Walking With Giants (Completed)

Chapter 9

Herin awoke to the sound of screaming.

It seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all at once, with his sleep-clogged ears, but then he saw Eon suddenly emerge from his tent covered in large gray insects.

"They're all over me!" He screamed. He was doing what seemed to be a crazy rain dance, hopping up and down one one foot while whacking and bashing the gray insects. Herin got up immediately and helped Eon with getting all of the bugs off. They looked like enormous Cambrian creatures: bony, hard and definetely out of date. They had large greyish-brown pincers and multiple mandibles that curved into a hook shape, topped off with a barb at each end. Herin did not have the energy to hit them off with a spell, so he just helped Eon whack them. Cobalt finally came out of his tent, wondering what all the commotion was about, and ran to help Eon.

Finally, when all the insects had been whacked, bashed, and smooshed, Herin asked: "What was that?"

"They were all over my tent! They were crawling up the walls, in my sleeping bag, everything." Eon was a bit shaken up after the grapple with the insects, and was breathing heavy and uncontrollably

"Stop it, Eon," Cobalt said, grabbing Eon and shaking him. "You keep breathing like that and you'll pass out. I don't want to carry a dead man with me to Horus. Let's go clean out your tent now that we got the ones that were on you. How bad could it be, really?"

They all stepped into the tent.

"Oh, yeah, a lot worse, apparrently." Cobalt was surprised to see dozens of footlong insects flooding every bit of the tent.

Herin started right away. He ran back to his tent and drank some coffee. Cobalt ran to his tent to get bug repellent. Eon ran to get a Band-Aid. Herin began rummaging wildly for coffee powder (It tasted nasty by itself, but it was a good kick-start for his powers).

He started off by chugging the coffee powder. He twisted his face to make it look as if he swallowed a scorpion. Oh, well, maybe it wasn't that bad. But he had some adrenaline in his veins and some caffeine in his mouth, so maybe that was enough to wake him up fully.

He decided to make a small curse, maybe a fun one to cheer him up. For some reason, the bugs didn't scare him... no, nothing scared him. He was the great Herin, the one who would get Eon's staff back and the one who would... honestly, he had no idea what they were going to do after then. Maybe they'd go and see the world. Maybe they'd explore the ocean...

Maybe they'd go home.

It seemed a bit impossible, but history continually played out for them in dreams and amnesia recovery and they began to miss friends a lot. He knew a kid named Hugo, who was his neighbor, and whenever he was bored, he would go on bike rides and walks with Hugo and they would go fishing or play basketball or whatever they could get their hands on. He found himself missing Hugo, but Eon reminded him of Hugo, so it wasn't all that bad.

He started the curse. This one had a comical tone to it.

Big bug, big bug,

You're sorta bugging me

A smell gonna make you leave,

Something stinky for me.

He found a can of bug spray in his hand, but it didn't have a logo on it or a price tag or anything like you would see in a store. It was a black can with BUG SPRAY printed in white on the side.

It would have to do.

"Herin!" Cobalt said, struggling holding off the bugs with his bug repellent. He had put it on a stick and was waving it ineffectively at the bugs."You done smokin' coffee yet? My stick doesn't work very well." He was sweating.