Curate, connect, and discover
Micah Prince invited Julia to a party at Rock Coast, the beach characterized by broken stones and ship sinker boulders that was a popular swimming spot for the MSAA students. Feeling that I needed to expand my social circle, Julia...strongly suggested that I should come with.
She also said that I had to bring grilled chicken. That was non-negotiable.
When we arrived, the Coast was buzzing. A virtue of being popular Micah Prince, I suppose. Old faces and new mingled, some of them friendly. A few of them were posturing while slightly cutting into their ego. Some were playing games, throwing around a ball or skipping stones into the water. There was a circle around a pentagram made of rope that held a snake eye trapped in amber in the center; and the circle was chanting around it. Julia pulled me away from them before I could question it.
Micah was talking to Sara and Kurt when we arrived, and waved at us to acknowledge our arrival. Sara smiled at Julia, but then glossed over me and went back to the Prince. Kurt, however, purposely caught my eye, and gave me the glares to end all glares. The boy who was already soaking wet had complete hatred and malice in his eyes. Readers, I definitely shrunk into myself. The look was only broken when Lucas threw a chunk of chicken at him, and Kurt broke away from his conversation to give his brother a verbal lashing.
Lucas carrying chicken brought my attention to the only constant among the gathering: everyone had grilled chicken. In a bag or a bucket, or a plastic case or a plate, the scent of chicken filled the air.
Micah clapped his hands to get everyone’s attentions. “Is everyone ready to dive in?” He was met by a raucous response. Micah did that smirk that meant something was about to go down, and opened his container. “Let’s give the mermaids what they want!”
I paused for a bit, but everyone else grabbed their chicken by the handful and threw them into the black water. Julia elbowed me. “Come on. They won’t let you swim unless you give them an offering.”
My curiosity got the better of me. I lifted my own plastic bag and removed the chicken, chucking it with everyone else.
A few seconds of silence was all there was. Then bubbles rose to the surface, growing into frothing. Then....the creatures.
Grey scaled beasts with shark like tails emerged from the depths, their razor teeth tearing into the feast we gave them. Some arced like dolphins to grab at the chunks while others clawed at the scraps. When Julia saw my awed...slack jawed face, she leaned in. “They’re the Rock Coast Mermaids. They’re cool if you feed them...unlike the other Mermaids.”
I gave her an incredulous look.
When the creatures vanished, and the frothing died down, Micah whooped and ran into the sea. The rest of the party cheered and followed after him. I kept glancing at the water, and with a heavy sigh followed at their heels. I had no reason to not trust them....though those teeth would stick with me for a while...
His name is Kurt.
The boy who is always soaked to the bone. While he didn’t give me his name himself, his older brother, Lucas [the one who wears the welding gloves everywhere] happily gave it to me.
Kurt has no friends by choice. Anyone who approaches him is immediately met with a paragraph long verbal lashing.
He’s always wet, as if he had just crawled out from the ocean. It is not sweat either; the custodian Principal Lee Anders has assigned to him claims that it is actually lake water. How she acquired this information, though, she wasn’t keen on giving.
I've began to notice that most people keep track of when Colem Arth dies somewhere. When I asked why, they turned me to the dark science majors who live in Aspen Ward.
The dark scientists have discovered a weird side effect to Colem's curse. When he dies 4 times in a single place, nothing else can die in that place. They have extra stipulations, such as:
Dying 2 feet away from the location of the first death counts as dying there
The effect covers a maximum of 2 acres
The effect doesn't prevent woundings, unless the wound in and of itself would prove fatal.
Though they aren't prevented, wounds are meaningless. Fingers can be reattached, and cuts close immediately. The wounds are only permanent if they are still there when the victim leaves said area, upon which normal healing resumes.
This has only happened three times. The first place is, obviously, Colem Arth's house. They say he uses it as a safety zone when he gets sick of the whole dying thing, and that sometimes when he's absent he's just hiding at home to avoid getting hit by a truck or something equally terrible.
The second one the dark scientists refuse to tell me about. They gave no reason why.
The third site is the most well known location and the site where the 2 acre rule was discovered.
This is site is called Lot 47.
Lot 47 is a vacant field outside of Marcus Ward that was supposed to be a new shopping centre to attract tourists, but lost it's funding at the last moment. Now it's over grown, reclaimed by the woods and littered with random steel pipes and piles of cinder blocks.
Kids use it for LARPing.
"What? That can't be right." I wasn't sure I heard the dark scientists correctly.
But they confirmed it. The day before the weekend, starting from right when school ends to when the sun sets, ayone from fhe sixth grade and below uses the Lot as the site of war games and intense LARPs. Since the plants there never die and are also subject to the healing rule, they don't have to worry about set up and clean up only involves reattaching severed limbs, which is why its so popular, or so the dark scientists claim.
(A few even admit to having played there when they were at MSAA, and that the only reason the sunset rule exists is because Demon Collectives like to stalk the Lot at night.)
Still sensing my disbelief, the dark scientists told me that there was Capture the Flag scheduled the coming weekend, and told me to be there and I would see. They refused to answer my questions about why Colem was at Lot 47 enough times for it to be a "No-Kill Zone" or what even causes the effect. I was left with more questions than answers.
Instead, I simply went to Lot 47 the day of Capture the Flag.
They brought actual weapons. Sharpened swords, axes, pocket knives, one kid brought a bow and arrows without practice tips. No one was allowed to unsheathe their weapons until they passed a (presumably) stolen street sign with '47' spray painted on it. They quickly broke up into teams and ran into the Lot. A few moments later, an airhorn broke the silence, and the games began.
I simply wandered around the Lot, observing. The kids did hack each other to pieces....sort of. Cuts didn't bleed. Limbs fell off, and the person who lost it would just groan or give their attacker a stink eye and pick up the limb, then run away. One sixth grader got his head cut off. His attacker helped him fix it on, the previously beheaded kid simply said thanks, then ran away.
The bow and arrow kid shot me by mistake. It hit me in the thigh, and I cried out from shock. But....I didn't feel it. There was no pain or anything. I could feel it wiggling around inside of me, but it was more like having a finger pressed really hard on my thigh than being stabbed. The kid ran up, said "You aren't playing right?" And asked for his arrow back. I pulled it out no problem, and there was no blood on it. I checked my thigh, and there was no wound. All the damage it did was saved for my jeans. The kid gave me a quick sorry and ran off to rejoin the fight.
As promised, the end of the game was signaled by another airhorn when the sun began to set. At this point I was hanging closer to the edge to avois getting accidentally maimed again, but as the airhorn went off, I noticed a few figures beginning to approach. Shadowy, indescript figures with a bunch of red dots across their form, slowly approaching the Lot....
I got pulled away by a larger sixth grader who said we had to go "NOW". He pulled me away, back towards where the kids had entered the Lot, and I could still feel the shadows watching us leave....
The coming school day I asked Mr. Lingua the talking aardvark about Lot 47. He kind of shrugged and said "No ones getting hurt." Which I guess is sort of right....
The older adults in town seem to want to forget about Lot 47 in general....
No one could enter Building 17 today. While it wasn't exactly because of the overgrown vines wrapping around the entire property, growing denser and knotting at any entrance, especially the door, they certainly helped.
My peers weren't exactly....affected by the blockage. They saw it as an opportunity to mess with their phones and have a break; two couples even decided to have a picnic right then and there.
Meiriam, of course, went to grab her father, Principal Lee Anders, who proceeded to do a particularly....intricate ritual that required dancing around the building, swallowing a stick of butter whole, and stabbing a statue made of some kind of melon with a firepoker.
The vines choking Building 17 blackened, but did not wilt. Apparently, this was not the intended effect, since Principal Lee Anders frowned, crossed his arms, and said "The woods rot serves to the feeding of his growth." Whatever that meant.
No one except me seemed to pay much attention to Principal Lee Anders as he tried to free the building several different ways, which includes: using wichfyre to burn the vines away [it didn't], talking to the vines using the language of flowers [from what I gathered, the flowers grown by the vines in response essentially said "fuck off"], and simply hacking at the vines with the firepoker.
There were ten minutes left in class when Principal Lee Anders decided to call for outside help.
I didn't expect my neighbor Prudence to show up, trying to ride her bike in her vestments; as an Oracle, the priestesses who followed the Goddess Aliurian, her garments were highly impractical. The vestments were designed to show off as much skin as possible, to display the jagged tree like scars that all Oracles had to bear.
Prudence approached the vines and pressed her palm against them, letting her eyes drift close. She stayed like that while my peers began to wander off, some moving on to their next class, while some outright skipped, using Principal Lee Anders attention to the blockage to leave without his notice. My next class still im Building 17, so I had to stay while the next group of students approached and were faced with the same problem as the previous period.
Prudence pulled away from the vines with a worried look, and pulled Principal Lee Anders aside to talk. They would occasionally point at me, which just made me hug myself and try to seem smaller than I already was. If they thought I had something to do with this catastrophe, they would be sorely mistaken; I still wasn't allowed to do the practical labs in any of the thaumaturgy classes.
Principal Lee Anders approached me with his hands behind his back, and Prudence followed, fidgeting with her mossy hair. They pulled me to the side, away from the other students.
"Story," Prudence began, wringing her hands. "We, uhm..."
Principal Lee Anders interjected. "We need your help, son."
"With....the vines?" They nodded. "I don't see how I can help..."
"It's not you, per se..."
"Your blood, Mr. Page. We need your blood."
[End of Part 1]