Welcome to Gaia! ::

In a cozy ranch house with white wooden siding and blue shutters, with a wrap-around porch situated in the middle of lush farmland there lived a family of three. To outsiders the Park family consisted of two happy farmers and their cute, if shy little girl. The Park family went about their daily business of milking cows, feeding pigs, picking eggs, and sowing seeds, content with their lot in life. Little Caitlyn Park spent her time happily climbing the large apple tree or playing with her pet goat, Snow.

That was the picture outsiders saw.

The family’s reality was somewhat different from the idyllic front they put up. Mr. and Mrs. Park were farmers, there was no doubt about that. They milked cows, fed pigs, picked eggs, and sowed seeds. They also had a daughter named Caitlyn Park. She was cute and shy, but she was also so much more.

Caitlyn had been a sickly baby. She had colic for almost the entire first year of her life. Soon afterwards she was diagnosed with juvenile asthma and, as the years went on, she was prescribed medication to treat bouts of adolescent panic attacks.

Life in the Park household grew ever more stressful as little Caitlyn grew older. The Park’s sickly daughter refused to make friends at school, choosing instead to speak to shadows.

Invisible friends are normal, the Parks thought. It’s just a phase.

It wasn’t a phase.

Caitlyn would spend hours chatting with the shadows in her bedroom. Her closet contained her best friends. Under the bed, the worst. Arbitrarily, it seemed, Caitlyn would choose a location in the house or on the property that was “dangerous” and she would refuse to ever set foot near that place again.

Trying to take her mind off of her strange imagination, Caitlyn’s parents purchased for her a white goat. They assigned farm chores to Caitlyn, the most important of which was to milk Snow every morning before school. The two quickly became friends and were nearly inseparable.

Soon enough, Caitlyn Park grew into a quiet, sullen teenager. She eventually grew out of the habit of talking to shadows, but she never did enter the family’s old, rundown barn. That was the place that had frightened her the most as a child and, as a young adult, Caitlyn could hardly stand to look at it.

One morning, after milking her beloved goat, Caitlyn walked down the winding driveway to her bus stop. She unconsciously skirted a twisted old tree, jumped over a mossy rock, and nodded respectfully to the bus shelter, but kept her distance. These were things Caitlyn had done for as long as she could remember. The shadows had told her to do so, long ago.

That day at school was the same as any other for Caitlyn. She endured her classes silently and stoically endured the jeers of her classmates who had pegged her as a victim as early as kindergarten, with her inhaler and weird medications.

After school was another story altogether. Caitlyn waited in the shade of her usual tree for the bus that would take her home. The student body milled around her and so Caitlyn didn’t notice the stranger until he was nearly on top of her.

“Excuse me, miss. I need to talk to you about something. May I have a moment of your time?”

Caitlyn shielded her eyes and glanced up at the man. “I think you have the wrong person,” was her response. No one spoke the Caitlyn Park if they could help it.

“Oh, quite the opposite, I think.” The stranger chuckled. His laugh was creepy, but somehow comforting to Caitlyn. “I understand what you’ve been going through.”

Caitlyn froze. He understood? How could he understand? All of her life Caitlyn was the girl who was different. She was weird. She spoke to shadows.

The man laughed again. “Unusual, I know. But you see, Caitlyn, I know that these things you see, the things you feel, they’re real. It’s everyone else that lives a life of denial. They refuse to see the darkness in the shadows. Don’t deny your gift, Caitlyn.” And then, as mysteriously as he appeared, the man disappeared.

The words didn’t truly sink in until Caitlyn was walking up her family’s driveway. She nodded to the shelter, hopped over the rock, and avoided the old tree. She approached the new barn with its cheery red paint and called for Snow. The soft tinkle of a bell tied around the goat’s neck heralded the goat’s arrival and a rare smile crept across Caitlyn’s face.

“He said I’m right, Snow.” Caitlyn felt an unusual sensation: pride.

Life went on at its tenuous pace in the Park household. Over the last several weeks something had changed inside Mr. and Mrs. Park’s daughter. Where once there was a reserved girl, quietly acting out her idiosyncrasies, there was now a confident teenager, brazenly flaunting her differences. She started speaking to the shadows again, almost overnight. There were new “special” locations, all throughout the property and Caitlyn tried to forbid her parents from approaching them, flying into a panicked fit when they ignored her.

“Look with your eyes!” she’d scream at them, and storm off to be with her shadows.

And then, one morning, everything changed.

It was foggy that day. Caitlyn skipped outside, anxious to get started on her chores. She approached the cheery red barn, its colour muted in the haze of the weather.

“Snow!” she called, expecting to hear the chime of the goat’s bell in response.

There was no answer.

Caitlyn’s heart began to pound in her chest. Her goat never failed to answer her call. Something was terribly wrong.

As she approached the door, it swung open with a squeal. Caitlyn yelped and jumped backwards, but quickly realized that it was the wind catching the door. But where was Snow?

“Snow? Where are you?” she called tentatively. Still no jingle.

The horses shifted uneasily at Caitlyn’s approach, but she ignored the beasts. It was Snow she was looking for and she soon realized her goat was gone. Stepping outside once more, Caitlyn scanned the farmlands until her eyes settled on the old, dilapidated barn. Her heart sank as realization set in. Snow was in there.

The old barn was the one place Caitlyn had sworn she’d never enter. It had the darkest of all shadows. These shadows danced and jumped around. They engulfed their victims and once they had hold, they never let go. If Snow was in there, she was in trouble. But still, Caitlyn had to find her.

What happened next might never be fully explained.

Caitlyn’s memories of the events that transpired consist only of pieces of images and sounds. She can remember approaching the old barn. She felt herself fall victim to the shadows. She heard the sound of bells and then the sound of screaming. The screaming never ended. She could smell and taste the coppery tang of blood.

Mr. and Mrs. Park had their daughter admitted to a children’s psychiatric hospital. It was schizophrenia, the doctors said. It had been that all along. The doctors pumped Caitlyn so full of drugs that she stopped feeling real. The psychiatrists pretended to listen to her warnings of the shadows, but she was nothing more than a case study to them. They would smile and nod and then pump her full of drugs that made her sleep.

The next time the stranger approached Caitlyn, it was in a dream.

“Caitlyn, you disappoint me,” he didn’t pull any punches. Caitlyn was almost affronted by his tone; this was her dream, after all. “You are special because you see the truth in this world. You understand the dangers that lurk behind the shadows. Humankind is in danger and you were one of the few who stood a chance to fight back. But now? You lay here in this hospital bed and allow yourself to be drugged into oblivion. You’re no better than the other human cattle out there.”

Caitlyn didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t often that she had a dream speak so directly to her.

“Caitlyn, mankind doesn't have to be the cattle any longer. Nor even prey with a fighting chance. Because people like me, people like you, have the ability to become Hunters.”

Hunters. Caitlyn liked the sound of that. Really, anything sounded better than living the rest of her life on the edge of reality, where one needle p***k was all it took to send her into a heavy, muzzy sleep.

“O-okay,” she croaked.

It was then, with that less than enthusiastic acquiescence, that Caitlyn Park’s life ended and the life of ε XII began.

In one moment E-12 was following her teammates’ into the void beyond the doorway. In the next? Well, there was a voice.

She was dead, the voice said. E-12 knew that already. She’d died pointlessly and fruitlessly in the damned mine field game. She hadn’t seen her death coming, but she’d died with the taste of victory on the tip of her tongue, and that was more than others on the island could say. E-12 would argue against the “no resolve” bit, but at this point in time that seemed somehow childish.

A figure started to take shape from the nothingness. The source of the voice?

“I am Epsilon Twelve.” E-12 didn’t know how to be anyone else. She had no other identity, no other purpose in life other than that which she’d been given upon awakening on the island. E-12 was a killer. She might have been unworthy or uninteresting, but no one could call her otherwise. She’d felt her knife bite into another’s body. She saw the life drain from the corpse. It was her kill and it was her only claim to victory.

The figure took shape and E-12 gasped. It was her. Though she’d never seen her own reflection, the figure standing before her was undeniably an epsilon. The pink armour flashed brightly against the black of the bodysuit and gas mask. The only clue to the figure’s identity was the number emblazoned on the side of her head. E-12’s own mark: ε XII.

“How...?” E-12 asked, eyes transfixed upon the roman numerals.

A metamorphosis? E-12’s own body spoke to her. Mocked her.

“I-I don’t want it to be over.”

For every step her body took towards her, E-12 shuffled backwards. Her hands trembled as her own body came at her, urging her to destroy it.

“If that’s what you really want!” E-12, no, Caitlyn shouted at the figure in the epsilon uniform. She clenched her fists and willed a weapon to her hands. Not the knife she’d favoured on the island, but rather several knives. Caitlyn swiped violently at the puppet. It was not her body. It might have been Epsilon Twelve, but it was definitely not Caitlyn Park and she felt nothing but satisfaction as the blades hit home.