False Moves 12.a

{{#if: | {{{image}}} }} {{#if: 17 July 2021 | | Date posted || 17 July 2021 }} {{#if: False Moves 12.a | | Link || False Moves 12.a }}

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False Moves 12.a
Chapter guide
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False Moves 12.a is the ninth chapter of False Moves. It focuses on the histories of the Witch Hunters currently investigating Kennet.

Plot

As Clint is getting ready to meet Teresa, a girl that has a crush on him, he looks in the mirror to check his appearance and sees his mother’s reflection as a horrifying monster. Something has taken his family and is pretending to be them. The tries to leave the house to escape but the monsters realise he knows about them and attack him, his father pulls out his heart and then he’s knocked unconscious.

He wakes up to see his midsection is a bloody mess. The house has been fixed except for the bloody spot on the bed where he’d been lying. He enters the living room and sees his mother talking to Teresa, Teresa leaves for school and the thing that’s pretending to be his mother says he’s taking a sick day. Everyone proceeds to act normally.

Eventually a van pulls up and a group of five people exit it, all of them carry guns except for one with a chainsaw. They enter the house and Clint tells them where the monsters are. They shoot his “family”, then Clint shows them the injury beneath this shirt, his heart torn out.

The girl with the chainsaw ask them to look for a heart. Clint informs her that his baby brother is also a monster, who escapes into the walls, but the girl with the chainsaw manages to get him.

After everyone’s dead, Elise Norwood, the teenager with a chainsaw, tries convincing him that this is all a bad dream and that what really happened was that his parents died in a fire. She puts the heart back in his chest and tells him to lie about everything that happened, even to himself. They say he can go in and take something before they burn the place down, he takes some photos out of a family album as well as a bunch of other mementos.

He's unable to forget whats happened to him so instead he gets in the van and goes off with them.

Four years later they're at an apartment block with Raphael Tindall and a group of fellow Witch Hunters. They enter a loft conversion with a mother and children inside. They go into the office and see a practitioner called Asher Hodgston, it’s revealed that his oldest daughter had tipped them off about him. Elise finds a glass case with clay in it and it’s revealed that the mother and children were created out of that clay.

Raphael thinks there's something suspicious about the necklace the mother wears and Asher refuses to take it off. After being coerced he eventually agrees to remove the necklace revealing the number 2113. It's a countdown to a doomsday event, the children also have a number. It turns out that Asher made a bargain with dark forces in return for power to create a perfect family with no regard of the consequence.

They ask him if he wants to handle it or if they should do it, when he refuses they proceed to kill them all.

They're heading back to the city with Leann Norwood driving them. She says all of them have special abilities, for Elise it’s proficiency with improvised weapons, Clint it’s his heart, and her it’s her medical skills. They stop just outside Kennet, and Elise says she feels a nudge whenever she comes this way, as if something is telling her to move on.

Leann starts thinking about how she became a Witch Hunter.

Elise’s dad found a magic clock with a blue face that could be seen from any angle, surrounded by gold infants holding snakes. People at the company he worked at started disappearing and practitioners start investigating. Then one of the people that disappeared turned up as a naked feral women covered in scars.

She discovers he still has the watch and starts to ask questions, he banishes her to another world, savage and far away. She has to fight her way to an exit and wait twenty four days to escape. Just as she's about to exit she realises her daughter has been sent there as well, she chooses to let her take her place and wait another twenty four days before escaping.

Leann's husband is arrested, and she and Elise join The Lighthouse.

Raphael notices the wards around Kennet and they discuss whether they should investigate. Miss appears and talks to Leann, she promises she’s trying to prevent undue harm to Others, humanity, or them. Miss asks Leann to tell her companions not to investigate the situation, suggesting she tell them that the wards are keeping something dangerous locked up. As they depart, Raphael mentions that if the wards ever do go down he’ll have to investigate in case something big gets loose.

Years later, the Witch Hunters have noticed the perimeter has changed, that Miss’s influence is gone and that the ghosts are no longer here. They also know Raphael was killed when he went in.

As they drive in Gerald Haris notices the smell of blood and Clint's heart starts beating faster. Suddenly Guilherme appears standing in the middle of the road, they drive past him but his presence puts them all on edge.

They reach the motel and find Abraham Musser and his gang are already there. It turns out he had a non-aggression pact with the Lighthouse in exchange for providing them with Aware, but ever since Bristow’s departure they’ve stopped delivering.

The Witch Hunters realize they’ve somehow been drugged and Haris shoots Musser with a crossbow, but Musser catches the bolt. Musser then walks up to Elise and threatens to kill her. Clint pulls out his heart, managing to contain the effect within it, leaving him free to act. He puts something under Haris’s nose, who starts to recover.

Musser starts to leave but Haris uses a punt gun concealed in the Witch Hunters' van to blow up Musser's car.

Major events

• Clint is saved from monsters pretending to be his family
• Asher Hodgston and his Marked family are killed
• Witch Hunters enter Kennet and start fighting with Abraham Musser and his companions

Characters

Witch Hunters Clint Elise Norwood Leann Norwood Gerald Haris Raphael Tindall Rocky Nelson Renfroe Francis Cleo Aleshire Kennet Miss Guilherme Blue Heron Institute Abraham Musser Wye Belanger Reid Musser Raquel Musser Miscellaneous Clint's impostor family Teresa Asher Hodgston Hodgston's wife and children

References

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