His Quest for Raine

A Small Town Girl

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Kristin

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There are pros and cons to every moment of one's life, Kristin told herself daily. It was a mantra. One of many she would say out loud just so that she could pretend anyone else was speaking it to her. 

Life was maddening at times, sure… but that reassurance helped in most moments. It helped settle herself, her space. It would quiet her mind and her endless questions but most of all it would remove the memory of what happened ten years ago today at Nerranne forest. 

Even the name passing through her mind makes her shudder. No one speaks of the incident and being from that small town, where everyone knows everything about all of the inhabitants, there’s next to no way to hide that she’s still looking into it. 

Kristen, like most that day, fled. 

She can still hear the screams around her in the wind and in the quiet moments she thinks she’s alone. 

It’s why she picks bustling venues to bring her studies to. That way, at least there’s more going on around her, but more going on means more eyes that can land on what she’s collected to study. 

It doesn’t matter how young or old they are, their eyes are on her and know exactly who to report to when she picks up a new book at the library or goes shopping, hell, she’s almost positive the others even know her bathroom schedule. Kristin wouldn’t put it past them. 

It’s been long enough that she’s positive that the event was far larger than she can actually remember. All she had on it was the possibility that Nerranne underwent an earthquake but there wasn’t a surface c***k. No items or people were lost, just simply their peace of mind. 

That was hard to accept for many. 

But the truth of it remained...People, good people, friends, neighbors, even children with underlying mental issues, medicated for such things as anxiety to schizophrenia, even the most borderline cases, had been thrown into a state of constant stress, unable to control their episodes or themselves. They reported seeing dark figures in odd, faceless forms running through the streets and blurring their memories. 

Complaints over seeing these crazed creatures grew, sending the entire town into a frenzy. 

It was called a national emergency and locked the town down. 

The Armed Guard came in to regulate life at every corner, in every space they could to protect them from themselves. That’s what they said at least. Kristin was careful in her thoughts about it, finally aware of the way that even the guards watched each individual. If she so much as moved with a thoughtful response or couldn’t show that she was working or at the very least, having a reaction to school work, they would double down and extract said candidate with brute force. Not that they knew, per se, but the rest of the town did and any within earshot was expected to give a full oral report of what they saw prior to the take down. 

It was utter chaos. 

Those around it the most, learned, and she was one of them. 

Of course, Kristin was a little in over her head when she first started, not knowing how to hide basic textbooks and items of interest. A few public raids later she happened to figure out what it was they were after. The Armed Guard would send in field agents to ransack her parent’s house, while she still lived there, for any theories she was running with pertaining to the event. Everything from minerals to star alignments, to coordinates and maps on the location itself. They would take comic books with “magical propaganda” which could exasperate individuals that were still dealing with their visions in silence. 

She was called insensitive over even having the unrelated artwork. 

Deep down she thought the guards had nothing to do on their breaks and needed something other than the animal planet reruns, weather and local news broadcast that was running out of things to say to the couple hundred still left. 

Kristin learned that being in school locally allowed her, while limited time in the library, it was still time to jog her memory on what she thought of throughout the day. While writing lists was her thing, the one that made it easy to remember simple tasks, was out of the picture now. All she could do was hope no one figured out why she wanted to know about crystals and which healed what alement, or herbalism, or the history of this town specifically, far past what she knew. 

The more she dug up about the event, the more she found herself covering up for looking in general, which not only meant changing her major four times from medical studies to philosophy and writing, to becoming a history major. Her most current had her working with multiple mediums within psychology. At least this one could give her some insight on what was still ruining people and furthermore, opened up the possibilities of not only listening to their stories without persecution but also find a therapy medium that could help work it out of them too. 

It was worth a shot. Especially because Kristin wasn’t lucky enough to get one of these evil visions herself. Just based on how they were being reported Kristin found it odd because her life had her on the edge but she never really knew there was a name for the stress she was going through. Kristin just got up and dealt with life. 

That was it. 

This though, this was something far different than anyone has been through. There’s just too much change in too little time. People are scared, and while the promise of going back to normal hadn’t really made its way back to their town, they pretend. It’s how she found herself in the same coffee shop, in the same seat, looking out the same painted window at the same street wondering about the people that used to pass but didn’t anymore because of the event. 

The place had been washed out since she had been there. Coats of paint began to peel with no outside help in maintaining it. Over the years, she noticed, it changed colors from being a deep teal to rust brown, to burgundy. The last color it had reminded her of caramel highlights she once had in an attempt to help her blond hair hold a vibrancy rather than wash her out. Kristin spent time challenging herself to come up with elaborate stories based on these colors, ones that could stand up against a lie detector as it has come down to that level of mistrust among the people and the guard. She learned to school her reactions to new and thoughtful revelations, retain as she’s been, and leave a misleading paper trail whenever possible.  

All the while, the books she’s managed to collect from the library are set up in short stacks around her. Loose paper scatters around the round table acting as a space where she can run her pen to look like she’s onto something great even though her mind is as silent as her breath. There she waits for anything. 

Not that she has an inkling about what’s to come or that there will be something soon. 

She’s simply wasting her time, diving into nothing…