A little bird had told me, this time, not to tell pengii about my escape attempt. I understood the implication of this statement, and it bothered me, but I didn't immediately reject it. I got to thinking about my past attempts; it seemed like the last few times there should've been no way for anyone to have noticed me missing until it was too late. And pengii was the only one I had told. Why, Pengii, why?
I had to choose between confronting her about it, or just going, and leaving the issue open for potentially the rest of eternity. In the end, I was a coward.
And so, I left.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, so did some others. I ran into them as I was heading into the hedge and out of the Snow Fairy's dominion of Faerie. Ironically, it was some of the others from when I was kidnapped. We decided together we would be stronger, in our attempt to escape.
But it turns out the Huntsman knew of his prized doggie's escape attempt. He stopped us in the clearing with a small pack of Alpha's comrades. He seemed amused, actually. He told us he would give us a chance to escape this time, and he would even provide us some directions. But we only had a few seconds' head start.
Off we were.
I lead the way, being the most familiar with the Hedge. We could hear the hounds behind us, closing in. In what seemed like the very last second, we dashed through the doorway and…. into the middle of UGA campus in the middle of day, from between the arches, and we were completely naked (and we looked like freaks no doubt).
The boys behind me bolted for cover as soon as they realized where we were. I was just frozen, like a deer in headlights. My mind was momentarily blinded by the fact that I was out, I had finally escaped, finally made it. But now what do I do?
I was in such a high place I just kinda walked casually over to where I'd seen Alpha, I mean, Tim was it(?), hide. Everybody was staring and pointing at me, but I was so not in reality at the moment. When I peeked over the edge of the bush Alpha, er, Tim, was hiding behind, I looked down at his fuzzy puppy form and suddenly I just yelled at him, “Give me my clothes back, you jerk!”
Tim freaked out and ran, and on a whim, I ran after him, continuing to yell at him. Everyone continued laughing and pointing and yelling as we bolted.
He ran toward the dorms, and I ran after him. Into the building we ran, after convincing someone to let us in, and to… I guess what was formerly his dorm room. In it, there was this HUGE GUY. Tim managed to scare the poo out of him to give us some clothes to cover up with, I was kind of surprised. I had to demand something that fit better than the huge pants he gave me, so he searched again and gave me his girlfriend's pajamas.
As soon as we got our new clothes on, we hurried off for the study lounge. Well, we meant to. A cop came into the floor at just about the same time we turned around to leave. He asked us to come with him because we were part of a rash of streakers on campus. I realized just now that none of these people were really freaking out about our appearances. Well, other than the naked part.
I looked down at my fish-hands in thought and then back up at the cop, as Tim explained that we were not streaking and we didn't know what he was talking about. The cop turned to ask the guy who was in Tim's former room to concur. Tim gave him the evil-eye again, and he quickly concurred our story. Amusing.
After the cop left, we thanked Bubba and headed back outside. Something drew us toward the police station, we weren't really sure what. Well, until we arrived. Jake was sitting there in the waiting room. We sat and talked to him, trying to figure out where Holden was. He came in after a few moments, apparently he'd been up to some really weird antics. I didn't really want to know.
Jake had apparently called an old buddy of his to come pick us up. Well, this was kind of weird. He picked us up and took us to Jake's place, well, Jake's alleged place, and dropped us off. He asked us why his car was here, but thankfully Jake was quick on a reasonable answer.
After he left, Holden appeared to be a neighbor who had had some of Jake's mail delivered accidentally. The guy who appeared in the door looked like fatter, older Jake. Apparently he was about to leave to go to work, so we waited.
After he left, we broke into his house. We found out that we'd been… replaced somehow. Holden was now apparently a mayor or something. Jake was a greasy nerdburglar. Tim was… a cop or something? I had apparently been arrested, but other than that…
Argh. After we'd searched through fake-Jake's stuff and taken whatever thing we needed, Jake called a rental car to be delivered on fake-Jake's credit card. From there, we decided to head downtown and discuss this, as we didn't really want to stay in fake-Jake's trailer until we'd decided what to do and risk being here when he got back.
Apparently Holden is some kinda weird socialite, he got us into that club without a hardly a word. But IN the club we saw a guy. A HUGE guy. MUCH HUGER than the guy who was now inhabiting Tim's old dorm room. And he was WEIRD, like us. After Holden broke the ice with him, he introduced himself as wallace_bolger, and said he represented some kind of political group of people like us. But that he was not supposed to be talking to us about this stuff really because his group wasn't currently in power.
Annoying. I didn't want to get involved with politics right now, and he wouldn't answer any of our dang questions without talking about this political bullshit. We were confused, had nothing, nowhere to go, people were living our lives for us, and we were FREAKS. God I hate this place, why did I ever want to come back again?
No, no. I was just riding a bat-shit high right now. I had been trying to escape for a long, long time, and not once did I ever really think about what I would do when I did finally escape. Of course, things had changed so much how could I ever plan for this? I needed some direction, something to grasp onto here, to convince me I was back in reality.
In the end, we decided we would go to Atlanta with him to get some answers about this.