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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    [open quest]  if you go down in the woods today...
    #3
    Although the flickering torchlight lit up the base of the mountain, as Beechbone goes further up the trail, the only light comes from the stars and the full moon peeking eerily through threads of cloud flying past like ghosts. It's brighter than the forest was, and though her beady eyes cannot see far (or well,) they do extract every detail up close.  Maybe that's why, even when the flowers light up with a clap like thunder, she takes her time collecting pretty bits of rock and one or two of the glowing blossoms, and does not immediately differentiate the lurking ice monsters from the snowpack.

    She hears them, though, feels them, with warnings trembling up her many long, spidery whiskers. Beechbone's Opossum Sense is tingling, but there's no real option other than to keep moving forward so the girl picks up her quick trot again as she climbs ever closer to the peak. Silence is a game that she is quite good at and so they do not seem to take much notice of her, either.

    Her soft little hand-feet are getting colder by the minute as she reaches the peak of the mountain trail she is following, and the large marsupial pauses to tuck them into the warmth of her pouch, hoping to stave off frostbite. For good measure, she tucks her tail in as well, but can only sit on her feet and hope that she is chubby and fluffy enough to cover the bare, pink skin and protect it from the glass-sharp winds.

    This tactic would work better if the ground weren't also rather frozen, but it helps a little. At least it isn't wet.

    Her pink nose twitches madly, but it's too cold for the smells to come out, leaving the air rather homeopathic. The yearling isn't certain if she's smelling smoke or just air that once had someone say "smoke" into it, but the effect is suitably autumn-ish. This isn't so bad. It's better than undead and mummies, at least, so there's probably a trick she just hasn't stumbled across.

    (It's the ice monsters, obviously, everybody but Beechbone knows that.)

    One of the glowing flowers bobs its gleaming white head close-by and the opossum-girl reaches out with that long whiskey nose to sniff at it. It has disappointingly little scent, but more than its fair share of phosphorescent pollen which she snorks up her nose quite by accident. It makes her choke and cough as she stifles a sneeze. The noises seem to agitate the ice monsters, she can hear them grumbling where they lurk among the snow and the moonlit darkness on the eastern side of the mountain pass.

    "ah-HA-CHEWPLBLPBLPLBOOTHPHTH!"

    Her hands come out too late to stop the enormous sneeze, but just in time to make it even worse. The noise splatters messily against the rock and ice and someone rather closer than she expected roars their sudden rage at having the silence broken. Which, frankly, does not make a lot of sense because if she can't have a perfectly normal, if sort of glowy, sneeze, how come they get to roar? Like that was way louder. It is, nevertheless, clearly time to be on her way.

    She scurries down the mountain trail as fast as possible, which is not terribly fast, actually, given her size, and her shape, but is at least slightly less thunderous than it might be on hooves, but the ice-monsters have gotten a lock on her now and they're gaining ground. Beechbone misses a step and falls heavily, rolling thrice before catching her feet back up again for a few half-stumbled strides, but in the chaos of spinning, she loses the trail and runs straight into a snowbank. The snowbank snarls angrily.

    "Sorry, sorry, sorry," she starts, meekly, trying to extricate herself from the snowbank's heavy limbs (do snowbanks have limbs?) as quickly as possible, but her apologies glance off of it. With a shudder, the ice monster rises, turning grey-black eyes to her. They are cold and rimmed with feathery frost like eyelashes. Although Beechbone is not small, the monster is even larger, an enormous creature not unlike a gorilla, but all in white with dusky black skin full of cracks and impossibly long fangs that are clear and deceptively fragile-looking, glistening in the silver light reflecting off the creature's pale coat. A massive forearm strikes out and knocks her down, holds her down prone to the earth while other wintry apes approach, ready to tear her to pieces and the girl shivers under its frigid flesh. In the moments before death, she can only think of how the beast smells oddly stale (most likely a result of its former life living in Jack's freezer,) and also that one of its fingers appears to be a peeled shrimp that must have fallen out of the bag like six years ago and been forgotten.

    (Honestly, Jack, clean out your freezer Sick )

    Not knowing what else to do, she reaches into her pouch, now full of mostly useless trinkets, some glowing flowers, some rocks, some bits of candy, and her fingers close around the snickers bar. It's a little melty, but still in its wrapper, and she pulls it out without thinking, offering it up to the angry beast.

    "Hey! Eat this!" Her sudden shouting upsets but also confuses the monster and it takes the candy before it really even registers what it is doing, then angrily shoves the sugary treat, wrapper and all, down its throat as if to say 'Your next,' but there is no next. The enormous ape looks briefly startled and then melts back into a pile of ice and freezer-burned shrimp. Beechbone leaps to her feet.

    "You're not you when you're hungry!" she sings out to the little pile and races down to the mountain's foggy feet where the ice monsters don't follow and the gray gravel turns to red sandstone. 
    Beechbone
    Don't let hunger happen to you
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    Messages In This Thread
    if you go down in the woods today... - by Jassal - 10-13-2021, 07:10 PM
    RE: if you go down in the woods today... - by Beechbone - 10-20-2021, 12:30 PM



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