#csw1monday

[gurutamhas-blog]

My little Pranksters... uhm... I mean Campers (Self Para)

Tamhas was an art teacher, he taught similar years at high school, students of 15 and 16 year old among them. He had dealt with his share of high-schoolers. He was sure he could deal with seven mutant ones as well. 

He was wrong. 

During their first minutes together, the little pranksters had already decided to test their counselors limit during whatever activity he could come up with. Luckily for them, Tamhas wasn’t much of a creative mind or just lazy. He went with them to an open place in the forest, and told them to make tree huts with whatever they could find. And he also had some wire. 

After an hour of them making little fuss about anything, they started their plan. 

“Guru! Guru!” - yes the name had sadly made an impression. “Bear!” 

Tamhas jumped up from his spot against a tree and ran up to Jaha and Charley, shielding them behind them as indeed, a bear ran out of the woods and up to him. How was he going to protect seven dumb campers from a bear? He didn’t sign up for this shit!? 

“Everyone! Get here, and run back to camp, now!” he yelled to the campers, seeing everyone freak out, or at least so he was hoping, and running behind him. The bear just stared at him. He took one daring look behind his back when he thought all his campers had run, and then back at the bear. It was staring at him, with big teeth, and hungry eyes. 

He gritted his teeth, collected up all his strength, and then took a run for it. The bear, to his luck, didn’t follow him. Annoyed and tired, Tamhas returned to camp to find his campers sitting at the picknick tables. 

“Okay, headcount!” he called, and all the little campers got into a line before him, but he was too tired to look at their faces. “Why are you with nine?” he asked, leaning on his knees. He finally took a look at his campers, and he noticed something was off. 

“Jaha, I’m pretty sure you weren’t triplets, and certainly not four of you.” 

The kids started laughing. 

Tamhas barely noticed them laughing. “Where is the little kid? Canberk?” he asked. “And the girl? Emma? Guys?” 

The kids continued laughing. 

“Wait, wait? Emma was the bear?” 

“Yes yes!” Amy called with a grin. 

The two other girls; Wiam and Nathalia were giggling behind her. 

Tamhas sighed, shaking his head. “Okay, but where is the invisible boy?” 

The little pranksters raised their shoulders. Okay, so great, he had already lost a camper it would seem. “Nobody talk about this, kay, get back to your dumb treehouse, go, all of you! No more pranks, because the next time it happens, I’ll have you all on a ten kilometer hike through the forest in your undies. Understood?”

They looked at him with wide eyes, and then walked in duos back towards the sight where they had left Emma. 

“What’s a kilometer?” Canberk asked Jaha while still invisible. 

From that moment on, Jaha was convinced there was a ghost a camp. 

[just-your-insignificant-ott-blog]

roll call || self-para

Otter looked at her list, noting two familiar names, then up again to match the ones she didn’t know to some faces. “Alexandra?” She was corrected to ‘Alex’, by a tall girl, and nodded. 

“Sabiha? Sherman? Tamara?” Fuck, Tamara was tiny. She had to be just barely twelve. “And... Yuri.” Yuri wasn’t much better. Tadpoles, both of them. Jesus.

Three lanky assholes bounded over, each sporting a black bandana. Otter’s eyes widened and she shook her head vehemently. “No. No no no. The list said two of you, not three---” She levelled a finger at them.

“Chill, Captain, I’m just messing with you.” Harold tugged his bandana off and stuck it in his pocket. “I’m an Angle now. Just had to see your face.” The big lunk pulled a disgruntled Otter into a hug, which she pushed out of grumpily.

“You’re hilarious. Get lost.”

“Getting lost! Later, losers,” he crowed, then bounded off towards Leaf and the rest of their group.

“I told you all last year, I didn’t want to see you here again,” Otter growled, turning on the two boys remaining, who wore matching grins that apparently her wrath did nothing to diminish.

“We missed you!” said Trevor sweetly.

“He missed you. I missed sailing,” Ali added, crossing his arms. Ali, who’d worked so well with her last year people had started calling him Skipper, was at least a good worker. Trevor was just a mess.

“Fine.” It took effort not to grin at the both of them, so she focused on the task at hand. “Whatever. Help me with these then, and I’ll yell at you both later.”

She pulled out a bag of navy blue bandanas, and began distributing them. Last year it had been a spur of the moment idea, but it’d worked well to differentiate her group from the others, and they wore them constantly like badges--- plus, the ones with long hair always had something to keep it out of their faces.

“Blue this year, suh-weeeeet!” crowed Trevor, tying his blue bandana overtop of his older black one.

“You look ridiculous, Trevor” she sighed.

“Yep. You really do,” provided Skipper, who had chosen to put his own blue bandana on his head rather than both on his neck, which wasn’t much better.

“It’s not Trevor, it’s Wall-Eee now. But you can just call me Wally for short,” he said, proudly.

Otter glared at him. “Fine, Wally.”

“Why does he get a new name?” said one of the new Sailors, Sabiha.

Trevor’s face lit up and he grinned at Otter. “Can I do it?”

Otter rolled her eyes, but Trevor--- or, Wally--- looked ecstatic. “Fine, go on,” she said.

Wally glanced around. Across the field, Rugrat’s group was bouncing around, and just as it looked like they were about to head off somewhere, three of them were stopped short with a chorus of ‘ow’s and ‘what?’s’. They struggled to get to their group, but an invisible force was keeping them at bay, the wall flickering into visibility where they touched it.

“Okay, okay, enough.” Otter put a hand up. “Sorry, Rugrat,” she called across, as the wall dropped and her campers regrouped in mild confusion.

“Anyway,” she said, turning back to her campers. “If you two are going to stay, I hope you know I expect you to help out everyone else, and be absolutely amazing at absolutely everything.”

The boys grinned. “Got it, Cap’n,” Skipper said, saluting smartly.

“And as for the rest of you--- follow their lead, and mine, and help each other out. I don’t do whiners, and I don’t do drama, so if you’ve got problems with each other you have to come to me before it gets out of hand. We leave our baggage on the shore, we don’t take that stuff out on the water. You’re here to learn to sail, and that means I expect your full attention when I’m talking, so you don’t end up in awkward situations, like having to visit Maybe in the Infirmary. Or drowning. That’d be super embarrassing for all of us.” She nodded, and they seemed to accept it. “That’s it for now. Go unpack your sh----stuff, and meet me at the boats in fifteen. We’re starting right away. The dorks,” she looked pointedly at the two double-bandana boys, “can show you where. Dismissed.”

Her group wandered off towards their cabins. Otter watched them go, tying her own bandana around her neck--- at least the two return campers were good guys. The summer might turn out not to be a spectacular failure, after all.

[alvasonn-blog]

9.20 a.m. on an otherwise nice Monday morning and Alva, well on her way through her fifth cup of coffee, was feeling decidedly antsy. She knew she shouldn’t be, yes, but there was that small but devastating difference between knowing and being that had her pouring her sixth cup by 9.23 a.m.

It wasn’t that she was bad with kids, more that she found it highly disconcerting to have so many little people running around at waist-height. So many hazards to be found at that eye-level, and though realistically she knew nothing much was going to happen -- they were kids, yes, but they weren’t idiots -- she still couldn’t help but worry that this was the year something happened that she wouldn’t be able to fix.

She’d get over it as soon as the first kid showed up with a scraped knee, of course, but until then . . . 

Alva once more went through her mental checklist, nodding as she went. Supplies all where they should be, yup. Everything clean, yup. Chance of sweets in the top right drawer of the cabinet, now marginally higher than it was yesterday. Queen of the spiderfolk lying in wait and poised to strike should the opportunity present itself--yup, still there.

All good, then. All ready.

She took a deep breath.

And with a smile on her face and a spring in her step, Alva made her way outside to watch the kids arrive.

[jay-byrne-eats-blog]

It was early morning before the kids arrived so Eats’ decided to take a walk through the Lodge kitchen gardens. He had looked in on them when he had arrived, but the whole week had just been a blur between getting everything ready, saying hello and managing Cat. There really was a LOT of asparagus here. It was not a flavour kids usually liked, so he was going to have to get creative. At least the kids were going to get a lot of vitamin K this summer... Eats wandered through the bushes to see if there was anything else overflowing he’d have to wrangle into the menu when he nearly tripped over Leaf. “Oh hey! Leaf! I didn’t see you down there.” He reached down to help Leaf out of the dirt.

“Sorry I didn’t get to chat much before camp started... arriving late really put a dent in my schedule...” Eats brushed some dirt off a nearby bench and took a seat and patted the seat next to him, “So how have you been since I was last here... God was it... May?” @arthur-cohen