Amentia

Chapter 43 - Thank you

When the alarm went off the next morning, the entire troupe found they had slept scattered around the living room. There were sheets of paper all around, some made into a messy ball and others resting smoothly on the floor, all of them full of doodles and scratched-out words. Upon waking, some troupers found they had stains of ink on their faces from rolling over the papers in their sleep. Others had funny drawings on their faces, victims of Adam's innocent mischief.

Overall, not a lot of progress had been made over the night. There were more rejected ideas than accepted ones. Surprising no one, Nina was the most creative and resourceful, being the one that read the most fiction books. But she didn't read plays, so it was hard to adapt her inputs to the format. There was a great attitude in the troupe to get this done, but this was such a unique situation and they knew so little of it that it was difficult to pin down a story that could benefit everyone. But they would keep trying... Well, most of them.

"People take months and years to finish a work of fiction, this is a waste of time," said Zoe as she took a bite out her breakfast fruit. "We don't have months before this turns into a nightmare; we have a week at most. Fairy tales aren't going to save us."

Zoe's words altered the mood of the room in a split second. It wasn't just that she'd thrown a most depressing prediction at them without warning; it was that she had said it so easily, so impassively.

Meira felt personally targeted by Zoe's words. She was so glad that Omylia was starting to come back to her usual sweet ways after the horror she'd seen in town, the whole troupe was working together towards a positive goal, they were trying to turn things around. Zoe's blunt negativity was the last thing they needed right now. So she started a discussion with her that quickly turned into a heated argument. The lightness of the room turned into loud aggressions in mere minutes. This wasn't a regular creative discussion and it seemed both parties were simply spewing their own thoughts at each other without listening to anything the other had to say until the argument was nothing but senseless insults. It took several shouts by Maylin, Anna and Ruvyn to stop it. When the fight ended, the participants either retired to their room or left the caravan to calm down outside. The silence that followed was disturbingly loud.

Anna sighed and lowered head, covering her face with her hands. The anger was still hovering in the air of the room. Zoe usually did speak as if certain things were obvious to everyone when they clearly weren't, but she was never insensitive about delicate subjects. And Meira wasn't a conflictive person; she wouldn't have reacted so defensively under normal circumstances. But these weren't normal circumstances, and Zoe was not being fully Zoe at the moment. Anna's worry was giving way to fear now. But, as the wind kept not-so-kindly reminding her, there was nothing to be done: she could only wait and see... and hope for the best.

Lunch was unusually long and uncomfortable; somehow it was harder to bear than the loud fight. One didn't need to be able to understand the wind in order to feel the tension in the air. There was a bad silence. There were a few sideway glances between Meira and Zoe, but mostly everyone was just looking down at their plate. It felt wrong to feel so chilly in this place of natural warmth.

Adam sat on the floor and picked up his nahe after lunch to play the song they usually sang together at this time, trying his best to clear some of the air around the room. The tune was just not the same without Meira and Almar's harmonies, who left the caravan together not more than five notes into the song. Omylia didn't stay much longer either, retiring to her room with tired eyes and pale skin. Members of this troupe never walked out of a song, ever.

A heavy weight sat on Adam's chest at the thought of losing this family as it was, and his fingers slowly stopped playing until silence befell the room again. He sighed and tilted his head against the wall, looking up at the ceiling. For a minute, it felt like everything was on the verge of falling apart.