Aspen

Three weeks.

Three weeks of watching the cameras you set up in the little grove of trees. You knew there had to be some sort of Presence. Why wouldn't there be? These trees dropped their leaves seasonally, yet even as the forest around them grew small buds of green they stayed brilliantly autumn. Leaves painted with sunset oranges and twilight purples, broken up by dawn-kissed yellows swayed gently with the breeze when you arrived to set up the hidden cameras. Teasingly, they never fell, but promised a satisfying crunch if they ever did.

The assignment should have been easy. Capture footage of the Presence, write down its behaviors, especially noting how violent it was, maybe make contact if it didn't seem too bad, and then go back to the Guild and write a report about it. From there, the techs would decide whether it needed to be captured, destroyed, or just left alone. Maybe you'd get to enjoy a drink that wasn't coffee and sugary sodas afterwards, or finally rest your eyes after staring at the footage for so long.

And yet, it eluded you. For three weeks.

Three entire weeks of nothing.

Day 23, you were rewinding the previous night's footage, watching the numbers rapidly tick by with one of your last cups of instant noodles. Your eyes were half closed and your mind far away, and you almost missed it. A flash on camera number four. Movement. Something.

You rub your eyes and rewind, playing it slower this time. At 0236, something fell from a tree, and within a few seconds a bright flash had... done something?

Frame by frame, you watched an owl chick poke its head out of a hole in a tree. It looked around and leaned forward. The chick leaned too far and lost its balance. But before it hit the ground, an abstract, wispy human-like figure flashed into existence and caught the chick. The figure swiftly put it back in its nest before disappearing just as suddenly as it arrived.

You stared at the figure. There it was. Three weeks, and you finally had solid proof of the Presence. You wouldn't go back to the Guild with nothing, but you couldn't just go back. Extended observation was the next step (and you were dreading how long that was going to take). And then afterwards, the step you and your fellow researchers always dreaded. The step that caused one of your closer friends to lose an arm to a living sculpture, and left you with nightmares after the dreadmare incident.

After observation, you would have to contact the Presence.

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Red Maple Leaf

Organics

It's considered impolite to leaf through someone else's leaves!

23