*now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning. the end will take care of itself.*

SUMMER IN NORTH KILL, THE INCIDENT AT HACKETT'S QUARRY. from kid camper to esteemed camp counselor, dylan had spent way too many evenings to count pouring way too many hours to measure into the quiet maintenance of sustaining the integrity of this old summer camp's history :
it was important to him. sure, maybe he never completely hit his stride with ever unabashedly acting exactly how he felt without the protection of a funnyman mask to cushion any potential blows ( the brutally honest "i don't give a fuck what you think of me" thing was way more ryan erzahler's whole department, anyway ) but he would've left chris hackett's prized quarry with an ultimately invaluable experience to help pad out those college apps, to boast about his charity and leadership skills, and all that bullshit. but mistakes were made, and they overstepped the deadline to book it off the property.things had snowballed to shit. truth or dare drama turns into nick furcillo's blood splattering their skin - a life lesson, fucking around with your coworkers is all fun and games 'til someone loses a hand ! . . . his hand. dylan's hand, sawed off by the object of his affections after a sudden bite and left behind in a pool of blood, and he'd say that it'd had to be done, that it was a necessary course of action, and he'd cling tight to the conviction that the werewolf curse would've pulled him under just like it'd done to nick, and then fuck knows what might've happened, or who he might've hurt, but saying all that . . . when everything was done and the sun was finally up, that's the sort of shit you can't just go around claiming, true or not.there was a body count, some long since decomposed and stowed out of sight while others were hardly a couple hours fresh. there was a fucked up family and a fucked up house, and a fucked up cop with a redemption hard - on, and it all rounded out to the same answer : the hacketts. the hacketts were insane, the hacketts were housing werewolves, the hacketts were so far up their own family first morality that they'd skidded well past the point of no return.
so the surviving counselors were subsequently acquitted of all charges off the back of this more palatable ruling, and by some eleventh hour miracle made up of a cardboard box jam packed with irrefutable evidence that the truth was stranger than the immediate presumed "camp teens go on murderous rampage !" fiction, but . . . there's one kicker : kill a werewolf, it turns back to the person they were. you can prove redneck family fuckery, but you can't prove this. you can't even try. in the end, even the best case scenario still. fucking. sucked. you survived, congrats. now go live with it.

IN THE YEARS AFTER, DID YOU FIND YOUR CALLING ?. it's time to pack up and move the fuck on. just . . . easier said than done. but time passes nonetheless. hackett's quarry becomes a memory further removed but still irreversibly stained like ink on his one remaining hand, leaving its prints on all he touched, and it isn't before long that even the focal point of his studies start warping in shape to fit into the recesses of those lingering horrors : the knowledge that werewolves exist, that something unnatural &. unexplained still lingered somewhere out in the woods of north kill and god knew wherever else, and . . . there was something there. something to measure, to theorize, to study.and it weren't as though he was trying to stay rooted in one moment in time, weren't as though that took much effort either way after the sensationalized true crime corners of the web'd taken hold of their weird ass headlines and popularized comparisons between truth &. everyone's favorite old summer camp horror flicks, but come one, two, three conversations from an online forum to an obligatory outing, the universality of the idea was starting to crystalize : the inexplicable was as naturally ingrained as the waves making up the entirety of the physical world, out of sight and out of mind, but there on principle nonetheless. there'd never been a chance for a fresh start free from all this either way, not a real opportunity when the way he'd been marked was too specific, too eye - catching. it'd only strike him as funny later on in the night, lying on the floor to share a classmate's pipe and dwelling on all that'd recently come that this was the exact type of unpalatable weirdo reputation he'd tried so hard for so many years to avoid back when hackett's quarry had offered itself as a private bubble removed from everything else, like the tiny plastic world tossed around inside a snow globe finally shaken hard enough to shatter.it wasn't camp radio, but it'd served the purpose of a long term information archive to approach this similarly, to lean back in his seat with the cord of a mic twined around his finger and to dump those musings in a bite - sized pod format, tackling things first with a broad brush and later moving backwards again, repainting those bits and pieces of that summer in north kill with a finer stroke.
therein marked the transitionary period, the effort in knitting together gaps of communication and collecting whichever manifestos he might from voices just as strung on the conviction that they, in some place and some time, had encountered something . . . weird. he'd made fair trade in claims or opinions for relevant explanation of potentially applicable quantum theories or general psychology, and in the maintenance of this formulaic consistency, there was modest prosperity, enough so to prompt a new habit of packing up a backpack and sorting out feasibly affordable short term travel plans.just -- there and back, just to look, just to see. just to feel a few steps closer to shedding the skin of the guy that hadn't been brave, not heroic, not admirable, the skin of a guy who'd just . . . scraped by on pure dumb intuition. a guy who'd lived to wash a layer of somebody else's blood off of himself.

born the younger of two children and gaining a multitude of step - siblings and partial cousins following the divorce of his parents &. remarriage of his father, he'd always had a large family, a fortune in blood relations, though dylan'd never felt particularly close to the majority of any of them. affection was mostly out of the obligation of it, the wouldn't it be nice indulgent way of thinking when he'd grin and throw an arm around the son of his cousin's daughter, like it hadn't been at least four holidays since he'd last seen these kids. he was fortunate, but that was empty.