Taking the Initiative [Dark]

[Dark]

Minh grinned; Mnem really was a canine after her own heart.

The pickings weren't all that spectacular, though, and Minh couldn't help but get the impression that their attackers hadn't been very good at what they did. And wouldn't it figure she and Mnem didn't even rate professionals. It was a horribly depressing thought, and she kicked one of the still-twitching corpses out of spite.

They found a little bit of money, and several days' worth of food, and several rather rusty, ill-used hunting knives. And arrows. Which weren't very helpful, as Mnem had pretty much destroyed all the bows mid-rampage.

She was loitering, wandering a bit aimlessly amidst the carnage to try and keep her muscles from freezing up, when she saw the eyeball roll past. It took a rather large sum of self-control to make herself turn around.

Monty had stationed hirself by one of the larger of hir fallen prey--a big-boned male, which s/he was currently working rather meticulously on to remove the tissue from the skull.

She watched with something resembling horrified curiosity.

What the fuck...?

[Bee]

Monty's activities had caught Mnem's eye as well. The little bander was pulling the brains of the slain male with hir teeth, eating the now-useless organ with malicious glee. When all the flesh had been stripped, Monty grabbed the large skull--chalk-white with large spots that were damp and dark red with blood--in hir little paws and lifted it, placing it on hir own head like a helm. It was one of the strangest things Mnem had ever seen. And that was saying something, considering some of the experiments Minh got up to.

Then Monty lifted hirself onto her hir hind legs and let out the loudest, most piercing, most vicious howl Mnem could recall the bander emitting. It seemed to be directed at the woods, where the last of the banders had fled. Some kind of warning, perhaps, or a declaration of dominance. Either way, it was disturbing and faintly chilling.

Mnem cleared her throat.

"Right then," she said. "Let's gather what we want to haul away from these pathetic wastes, get back to the path, and find ourselves a place to wash off."

[Dark]

Right. The path. And...where was that, exactly?

Minh shuffled around in a tight circle, surveying the darkening woods with no small degree of trepidation. The thought of being lost for all eternity in woods infested with all kinds of previously unknown, nasty beasties was not at all pleasant, but she really had no idea what direction they'd come from. It didn't help she was horrible with directions to begin with.

"So, uhm. Yeah. A path. That would be great. Which direction would that be in, again?"

Admitting she had no clue was rather humiliating, but she didn't feel particularly like getting any more lost than they already were, so she decided to go with honesty. This time.

They were so fucked...

Oh! Genius.

"Hey, Mnem. I don't suppose you can just float up to the top of yonder tree, and point us in the right direction?"

[Bee]

Mnem nodded. "I could do that."

She pushed herself gently off the ground. But this time, as soon as she began to hover, a sluggish weariness that wasn't there when her feet were on the ground began to encroach. She tried to ignore it and lift herself further into the air--it had been so easy, before, like she had been doing it all her life--but she got no higher than perhaps seven feet before the weariness morphed into outright fatigue, and Mnem floated back down to the earth before she fell down.

Kicking angrily at the dirt, she said, "I don't understand. I'm too tired to fly."

But she was already feeling less exhausted, now that she was on the ground. How wretchedly frustrating. She hated it when there were limitations to what she could do.

She tried to lift herself into the air once more. She got maybe a foot this time, before her body just gave out and she knew that she wouldn't be able to fly for a little while. How long, she didn't know.

"Damn and double damn! I suppose we're walking." With an annoyed frown, she said, "So, what is the direction you'd most like to wander off into aimlessly?"

[Dark]

Well, fuck.

Minh's ears twitched in agitation, and she stomped about rather angrily for a moment before she settled enough to start analyzing their options. It would prove to reason, since the bandits had attacked from the tree line, they would find the road in the direction the bandits had approached she and Mnem. Which was only true so long as their attackers hadn't circled around or something, before making their nefarious presence known. It was circumstantial evidence, at best, but it was their best option, as she pointed out rather unhappily to her canine comrade.

She kicked a bandit-body, hoping the therapeutic practice of violence would make her feel better. It didn't. Much.

And then a horrible thought occurred to her, the attack and subsequent flight playing through her mind in rapid, vibrant panes.

"Oh, fuck. Mnem, where is the pack?"

[Bee]

Just when she thought their situation couldn't possibly get worse. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and tried to ward off the headache that was simply dying to surface. They could work without the pack, she told herself. It had only contained all of their food and supplies, after all.

She grimaced. She couldn't even stop being sarcastic in her own head. "We must have lost it when we were getting shot up by arrows and flying. We'll just have to try to make do with what we get off the bandits. If I can identify anything edible in the woods, we can grab that as well, and I'm sure Monty will be more than happy to slaughter us a meal." She gestured in the direction from which the bandits had come--it was, as Minh had pointed out, their only lead. "Let's just go. We're losing daylight."

[Dark]

Losing daylight? Daylight was gone. They were very firmly stuck somewhere in the realm of twilight, though Minh couldn't be sure, as the quality of light wasn't very good to begin with. But in an effort to maintain a more pleasant group-mentality, she resisted the urge to point that out.

For such horribly inadequate bandits, the deadly trio actually managed to salvage several packs of decent quality, which they stuffed with everything even relatively useful. They were feeling a bit paranoid, after everything that had happened so far, and weren't taking any chances.

Monty led the way through the forest, a pale shadow against the gloom of the trees, leading them in the relative direction they had chosen. Minh followed along and tried to contain her complaining. Tried, anyway.

She tripped, stubbing her little toe, and blew up: "We have the most unimaginably bad luck, ever. Have you recently been cursed? Because I can't think of any other reason. I mean, fuck--"

The rest of her rant was a garbled mess of profanities with a fluency that even had Monty twitching her ears in disbelief, and no person could really be expected to understand.

[Bee]

Mnem stood there for a moment and let Minh fly with the profanities. Perhaps a minute or two went by before Mnem said, as calmly as her irritation with their situation would allow: "Minh, we need to keep going quietly. We don't want to attract undue attention. Especially by more people who might want to have us arrowed to death. We find our way back to the path, somehow. I don't feel comfortable sleeping until we do."

If worse came to worse, they could always set Monty out to be their guard-bander, but while the little skull-wearing munchkin was certainly terrifying, Mnem was not confident that s/he would be able to take out a large group of non-banders while Mnem and Minh slept. Maybe she could just be an alert-bander.

As they wandered through the night--even darker as they found themselves walking under a thicker and thicker forest cover--Mnem thought that she had better equip herself for self-induced insomnia, because it didn't look like they would find the path anytime soon.

[Dark]

They had been trudging on steadily for hours, and Minh had settled into a sort of zombie-like trance. She wasn't tired, really--she was used to staying up days at a time when she was working, though she didn't usually pull such stints after brawling--there just wasn't anything that promoted any sort of higher brain function. There wasn't anything particularly interesting to look at--tree, tree, and hey, another tree--and Mnem didn't seem all too interested in talking. The few times Minh had tried to strike up a conversation she'd received grunts and the occasional annoyed growl. It just wasn't worth the effort expended.

So, they were walking. Through the woods. And there were lots of trees. Lots, and lots, of trees.

The second time she ran into a tree, she sunk down into a miserable puddle of abject misery and woe.

"This sucks. Feed me."

[Bee]

Mnem was exhausted, physically and mentally, and she wanted nothing more than to curl up at the base of one of these endless godforsaken trees and catch a bit of rest, but she was determined to reach some point of safety before she allowed herself to sleep.

At least, that was the game plan. At this point she could scarcely put one foot in front of the other, and now Minh was demanding food, when what they really needed was a massive injection--no, an IV drip--of caffeine.

"Of course this sucks," Mnem grumbled. There was a little semi-cave made by extremely large and exposed tree roots just a little bit ahead; Mnem thought it would be a good place to sit for a moment and collect her thoughts. Not that there was much going on upstairs, at this point.

She settled into the small cave and got halfway through the sentence "So stop your bloody whining before I order Monty to eat your kidneys" before plummeting headlong into sleep.