Ofelia had never been one for nightmares.

She always slept easily at night, even if she was something of a light sleeper, but the fact of the matter was her dreams were never the thing that woke her up. An outside noise or a change in her surroundings, such as heat or cold, always did the job without her mind needing to even give it a try. She snored when she slept, her brother did tell her that, so as a child Ofelia had believed that all her bad dreams escaped from her mouth during the night, rather than get trapped in her head. Neither of her family members cared to tell her otherwise, her brother too kind to really even suggest she was stupid for thinking so and her aunt not caring period, so that was still a thought Ofelia tucked away in the back of her mind with each night. Whenever she laid her head down to rest, burying her face into the pillows and pulling the blankets up to her nose, she made sure to keep her mouth open.

Once she woke up to her brother covering her mouth and plugging her nose, a childish attempt at forcing her to wake up without calling her name or shaking her. The end result had been Ofelia gagging and nearly dying but well, her brother thought it was funny. He was eleven, she was seven. She cried for the rest of the night and worried that she'd die in her sleep if her eyes closed again. Her brother was forced to stay up and at her side, helping her blow her nose and keeping the sobs to a minimum. An aunt awoken in the middle of the night was an aunt no one wanted to deal with, least of all two children who barely knew her.

But that was the past and this was now. Ofelia was laying in her bed in the dorms, blankets drawn to her nose, and her eyes were wide open no matter how hard she tried to force them shut. The simple game of closing her eyes and refusing to open them until her alarm went off didn't work, nor did the counting to a hundred. Ofelia went on to count to a hundred in two languages, struggling a bit on the Spanish (hey, those classes in high school were boring and she didn't care okay) but still she stayed awake. The white of the walls, the white of the cieling, it did nothing to ease her into a coma. Perhaps it was the stillness of the night air, the lack of evening sounds. Until this point she'd been able to crash just fine, generally exhausted from wandering around the compound all day, but as the itches in her legs flared up her mind kept replaying the events over and over. It didn't matter how tired she felt or how her body ached - Ofelia wasn't going to get any rest so long as her mind kept showing her the looks on the faces of the people and the sounds of the water and snakes.

Were adventures supposed to haunt her? The look on Sandy's face as desperation had set in, the feeling of Ofelia's lungs burning as she ran away from the beast. The sound of her FEAR scanner's screaming still echoed in her ears like a bad song and every now and then it would fade to a high pitched whine that reminded her of speaker feedback. From there she'd see Sandy's face again and hear the snakes, the pained scream as one bit into the woman's leg. Ofelia hadn't seen the bite, hadn't seen how Barney died either, but she had looked back just in time to see them both down and the escape route of both Hunters slipping from their grasp. Everyone had been running, no one had been screaming - at least not out loud. Ofelia was certain there had been screams, be them internal or from the weapons in their minds, but everyone had just been so focused on running.

Should they have gone back for the bodies? Would someone even go back for the bodies? That 'Cael-something-or another' person had gone missing too, was his corpse among those that floated in the murky depths? Ofelia recalled the stench as she looked around for the weapon tablets, the putrid rot that even now caused her nose to scrunch itself up despite the only smell she had being her sheets. Was that creature going to eat the bodies and was he thankful for the strange feast? Did snakes eat the bodies, would enough of them overwhelm the corpses and take them down piece by piece? The teen's knowledge of snakes was limited and her imagination was vast, providing her weary mind plenty of stimulus to keep her eyes open and her thoughts racing. The blanket was pulled up and over her head.

How come she kept thinking of Sandy? Was it because she took her book from her bag? Was it because she found that note piece and the flowers inside? Part of Ofelia was curious enough to venture to the library, at least she thought she would when she wasn't trying to get some sleep, and look up the different types. There were so many she didn't know, so many she didn't recognize. Ofelia might have been someone who enjoyed the out of doors but she wasn't well versed on much of nature. Her existence had been that small farm with its dirt roads and thick brambles. Her knowledge of animals had been the rabbits who chewed at the makeshift garden her brother had and the coyotes they popped at with guns during the twilight hours. Plants....usually got run over with the lawn mower. Stopping to smell the flowers was wasted on her and maybe so was the book? Should she go and try to find someone who knew more about them and would appreciate them? Ofelia knew so few people and well, her personality was lacking. Plus bringing up people from the mission so soon after might offend someone and result in her just making things worse.

She rolled over in the bed, kicking her leg out in the process. A solid hit connected with the wall and her toes all started to sing with pain at the same time, resulting in Ofelia pulling her knee to her chin as her fingers bent down to rub the injured appendages. Hopefully her neighbor hadn't heard the kick, hopefully they were out cold or just...not in the room. Ofelia hadn't cared to check, Clerise's business was her own, but still some part of the teen wanted to be polite. For good measure though she kicked the wall again, perhaps out of spite or to see if Clerise really was in, though playing off that she did it in her sleep would be really hard since she was still quite awake. Maybe she could say kicking the wall had woken her up? All it really did though was make her foot hurt more and made her more aware of the time.

Squeezing her eyes shut Ofelia started counting again, this time trying to push out the fact that she could imagine her running footsteps in time with the numbers she was softly whispering. She could only imagine the numbers going in rhythm and their sounds changing to the screams of the FEAR scanner. It was disgusting how something she'd been so excited to go on was now preventing her from getting sleep to get ready for another one. The teen sat up and rubbed the back of her neck, her whole body ready to just collapse while her mind continued on forward. Perhaps there was someone else awake, someone else willing to talk about it and help her understand that what she was feeling was fear, not a bad case of indigestion.

Fear was something Ofelia never liked admitting she had because she always believed that as she got older the world got less scary. The problem was that as she got older she learned that there was more in it. The things that hid under her bed were really under her bed, not just a childhood story, and the things that went bump in the night really needed to get bumped back. It was all a problem, such a problem, and Ofelia leaned back in an effort to reach her pillow.

Instead she hit her head and knocked herself unconscious, her mind finally at ease as a massive welt spread across the back of her head.