Once upon a time, in a land not so far away...
You wake to the feeling of being watched. Of a set of unfamiliar eyes, of warm breath on the back of your neck. A jolt back to the land of the living, and it's gone. No matter how quick you are, how sneaky, the source of the disruption has long since disappeared, so you have no choice but to try and ignore it. To continue on with your day and try to set that moment of strangeness aside.
You eat, drink, speak with others. Perhaps you explore a little. Whatever it is you choose to do for the day, that feeling from the morning won't return. And by the time the sun sets and the moon glows brightly above, you've likely set those moments of strangeness aside. It's not like it's anything new, after all.
It's the same again for the next few days. No better, no worse. Something best ignored, right?
A speck of blood on the doorframe. That wasn't there before, was it?
A snap of twigs in the distance. A crunch of leaves.
Claw marks gouged deeply into the door.
Into the wall above your bed.
Scraps of red fabric, turned darker with blood. Pieces of fur. Of flesh.
Do you run and hide? Do you fight? Whatever you choose, it's definitely time to make sure your body parts aren't scattered next...
...what a horribly big mouth you have.
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Since first waking up on the island, characters have been stuck with that feeling of being watched. It isn't a constant. Isn't more than a few seconds at a time, dotted throughout the day. Investigation has never turned up much, and there's never been any sightings of the cause of it all.
Until now.
Throughout the first half of the week, characters will find themselves suffering from that feeling of being watched on a far more constant basis. Rather than it being a one-off, few seconds occurrence each day, that feeling will last for minutes at a time, and on multiple occasions.
However, it isn't until the fifth day that they'll start stumbling across physical signs of their monitoring. There are claw marks on doors. Spots of blood on the paths outside. A crack of twigs in the forests, or the imprint of bloodied paws in the snow.
Ten days in and those signs start finding their way indoors. Wet footprints, tinged with red. Claw marks in the walls, the floor. Torn sheets and the smell of wet...something. Whatever it is that's been watching you, its finally decided to come and say hello.
Two weeks in and characters will begin to have sightings of the creature, its fur dark and its eyes a glowing yellow. At times it looks like a wolf, prowling in the distance. At other times, it's walking on its hind legs, almost human were it not for the muzzle full of gleaming sharp teeth. Get too close, and it slips away like a shadow, gone between one blink and the next. It decides when to reach out to characters, not the other way round.
It's after characters finally get a good look at the creature that it starts leaving...gifts. Characters will start to find familiar items from their home worlds amidst the mess. The remains of a childhood pet, perhaps. Photographs of loved ones, faces torn almost beyond recognition. It's only once it delivers its final gift that the creature retreats to the trees again: a blood-splattered item of clothing that clearly belongs to the person the character misses the most at the time, alive or dead.
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But aside from the stains of grass and dirt marked onto his clothes, it looks like he had nothing to worry about. He couldn't smell any blood, either - at least, none that belonged to Ryo's. There was just the beat of his eager heart, the relief in his breaths, and the glint of a real smile in his eyes. That was more than enough.]
Busy -
[What he was referring to doesn’t quite hit Akira until he notices the red smear on Ryo’s coat from his own hands. The claws retreat from him apologetically, a foaming wave reaching its crest too early and seeping quickly back to the ocean. Were it anyone else's eyes looking back at him, he may have felt a stronger sting of human insecurity at his frightening appearance.]
- I’ve been trying to find out where we are. None of this place looks familiar.
[His hands lift to his chest, where where something begins to shift unnaturally, driven by neither bone nor muscle. Over his sternum grows a mass, not much larger than the devilman's palm, stretching the hair and skin until it acquires a bare leathery texture and oblong shape. The stitching only engraves itself into recognizable, manmade patterns once the pack is mostly formed and nearly freed from the grasp of pliant, pulsing demon flesh. It falls into his hand in the same state as when he absorbed it, entirely dry and preserved inside him. Somehow.
Akira didn’t know how it worked, exactly, just that it was the first thing that came to mind when he became too large to properly wear it. The same way he knew Ghelmer’s name, or how to grow his wings, or to grab Sirene’s antenna with his own. ]
Someone left this.
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He wasn't positive how he'd managed it. But, he knew that he had to. He knew that he did. And he knew, in the hours spent in pursuit, he'd somehow pulled the talons out from beneath the firm lay of his ribs and shoved the extremity over the lip of the steel beam that given him a vantage point to begin with. It was too heavy, he knows, for a human to typically lift. But, humans in their own right could be strong enough when given opportunity. And he was, more than once. From one day to the next, he'd grappled with what anxieties subsumed them. He held back their teeth and their claws, felt the acidic bite and the slow abrasion of inevitability as the world they'd come to know began to distort. For one who'd been so gentle, he'd splintered under the strain and the barbs of what remains is enough to fend most people off. It was an adaptation, in its own right. It was its own power, though illusory and cloaked.
But, as he does not fear Akira, Akira too does not fear him. No matter the way he arms himself against all beyond him, Akira finds his way through. He shoulders through the strongholds, uses the sensitivities that still exist within the skin to peel away the layers that surround him. Ryo takes a slow breath as Akira's curved nails skim, take from him one guard in part as Akira inspects him in the same way Ryo had inspected him. He's careful, precise. His wounds, much like Akira's own, had healed without indication of why or when. It is only that they had, leaving the residual cast of bandaging beneath his shirt to cover what once was there. ]
I was thinking the same thing, [ Ryo starts, after a moment. The bright in his tone dulls, like a frost pressed against dark windows. It smudges what is beneath, an odd ache that curls within his ribs like ivy. His hand retreats as Akira's does, finds a place to rest beneath the shoulder strap that cuts dull into his flesh, even above the coat. It's heavy with wild vegetables, fruits — a few other items, here and there. His gaze moves, for a moment, to what fans around them. There's forest as far he can see, a green sea of trees. Ryo sighs through his nose. ]
There's no way I traveled as far as you did, but there's nothing about what I've seen that looks geographically familiar.
[ He glances back. The manifestation of the pack, somehow, isn't surprising to him. He'd seen an action akin to this before, the reconstitution of muscle and sinew, the weight of Akira's arm in his hands. The recollected sensation of blood smeared across his palms strikes him, but he does not say a word. Akira is here and Akira is whole. He is uninjured and that is all that matters now, in a place they both do not know.
He turns the pack around to the front of his hip, demonstrative. He pushes aside the flap, blind, with one hand as he roots in. ]
I got one too.
[ Though, what he comes up with shouldn't be in most bags. It's a book, its binding bent and battered. The pages are dog-eared in ways that reflect something well-read, a singular and makeshift bookmark holding the place the owner stopped reading it. He extends it to him. ]
Here.
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The thick keratin of claws retract back into their beds as the dense undercoat on his legs thin out until bare skin was all that was left underneath. Crouched on the ground, the monstrous mass of his limbs slim down to human proportions. The long tail, with all its tense and emotive curves and arrowhead tip, vanishes into his spine. Wing-like crests and thick antenna lose their shape, becoming a formless, writhing mane of hair absent of any effect of gravity. The shearing carnassials and fangs of his teeth lose their vicious sharpness - though a hint of them remains by the end.
Akira soon stands to his feet, bare as the day he was born, and wipes the still-present blood from his mouth. His eyes are obstructed by wisps of hair, falling chaotically over his face once they lose their supernatural viscosity. The yellow glow of the demon fades from his eyes until there is nothing but a familiar, warm umber staring back at Ryo, and a hand (mostly) wiped clean of his lunch reaching for the book.]
[Touching the worn paper edges with his fingers brought fond memories of being lost with Ryo in the curiosities of the Professor’s study. Despite his rougher appearance and even more physical methods nowadays, the human Fudo Akira once enjoyed diving through a library - whether they be at his school or in the dark corridors of the Asuka mansion. His room in the Makimura’s house was sparsely populated, save for small things like this copy of the Divine Comedy he'd taken a liking to, unaware of just how relevant Dante’s stories would be to his future.]
Why this, of all things…?
[Akira muses on the question as he picks it up out of Ryo’s hand, his own pack nearly empty in comparison. A quick flip of the pages uncovers the scent of old paper before the book is packed away.]
I have something for you too. Let’s trade.
[Akira offers his lighter bag in with the thing in question, taking notice of how Ryo’s strap sank sharply into his shoulder. Even with his friend’s uncanny endurance, Akira knew he’d have an easier time carting around something heavy on his own back. Ryo was still human, as far as he knew.]