"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Max pushed David over onto his back. A fresh spurt of red blood spilled over the layers down into dried brown, weakly, and Max yanked his hands back before mastering the panic to act. Taking his hoodie off, he pressed it to the wound and tried to remember what David and Gwen had taught them during first aid and emergency response camp. He kept drawing a blank. All he could remember was David's face when the CPR dummies had fallen on him and how Nikki had laughed so hard she'd fallen to the ground and taken Neil with her. Fuck, that was useless.
Plus, David had been bleeding out for... A half hour? An hour? Probably closer to an hour than not. It was a miracle he'd been alive, much less conscious this long. Fucking unnatural-
Almost like magic.
"That magical bitch," Max breathed. Sure, David seemed oblivious to the implications of Harrison's physics-breaking 'tricks' and Neil may have given up on understanding them, but Max had first hand experience with Harrison's fucking OP spells. If there was anyone that could pull this rabbit out of the hat intact, it would be... well, the kid who couldn't pull the rabbit back out of the hat.
Bad analogy, Harrison was still working on bringing things back. But hadn't Neil said they faked Nikki's death? Or somehow healed her from the shit Neil had forced down her throat? Max's mind raced with the possibilities and tried to keep hope out of the pragmatism.
The magic kid duo wasn't even hard to find- currently they were placidly correcting one another's plastic fork placement, re-setting the table the other had finished with the fork on the other side. Max scrambled to his feet and lurched across the distance between them.
"Harrison, I'm going to wake you the fuck up," he announced aloud, but found himself momentarily distracted by the feeling of blood dripping down his face. Right. Daniel had died on him and Max was still bleeding from the cut in his cheek, himself. He grabbed a handful of napkins from the table and wiped furiously at his face, ignoring the burning pain of pressing rough paper into and across the wound. God, he hoped Daniel had been too busy sacrificing people to fuck around and catch an STD or something. That would just be the chlamydia cherry on top of the shit pile. He didn't really want to think too deeply on Daniel's blood in his blood or anything about the death, at all, though. Holding a clean napkin to his cut, Max took Harrison's arm with his free hand, turning the magician towards him. Said illusionist smiled dreamily at him.
"I've wanted to do this for a long time," Max informed him before he hauled back and punched Harrison in the face. Pain was a pretty strong feeling to fight the haziness of their brainwashed state.
Plus, Max just really felt Harrison's face was fertile dirt begging for someone to plant a fresh fist.
"Ow," Harrison said dazedly, managing a weak smile.
Okay, that didn't work.
Still felt good.
David didn't really have time for failure, though. Alright. Emotions stronger than pain. Stronger than pain. Think, Max, think, goddammit. If there was anyone that could throw off the mind control, it was the resident illusionist and his eldritch powers. Max just needed to find the right way to push.
"Bet your dinky little magic can't heal people," Max taunted, but Harrison just shrugged at him as he stood.
"I can," he denied easily, voice as hazy as it had been since he stepped out of the sauna.
"Prove it," Max challenged, stepping forward slightly.
"Not really interested. We need to prepare for the Ascension, Max." Harrison accepted the wet towel Nerris produced from somewhere and held it to his own cheek, absently adding, "Thanks, Nerris."
Oh, well, that was an idea.
Stronger than pain, right?
Leaping forward, Max grabbed Nerris and a plastic fork, using his momentum to drag her past Harrison and out of his immediate reach. He held the fork to her throat, keeping her arms pinned. "I'll do it, Harrison!" he bluffed.
"That's not sharp enough-" Harrison scoffed, a bit of light flickering back into his eyes.
Max snapped the fork against the table, holding the newly sharp edge to Nerris's neck and nudging her chin up.
"Fuck you, Max," Harrison growled, eyes clearing completely with something like a flash of light, fingers curling as if they held something invisible he was prepared to throw at Max, and Max hastily shoved Nerris at him. Hands shaken out quickly as if to free them of something, Harrison caught Nerris without any further harm coming to her - not that Max had actually done anything yet.
"Don't hex me! You're awake now, aren't you?" aforementioned hellion demanded, already ducked down behind the edge of the table and peeking up at Harrison from the safety of cover.
"Where is your hoodie?" Harrison asked, a confused frown crossing his face as he let Nerris move a bit away from him, but not entirely releasing his grip on her sleeve. He shook his head, hard. "You look weird without it."
"I will take that as a yes," Max stood, dusting off his knees, "Look, I need your..." he struggled over the word, but managed to continue with sheer force of will, " help . Magic help. But I had to break the brainwashing Daniel had you under first."
"So you tried to stab Nerris," Harrison concluded, looking at Nerris uneasily, "Because no one can kill my rival except for me. So that woke me up."
Oh, god. He was so deeply in denial Max was sure the illusionist could see crocodiles at play. "Sure," he agreed flatly. What an oblivious shit. Okay, he didn't have time to cater to Harrison's denial and he didn't really feel like playing fucking magic matchmaker, either. "David is bleeding out and I need a miracle." Meeting Harrison's eyes, he tried to convey exactly how serious the situation had become while still keeping his voice steady, "Can you give me one?"
"I mean sure," Harrison casually pulled Nerris back when she tried to wander away, "but it'd be easier if Nerris were helping."
"Ugh, fine," Max flipped the pointy bit of plastic in his hand and gestured at Harrison, "Come here."
A high pitched, nervous laugh escaped the illusionist. "N- no need for that." He shook Nerris a little without taking his eyes from Max and the sharp object said malevolent force was holding, "Nerris, perception check yourself before you wreck yourself. Don't you have arcane knowledge or something?" She stopped fighting to get away and hummed thoughtfully to herself.
"Fourteen," she mused aloud, holding her chin, "I seem to be a little brainwashed, if you ask me."
"Can you roll a will save using your wisdom stats and mine?" Harrison pressed, still eyeing the plastic fork Max was tapping impatiently against the side of his leg, "Since I'm helping out?"
"It's unconventional," she complained hazily, but eventually shrugged. "Okay. You're going to provide magical support right? There's a penalty for me because I'm mentally altered and you because you're just helping out, not rolling the dice yourself. Say half for you and minus two for me."
"Oh my gods, just roll," Harrison urged, shaking her arm again, and there was the faintest sound of rolling dice without any motion from the girl in question.
"Oo, that was a close one," she said with clear relish and equally clear eyes, "Nerris the Cute triumphs again!"
"Okay, well we've got a party member down and we need you to cast some sort of reviving spell while I try to close the wound," Harrison explained quickly, casting glances Max's direction but otherwise meeting Nerris' curious gaze.
"Spell slots," she pointed out officiously and Harrison groaned. Now was not the time to conserve magic!
He turned her away from Max with one last nervous look shot back at the boy's raised eyebrow. In a whispered conference, he filled her in on who exactly was down and why that might release Max's berserker side and didn't she remember that berserkers of Max's caliber typically had some sort of magic resistance when they were in a full on battle fury?
They both agreed Max probably outleveled them with sheer rage alone. Either that, or he would drag them down to his level and beat them with experience. Lose-lose, either way.
Even if Harrison usually preferred not to word it quite like that... Well, it was always delicate communicating with Nerris. Self taught mages were the worst. Either way, they broke from the small collusion with conspiratory nods.
"Okay, we will help you," Nerris began high-handedly, fingers steepled before her as she approached Max, overdoing the bravery in the face of danger thing - at least in Harrison's opinion, "for a pri-"
"For free ," Harrison interrupted, elbowing Nerris and continuing pointedly, "Since you freed us from that foul mind trick."
"Yeah, can we get on with it, now?" Max had either discarded his makeshift weapon or slipped it into a pants pocket, because his hands were free to tersely drag the two magicians over to David's prone form, "How long does it take you fuckers to decide whether or not to save a man's life?" When they hesitated over the body, exchanging heavy looks, Max snapped, "Well ?"
"Max, are you sure he is... still alive?" Harrison put forth delicately, nudging David with a toe.
Nerris nodded, "That's a lot of blood."
"He's not dead!" The shout was abrupt, exploding out of Max without warning, and he looked down when it was over, hands moving aimlessly up and falling to his sides when he had no hoodie to hide his hands in. He took a deep breath. "Look, just try, okay? Just- just fucking try."
Another dubious shared look between the magicians and Nerris cracked her knuckles, pulling out and swigging the contents of a teal glass bottle. "Potion, ups the chance of successful restoration," she explained at Harrison's glance. "Okay, let's get casting."
She put a hand out over David and began to chant in a language Max probably could have recognized if he gave the smallest shit about Nerris's occasional introductory language classes. Harrison knelt down next to them both and peeled Max's ruined jacket from David's side, laying hands on the skin around the wound for a moment before covering the wound itself with a slight wince.
Nerris' chant came to an end and Harrison pressed down once, then took his hands away with a small, "Ta-da!"
The gash had vanished.
David was still unconscious.
"Okay," Max shifted his weight, the worry in his tone quickly sublimating to anger, "Why isn't he waking up?"
"He's lost a lot of blood," Nerris pointed out again, ignoring how Harrison shoved at the side of her legs in irritation. "Plus, it's hard to know if there's infection and I could only give him like six hp back. Harrison stopped whatever drain per second that wound was, but... Dicey."
"What in the everloving heck demons are your charisma stats?" the illusionist demanded in a harsh whisper. This was similarly ignored. "Or is it your intelligence that is low?"
"Look, I can give him a potion, but we can't be sure it'll help," Nerris crossed her arms over her chest and looked down at David's pale face, maintaining her bravado stubbornly despite Harrison's protests, "We should call the police, Max. And an ambulance. He needs a blood transfusion." Honestly, she was proud she sounded so very unlike someone about to cry.
Harrison stared up at her, unblinkingly, and she rolled her eyes, grabbing at the distraction eagerly.
"I have a background in basic first aid and so do you," she complained in the face of his ongoing shock at her practical suggestion. "First Aid Camp? Hello?"
"Wake everyone else up and dump any kool aid you find into the dirt - it's poisoned," Max ordered, their byplay of little to no interest to him. What mattered was that the weirdos were... kind of right. "I'll hunt down Gwen and find her cellphone." With that said, he ran off, towards the edge of the camp where he last saw Gwen meandering with the rest of the sheep.
When he was out of sight, Nerris turned to Harrison and jabbed a thumb at the other body nearby, bravado falling to reveal her anxiety now that Max wasn't hovering, "So, wh- who killed Daniel?"
Harrison jumped a little, and laughed nervously as he took in the definitely dead person, "Oh, I do not think we want to know, right now."
She considered the situation with just an edge of hysteria and gave a little nervous laugh of her own, the two of them meeting each other's eyes and dissolving into frightened giggles for just a minute. Still, they were too deep into the mystic arts for the shock to stagger them much longer, and they both knew it. No point dragging it out. Magic wasn't all sparkles and hat tricks - emotional control was... necessary in some situations.
"Self defence," Harrison said once he had the panic under control, using the breathing techniques that had gotten him past vanishing his brother and onto finding a solution, "Or protecting us. Since Max says Daniel tried to poison us all."
"Self defence," Nerris agreed, deliberately not thinking of why her father believed sincerely that he had never had real magic himself, but still shoving the fear into that same box in her head, "Whoever did it. Which we don't know."
"Because any grown man nearby would have the strength to force a kitchen knife all the way through someone's neck," Harrison continued in the same tone, accepting Nerris' hand and letting her pull him to his feet, "from behind."
They looked at each other meaningfully one last time and Nerris crossed her arms over her chest, averting her eyes, "We should figure out how to wake people up."
Obviously, she didn't want to tempt fate by talking about it anymore. Finally, a decision with which Harrison could agree. He snapped his fingers, and the tablecloth shimmied off the table without upsetting a single dish, drifting down to cover the cult leader. Out of sight, out of mind. That done, Harrison turned away from the corpse and David's hopefully still just unconscious body with a little shiver of relief, glad to be faced with a problem he had a chance of solving.
"Yes, well, that should be easy if we can get everyone in the same place, facing the same direction." Producing a pocket watch on a chain with a small burst of smoke, Harrison waved it back and forth for a moment, wiggling the fingers on his other hand in Nerris' direction, "Are you ready for a little counter-hypnotism, my lady?"
.
Gwen was easy to wake up now that Max had the hang of it. Strong emotion! He already knew how to make her despair in a little under three minutes.
Of course, then he had to coach her through the breakdown that followed.
"Hey," he said in a tone that would be soothing were it not for the undercurrent of impatience sharpening its edges, "I'm sure you'll get a real job someday." Under his breath, Max added, "And you've just been freed from the control of a fucking cultist, so rejoice, already." Patting her shoulder gingerly, he couldn't see any change in the sobbing, which is why it took him by surprise when her head snapped up and she snarled at him.
"You little dick of Satan, that was the happiest I've been in years!"
One foot and then the other didn't seem to be working, as Max found when his step back turned into a stumble from which he only just managed to recover. Shock abating, his blank stare morphed into a glare, "Ungrateful bitch says what?"
"What?" she snapped irritably, "Now what are you muttering?"
Max had found long ago that if you fermented fear, deep down, under great pressure, you could actually manage to come up with more rage. He tilted a hand as if to ask, what can you do and laughed, sounding just this side of unstable. "Yeah, fuck you; I just saved your life - well, David helped - but right fucking now, you owe me literally everything." Hands spread expressively and Max discovered that, despite feeling so livid his insides were molten, an incredulous smile was still tugging at one side of his mouth, "But lucky you! All I'm going to ask for is your shitty-ass low reception cell phone."
"Excuse me?" Gwen stood to her full height, folding over only enough to loom over Max, "First, you'll need to tell me how you supposedly saved my life by breaking my fucking zen."
"Brainwashing," Max corrected, smile dropping and a crackle of irritability digging into the panic buried in his guts and pulling, "Daniel was a cult leader, so judge that book by its cover, and he tried to kill all of you fucking oblivious nerds by making you literally drink the kool aid, alright? He stabbed David, and now we need to call a motherfucking ambulance or is that not worth breaking your worthless zen, Gwen!"
"What?" All the indignation had drained from her, and the counselor put a hand to her head, looking lost, "David... what?"
"For fuck's sake- cell phone, Gwen!" Max shook her arm, "Where is it?"
"Oh, it's-" she fumbled with the apron she'd donned while cooking... something with Daniel. It was all fuzzy around the edges, indistinct and gossamer. Like she'd been hit in the head. Honestly, she'd have to have been knocked a good one to be wearing a frilly white apron in the first place. The left pocket was empty, but in the right, cool plastic met her questing fingers and Gwen drew her mobile out of the apron, holding it Max's direction, "If you're lying to me-"
The phone was snatched from her hands and Max was dialing. With barely a pause after the line connected, Max reeled off, "Yeah, we need an ambulance at Camp Campbell, and I guess Sal since there was sort of an incident-" A blast of static exploded out of the speaker. "Fuck!" The phone fell from his hand to the ground when he flinched, and he hastily grabbed it up again, holding it half a foot from his head, voice loud and edged, "Hello?"
He wouldn't get to hold onto it for long. The static twisted painfully, impossibly, making both Gwen and Max clutch their ears as the sound somehow grew worse, spiking once in volume before it faded out.
"Hello?" A sweet, female voice emanated from the phone, clear even from a few feet away, "Anyone on the line?"
The kid dove for the phone. "Hi, ambulance, Camp Campbell, now," Max demanded from where he remained sprawled on the ground, phone in hand once more.
"Wha- oh, drat. Okay, where's this Camp Campbell, dear heart?"
"On Lake Lilac," Max supplied uneasily, glancing up at Gwen for help. She leaned in to supply the correct address, but the woman on the other end interrupted.
"Lake Lilac? You're saying you're on the reservation?" she huffed, tone losing all urgency. "That's a thumper! We've only just got the one telephone in town and you're trying to tell me the Indians have one already! What a bricky kid. Well, I'm a little too afternoonified for that bunkum to fly with me, snake waker! Telephones aren't for children!"
The call ended with a click.
Max dialed again, unwilling to process whatever the hell that woman had just said.
"Sleepy Peak Police, what is your emergency?" A young man answered promptly.
"Ambulance to Camp Campbell, for the love of god," Max tried again, tensely, just barely keeping himself on an even keel.
"Camp Campbell?" the voice questioned, "Don't you mean Campbell Cabin? Up on the island?"
Aw, hell. That. Was. It. The shout ripped out of Max like a cannonball aimed at the entire fucked up situation, "Fucking hell, I mean the big, empty camp on the south side of Lake Lilac that's been here since July third of motherfucking 1962!" He'd only heard David wistfully recount a secondhand story of its founding eighteen times so the date was burned forever in his mind.
"It's... Uh," the man cleared his throat, "It's 1953."
What?
This was the police, not some prank hotline.
Weren't they... No, Max didn't think he was lying. Whoever he was.
He'd sounded flustered, not polite and condescending like how someone trying to convince Max would behave.
"Oh," Max held the phone silently for a moment, "Sorry to bother you." He hung up.
Gwen broke from her still stance, brow creasing. "What the hell? You better not be messing with me, brat." She pulled the phone from Max's unresisting fingers and dialed, not letting the call's recipient get a word in edgewise before she shot off like a machine gun, "Hey, we need an ambulance at Camp Campbell, and what goddamn year is it, again?"
"Oh, in all my born days. What a mouth on you," a new voice fluttered, "What language!"
"Year," Gwen pressed, "Now. What is it?"
"1895, you- you hedge creeper! See if the operators in this town help you again or your made up camp!" Another click.
"Okay, so we're dialling out to... different... time periods or something," Gwen summarized slowly, reluctant to believe what was happening but unable to see how Max could have set up a prank of this scale. She definitely dialed 911. There was no mistaking that.
Wow, that could have horribly backfired.
Best not to think about that.
She really wanted to say it was solar flares or something and put it behind her. Unfortunately with circumstances as they stood, Gwen needed to address the issue in some fashion. Some productive fashion. "I think it's changing each time, so if we keep calling..." For Max, her voice blurred out to white noise as his fingernails dug painfully into his palms.
Calling over and over again while David lay on the ground with the magic kids' bargain brand Hail Mary holding him together? No, no, fuck no!
"We don't have time to play Russian roulette with all of history! David could die! Fuck, we have to bring him into town ourselves!" Before she could reply, Max was already pushing her legs in the right direction, she had no choice but to start walking or risk falling backwards and crushing the kid, "You're driving; let's go!"
.
Where was he?
Hello?
Everything looked green. New. Alive!
Appetising.
What a strange thought.
Blurry lines of motion moved backwards and forwards at the same time, pulses of light beating inside them. The light was beautiful; it called to him.
He wanted to rip it out and taste it.
No, wait...
They wanted to rip it out and taste it.
Who are you?
The pressure was immense, heated and roiling and painful, but these were growing pains. This was progress. They reached out. They reached in. They circled the area with their minds and called, cried out for a champion. That their message was twisted away from reality into mistruth like a vine twisting towards the light was irrelevant. If they pushed out, just a little harder, and someone outside pushed in...
The pressure grew.
What are you?
Abruptly, they took notice of the little light touching them, and the pressure turned on him, crushing and burning, as a thousand voices popped, crackled, and burned in his head.
L͔͕͔̬͂̃̆͆͘ȇ̶̈́̎ͩ̀̾t͔ͬͮ ̮̭̮͓̥͓͓ͪ͊̀̿̒̾ụͣ̑ͭ̾͢sͥͯ̃ ̗̮̋̏̒ͫ͐͗̚͢į̤̑́ͣͥͤń̼̪̫̫̗̲̮.
.
David woke up breathless.
Oh, shouldn't have sat up that fast. His head was aching, but... nowhere else.
Hadn't he been... stabbed recently?
Sort of in the intestine type area? Lower right?
Reaching down, David felt the smooth skin there through the bloodied rip in his shirt and glanced at the cloth-covered figure lying beside him. Something was... maybe not wrong, persay... Something was- something was off. As much as he appreciated not being in imminent risk of bleeding out, David needed to know.
He pushed himself to a wobbly sitting position and noted there was no one else around.
"What in the heck is going on?"
"David!" Max had at some point materialized at his side, enraged as per usual, but also gripping the counselor's ears painfully to keep him partially upright, "How the fuck are you awake? Again?"
"That's my question, kiddo," David pulled out of Max's grasp gingerly and shook his head, one hand going to his temple, "The last thing I remember is you telling me about-" A hand slapped over his mouth - one that was a tad smaller than if he'd done it to himself.
"You don't get to talk about... stuff when you're clearly delirious from blood loss," Max informed him with all the sharp command of a seasoned drill sergeant, giving David a glare that straddled the line between infuriated and desperate. Why...? Right, Gwen was there, too. And the magic kids, along with some napping campers, now that he thought of it. He easily dislodged Max's censorship by standing, despite protests from the small crowd.
"Okay, so..." Trying to think through what he could and couldn't say was futile in this state - David was still reeling from that vivid fever dream or hallucination he'd broken a moment ago. At least he could recognize his own lack of coherency. Better to get more information, first. "What happened?" he reiterated lamely.
Max stepped smoothly into this opening, banking the flames of his wrath long enough to relay the narrative everyone needed to believe, "Daniel was a fucking cult leader, like I said. He brainwashed everyone with a gas chamber disguised as a sauna, like I said. Then he tried to poison everyone, just like I fucking said." Okay, his fury wasn't so much smothered as it was restrained. David couldn't just sit back up and forget after all this. Max wanted answers, dammit. Regretfully, that was a problem for later. Still, he... kind of needed to stay mad or the other feelings lurking in his gut might pounce. "You got half brainwashed, because I pulled you out before it could really set in, and when Daniel tried to kill me for it, you confronted him and he stabbed you and he died." An extra glare for the campers and Gwen, on the house, assured them this was the only version of events Max was endorsing. "So I woke up Harrison, Nerris, and Gwen, saving your ass along with everyone else's, and learned we can only call out to random points in time on any phone at hand, from now back to the year phones were invented. Probably." This bombshell was dropped casually and without the slightest hint of regret for his cavalier and, frankly, confusing information dump. "Also, maybe Space Kid is dead. I don't know."
It took a few minutes to get everyone calmed down after that. While most of the now-shouted conversation was focused on the time anomaly - and Daniel having died, in Gwen's case - David had nearly swooned at the thought of a camper being seriously harmed while he was impaired. Or, rather, the counselor went blank-faced and dead-eyed until Harrison exasperatedly searched the area and retrieved a nervous, but living Space Kid from his hiding spot.
David immediately grabbed the child like a teddy bear and returned to semi-normal function, otherwise ignoring the grateful camper clinging to his front, koala-style. "So we're somehow cut off from calling people outside the camp in our own... year," David summarized from the loudest parts of the shouting that had gone on during Harrison's reluctant search of the grounds. He absently patted Space Kid's back, voice tired and tight, "I don't know what to do with that information."
"Well, it means we'll have to go into town to report... this," Gwen made a circular gesture encompassing nearly her entire field of vision. "Yeah, this. And you should get checked over. Where were you stabbed?"
"Harrison healed it," Max said, waving a hand at David's torn shirt and drying blood. At the sniff from Nerris, Lady of Dork, he guessed he was supposed to add her, too. All he'd seen was Nerris chanting nonsense again while Harrison seemed to do the work, though. Max wasn't giving in so easily. He ignored her, adding instead, "But he only closed the wound."
"And cleaned it," Harrison held up a finger importantly, "With the help of my almost lovely assistant, Nerris." This earned him a swat to the shoulder from his newly dubbed assistant.
"Thank you both," David said on automatic. It seemed Harrison had more tricks up his sleeve than David had thought. He'd never expected the boy to incorporate field medicine into... His skin really was smooth and intact over his stomach, just as he'd thought when he awoke.
David pressed a finger into his side again, and only got so far as the seemingly healthy skin could compress. Turns out that hadn't been part of the hallucination or whatnot. Well, he had sort of seen this coming after Max got cursed.
Still, he needed just a moment and he briefly put the palms of his hands over his eyes, registering distantly Gwen loudly denouncing them all as devils and demons as she gently wept. Max appeared torn between mild interest and intense worry at this development in the only adults for miles around that had any interest in the camp.
"I should have been an accountant," Gwen sobbed with sudden, fierce conviction. "What did I do to deserve actual magic slathered all over a job herding children ? First David's acting weird, then the bodyguard froze and time broke in my cellphone," she shook the offending article with vigor, "and now Harrison's eldritch magic can no longer be safely and sanely explained away as illusion because David isn't dead from Daniel stabbing him and Daniel is actually dead."
"Wait, repeat that," Max yanked the hem of Gwen's shirt with a funny look on his face, but she just glanced at him helplessly. With growing urgency, Max refrained from shaking her only because he'd turned to David instead, "She said that Campbell's bodyguard froze and time broke."
Neither counselor seemed to get it, but Nerris snapped her fingers, "Classic. How did we not see that? He's frozen in time." She chuckled in chagrin, "Wow, if we were playing a tabletop game, I'd have figured that out hours ago."
"The rabbit and the squirrel did seem mostly immune to anything we could throw at them," Harrison mused unhappily, a growing dread easing into his tone, "And it would explain how he supposedly has no pulse or breath, but remains standing and immobile. I would not call it frozen, but he may have been pushed a little to... the left... of time." He fell silent, and no amount of badgering from Nerris or Max was able to force him to elaborate on that statement.
Meanwhile, David had quietly managed to convince himself real magic was a good thing, in Harrison and possibly Nerris' case. They were safer, for one, and he had only seen Harrison misuse his magic once, with Max. So far as David knew, the only mischief the boy got up to otherwise was accidental, and for the most part, the young magician seemed to use his magic for good.
This was good.
Especially as it seemed Harrison may know more about the situation they were in than David and Gwen could cobble together, if the rapid draining of color from his face meant anything.
"Maybe we should get the police," Space Kid suggested, voice muffled by both his helmet and how hard he was pressing it into David's chest, "And show them the frozen guy and stuff."
"That is uncharacteristically aware of you," Gwen pointed out in a strained tone, having apparently cried herself out enough to face reality once more. Even if it was clear she didn't want to do so in how her arms crossed her torso in a tight self-hug and her voice jumped with the smallest of trembles. "And right. You're right. David should get checked out and we need to report Daniel's... death as soon as possible."
It was this that snapped Harrison out of his daze, head snapping her direction with a terrified, "No! We cannot just go into the forest all willy nilly!" His volume lowered, but was no less urgent in delivery, "Don't you see the fog?"
"What fog...?" Even as she asked it, Gwen felt as if something in her head snapped into place, and the thick rising bank of fog between the trees around the camp came into focus. She couldn't quite tell how far away it was. Whenever she tried to estimate it, the distance slipped away from her and she was left wondering what she'd been thinking about for a blank second.
"It smells like smoke," David noted, brow furrowed in confusion.
"It probably smells like a lot of things," Harrison muttered uncomfortably before returning to a normal volume, "I would bet my hat it is surrounding the camp, now. In fact I would bet my hat and wand it has been surrounding the camp since the last camper arrived and none of us could focus on it enough to see." Painfully aware of his rapt audience, the magician continued hastily, "It is not really fog, it is... Well, if it is what I think it is, it might be better to show you." He retrieved a brightly colored scarf from his sleeve, removing it with a flourish and blowing it towards the fog.
It drifted an indescribable amount of time before it abruptly reached the fog. The fabric curled in on itself in an impossible endless curve before exploding out into a thousand tiny shreds that themselves disintegrated and twisted out of existence.
"Ta-da," Harrison said weakly. "That, my friends, is the edge of a thousand timestreams glinting in the light." He appeared a bit ill at the thought, but gathered himself before the counselors or his fellow campers could manage the same. Fixing them with a look, he asked, "Hasn't this summer felt odd to you? Maybe you would be walking along and think, 'It certainly has been a long week' or 'My, I can't believe it's only June,' or-"
"'Isn't it unseasonably nice?'" David put in, hand on his chin as he stared pensively at the forest floor.
"Exactly," Harrison pointed at David, and turned back to the rest of the conscious occupants of the camp with a bit more confidence, "This summer has gone on too long, don't you think? How many weeks has it been?"
"I... I don't know," Gwen admitted, surprised at her own failing, "Normally I count the days until you brats all leave, but I've kept on... Losing count, for some reason."
"And what date is on your phone?" Harrison pressed.
Gwen related a date.
"What did Gwen just say?" the illusionist demanded, turning to the rest of the group.
"May thirty first," Max related with some wariness at the same time Nerris said, "July first."
Space Kid offered a snort, "Guys, she clearly said June eighth."
David had heard something around Space Kid's estimate, and Harrison nodded at them, jaw set and eyes dark with fear.
"It is as I expected," he laced his fingers together and looked away, clearing his throat before he could explain, "We are somehow being hunted, by something that should be sealed away deep in the untamed wilderness."
"There isn't a lot of untamed wilderness left," Max pointed out with half a sneer, unable to stop himself from focusing on that one detail to avoid thinking about the other part. The hunted part.
"What's the name?" Nerris asked, her heavily annotated DnD bestiary out and at hand.
Harrison shifted uneasily, "The Greeks called them Kronics." He wrung his hands slightly, nervously removing his gloves when it was clear they were too sweaty and uncomfortable to keep on, "Time demons. And it appears something is letting them in."
...
(Photo sourced from https://unsplash.com/@reskp)