The GP Advent Calendar - Door 5

Finally, finally you are all back together. Jaden’s last ditch effort, and Em’s epiphany have eaten into the evening a little. Not in time, not really. But in light. It gets dark early this time of year, and that makes parents antsy. The hunter’s lodge calls to you, but one of your parents calling up the sheriff to look for some missing kids doesn’t sound like a fun way to spend the first night of break.

You mount your bikes, look back at the farmhouse, and then kick off. As you head for home, you think back on the little successes... and failures of the investigation. What does it all mean? There are still questions. The dog. The math teacher. The lodge. Questions for tomorrow, perhaps. The drizzle continues, and your clothes get wet from inside and out. Despite the poor weather, and the quickening dark, you stop a few times on the way home. Yes, for Spud. But also to savor that first real day of freedom. If you’re lucky, you might get out again tomorrow, but nothing ever tastes as good as that first little sip of freedom. At one point, you stop after cresting a particularly steep hill on the way back to Boulder City proper. It had been all fun and games a few hours earlier going down. It made somewhere deep in your tummy feel funny with the sudden fast descent, but now... coming back up...

More than just Spud needs a rest. You dismount for a moment, looking out over the water of the Basin in the distance.

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A constant drizzle has been over the lake like a blanket for the last few hours. You’d been spared the most of it being slightly further in-land, though not much. There’s no wind now and the air is oppressive. Your clothes begin to get heavy; soaked through and your stomachs start growling. It's creeping further into the evening and the parents are probably starting to check out the front window for your arrival.

Suddenly, the rain ceases for a moment. The world takes a breath and everything is quiet. Then, out of no-where, the sky fills with thick snowflakes, a lashing wind, and... sand? You get sand in your mouths while your cheeks are thrashed raw by the winds. A sharp lightning flash lights up the sky, and then everything is dark. The light on the horizon and from the small, lit cabins on the other side of the water are blurred. An enormous ship appears in a haze of electrical discharges. Several hundred meters long. Metal is bending, parts come loose and fall down into the boiling water. Your ears ache and your nostrils are filled with ozone. The machine seems to fall with a metallic roar.

And then, the entire scene is gone. The wind is still. The only thing that remains are a few snowflakes that quickly melt away in the drizzle. You look down to see your clothes dirtied from it all. Trouble.