Scavenge Me Some Sanity
The Scavenger Hunt (8 ) : Destiny City is hosting an annual scavenger hunt during the Star Festival to encourage people to get out and explore their city. The prize for turning in a completed scavenger hunt is a coupon booklet and a few free tickets to upcoming city events. Even if you aren’t interested in the prize, the scavenger hunt is specifically designed to take you through the city to showcase a few historic buildings, some art installations, and some of the city’s greatest accomplishments. While many of the places are familiar, during your explorations you come across a building you’ve never seen before--something that feels out of time. You’ve been in the area countless times before, so how did you miss this place? When you lay eyes on the building, you feel a strange timelessness and have the distinct sensation of being a part of something bigger. Briefly, you may see flashes of some distant past--a flickering memory that you can’t quite place or fully form. It’s hard to make out, but at some point in time you have the distinct impression of a faded figure taking your hand and telling you to do something. They sound hopeful and encouraging, like they really believe in you. By the time you blink, the visions are gone, the building is gone. The only thing that remains is a beautiful little garden and a plaque so faded that you can’t make out the inscription.
It felt like a good way to bond - kick the kid off his need to be stuck to a screen like flies round dung. It'd worked, for a time, something about laying out a challenge centered around *moving*. Meant Coady could feel like a winner, even if they got nothing out of it in the end, wasn't the prize that mattered, so much as the quality time spent. Not that Triton was about to relay that, the second he let wind that it was something sideways of nice, or decent, or *fun*. Oh, he knew, sure as cats hated downpours, that it'd all go to complete n utter scrap. So he played lazy interest all the way through, offered the occasional attaboy -- it was only as things wound down to the end that they got sidetracked. Some building even *He*, his dusty a** self (as Coady exclaimed), didn't recognize. Which, was a ******** wonder -- all these historical sights? Shouldn't this one have been dead center on the list, first stop instead of a crazy eight straw of a crawlaround?
Maybe ---
Before he knew it they were in, beckoned, drawn. He couldn't find the will to say No, to turn back out a door that turned into another door that turned into -- like a maze of the mind. Soon Triton found he'd lost track of Coady but couldn't bring himself to care, then he'd lost track of *himself*, and in that moment it all stopped being funny. The picture of his Sister, younger, whip-smart, ******** was she *smart* - just never in the bookish way, had looks that could've killed, could've gotten her *scratch*, and instead she picked every alley laced with barbed-wire, and ever man with ten-thousand red flags, and -- every time he'd picked her up at 3am from a side of town even he didn't want to be on....
The shades of the past broke their hold; the house dissolved. Coady was left standing next to him like he'd never left, but with the same look on his face that Triton just -*he felt that look*- wondered if it was some genetic trait that let them share it? Then the kind whispers started up, and Triton? He was Done.
Because No, and also? ******** No, to absolutely *all* of whatever was going on before them. Pretty gardens, faded placards, smiling spirits and hands that held soothingly whispered messages in their centers; strange-a** things voiced without mouths. It all got a solid ******** nope. Triton didn't care if the entirety of the area erupted into gold and silver cutlery ripe for the plucking off the vine, and ready to sell.
They were leaving it, together and at speed.
He took Coady by the shoulder and shoved - "Zipit" any and all confused whining was ceased into halting steps and grunted sighs, the pair taking what seemed like the most reasonable path straight the hell *back* to civilization proper. Triton didn't know how they'd gotten off track, wasn't about to ask. He'd lived long enough now, by his own foolhardy reckoning, to know better than to question whatever paper thin difference existed between evil spirits and gods, between life and death. Triton preferred to tread on neither, and better yet? To avoid dragging his nephew into any damnable oopsidents that the city could've conjured with it's unlimited bullshitworks, heaped on by extraneous Bermuda triangle-like antics.
WC: 562
