Someone's Watching

[Kermit]

Val listened to what Meka had to say, because it wasn't like she had anything else to do except hate Teresa and feel depressed.

She agreed with him, for the most part, though she resented being called petty. She wasn't after Teresa for revenge; Jessica had been nothing other than an ally of convenience. It was just, like, pretty obvious to Val that the only person whose interests Teresa had in mind was Teresa. Val trusted her about as far as she could throw her, which wasn't very far unless she was being thrown off a waterfall.

Mmm, still, she supposed that selfishness could be transmogrified into some kind of motivation to do good. She just needed to find a way to get leverage over Teresa and get to a position from which she'd have no choice but to listen to her.

She inhaled through her nose and looked away from the ground, to Teresa and Meka. Her face was weary.

Her mind went back to the first day, standing with Julien by the odd cage-ridden lake. She wondered what he'd been up to during the past three days. He'd seemed to get it. She kind of wished she'd gone with him instead of staying with Claude, Princess, and Camille. She wondered if Princess was still running around without shoes on, or if she'd done something like step on a knife.

Her voice was cold. "Martyrs," she stated simply, nodding her head.

[Jilly]

Martyrs.



Oh God... BANDAGED GIRL... she couldn't... didn't know how much more of this she could take. But she contained her gut-busting laughter to herself, rendering it as a scoff and a smug aura as always.

"Okay, so like first off I guess," she said while staring at and digging under her findernails, "that's cool and all if y'all wanna take the martyr approach. I won't stop ya, but I'm not interested. Y'all do y'all. But anyway..."

God, there was so much dirt under there.

She turned specifically to Meka for this next bit because it was, like, all important and shit. "...I'm sure whatever you wanna do is very mind blowing and big brain and everything, but like... do you think you're the first to try to fight 'the powers that be' or whatever? Because I guarantee you're not. Or are things gonna be different 'this time'? Because I guarantee it won't."

And then to Val, every sentence ending with a raised pitch like it was a question. "But yeah, like... I'm not your enemy? But if you go up accusing people right off the bat, like, that's a surefire way that I can be? So like... stay in your own lane? But yeah."

Her very epic Tumblr .gif photoset worthy dressing down finished, BANDAGED GIRL turned around and started walking down the same path Jonathan left by. If she hurried, maybe she could catch up. Apologize and shit if he didn't have short term memory loss by now. Though if he did, ya know, even better. "Lemme know how it goes if you guys don't get blown up or yeeted off a waterfall. TTYL!"

((END SCENE))

[Laurels]

Meka listened as Teresa replied. Unlike Valerija, who seemed to understand what he was going for, Teresa seemed way more critical of it. Yeah, Meka knew he wasn't the first to try and break the game, and he didn't expect it to entirely work. But that's why he had to try: for the sheer hope it would work.

Either way, Teresa didn't seem interested in hanging around and left with some "encouraging" words. It sucked to lose a potential ally, but at least she wasn't likely to fight Valerija anymore.

That did leave Valerija behind, though. Meka sighed and looked around, noticing the house in the distance.

"Look, if you want to engage in civil disobedience with me, let's go there," he said, pointing to the house. "If not...well...just don't be the kind of person who can't go home."

Meka turned and began walking to the house. He needed to find the right time to enact his ideas, and he had to make sure it could go off without any suspicion. At the very least, he needed to light the fuse before the explosion happened.

((Meka Gibson continued in The Chemicals Between Us))

[Kermit]

Val closed her eyes and inhaled softly.

Teresa was right - or, well, sort of right about some things, and not in the way she probably thought she was. Civil disobedience, as Meka called it, had almost certainly been attempted during every SOTF attack. SOTF attacks still kept on happening. It hadn't changed anything during the past six attacks. It wouldn't change anything now. They needed to try something new.

Meka was naive. He was too much of a wide-eyed idealist to realize this world was different from the one he'd once known.

Val watched Meka as he left. "She's right. It won't - it won't change anything," she stuttered.

It wouldn't change anything yet. Not at this point in the game. There were still too many unknowns. She needed everyone alive to be on-board with her plan and there were still too many people for that to be realistic.

She kicked the ground idly, her mind going back to the start of the very first day.

The terrorists were ideological. They were trying to prove a point. They hadn't proved their point yet; if they had, the attacks would have stopped.

They were trying to instill faith in humanity via force, which Val supposed was an odd methodology, but she digressed. They were waiting for the students to disprove Thomas Hobbes. The students hadn't done that yet.

What was she supposed to do with the people who'd be unwilling to listen to reason? What was she supposed to do with people who killed without a second thought? Val knew they'd be the one thing standing between the students and stopping this thing once and for all.

She snapped her fingers.

The cages in the pond.

Fear.

Fear was reason to them.

She walked back the way she came.

((Valerija Bogdanovic continued on a different part of Hippy Hill.))