Under new management

Okay, first things first. I need to bury this… asshole and get out of here before whoever Bill and Jake are show up. Considering they haven’t yet, he probably just screamed it out in desperation but they could still be close by. After a bit of practice, I’m able to dump more snow on top of him, hiding his body from view. And now… I guess I retrace my steps. I look back the way I came… and it seems my footprints are already becoming hard to see under the new falling snow. They still show up pretty clearly as indents, but if it’s this obscured here I probably won’t be able to follow them back past the lake. Which is when I will actually need them to keep from getting lost.

I sigh. I decide to leave at the perfect time to not be tracked… and now I can’t track myself. Yeah, this makes sense with how my life has been going. It’s fine. Fine. I’ll go back to the lake, and make my way to the clearing. I shouldn’t need footprints to guide me for any of that, and by then the falling snow might have cleared enough to see the hotel from there.

Fantastic. I have a plan. Sure, it’s basically to run back to where I just ran away from, but now things are different. I have weird green snow powers. Which I don’t understand and didn’t show up while I was having a really shitty time before. So… perhaps not the most reliable of snow powers. Then again, maybe they didn’t show up because there was no snow?

I get to the lake, and wonder if my power works on water. Snow and water are basically the same. I look at my weird glowy spark hands, and unleash a wave into the water. The water itself doesn’t move, but it is disturbed by snow and mud shifting above and beneath it. Mud? Or sand maybe. The water doesn’t care but something in the sand does. And that craps made of all kinds of different substances, so who knows what’s reacting… shit. I wanted this to be a nice easy to understand power, but no. Shit. Is it really a good idea to fight the leader with this? Even if it works perfectly he might just shoot me with his crossbow before I can do anything…

Son of a bitch I left a gun behind! He had a gun. I could have had a gun. Yeah, it probably would have been a pain for me to use being so small, but it’s still a gun. Hell, they might not understand how bullets work, I might have been able to take a single shot and then bluff my way to the top after… can I go back? I look down the river… and shiver. This is getting really cold. I can’t afford to search for a gun right now. And his friends might be over there now, and for all I know his gun doesn’t work anymore after being buried in snow. I take a deep, freezing breath, and accept that I missed my chance for a gun. In fairness, if he doesn’t shoot me right away a wall of snow slamming into the leader will be far more intimidating to the rest than a loud pop and him falling.

I keep going along the lake until I find the path up to the clearing I came from. I was correct in that I can’t make out any indication of my previous footprints, but it’s pretty clearly the way I came from. At first I don’t want to make an obvious path for any potential hunters to follow… but the snow is getting tall enough that my feet are going to fall off if I keep wading through it. With chattering teeth and a wave of my hands, the snow is blown away. It feels a bit excessive just to walk, but I don’t really know how to do gentle snow removal. I try to jog about to get some more blood flow, to keep my self warm. It had been getting chilly recently, but this snow is a drastic dip in temperature. I would complain about the timing, but I literally ran out today because of the snow.

I continue on, occasionally blasting snow away in a white tidal wave, clearing 15-30 feet of walkable path at a time. While I can feel something from the green energy, it’s not easily understood just by the sensation. Do I have a limit? Will this eventually tire me out? I have no idea. I feel fine even after the hundredth snow blast, but for all I know a hundred and two in row will make my head explode. Still, it’s not like I have a choice. Humanity is clearly not an option, and I’m no woodsman. So I have **** but to punch that blue asshole in the face with snow until him and his little blue shits feed me and make fires for me. Of course, I should probably figure out if any part of the building, like the heating, can be brought back… son of a bitch he probably had a phone.

No, it’s okay. Stop thinking about robbing a dead person. Even if it does distract me from the numbness spreading to my fingers… his gloves were definitely too big for me. No… stop crying! Bad face. My feet might be hurting, and My toes and fingers might be going numb, but I’m not going to die here. I make it to the edge of the clearing I first entered at. From here it’s either back into the forest and hope I can navigate well enough to end up at the hotel, or try and follow a more direct path that I think is straight at the hotel… which I still can’t see in this snow. I think about the road the hotel is on… so if I go towards the hotel, but err on the side to the right, then even if I miss it I should just run into the road and be able to turn left to follow it back. Not ideal, but I need to move before I die of cold.

I pull in my arms beneath my jacket, trying to stay warm between blasting away gusts of snow. I keep walking. And walking. And walking… oh shit why did I think this was a good idea? My life is going to end from walking away from shelter for too long… shelter I shared with a bunch of literal monsters, but still. I try to run, but I have to slow down to make sure I can blast the snow away properly. I feel some tears fall down and quickly wipe them away. I can’t have that on my face in this weather.

Finally I emerge from the forest onto a road. As expected, I went too far right. So left it is… I can’t feel my feet. Or my fingers. I stumble forward, wildly swinging my arms occasionally to blast away more snow along the side of the road… the road that oddly enough hasn’t been plowed. I guess this just happened, but it looks weird to have a proper road buried beneath snow.

Finally I see the turn off into the hotel parking lot. I run childishly forward. I need shelter so god damn badly, I don’t care that it’s my own personal prison. I approach the door and suddenly two blue goblins come out and raise hatchets at me. Shit. I raise my hood and they stop snarling at me, I guess recognizing me as the leaders pet. They go to grab me but I just walk past them. Since I think they were going to push me inside they don’t seem to mind that I evaded their grasp. Inside the lobby is a bit chilly, but it looks like every single blue goblin is here, and their body heat alone seems to be keeping the room tolerably warm.

One of the goblins that let me in screams something across the room, and suddenly I see the leader stand up tall on the reception desk. He does not look pleased. He starts marching towards me, with many other goblins moving out of his way. He looks ready to beat me again… and I’m not ready to do anything about it. I fucking walked inside, where there is no snow! Why am I being so stupid today! I want to stay inside and let my fingers and toes thaw, but if I don’t turn around now I’m going to be a bruised and bloodied mess on the floor for the foreseeable future.

I turn around and start to head back out. The leader yells and the two door goblin guards try to stop me by grabbing my arms. Luckily my arms aren’t in my sleeves right now, instead I’ve been hugging myself for warmth inside my jacket. So I push my jacket up over my head and leave them hanging on to an empty garment. I rush outside as the leader bellows. This isn’t going to be fun, but I should only need to be out here for a couple of minutes without a jacket, just my oversized sweater and dress underneath. I run into the parking lot and then turn around.

It takes the leader a second to follow, and apparently none of the other goblins wanted to listen to him badly enough to go out in this weather. So he bursts out of the door… carrying his fucking crossbow. I don’t know why, but I had really hoped we could have something like an honorable duel. Sure, this is obviously hypocrisy on my part since magic snow powers are hardly fair, but still. He seems surprised I’m just standing in the parking lot next to an old ford sedan. He grunt at me and points inside. I do my best to mimic his grunt, and point inside. He seems a little taken aback. Mimicry is the closest thing I can do to back talk in this situation. He roars at me and raises his crossbow… fuck. I duck behind the sedan. I’ve seen how quickly something can be fine and then dead with a crossbow bolt in them. Just because it’s not as fast as a bullet doesn’t mean I can just dodge it casually. I really hope he’s not that good a shot.

From behind cover, I take a deep breath. Please let this be the last life or **** fight I get into today. Right now I just want to be warm. I wave my arm out from cover in the hopes that he is baited to shoot at the very hard target to hit. And he does! Success! Painful, agonizing success. How the fuck did he manage to hit a waving arm? I pull my arm down and do a quick terrified assessment… okay, it looks like he just nicked my wrist… fucking bastard, it hurts! Why can’t the numbness extend from my fingers to my wrist for just a bit.

But I don’t have time for this. With my other arm, I come out from behind cover and release as big a blast as I can at him. Between the extra snow that’s fallen since my last fight, and the shorter stature of my target, it’s almost comical how effective this is. A wall of snow easily engulfs the blue goblin leader and stops just a bit short of the building doors. I quickly run over, hoping I’m not a serial killer. I feel a bit more confident with my control over the snow, so I blast the snow off of him a bit less carefully than before. I uncover his feet first, he seems to have been knocked over and knocked out completely with his legs in the air. I quickly dig him out with my numb hands, but realize I can’t carry him. I run to the doors, and the guards open them for me. I look in their eyes and point at their **** leader.

They just stare at me, clearly not sure what to do in this situation. Okay, calm down. I can’t lose my patience with these guys. If what the hunter said is true, these guys were probably animals before being transformed… oh god that adds a layer of horror to this past week it really didn’t need. But, that means they aren’t people transformed and made stupid, like I had been kind of assuming. They are probably figuring out language as a concept right now. Okay, I can do this. Just channel the patience of a kindergarten teacher…

Fuck that, these guys are assholes. I grab the guards by the wrists and basically drag them with me to the leader. They probably could have stopped me from doing this easily, but they still seem shell shocked by me hurling a wall of snow at their boss. So I easily pull them over and then point at the leader. Then I start pulling him towards the door. It takes a bit, but they finally seem to understand and start dragging him inside. Which is when I realize that if most of the goblins hadn’t been watching before, they were now. It looks like I am going to have difficulty walking inside with all of them gawking at me… and I can’t just ask them to move because they suck and can’t talk.

I look at the remaining pile of snow from the leader’s temporary burial. It’s blocking some of the view from the door, so it should probably leave. I give it a nice blast away from the door, causing the pile to slam and roll into an even larger pile off to the side of the parking lot. I look at my audience, and casually walk towards them, hoping desperately that they don’t know how close I am to letting the shivers take over my body and shake myself apart. Play it fucking cool body. Straight face. I’m not basically half frozen. I’m just walking inside briskly because I own this place now… and they all seem to sense it as they make way for me. These bastards better have something we can burn.