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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Loki | The Bifrost Incident | OTA
Loki wakes slowly, the sounds of the forest gently pulling her out of her sleep. She blinks at the trees, a small frown crossing her features. This..this isn't right.
She pushes herself upright, fingers entwining with the grass around her. There's sun here, there's the smell of nature and she feels like, if she listens hard enough, she can hear voices. People, actually other people, and not just voices in her own mind.
Where is she?
Loki gets to her feet, shaky and uncertain, and collects the bag that she'd been resting on. Then she turns around once, looking at the area around her, and starts to laugh.
Is she free? Or has she died somehow and this is what the afterlife is? Or is it a test? Maybe she's supposed to survive this for some reason, supposed to prove something or find it or...
She shakes her head. It doesn't matter. She gets the sun, she can feel it on her skin, smell the grass and touch the bark of the trees. Whatever this is, she is choosing to look at it as a gift, rather than a curse.
[Five Days In]
The thing is, Loki knows how to live with paranoia. She's used to feeling that there's something creeping in the corners, something watching her, waiting for her to fall into sleep before it strikes.
What she's not used to is seeing more physical signs of its presence.
She touches the claw marks on the door, frowning and blinking as her hands trace the marks over and over again. This isn't how things work. The things want in, they want to get to where she is, but they had no way of actually doing that, not yet.
But...But she's not where she used to be, the rules are changing and she doesn't know what this means.
The wood around the marks is splintered and she doesn't notice when they start getting caught in her fingers. She's tracking blood against the door but Loki is lost in her own thoughts, distracted by trying to puzzle out what this means.
[Or throw someone at her!
Five Days In
No, Tsume's wariness is just that of an animal that has had too many negative encounters with human beings to think that they will show him any kindness. The X-shaped scar on his furry chest shows he's been a survivor of things in his past before. He's mostly wondering what she's going to do now that she's found the signs of the other wolf.
no subject
She turns, looking around and spying the wolf. Her fear isn't at high tension yet, so she has enough sense to look down at its' feet, see that it's not the same creature that would have been capable of leaving the marks.
She smiles, just a little, at the creature, raising her hand, the one that had been on the door, and waving.
It might seem odd to greet a random animal but Loki has learned that not everything is as it seems.
no subject
He comes closer, slowly and with measured steps, sizing up his paw against those on the ground. Whoever left these is a beast of much mightier size than he is, which means the other wolf has to be huge. Tsume is not a small wolf.
no subject
"Hello," she says softly, offering a small smile.
no subject
So sorry this took forever to get back to. Busy, busy week
Loki considers him for a long moment, then nods back, still wearing a smile. "I didn't think you'd want to come close," she tells him. "Nothing wants to come too close. But new places, I guess. New things, new sights, new people, new wolves."
Laughing a little, her voice shakes as she does it. "I wonder," she starts. "If you'd know these woods better than I do."
It's all good! I was on vacation anyway.
He sits down on his haunches and watches Loki intently. It's clear now that he's listening to her with purpose and taking her words in. It seems like she's been here just as long as he has and has just as many answers to what's going on.
Unfortunately, he knows nothing about these woods beyond what he's already found out for himself. He's never seen woods like these before. The forests and plains of his home had been stripped bare by the humans long before he was born. Hence why wolves were most often found in cities these days.