Survival Of The Fittest

Tenshi sighed, finally getting her answer. Trinity, who she knew. Well, kinda knew. Actually she didn't know anything about Trinity aside from her face and the fact that she was a classmate, so, uh, she didn't know her. Because back home, Tenshi was focused on the important things in life, like doing vocal warmups instead of her homework, so she didn't have time for every loser at school. And she certainly wouldn't have the time to get to know any of them now!

She, personally, couldn't imagine why Trinity would be scared of - well, she could probably be scared of Fitz's gun, but her and Cedar and (let's be honest) Fitz himself? Hell, Fitz actually shot at her but she wasn't afraid of him. Not anymore.

And then, she winced, and politely averted her eyes from Cedar's vomiting session. She almost dragged her gaze back to Cedar, seeing her boyfriend go over to comfort her, but Tenshi refrained. But wait - the only way she could see what they had to say is if she was looking at them! So she turned to look, after all.

Cedar said it in ASL, Fitz said it with crude gestures. Either way, the message was clear. Tenshi raised her hand in a fist and "nodded" it - <<YES>>, as in yes, she agreed. Was that a valid way to use that sign? Tenshi had no idea but was doing it anyway, because what, was someone gonna call the ASL police on her?

She shuffled her bag back up onto her shoulder as she walked over to Cedar (and Fitz). The bag would have been an overly-hefty but honestly kiiiiiinda cute accessory for a ski trip. If Tenshi was sportier she might have put together an outfit to go with it.

She tilted her head to the side, ready to leave.

Everything was wrapping up in a blissful anticlimax, and not a moment too soon as far as Trinity was concerned. There would be no wild gunfight breaking out, no cowering behind cover and waiting for the right moment to break for freedom, no creeping dread as a group of killers descended upon her. Just three folks, walking out of… wherever this place was, heading to someplace she didn’t care about.

It should have all happened much, much sooner, of course. Personally, Trinity didn’t know how much clearer she could have made her desires. She really didn’t think that yelling ‘Fuck off and leave me the fuck alone’ was a particularly enigmatic, easily misinterpreted thing to say, after all. But Fitz in particular was, for lack of a better and more polite term, being something of a colossal imbecile right now. Yes, that was exactly what her plan was, she had absolutely no intentions of leaving this stupid cupboard ever, her entire goal on this fucking island was to replay this whole pointless song and dance whenever someone even got close to the storage room door, and then to die whenever someone did get fed up and riddle her with bullets, you are so smart and correct, Fitz!

She huffed, waiting for the trio to leave, anger and self-righteousness slowly burning themselves out. Logic dictated that there was safety in numbers, but she was also pretty certain she’d dismantled too many bridges with this lot to be welcome among them, even if she’d wanted to leave the safety of the storeroom. There would be other classmates, other actual friends, who she could try and find, or run into in the middle of an abandoned grain silo or wherever they’d been dropped. She could stick together with them, if she was so inclined. This group, she could go no further with. Whatever. Shit happened. She didn’t care.

And it sounded like somebody had thrown up, so it was a dead-end group that was as woefully unprepared for this Final Destination bullshit as she was.

Well, almost dead-end. Almost all her bridges were torched. It was clear now that the group outside didn’t mean her, or anyone else, any harm; Fitz just had lousy trigger discipline, Tenshi just had an insane screaming murder whistle. They had asked for some help, so, fuck it, she would do that before they wandered off. She wanted to wash her hands of this whole thing anyway, and there was a stupid reminder of it all sitting at her feet. What goes around comes around, after all; maybe this would cause the sun to shine for her, further down the line.

Or maybe she would change her mind and feel like an idiot in a few minutes' time. Fucking, whatever though. Wasn’t like anyone could kill anybody with this.

“Ugh… hey.”

The cupboard door creaked open, just enough to let a thin sliver of light inside.

“Here’s your stupid goddamn paint, if you still need it.”

A positively ancient looking tin, label shredded to pieces and metal rusting away, skidded out of the closet, sliding along the floor, coming to a halt and depositing a glob of turquoise paint onto the ground as it did so.

“Take it, or leave it. I don’t fucking care.”

Without another word, the door slammed shut once more.

She felt more comforted than humiliated. The moment after she was sick- common- created a brief bubble of reality whose reflective surface showed humanity at it's best and softest. Fitz touching her in that moment made warm and human the same hand that had squeezed the trigger to sentence a person to death minutes prior. It was a moment she was reluctant to dwell on when she was sure she'd experience little of it in what time she had left.

It lingered. Pandora's most fundamental evil.

"Tenshi's good to go too." Cedar confirmed her confirmation to her friend who couldn't otherwise make much sense of it with, a thumbs up, said thumb redundantly marking the path they'd take into the unknown. At an unseasonably slow pace likely, thanks to her. It'd be a twofer: moving so slow they'd even feel the sheerness and bitterness of the cold more than if Cedar wasn't a walking sack of rotten meat. Good, she could blame herself for everything. That was a good deal easier to deal with than wondering who would shoot the bullet that broke a friend's skull open in front of her. Even abstractly considering the possibility felt like the creak of the house at the deadest of night when still awake and shadows were dancing on the ceiling above. Inexorably wrong.

Cedar stared, barely catching Trinity's peace offering in time. Reflexes absolutely on point, she had spent almost the entire moment counting the shades of vertigo swirling over the haze in front of her eyes, then at the last second she'd heard the dry skid of a can over floor.

That was nice to see. Another point for humanity. Like the 2020 elections they'd need to run up the score, because the flip side of the two-faced coin would be catching up soon.

“Jeez,” Fitz muttered under his breath, eyeing the rather violently thrown paint can. Louder he said, “Thank you. I guess.”

As he did, he let go of Cedar, though not without giving her a gentle nudge towards Tenshi, and rummaged in his pocket. He’d stuck the map in his pocket during his initial rummaging through his bag, and withdrew that to peer at it briefly.

“Let’s, uh… find somewhere with warmth and paper. Lotta building. Town nearby, research station elsewhere... Gotta be somewhere.” He pointed. “Uh… thataway, I guess. Paint might be good for… something, so yeah… bring it with.” He gestured at the paint obviously enough that Tenshi took the hint and grabbed it.

Fitz moved ahead of the other two, somewhat leaving Cedar in Tenshi’s care. On the way out, he veered back towards the stairs that he’d initially been near, peeking underneath and scooping up the magazine he’d dropped through the gap earlier before sticking it in his pocket.

He kept the sniper rifle somewhat raised as he nudged the door out open with his shoulder, glancing back at the other two before leaving to make sure they followed.

((Fitz, Cedar and Tenshi continued in Welcome to Camp Nightmare.))

There was a final flurry of activity from outside the cupboard. There were footsteps, the shuffling sound of people moving around, the scraping of metal and rustling of fabric, the low discussion of next steps and plans for the future, along with… other comments (he really couldn’t have just stopped at ‘Thank you’, could he? Dick). A conclusion seemed to be reached. The footsteps started up again, growing fainter and fainter until only their echo remained.

Trinity remained where she was, inches away from the door, the tension coursing through her body the only thing keeping her standing, ears pricked, constantly on edge as she waited for the next inevitable bullshit situation to crawl out of the woodwork, the actual threat hidden in this building to slink out of the shadows and strike.

She waited. Minutes passed. Silence filled the room, seeping into every corner and surrounding her. Still she hung on, filled to the brim with anticipation, a little longer. Then a little longer still. Just a little bit more.

Until eventually, even her paranoia had to admit that she was totally, completely alone now, and she let out a sigh of relief that she’d been holding in since she’d first woken up. The pipe cleaners that had mysteriously replaced her legs gave way underneath her, and she collapsed to the floor, pressing her back against one of the shelves, gently resting her head against the wood, and closing her eyes.

Finally.

A little bit of respite. A little bit of time to think. A little bit of rest. ‘Little’ was, of course, the key term here. She’d been left to her own devices for now, but sooner or later this place would be buzzing with activity once more. People gravitated towards shelter even when they hadn’t been snatched up for a death game in the dead of winter. And right now, it didn’t matter if they were altruistic and just looking to help, wary and cautious and snide like the outside trio had been, or straight up menacing and a threat to her well being; until she had gotten herself a plan of action, Trinity had no intention of interacting with any of them.

The latter sort most of all, of course.

So. With the acknowledgement that she was running down an invisible timer; a breather, a rest. And to work. The first order of business: realising that, with a little bit of luck, this wouldn’t be the last opportunity she had to get all of her thoughts in order, before she was forced back into interacting with the world again. It would be absolutely rotten misfortune to run into somebody as soon as she left this building - her hand pressed against the wooden shelf as she thought this - and although she obviously couldn’t predict what the rest of the journey to god-knows-where would be like, it was reassuring to remind herself that she had a decent stretch of time to make sure her head was screwed on straight.

Deciding what to do after she’d gotten from Point A to Point ? was a trickier prospect, however. It was all well and good knowing what she would like to occur as she muddled her way through the next few days - that being to avoid human contact wherever and whenever she could - but she knew that the reality of that was near impossible. She couldn’t stop people from stumbling upon her little hiding spot. She wouldn’t be able to prevent herself from trying to find shelter where a dozen other folks were already hunkering down for the night. And what would she do if she saw someone bleeding out but still alive, a few feet away from her? Saw someone get attacked when she was close enough to assist?

Freeze up and panic without a better plan than ‘don’t talk to anybody’, if history was determined, as it frequently was, to repeat itself. She couldn’t prepare for every possible outcome of every potential interaction with every single one of her classmates; if she’d had time, and paper, and planning, then she might have, but out here it was liable to drive her as close to insanity as having no plan at all.

Eventually, she came up with something workable; she would not make any attempt to initiate contact with others, but if contact came to her, then she would respond appropriately. Vague enough to cover a wide variety of situations, but with just enough specifications to feel like an actual goal. It was a building block. She could work with it. Stack more on top, as soon as she was out of this tiny room.

She knew what the beginning of her journey was going to entail. She knew enough of how she would approach the middle that it didn’t feel like she was stumbling with her laces tied together headfirst into darkness. So. Here was the million dollar question.

How about the ending? What was her overall goal, now that she was trapped, caught in the terrorists’ vice grip? How did she want this all to finish, and what would she do to get that?

What indeed.

A few minutes later, the cupboard door clicked, swinging all the way open this time, the creak of a thousand years of neglect echoing throughout the processing plant. Trinity blinked, adjusting to the light, using her hand both to brush her fringe out of her eyes and also shield them as she squinted. Her bag was tightly strapped to her back. In one hand, the hair-brushing hand, she held her strange, awkward polearm. In the other, a plastic bucket of water. She’d had plans for it before; if she’d opened the door for Fitz and his weapon had still been raised, she would have flung the entire thing over his head. Shock tactics. Might have given her an extra few seconds to book it. Obviously that plan had never come to fruition in this building, but you never knew. There could be another time, another place for it to come in handy.

This place definitely wasn’t somewhere she wanted to stay any longer than necessary, now she was getting an actual look at it. The conveyor belts had been inactive for years, the pipes rusted over, the air still, but the entire sprawling mass of machinery coiling around each other and stretching from floor to ceiling to wall to wall… it made the entire building feel alive. If she turned the wrong way, then it would all contort behind her, and trap her in an endless network of groaning, rusting metal.

As if she needed another threat to panic over.

Trinity took a long, deep breath. Was she ready to face whatever was waiting for her outside these four walls? Absolutely not. Did she want to retreat back inside the cupboard, bar the door with her spear, and curl into the fetal position. Honestly, kind of yes.

Was she going to get out there anyway? Of course she was. This was her task now. The only thing penned into her journal for at least another week. And Trinity Ashmore was never in the mood to half-ass anything.

The cold air greeted her, as she stepped outside, and left the slumbering metal behemoth behind.

((Trinity Ashmore continued in “Look, Zeus is a deadbeat. Don’t rely on him for anything.”))