ic inbox - Pasture / Sheep Game

[finalbows]

choose

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[ Angel Devil. ]
[  chatcube, or action. ]
[ if you're visiting the rose barn,
look for the door with the creepy bat-and-angel-wing sigil on it. Knock first! Or get zapped. ]

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[wants_the_phd]

[Immediately playbows back and does an excited little prance!!!! Gosh! This is like going on an adventure. It makes her feel like a kid again.]

[finalbows]

[

he meant to do that. it's not a slip in decorum if he can make it look 100% intentional. IT'S FINE. IT'S...

it's genuinely fine. he thought this would be fun and it turns out it is, even if they're still just loping over dewy grass, angling southwest. They should be reaching the river soon... ]

[wants_the_phd]

[We are just two happy little monsters roaming around in the dead of night with murder in our hearts. What's there to judge about taking a minute to enjoy life while you've got it?]

[She hops easily over the river. She's not exactly sure where they're going, but she's snuffling around for interesting pyg smells. Hmm hmm interesting! A bird preened itself here recently. She likes that. What is it about feathers that makes them so intoxicating?]

[finalbows]

[ Angie's still in the 'figuring out what all this abruptly stronger sensory information MEANS' stage with scents, so he watches her snuffle, a bit mystified, before taking the opportunity to dip his muzzle in the running water. Some of that red around his mouth wasn't just his wolf form's natural pattern.

...lifts his head up. shake-a shake-a! ]

[wants_the_phd]

[The bell on his collar jingles violently. Maybe the puppet will come to them. She still has her nose to the ground, looking for hints.]

How did you take down the last thing you caught? Magic or nah?

[finalbows]

[ he flung it around with telekinesis and pounced on it like he was playing fetch with a ball until it stopped moving .. .... ... ]

Magic.
...Some chasing.

[wants_the_phd]

It feels really good to tear a living thing apart with your teeth, doesn't it? There's something uniquely special about it.

[sniff sniff sniff sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiffff]

Oh, I think I found something. I'm not sure if this is the one you were looking for, though.

[finalbows]

...you can feel what you're taking from them.

Which direction is it off towards? I'll be able to tell you based on that.

1/2

[wants_the_phd]

[...Is his nose okay? She thought dogs, at least...?]

[wants_the_phd]

Come here. This branch, with the tuft of fur stuck to it. This is pygmidillo scent.

Can you smell it?

[finalbows]

[ snurfs. tentatively, at first, then more interested. ]

Oh! So that's what THAT one is...

[ he drifts lower to the ground, still sniffing...
takes a few steps in the right direction, but he also looks like he's already getting distracted. there's just.... so much information that's completely new to his perception.... ]

[wants_the_phd]

[She imagines it must be like seeing color for the first time. She's so happy for him!!]

[She just walks along beside him, smelling roughly the same things, pointing out interesting scents worth learning to recognize.]

This one over here is an ant trail. Sometimes you can find something interesting at the end.

And this flattened patch of grass is where a deer slept.

This is where a rabbit groomed itself. Can you smell its fur, and the clover on its breath as it licked?

[the world is full of LIVING THINGS!!!!!!!!!]

[finalbows]

[ there's just so very many.... moments, of life in time, piled on over each other.

he dutifully chases after what she points out, mulling over each until he murmurs, ] Yes, I think, so, I think I can tell what that is...

[ he seems pretty into it.

excited zoomies to go destroy something for fun temporarily put on a hold for him to have a quasi-religious experience about how even the Pasture, as utterly fucking jacked up a place it is, has that same unfathomably amounts of chains with link after link after link after link that he had once felt streaming through his overloaded perception as he cleaved his way to their one and only source--


huh.
when did he lay down and start rolling around in the grass.

he has definitely been doing that. he's paused mid-roll, snout turned to the stars. ]

[wants_the_phd]

[She's not feeling physically up to rolling right now, but she is laying in the grass nearby, seemingly just as happy.]

[While they're keeping themselves busy with their own lives and stresses and dramas, the rest of the world is having its own at endless different scales. The plants of the forest compete for light and tangle themselves in mycorrhizal networks. Termites carve their complex dwellings under a crust of bark and rearrange their brood. Partridges fatten themselves up on autumn seeds in preparation for the long (short??) winter ahead. Everyone has come up with their own ingenious little ways of living. And their living is changing and affecting each other in ways that may not necessarily perceived, but are felt by everyone just the same.]

[What a beautiful thing it is to be alive in this moment, at the same time and place as all these other strange and complicated little lives. What a beautiful thing to learn the smells of the world and roll in the green grass under a clear, starry sky.]

[What a vast and welcoming world, full of mysteries and infinite things to discover.]



Isn't the world beautiful?

1/2

[finalbows]

2/2

[finalbows]

Yes.

<sub>[ ... ]

[ doesn't feel as bad, anymore. thinking about it.
it still hurts. but not as sharp. not as terrifying.

and the parts he always loved,
they're not any stronger, per se.
but it feels brighter, lessened those pains. ]</sub>

I didn't mind. Being brought here, and asked to better a world.
It wasn't just because it was better than where I was. All I could understand of it was the emptiness and the peoples' stasis...

But I should have looked closer...
Just like the desert, it was never really empty, after all.

[wants_the_phd]

[She's silent for a while, mulling that over while staring at constellations she doesn't have names for.]


We ruined our own world, once.

I spent my most joyful days in another, more lush world, studying creatures so fantastic it was hard to believe they were even real. I liked to imagine it's what our own world was like, before it died.

Here... it feels like both the living world and the dying one, separated by a wall of fog.

I wonder if our ancestors found themselves at a crossroads like this one. I wonder if they tried to make a difference, too.

[finalbows]

"To live is to give life meaning, yet one must take others' lives to survive... in that way, life is death, itself..."

Do you think...
Where it might have went wrong... was when they all stopped looking what they consumed in the eye?

I'd be different. If I hadn't had to watch the lot of it all, living.
My Master would even say... his goal was for Terra's people to never have to even consider that cycle.

[wants_the_phd]

No... We're the opposite. Looking a thing in the eyes as you tear its throat out in your teeth is the appeal. Just like we're looking to do with the beast we're hunting now.

There used to be other zmeu subspecies... different clans, different cultures. But just like we see in every other sort of evolution, the population that's the most competitive in its environment is the one that succeeds. In our case, it was the population that was the most ruthless, the most greedy, and the one that most rejoiced in carnage and domination.

We consumed the other zmei. We consumed all our ancestral livestock. We consumed the rest of the world until the whole ecosystem collapsed, and then we consumed each other.

It's only by tempering our natures in the face of oblivion that we survived, but that desire to conquer and rend is still baked into who we are. And when it can't be expressed outwardly, it manifests in our society and culture and our social dynamics.

Day TBD but probably around 104-105

[wants_the_phd]

[It's a beautiful early-autumn kind of day. The sun is pleasantly warm, and the perfume of late summer flowers hangs in the air.]

[Walking through the rose-garden meadow outside the barn, Angie will also be able to catch a whiff of Azdaja's scent drifting along... even though she's nowhere in sight. Normally it would be easy to miss it, but his sense of smell has gotten sharper since he became a wolf, hasn't it?]

Re: Day TBD but probably around 104-105

[finalbows]

[ delicate little sniffs at the air ]

[ he likes to make a point of getting visual on her, at least, when he catches her scent. the sort of little checks one does to an aging loved one, a favored pet; are you still alive in there?

it's novel to him, to think to worry.

where are you, azdaja, he silently mouths, and follows after it, in a way she herself had taught him. ]

Re: Day TBD but probably around 104-105

[wants_the_phd]

[She's not hard to find. She's found herself a little patch of grass between the rose bushes, just like she did during her first few days in the pasture, when she was too cagey and feral to come inside.]

[She's laying on her back, staring up at the clouds and the flowers swaying against the sky, casting shadows on her face. She looks pale.]

[Her eyes flick to him as soon as he comes in view. She starts pushing herself up, laboriously.]

Oh, thank God you're here.

Sit down right now.

Re: Day TBD but probably around 104-105

[finalbows]

[ when he finally picks her out,

he looks at her with open calculation. like he's updating something in his head that had been left too lax. like he doesn't spend each day now carving out time to circle her like a hawk.

with an easy, infuriating grace, he takes a seat down in the grass, facing her. it's eerie. he does so soundlessly. ]

Re: Day TBD but probably around 104-105

[wants_the_phd]

[She does not have any sort of grace whatsoever as she shuffles over to him, straddles his lap, grabs him by the collar and kisses him desperately.]

1/3

[finalbows]

[ THINGS HE DID NOT EXPECT FOR 300, ALEX ]