nightlogs | ❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

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dan sagittarius

❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

Each year in this town, the winters seem to get harder and the summers seem to get hotter, and this was no exception. After several months of sweltering afternoons and sweaty nights, fall is finally starting to break the town’s fever, although with the cooler weather comes the death of the horseflies, leaving many of the town’s flat surfaces coated in bug carcasses. The sky is overcast, the air remains humid, and in the distance thunderstorms can be heard almost every hour of the day.

During the day, people go about their usual routines, working primarily at the slaughterhouse or mines during the weekdays, vegetating in front of the television on Saturdays, and sitting straightbacked and paranoid in the pews on Sunday, fearful less of the wrath of God than the ire of the neighbors. Evenings for the average person are filled with drinking at Nog’s or Auntie’s or peering at the TV until bedtime.

This is where our heroes find themselves, waking with a new lifestory that integrates them into this, the shitty little town.

PROMPTS

a) NOG'S

Nog's bar is the preferred haunt of most of the miners and slaughterhouse workers in this town, who meet to drink their woes away, complain about their supervisors and speculate on the personal lives of the people around them. Despite Mr. Goluboy's constant harassment, Nog has managed to keep his liquor license, and as such is one of the few successful businesses in town on account of all the stress-induced alcoholism. While one won't find fancy cocktails here, if they're just looking for a beer and some scuttlebutt, this is the place.

b) AUNTIE'S

"Auntie's" is the name of the old-school, 1950's-esque, 24-hour diner in the middle of downtown, with big red pleather booths, checkerboard floors and a jukebox. Typically, the only difference in clientele between Auntie’s and Nog's is that the people at Auntie’s wanted a burger or a stack of pancakes alongside their beer – but unlike Nog's, Auntie’s is only barely hanging on, constantly getting ticketed for waterspots on the silverware and not having enough napkins. Thankfully, one can get a full breakfast meal at Auntie's any time of day for a few dollars.

c) THE DOCKS

The town is alongside a lake, and once upon a time there was enough fish to sustain a modest fishing economy and a river that allowed for trade by boat with other nearby towns. However, with the mines' pollution, fish are no longer considered safe to eat, and only the water immediately adjacent to the springhead on the Warren Family Farm is safe to swim in. Draining from the mines has lowered the level of the river enough that it's no longer navigable. Residents will still occasionally use the lake for boating recreation, but fees at the marina keep going up (into Goluboy's pocket) and mothers are increasingly worried about letting their children get wet in that water.

d) THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE

The other major employer, owned by Ms. Cygne. Most of the locals who don't work at the mines work at the slaughterhouse, where the work is disgusting, dreary and grueling. Sometimes people get promoted out of the trenches and into admin. Yay.

e) BIG TOP CIRCUS COFFEE

Dick's Coffeeshop is in the bottom floor of an apartment building, and many locals have no idea how it hasn't been shut down yet, given that the owner is famously generous with his resources in a way that clearly irritates the city council. Dick offers jobs to those who Goluboy and Cygne won't hire at the mines or slaughterhouse and frequently sneaks day-old pastries to the hungry. The coffeeshop is one of the few areas where artists tend to converge, usually at the weekly open mic night; however, whatever one expresses at the coffeeshop is likely to be picked up by the town gossips, mocked relentlessly, distorted and spread around.

f) THE FARMER'S MARKET

Because Mr. Goluboy's malicious prosecution of small businesses has essentially shut down any legal avenue for a farmer's market, a few of the residents of the town have established a black market for homegrown fruits and vegetables, small-batch soaps and candles, and other small products. Words gets out through a whisper network, and a few times a month everyone in the know meets in a parking lot, opens their trunk, and does some bartering and selling with each other until they get found out. Sheriff Mallard and her deputies have arrested many people at these pop-ups and confiscated their products. By now, these pop-ups have around forty people trading and selling at a time, and the city council has announced that out of concerns for food safety the sentence for being caught vending homegrown produce will be increased to a misdemeanor with jail time.

g) THE LIBRARY

The library, once well-stocked and indulgently funded, is now kept alive sheerly by the passion of the one paid librarian, Aziraphale, and the volunteers who work there. There is no interlibrary loan program and there have been no new books in years. The library is reduced to loaning damaged copies missing pages, and story hours or public events are difficult to organize due to the complete lack of resources. The city council has also forced Aziraphale to put up a sign against loitering or using the library "for any purposes besides the borrowing of books." An organization of local busybodies drops in frequently to comb through the stacks for "objectionable material," which is then destroyed at Ms. Cygne's behest.

h) WILDCARD/NEW LOCATION

Feel free to set things around town anywhere you want or make up new locations.

i) THE SPOOKY WOODS

Outside the town, there are foggy, dense woods, difficult to navigate by foot due to thickets and brambles that come up to a grown man's waist. The city council has done what they can to ban people from going into the woods, and the gruesome animal maulings are a compelling disincentive.

Note: Let the plot mods know when your characters are going into the spooky woods.

OOC DETAILS
❅ OOC Plotting: Here. More locations can be found there. You can also ask the players running the plot questions there.

❅ Event Length: This part of the plot is to establish CR and characters' roles in town. It will last about a week and half before future parts that allow the characters to start digging into the mysteries of the town.

❅ New Characters: If your character is introing at this time, assume they arrived just in time at the location the plot takes place in to be caught up in the magic drawing everyone in. They would have gotten the Man in the Moon's spiel from the welcome page right before being magically sucked in.

❅ Opt-out: Anyone that doesn't want to play in the plot can handwave their character didn't go on the mission that put the characters in the location where they were sucked in. You can thread your characters back at the Pole or send them on another smaller mission with other characters.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"We ain't in a rush. You tell if you're feeling a little green, especially since it's switchbacks on the way back. We can take breaks."

It feels good to drive again, and Dan finds himself imagining reaching over and holding Aster's hand as they drive away from this godforsaken town. He's going to miss Aster. He won't be caught dead coming back to this town that he hates, that hates him, so he's sure that this will probably be the last time he and Aster see each other. Maybe they can stay in touch, maybe Aster can come out for weekends with him whenever Dan's in this part of the continent.

Dan vaguely remembers the way that this road went, although he realizes that his memory of this place is blurry. The switchbacks seem to go on forever, and by the time the car comes to a stop the fog is so thick that Dan has to keep the headlights off to see better.

"That don't sound right." Dan sets the car in neutral. "Alright, can you help me push it to the side of the road?"

Dan's still easily fatigued from how worn down being homeless and underfed and underslept has left him. He can push the car, but even getting it a few feet in neutral wears him out.

Aster, by contrast, has no problem pushing the car, but he looks a little embarrassed at himself as he fails to know how to even open the hood of the car. His passenger rant about Goluboy's stupid McMansion suburb plan and the watershed from the hills on the farm is dead in the water, as he shoves the car to the side of the road and stands back as Dan pops the hood and opens it to find . . . nothing that Aster can identify as wrong. But the serpentine belt has broken into no less than four smoking pieces, one of which slithers out of the whole engine compartment, smoking on the shoulder of the road beneath them.

"Does that mean anything to you?" Aster asks, looking at the strips of rubber broken in the compartment. He looks around the dim woods, calculating the amount of miles they've put behind them, the amount of time til sunset.

He doesn't mind sleeping outside, but this part of the woods makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

"We got a spare for that?"

"I checked that. I checked that before we left. This don't make sense." Dan bites his lip. "I can't fix this. They probably don't even got this part in town. I don't understand how this happened."

He closes the hood and rests his elbows on it, resting his head in his hands. "I need a second."

He feels as if he was an idiot to let himself get his hopes up. He should know better by now. He let his thoughts fill up with a future in Costa Rica, a lovely weekend getting away from this cultural cesspit, of having his autonomy back again, and now they're trapped. Now that bit of hope that he had has turned out to just be yet another thing to lose, and he's losing it now.

He tries to hide that he wipes some tears of frustration away. "Okay. We can see if we can find a trail through the woods for a bit. If we don't, we can turn back and walk to town. We're only ten miles out. We can make it back."

Aster feels like he can hear Dan's hope dissipating, and he reaches out for a moment before thinking better of it, before remembering that they don't know each other that well, all things considered, that they don't know each other like that. He takes a deep breath, sighs out.

"If we just keep the road on our left we'll be fine," he agrees. They can't not get out of town. They're only a few miles from the town limits. "We can check for parts in the next town over, get a ride back to fix it and get back on the road." Turning around completely is nearly unthinkable. "We're not washed out yet." He has never given up on anything this fast, and he's not about to start.

They get on their walk alongside the road - Aster looks away from it for what seems like two steps, and all of a sudden, the woods and mist to their left are too thick to see the road anymore. The hair on the back of his neck is still standing up, but he's not willing to tell Dan it doesn't feel right in this place when that would look and sound an awful lot like cowardice.

There can't be anything to be afraid of. The worst thing they might run into is a bear, and there are two of them to ward a bear off with. The worst thing that might be following them is a cougar, and Aster keeps looking over his shoulder expecting to see one.

"Yeah. You're right." Dan can't muster up any optimism right now, so he outsources that to Aster, who seems to find it easy. It's not that Dan isn't a problem-solver. It's just that by the time he reached this shitty little town, he's had the faith that things will work out fully ground out of him, and then the town ground out his dignity too.

But he'd rather Aster not think of him as just someone who gives up when things get hard. Life's been hard, and Dan's considered giving up several times a day for years, and he hasn't done it yet. A car part isn't going to break him if losing his family didn't. This town isn't going to break him if losing his daughter didn't.

"I grew up on a farm, but I spent a lot of time in the woods growing up. I can navigate us." He digs through Aster's glove compartment and finds a compass to set a bearing, although that's difficult to do in such thick fog. He also finds himself disoriented by the way he seems to be navigating correctly, but the compass doesn't seem to agree with him, almost like every step he takes is more to the right than it looked. "Stay close."

He comes to a stop after he takes a few steps to the left to try and find the road again and finds a stream, which means they aren't anywhere near the road anymore. He isn't sure how that happened, when they're going so slowly.

"You get the sense that something don't want us to leave?" he jokes to try and cover that he's embarrassed that they're lost.

Dan's tone is joking, but Aster has been feeling a creeping sense of dread since they stepped out of their busted vehicle and took to the woods.

"Let me see that." he holds his hand out for the compass, trying to second-check Dan's calculations, and finding the same problems with the compass that Dan had.

A few more steps leads them back to the road. Aster recognizes the shell of the burnt out VW bus that is the land marker five miles out of town.

"That - that doesn't make sense. We haven't been walking for long enough to be back here."

Dread is pinpricking in his stomach. Every one of his instincts is screaming at him to take the navigational cue and go back into town. They could check the farmhouse for spare parts. They could take another car.

And yet, the very fact of feeling pushed back into the town makes him want that much harder not to go back into it.

"How many miles you think you got in you today?" he asks Dan, mindful of Dan's exhaustion. "If we just stay on the road, we can't possibly get lost." Could get hit by a car, except, the road's been so empty that it doesn't seem possible that they wouldn't hear one coming.

Dan, too, looks alarmed that they ran back into the bus that he also noted on the way out. It's simply not possible that they've walked this far, even if the switchbacks were obscenely circuitous.

"I reckon that depends on on how far you think you might could carry me." Dan winces. "I can go maybe half an hour without stopping to take breaks."

He feels embarrassed about that, too, because some part of him really thinks that having eaten some of Aster's produce and eggs and had a good shower should have replenished him back to full capacity. But instead he's just tired and stiff and hurting still.

But Aster's clear anxiety indicates to Dan that he needs to step up. Aster's already given him a lot of generosity and a lot of latitude, and the least Dan can do is dig deep into whatever pep and energy and cleverness he has and bring it to the surface.

"How far is the next town? If it's less than ten miles I'm sure I might could make it." He pats Aster on the shoulder. "Is it going to alarm you or make you feel safer to know I've had a weapon on me this whole time? Just, you know, in case an unfriendly animal comes our way."

Aster's surprised to feel what a relief it is to know that Dan's armed. A stranger with a weapon ought to make him nervous - instead, these woods do.

"No. That's a good idea. I ought to do the same." He casts his gaze around for anything suitable, picks up a fallen branch and starts testing it for hardness and durability. It isn't as good as a baseball bat or a tonfa, but it's better than a handful of nothing.

They take to the road and the fog thickens with every mile. Crows are croaking in the mist, fluttering unseen, and Aster jerks toward each sound like a startled animal, hating how hard he's having to work to keep his heart rate down with each mile ticking on. The crows calls begin drifting higher, harder, towards the arena of screeching, and when Aster looks over his shoulder the fog is so thick he almost can't see Dan as anything but a smallish blur beside him.

Every nerve of his body is suddenly flooded with alarm, like something inside him is trying to use his own voice to scream at him to run. He reaches out to take Dan's hand to get his attention, to tell him he thinks they should turn back after all, but the blur in the fog is already reaching for his hand, fingers long and sharp-nailed.

Aster yelps and jumps back. He bumps into Dan, who was standing to his other side. The figure in the mist is flanked by two others. She lunges for him, skin pale and emaciated, a thin white veil over eyes black as a sharks and a mouth open with bloody, sharpened teeth. The figures flanking her are flanked by more. No less than five lunge at them.

Aster lashes out with his branch and clocks two on the sides of their heads. They stumble and trip the others, and Aster bolts back down the road, grabbing for Dan's hand, missing, running anyway.

He cannot be here. He cannot find out what would have happened if whatever that was had touched him.

Dan doesn't have Aster's same sense of dread, but he is uneasy. Everything about these woods seems wrong. Dan's been all over the country and hasn't ever heard crow calls this discordant, certainly not in such inclement weather. The smell of these woods seems all wrong; this is an evergreen forest that smells like deciduous trees, and some of the shrubs Dan sees shouldn't be able to survive in a humid climate like this. It's all just wrong.

Dan's been keeping pretty close to Aster, but he trips over something and catches himself on his hands. He gets to his feet just in time for Aster to leap backwards into him, and then sees a moment later the things that are lunging for them, intentions all too easy to glean.

"Go, run! I'm right behind you!" he yells at Aster, giving Aster a few seconds to get clear of potential hearing damage and stumbling backwards before he fires off a shot into one creature's knee in a splash of blood. He doesn't know what they are, but he doesn't want to kill them, but the bullet seems to just piss them off more than scare them. He fires three more times, nailing the one closest to him in and through the shoulder, and then he turns tail and runs too.

He's so tired that he feels like he's running through water, like his muscles are made of wet sand, like the fog is painfully insufficient for the amount of air he needs, but somehow he hits the stream they reached earlier and when he crosses it, he doesn't see the creatures following him. He sees some blurry forms in the fog on the other side, but as he gets further away from them they're swallowed up in the dim monotone of the misty woods.

"Aster? Aster?" He doesn't just sit. He lays on his back, catching his breath, staring up at where tree trunks disappear into fog. He checks his gun; with the speedloaders he has, he isn't short of ammunition, so he aims the gun at a mulchy, mossy patch of earth that'll absorb a bullet rather than ricochet.

Aster ran a few moments ago when they were in trouble, so Dan doesn't know for sure if Aster will come towards the sound of a gunshot, and yet he trusts that Aster's unlikely to find him just by listening to the pitiful caw of Dan's voice calling. He shoots the earth and listens to the woods.

Aster runs everywhere. He's well fed and well rested and strong and runs like it's his only mode of transport, and once he gets going, nothing else bipedal can catch up to him on foot, not in this town anyway, not on its outskirts either -

But he's left Dan behind. The terror that dropped the bottom out of his stomach convinced him that if he stayed in reach of whatever that was in the woods, her touch would spell death, and with every fiber of his being he said no. And ran.

He's sick with himself. Dan is tired and hungry and has that voice that indicates a lifetime of ruining his lungs with smoking, and Aster left him. The black eyed women in the woods will probably kill him.

The gunshot gives him hope again, and he barrels back into the mist as unthinkingly as he barrelled out of it. This time he stops to grab every rock he sees, filling his pockets, and a stick for each hand. "Dan!" he bangs the sticks together, trying to save his voice, knowing he's gone in the direction of the gunshot but no longer sure how far away it was. The mist gets thicker, until he's once again in danger of stumbling directly on top of whatever it is that's been hiding out here.

While on his back, taking deep breaths, Dan stops to think about what it was he was running from. Novelty, probably. He isn't afraid to die and has been contemplating it for a long time, so he doesn't feel like he was running for his life, but maybe he was running from the fact that such creatures freaked him out with their uncanniness, or maybe from the possibility that they might kill him painfully, or maybe because he felt in some sense that it would be unkind to get killed when someone like Aster would end up shouldering the guilt. He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, intermittently coughing from how sprinting kicked up sediment in his lungs.

'Animal maulings.' Dan always doubted that explanation; there aren't enough bears here to explain that many deaths over the years, bobcats aren't aggressive enough, and mountain lions would eat their prey. Somehow, monsters makes so much more sense, even if it's harder to wrap his head around.

His hearing doesn't extend far on account of too much exposure to firearms, but he's very good at discerning through what he can hear. He lets the ringing in his ears from the gunshot die down and listens to the forest, the ripples of birdcall, the sound of humidity dripping from the trees, trying to make out footsteps, either Aster's or those creatures'.

"Here!" he tries to shout when he thinks he hears movement, wood being smacked together. He sits up and grabs a stick and hits a rock next to him. "I don't reckon they like crossing water!"

Aster's ready for every rock and broken tree stump that looms out of the fog to be another one of the pack of veiled women, but the fog is so thick as he approaches Dan's voice that he has to stop running, because he would trip and fall on something.

Here, he hears Dan's unmistakable rasp, to his left, and then, wood hitting rock to his right, and he holds in place, hearing Dan's voice from two sides, but the wood hitting rock only on one. To his lift, a Dan-shaped shadow stumbles through the trees. Aster holds his sticks and waits for what emerges from the fog.

Here she comes again, flanked by her sisters, all of them in white that is shredded and filthy and stained from the woods, eyes black and tracks in the dirt on their faces from weeping. Her mouth snarls for vengeance and her eyes weep, who can tell for what. Aster backs up slowly, yells, "Get up, get ready to run," so Dan can hear him wherever he is, and the lead veiled woman opens up her mouth for Dan's voice to pour out like a recording. Aster, I'm here, I'm here Aster -

She lunges for him and she's faster than a person ought to be. He strikes with one stick and another, a cracking blow across her face and the second along her outstretched arm.

The flesh shears off in a dry strip. The bone underneath, like an overcooked chicken wing that dry flesh has been ripped off, browned and unbleached. The flesh doesn't bleed, but hangs like leather. Aster is already jogging away as she smooths the flesh into place. It doesn't heal, it only sticks in place like it has to because it belongs there.

There must be a dozen looming in the fog. A whole pack. A whole company. Some of them, reaching out, have lost flesh on their fingers, and the bones of their hands are white and bleached the way their flesh-covered bones have not yet become.

"Run!" he shouts into the fog, as he sprints in a zigzag to lose them. "They mimic! Don't listen to anything else, just run!"

He stumbles directly across Dan's hiding place, tosses one of his sticks aside and grabs Dan's hand to pull him closer to the clear light out of the fog.

Of all the places Lady is supposed to be, alone deep in the woods is not one of them. She couldn't resist, there's low cloud cover and while something doesn't happen every time there's fog, every time something has happened there's been fog. She spent enough time in these woods to feel hesitantly confident about her ability to lose anything that tries to chase her, not that anything ever has.

It takes her a decent amount of time to actually reach the boundaries of the fog (does it usually form such a distinct wall? Another question to look into, she'll have to ask Aziraphale if he has any books about meteorology for her to borrow). She shines her flashlight into it, suddenly feeling some trepidation about actually crossing the line.

Right when she musters up the courage to move forward, she hears panicked shouting.

Her brain barely takes the time register the voices as masculine and vaguely familiar. There's no hesitation-- she sprints forward into the mists.

Dan fully gets to his feet when he hears the commotion, and even though it takes him a second to process what Aster just said, he's already running. He has shorter legs than Aster, so he has to feint around some of the taller brambles and fallen logs, but he doesn't break his grip on Aster's hand.

He isn't expecting to nearly clothesline a young woman as he does so. He lets go of Aster's hand just in time to avoid Red Rover-ing Lady, skidding to a stop in the mud and grabbing a tree trunk to avoid falling over entirely.

"They ain't coming from your direction, are they?" he asks Lady, raising his firearm and keeping it ready to point it back the way he and Aster came, expecting that the beings are right on their heels.

Edited 2024-08-26 20:21 (UTC)

For a second Aster starts away from Lady's appearance, tree branch club raised, mistaking her for one of the dead, veiled things flanking them.

"What the - go the other way!" he shouts, looking over his shoulder. The crow calls intensify as the figures loom in the mist, leaping with the grace of deer, unhindered by brambles, unslowed by the branches that rip their desiccated skin and filthy garments.

Aster throws his branch side-handed. The heavy stick whips around and strikes the two in the lead at once, knocking them over, but others bound past them with sharp-nailed hands outstretched.

"Sorry," Aster mutters before he picks Lady up and throws her over his shoulder, sprinting for the edge of the fog. He doesn't stop when he's reached the full light, only stops in the open, setting sun when he doesn't hear Dan's gunshots anymore.

What the hell? Those crows, those... women? Creatures. Her mind fills with a cold sense of dread. This is it. These are things she's been looking for, and it's more terrible than she could imagine.

Lady doesn't even get the chance to answer the first man's question or start moving the other way before she's lifted off the ground.

"What the fuck!"

The air leaves her lungs as her gut presses against the other man's-- Ash? Aston?-- shoulder. By the time she's able to respond they're already in the light, but she still jams her knee as hard as she can into his chest. Her leg strength is considerable.

Left behind in the fog again, Dan empties his revolver into one of the advancing monsters, no longer worrying about trying to aim for nonlethal parts of their bodies. Their intent seems clear, so his will be too: get back.

The bullets do seem to slow them down, although Dan gets the sense that it's more about the noise than about the physical damage. Dan takes off towards where he heard Aster run, catching a glimpse over his shoulder of one of the monsters doing a full jeté, not bothering to process that bizarre sight because he needs to focus on his feet and not getting tripped up in brambles and fallen pine. He scrambles and slides, but he's getting away.

He makes it to the light just as he feels one of those clawed, bony hands grab the hoodie to his sweatshirt, and then he hears a hiss and a shriek as the hand retracts. He whips around to try and see what happened, but the blurs are already fading back into the fog.

He looks around and sees Aster carrying Lady, Lady struggling mightily. He holsters his gun and runs over. "It's okay, we ain't trying to do no harm!"

"You allr-" Aster cuts off in a grunts as, midway through putting Lady down, she knees the wind out of him and he drops her the rest of the way. He doesn't really have time to manage the wind being knocked out of him - Dan's still back in the fog, and he reaches into his pocket for one of the rocks he grabbed earlier, turning into a throwing stance and hurtling a rock into the fog over Dan's shoulder. It connects with something, which screeches with a crow's voice.

"Jeeze, you're welcome," he grunts at Lady, waving Dan over, hand out to grab his shoulder as he herds Lady to keep on going, away from the fog and whatever's in it, back down this hill and the rest of the way back into town. "No point waiting around here, if you're gonna walk yourself, walk away from danger, not at it."

Something from the fog calls out with a voice Aster doesn't recognize, but Lady will. Adam Bryant's voice, scared and exhausted, calls from the fog - "Where are you? I can't get out! Help me!"

Aster looks at Lady, and gets between her and the fogline. "Don't listen to it, it's not whoever it wants you to think it is," he warns, arms spread to catch her if she tries to run past him.

Lady lands on her feet and stumbles back a few steps. Dan's claim of good intentions barely even registers. She's about to make it clear how grateful she is when she hears a familiar voice.

She freezes, her mind blank as instinct takes over before rationality can kick in.

But no, Adam's dead. She found his body-- what was left of it-- herself. Whatever is out there is using his voice as a weapon, and that makes something long-buried in her gut start to burn.

"I know," Lady snarls. She doesn't even look at Aster, she's busy trying to see around him. She needs to see the things that fucking dare use her brother's voice.

With the way these guys were running, she expects the things she had gotten a glimpse of before to come barreling out of the fog, but they don't.

"Are they- are they stuck there?" All she can see are twisting shadows in the mist as they continue to cry out in a voice that doesn't belong to them.

"Hell if I know," Dan says, wheezing coughing into his arm as his post-exertional asthma catches up to him. The irony is that all of this has really made him crave a cigarette, and that that's somehow cutting through even the issues at hand. "But let's get into a clearing or something where we can see them coming if they do."

He stiffens at the cry for help, but he knows from Lady's reaction who it is.

"Lady, I don't mean to boss you around, but I reckon we should stay together and stay out of the fog until we figure more of what's going on." He gives Aster's hand on his shoulder a reassuring clap and then staggers to a tree to lean on as he catches his breath. "Whatever those are, they mean harm."

Probably the same harm as whatever happened to Adam, and Dan doesn't want Elle to meet the same fate just because she doesn't have parents around to tell her no.

"Look, we're standing in the light, they're not," Aster points out, but there's mist swirling all around them in the forest. "If we're gonna get out of here before curfew we need to keep going."

He doesn't want to pick Lady up again when they aren't actively being chased, but as the mist drifts around the trees and shifts on the path before them, he might do it.

"Were you out here looking for that?" he asks, remembering that this is the girl whose parents opted for the kind of neglect only the very wealthy can get away with, and left her out here alone. "Did you know anything about them before this?"

Lady glances around to see the bounds of where the light falls. She takes careful a step closer to the edge.

"They're staying where it's thicker... Do you think it's the fog or the dark?" She's talking to herself, mostly, but the words are loud enough for the other two to hear. The next time she sees a moving shape she clicks on her flashlight and points it in that direction to see how it reacts.

"I didn't know what I was looking for," she answers. Lady has her suspicions about the unnatural occurrences around the town, but the proof in front of her is difficult to process. It's easier to analyze the things' behavior than to think about what they actually could be.

Dan loads his gun and holsters it again. He wants to go back in there and get more information, but Lady's presence makes getting back to town more of a priority. Dan knows that's probably paternalistic, but at least seeming paternalistic is better than seeming predatory.

"Little column A, little column B," he says, finally feeling like he's caught his breath but still feeling so exhausted. "But either way, reckon we don't want to be caught out after dark here. They way they chase, I don't think the fog slows them down because I don't think they're using eyesight to hunt."

And that's what it felt like, like he was being pursued.

"Are we far from town?" he asks Lady.

Now that their prey has gotten somewhere they can't reach, the spectral women have retreated into the fog, where only the occasional shadow flicker between trees betrays their lingering presence.

Not wanting to seem paternalistic is the farthest thing from Aster's mind. He's ready to throw both of them over his shoulders again if he has to.

"Think about it," Aster says. "Some of the bodies have been found in town, but only overnight. The fog might not keep them in after sundown. We're about five miles from town," he tells Dan, a pit in his stomach already at how very close this already is. "That doesn't make any sense. We got to the twenty mile mark before the car broke down. We haven't walked twenty miles today."

"We're a just over an hour out from my place," Lady answer absentmindedly.

Her mind is racing. Adam had been missing for a week, then one night she could've sworn she heard him calling out for help. Her parents kept her from running into the dark, told her she was imagining things. The next day she did go into the woods, and that's when she found him- the body. The doctors said he had been dead for days.

For almost two years Lady's been hearing his voice at night. After the first few times, she went to her parents. Her mother said it was grief. Her father said it was a psychotic break. She told them it had stopped, that it was just her being upset, but it didn't. It hasn't.

She isn't crazy.

"I know the way back," Lady starts. A way forward is beginning to put itself together in her mind. "We don't have that long before the sun goes down, but we should get far enough that they won't catch up before reaching my house. You can stay there until the morning."

She feels better for having something resembling a plan.

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cw: body horror

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