Hippy Hill

[Kermit]

((Valerija Bogdanovic continued from Someone's Watching.))

By the time she arrived back at the house, the sun was down. Stephanie, and rather inconveniently for Val, Camille and Camille's gun, were gone.

That was okay, she guessed. She could make do for now. She had nothing but time.

She quickly blocked the front door with a makeshift barricade and wandered away to the bedroom. She flopped onto the bed and passed out, not even bothering to take her helmet off.


She awoke just in time to hear the announcements. She listened, idly staring at the ceiling. Mentally, she noted down what she felt were important details.

- A third of the class was gone now, allegedly. They'd probably be hitting halfway some time during the next two days, she guessed.
- Julien had killed Ashlynn Martinek. Val had been on friendly terms with Ashlynn back at school. They were in a few of the same clubs, and both shared similar political philosophies sort of. She knew Ashlynn could be... pointy? Tactless. She could be tactless at times. Belligerent. Val remembered, back on the first day, Julien had told her to 'be careful'. Ominous! The announcements mentioned — and Val took them with a grain of salt — but they mentioned the killing had been over something Ashlynn'd said. Val wasn't really sure what to make of that whole situation, but she was glad Julien hadn't stuck with the group at the cage pond.
- Jessica was dead. Oh. Oh God. That was - oh jeez. Okay. Suicide, it sounded like. Gosh. That wasn't good. That... that had been her fault, right? She'd caught Jessica's little Freudian slip, and she'd let her go anyway. No matter, it wasn't like she could do anything to change it now. There was no use focusing on something she couldn't change. The past was immutable, the future was in her hands.
- Based on kill frequency, grouping, and MOs, Blaise, Quinn, and Erika (and Marco V., perhaps) probably wouldn't be open to diplomacy or intimidation. They would... they would need to die. That thought didn't feel great, but such was life. Necessary evils, yada yada yada.


After the announcements were over, Val got out of bed. Then she got back into bed. She napped for most of the day. She didn't have much else to do, and she figured trying to do actual things like thinking would lead her into the same state of frustration that earlier had caused her to stab a chair to death. She napped through most of the night, too! It was a really slow day for her. Like, even slower than the other day she'd spent here twiddling her thumbs.


The sun was coming up. Day six, pre-announcements. Val sprung out of bed. She felt... energized? Springy? Manic? Energized. That sounded like the best word. She stepped into the house's living room and looked up at a camera.

"Hi? This feels weird, talking to a camera. It doesn't matter, this is important. This is something I need..." she trailed off, rubbing the thumb and middle finger of her right hand together, "...on record, I suppose would be the term. Like, in case I fail here, and this whole thing keeps going; if someone watches this and then ends up being kidnapped for the next attacks, they can... they can build on my work."

She paused for a few seconds.

"Okay, so first off, on the nature of the attacks... they're ideology-based. I'm not really sure what ideology, specifically — maybe something like... Jean-Jacques Rousseau except really angry? It doesn't really matter what it is. What matters is these attacks are too, um... sophisticated to be the work of madmen. The kind of people who would do something like this for 'fun' would kill each other long before getting anywhere close to pulling off attacks on this kind of scale. If the point they were trying to make had been successfully, um, made, the attacks would have ended. These things must be logistical nightmares; huge resource drains. It doesn't make sense to keep doing this after your point has been made. Ergo," she paused for emphasis, "none of the past six attacks have successfully proven said point. A sole survivor is not a successful ending; nor is an escape. We already know the attacks continue after those conclusions."

She cleared her throat.

"It is my belief that the terrorists want us to reach a peaceful conclusion, and that once a class does so, the attacks will stop. Normally, I'm not one for appeasement, but... well, if the government was able to do anything about this, they'd have stopped this long ago, probably, so this is the only way I can think of to really end this. We go a day without kills, we end this forever. We don't even know if they'll actually detonate the collars. They probably won't, I think. It'd be antithetical to what I'm pretty sure they're trying to go for. That's all I wanted to say. Wait, actually..." she trailed off, walking over to the wall opposite the camera. She took off her helmet, and used its spike to etch a message into the wall. "There. That's what I think their point is, kind of. I don't know. It's more going to be my strategy to get us to a point where a peaceful resolution is viable."

Scraped into the wall, in neatly-styled lettering, the words "If they won't live in peace, then they'll die for peace."

((Valerija Bogdanovic continued in Knight of Faith.))