminder that she had to go through their possessions again to remove these new prohibited items that she’d somehow missed last time. Gids had never expected it to be the goblin that was upfront and almost confrontational about it though; goblins tended to be cowardly as a survival mechanism.

“Somnambulance.” The technical term bubbled from Gideon like a carbon induced belch. Sleep walking was exceptionally rare in Portentums, it left the sleeper far too vulnerable and exposed, making the walker unbelievably easy to kill off and as far too much a risk of exposure to their Portentum heritage. In fact, these were often the ones even the Humans could kill. It was a human luxury, as for a long time had been many things, like the behavioural disorders this Camp helped rehabilitate. Back when the war was going strong and even long before the humans even realized they weren’t the only evolutionary successes, any Portentum that could potentially expose the rest was eliminated by their own kind. Funny how that kind of behaviour seemed allowable when it was necessary to keep their hides intact but it was unforgivable that Gideon’s kind had been created for that same purpose. The hard truth was that Furies were supposed to go extinct once a truce was reached, a weapon of war no longer needed like the nukes of old. But the Daedlusi that had created the Furies didn’t want a new genus to be eliminated so they’d given the first Furies the keys to their perpetuation. It was a complicated procedure because that helped keep their numbers low; a smart precaution given just how violent her kindred could be. They were invariably drawn to volatile and violent fields, which solved the issue of what an aging Fury would do. Gideon had heard of the mythical elder Furies, the originals: Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone. They were the first three successful warriors and the base code for the continuing evolutionary chains. There wasn’t a big difference in the typologies either, small variances in appearance and personal defence mechanisms, but they weren’t all identical either. Ironically enough, lots of Furies had strange sleeping habits, breaking yet another mold. Gidster was an insomniac as were many others, but she’d never actually dealt with a sleep walker before. She just knew that being suddenly woken up by a Fury at the best of times was a pants wetting experience, let alone when one has been sleep walking.

“Hantu, go back to your bed.” Gideon breathed the words in the night air and saw the goblin blink owlishly in response to his name. She couldn’t touch him, with her arms burned she had no tolerance for contact. “Hantu, back to bed.” It felt so natural to use her proper voice that Gideon didn’t realize it’d happened right away. Lo and behold it worked too. Hantu put the chip bag down and them took himself silently off to the dorm wing he slept in.

“That’s a new one for us. Oh where’s the fun if everyone starts obeying what I say?” Gideon gave her head a shake, putting her fingers to temples. “I’m not reverting to pluralistic language again dammit. He’s just suggestible, the whole zombie walk sleep thing.” She forced herself to use the regular voice she’d cultivated for everyday use. It felt strange when her whole system just wanted to be full form. No but we do have something provoking a relapse. It’s time to come to an accommodation in our new best interests. “Why do I suspect that this will be a huge mistake? I’ve gained a lot of control but the more I connect with my blood line, the harder it is to know when I cross that last line.” Now you’re just stalling. How do you expect to help the two minded boy when you can’t even accept that WE are one? We are not an ‘us’.  “Me.” Gideon didn’t need to argue with herself to know when she was right. A statement that truly boggled the mind and made her shake her head again.

The Dragon was taking the kids away from her after this. A simple precaution to be sure, but one that was truly necessary, Gideon was going to have to adapt once again and the time to start doing that was now. Step one, following her own damn rules. Gideon had locked her darkest self away as an act of self survival. The fact that she could do that had been terribly surprising for every single living entity that encountered her, and yet she feared that it had been a onetime trick. Only it wasn’t. Gids had let loose on the Maelstrom and then hauled it all back inside. The attack today hadn’t let it all come tumbling down, it was only the Dragon that had provoked a response and even then….  “I am controlled.” Gideon admitted to herself and this time there was no cackling glee from the voice inside. Instead, just the rush of adrenaline and excitement that left a slightly metallic taste in her mouth.

Now she really did need to go outside. It was one thing to keep her caged up inside when she was suppressing everything inside but now that she was opening that crypt up wide and letting fresh air in, there would be a few days of resettling. Something Gideon had skipped over last time in the name of not letting a Maelstrom literally eat her Intake. And then the whole nearly dying and being in a coma for a few days had made the transition a very subconscious affair. But with the Dragon’s curfew in place, going outside would only aggravate those who were on her side and give ammunition to those that claimed she was a problem. But something had Gideon convinced that this was what the Dragon had wanted her to do. If there was a potential breach in the Punt and likely still unknowns stalking within the Camp, they needed her at full Fury; vengeance, destruction and that unnameable terror that could fight back. And if this wasn’t what the Dragon had wanted, there wasn’t a whole bottle of bourbon he could do about it.

“Do I play nice or do I follow my nature?” Gideon asked herself rhetorically, feet itching to go to the door. But even as she levered herself up to leave, she stayed rooted to the spot. Yes there was something out there that begged to be Hunted and caught. But whatever it was had come in here before, through the defences in place and had only run when Gideon fought back. She couldn’t desert these kids to face that alone, not even to help herself settle back into her own skin. “Sometimes being the responsible adult in the room sucks.”