Taking the Initiative [Dark]

[Bee]

Monty went wandering for breakfast, in the morning. Their supply of meat was getting to the point where they could not afford to have Monty raid their provisions, despite the little bander's best efforts.

So, when dawn rose, Monty nipped furiously at their noses to wake them, and then tottered off into the woods to procure food. They were not yet to the point of hir training that they could persuade hir to actually bring anything back rather than just devouring it on the spot.

However, when rosy dawn gave way to bright blue morning, and there was still no sign of their little companion, Mnem began to worry. Maybe, against all odds and Monty's fearsome ferocity, s/he had been captured. Maybe s/he had found something, chased it, and gotten lost. Mnem was surprised to find she was actually worried about the little beast.

"We'd better go look," Mnem told Minh, with a long-suffering sigh.

[Dark]

Minh stared resolutely at the fire, taking long, slow sips from her coffee mug. She really didn't want to move unless she absolutely had to; she wasn't constantly tired like she had been in the beginning of their excursion. Their adventures had worn down on the soft edges of her physique, leaving behind a lean, sleek, heavily muscular body that Minh found herself feeling rather proud of. She'd never looked so good, and she almost appreciated it. That she was being forced to exercise regularly, however, didn't change her basic response to exercise--and that was being a complete and utter lazy arse, until forcibly dragged into action. And that included everything up to and including her prize creation.

She sighed, "Do we have to? S/he's probably just found some sort of interesting smell and wandered off, following the scent--a dead, bloated, fly-infested chipmunk, or something akin with our luck."

[Bee]

"Or s/he's currently being roasted over someone's fire, and hir flesh shall be used for breakfast and hir fur employed as a fashionate cap," Mnem said airily, walking around the stubbornly sitting feline. She could sympathize with Minh's unwillingness to move--it was morning, after all (and mornings were an awful time for anyone) and coffee had not been terribly abundant.

But Mnem seldom acted on her sympathies. In a couple of quick, fluid motions, she threw dirt on the fire and yanked Minh's coffee cup out of her hands. She had been the taskmaster for the better part of their journey up till this point, urging and bitching until Minh got moving: she slid quite comfortably into the role. If Minh needed to be pushed into action, fine; Mnem liked pushing.

"You can have your coffee and a nice long break when we have Monty back at camp."

[Dark]

Minh snapped. Mnem had always been a little bit bossy and domineering, and their time in the wilderness just seemed to have amplified her most undesirable qualities; it almost seemed like she was compensating for not being able to control the weather, or something. Not that Minh really cared. She'd been able to ignore it up until this point, preoccupied as she was with her own little issues of misery and woe. This, though...

This was about coffee.

"Yeah. I don't think that works for me."

She lunged for the canine's midriff, trusting her superior bulk to topple them. It wasn't smart, really, considering that her companion was of a higher, more dangerous suit, but she'd had enough and needed some sort of way to blow off steam. It that meant getting a split lip in the process, so be it.

This was so going to hurt.

[Bee]

If Mnem had more time in which to think and act, she probably would have jumped out of the way, or it would have dawned on her to fly, but all she really did was scrunch up her face in incredulous irritation, think I'm about to get pounced over a fucking cup of coffee, what the hell, and a very short time later she hit the dirt.

The combined force of the hard ground on her back and the rather large feline slamming into her abdomen knocked the wind out of her, and her breath came in hitching, shallow pants as they rolled. Oh, yes, she was getting needlessly filthy and attacked while Monty was roasting somewhere and the Marsh was still far ahead in the distance and in a very curious flare of imagination she imagined all the regions of the known world declaring war on another because one of them spilt a cup of coffee. The end of the world in an espresso bean.

She finally gained back enough wits to start trying to shove Minh off. "Mi--inh--what the--what the h-h-eeell are you doing?"

[Dark]

Minh thought about it, since it was a very legitimate question between attacked and attacker, if slightly unorthodox--punches were usually exchanged at this point; explanations later--and rapidly deduced that she didn't have a satisfactory explanation for her sudden psychosis. She stopped trying to strangle Mnem and clamored off, a tad ungracefully.

She scratched at her ear, the action setting off a cascade of dirt and leaves and twigs and other various bits of miscellaneous forest gunk that had taken up residence in her fur, "No idea, really. Just expressing some pent up resentment for authoritative figures, I suppose.

"Shall we go look for Monty, then? You're absolutely right--s/he's been gone too long."

She started walking and hoped that she wouldn't get clobbered from behind. Her reaction to a stolen cup of coffee had been a bit extreme, but one just did not hold coffee up for ransom. It just wasn't done.

[Bee]

Mnem followed Minh with a frowning, mildly irate and bemused expression before getting to her feet and brushing the dirt off. The next time Minh felt the need to pummel someone for trying to get her off her ass, she would kindly point the feline in the direction of Rai and tell her to have a party. Otherwise Mnem was going to poison her, chop her to pieces, and bake her into a nice kitty pie for Monty.

Well, probably not. But the notion of future vengeance soothed her.

"Your apology is accepted," she said, primly, and started off looking for Monty as well. With luck s/he hadn't gone too far.

They had been walking for nearly half an hour when, from the corner of her eye, Mnem caught sight of a dirty-white fluffball springing from a bush. Directly at them. Monty.

Mnem jumped back, and Monty landed in front of them, running around their legs and screeching excitedly. S/he pointed a little paw back toward the bushes and sniffed wildly at the ground. S/he had found something. But what?

She stepped forward, and pushed aside the thick layer of brush. There was a path. Someone had covered it up.

"Monty," said Mnem, with unwonted pride. "You are a genius."

Monty preened, and held hir mouth open for a reward.

[Dark]

"Oh, yes. Cheers for Monty. Why didn't you just come back to camp, you dolt? Now we have to walk all the way back and get our stuff. You better be able to find the trail again."

She stomped off, grumpy from extended coffee-deprivation. It didn't really take that long to get back to camp--it only took about ten minutes, walking in a straight line, and Minh couldn't help but wonder why it had taken so long going the other way.

Still, it was rather invigorating having a definite direction to travel again, and they packed up camp in record time. They were back at the trail head in under an hour, and by then Monty had stopped nipping at her heels. Forgiveness had been as easy as the surrender of a handful of the huckleberries she'd been saving. She really should have thought of it sooner.

[Bee]

Monty took them eventually to a cave. Mnem grimaced. She hated caves, ever since the last one had turned out to be nothing more than a rabbit hole enlarged by their drug-fueled imaginations. She experienced a bizarre moment of unreality, then, convinced for a few fleeting seconds that this was not actually a cave either, and that perhaps they were back on the mushrooms.

The moment passed. The cave still looked ominous, though, and she couldn't shake the feeling that something unpleasant was going to happen. Impending doom was actually a sensation she was quite accustomed to, at this point, but there were...scratching noises, and moving rocks, and something that faintly resembled chirping. She wondered what the hell the kids were doing in there. Probably nothing she wanted to stumble upon.

But they needed to go in. They were going to help the brats, after all.

Mnem started forward.

[Dark]

Minh inched forward cautiously, sure to let Mnem and Monty wander ahead of her. The cave wasn't completely dark, more of a solid gloom, and she flinched every time she heard something rustle and shift in unseen eddies of the cave wall, both above and below them. She could definitely hear something, but she couldn't distinguish it as anything specific.

She stumbled, and glanced up just in time to see several hundred pairs of eyes gleaming back at her. She peered closer, uneasy, and almost laughed when she realized what they were.

"Mnem, they're Slithey Toves!"

Of course, Slithey Toves could be fairly nasty if provoked, especially those in the wild, but hopefully if they treaded carefully they could avoid being bombarded.

As prevention, she snatched up Monty before she could wander to far. It wouldn't do to have the bander wander off into a nest, and start eating their young or something.