Sequoia Coast reform this year

Making some stuff up about where they came from!

Coco gave her arse a suspicious look, but more or less accepted what Herschel said as fact. "You're smart," she conceded - certainly compared to his sister, who wasn't the sharpest crayon in the box, nor the brightest bulb in the bunch, nor the... you get the point - she was the blunt, colourless lump of intellect.

At his question, she narrowed her eyes, apparently thinking hard. "I can feel it," she insisted, even though the feeling she was referring to was probably just gas, ".. it's in distress! We need to cleanse it, so that everyone can have good dreams and die peacefully and.. and.." Coco trailed off.

'The Sacred Stream' was her own personal manifestation of the very loosely defined system of beliefs held by members of their birth-pack. Mostly, nobody really thought about it beyond 'shit, better tell my kid a bed-time story', and it was a nice thing to hold in your mind if you were about to meet your death in a bloody, violent way. The idea that the conscious mind flowed like water through an endless wonderland when you slept or died was something that Coco believed actually happened, and she would pass out from sheer horror if anyone pissed in the vicinity of a stream she deemed sacred.

And this one, this still-not-found creek or river or whatever they might end up finding was the most sacred of them all.

Her caramel-coloured eyes swivelled from the sand to her brother's face. In a rare break from her conviction that their quest was totally going to change the world, she asked him meekly: "Do you really think we'll find it?"