Camp Terror – Trust

In the aftermath of the terror attack, the protectors decided that it was time to leave their past behind them and move on with their lives, especially since the threat of an alien invasion had been eliminated, for at least ten years. Well, all but a few select protectors who started up various investigations into thoughts that continued to nag at them. Connor receded from his family into the shadows as he attempted to work out who orchestrated the attack, focusing on the one fact that Carl had left him with, a girl with white hair and the ability to control people. Thus his investigation turned to Emma, the person responsible for Matt’s death a year before.

Tom and Connie likewise found the sudden control of thousands of people to be too hard to ignore, although their investigation hinged on Jackie potentially still being alive as well as having something to do with Claire’s and Gemma’s resurrection. This led them to a number of protectors who they were either were told had died, or whom they had personally killed. While investigating this, Tom attempted to locate his brother who’d mysteriously disappeared during the extraction of the civilians.

Emma started working with NCIS in an attempt to find the people who arranged the whole ordeal after a slot on the team was unexpectedly vacated when DiNozzo was shot and killed after destroying the tank in Teginmouth, however her investigation was moving along extremely slowly as the lack of physical evidence made it increasingly hard to track.

Jack took a drastically different approach to the others, instead of focusing on the present and who was alive there, he focused on the past in an attempt to try and locate any potential candidates from the protectors’ own past who may have survived their supposed death, which led him to mixed results including finding a protector who had killed her love rival whom just so happened to be able to control peoples’ minds before she just disappeared after  suddenly just vanishing, with no one seeing her again.

‘There is something off about them,’ Connie noted as she looked over Claire and Gemma’s report on what happened when they disappeared in the future.

                ‘Don’t even know why you’re reading that,’ Tom laughed. ‘It’s all a load of rubbish.’

                ‘How can you tell?’ Connie questioned.

                ‘Because Gemma begged me to kill her after she lost her legs, and I did. I buried her body, I got her powers, I didn’t sense anything travel through time when they reportedly disappeared, and most importantly: Travelling through time won’t give you back your legs,’ Tom explained as he rewound and restarted the security footage of the day Maddi and Ed died.

                ‘What about with that?’ Connie asked. ‘Anything useful.’

                ‘A theory, but everyone who has anything to do with life and death are dead,’ Tom sighed. ‘Basically I think the accident that kill Maddi and Ed was responsible for opening a rift of sorts that tore through the barrier between the realm of the living and realm of the dead. I believe that is why we’ve found so many of the protectors who were once dead, and why Gemma lied about what happened in the lead up to her death.’

                ‘But if she’s working with someone, under someone, then won’t they know if they lie?’ Connie pondered.

‘Only I knew about her legs, and only I knew about how she died, I think she lied about how she died in order to push us towards the correct answer,’ Tom guessed. ‘But I need you to do something, and you are not going to like it…’

                ‘What?’ she asked uneasily.

                ‘I want you to absorb their memories, find what they’re hiding,’ Tom stated simply.

                ‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘But I want you to be nearby, just in case.’

                ‘Of course,’ Tom nodded. ‘I’m not about to send you in there without a safety net to protect you from the sudden increase in memories.’

The two of them nodded and turned to go and find Gemma and Claire. Finding them wondering the Catacombs beneath Newton Abbot, Tom approached them and introduced them to Connie, who shook Gemma’s hand and reached out to shake Claire’s, however she pulled her hand away and said, ‘No gloves.’

                ‘What?’ Tom questioned.

                ‘Don’t play coy with me Tom,’ Claire warned. ‘I know that she’s like Jaso, so where are her gloves?’

                ‘What are you talking about?’ Tom questioned. ‘She can control it, just like Jaso can.’

                ‘Yeah, but at least Jaso had the decency to wear gloves so that people knew he wasn’t taking their memories,’ Claire snapped.

                ‘Okay,’ Connie stated accepting the fact that she wouldn’t get Claire’s memories. ‘If you don’t want to then we won’t.’

                ‘Thank you,’ Claire stated calmly while shooting an angry look at Gemma who just stood there as if she were completely oblivious to the previous conversation.

                ‘So, you found what you’re looking for down here?’ Tom questioned, taking a rather extreme leap as to what they were searching for.

                ‘No, still trying to find my room,’ Gemma smiled sweetly.

                ‘They weren’t built until 2056,’ Tom stated quizzically before thinking, which you should know, you knew everything about the history of the catacombs…

Gemma just stood looking as plain as she could while thinking, come on Tom, figure it out, figure out what really happened to us. She looked away from the pair and at one of the cameras before asking, ‘Why do you need those in here if only protectors know of this place?’

                ‘I’ve had one too many visions of a future where the Taleon portal is activated, so I keep an extra close eye on all of the catacombs to make sure no one is sneaking around,’ Tom explained with a wince as he remembered the horrors of his vision. Claire looked at him puzzled before quickly realising that Tom knew exactly what they were looking for and had also hidden it from plain sight from anyone who entered.

Tom invited them to his house for dinner so that they could discuss their disappearances and what they had missed in more detail and in a much nicer environment.