Bright and early and with malice aforethought, Caiaphas cast off from her grotto in the direction of Donnelaith, toting with her the measly two advocates she had in her ambitious quest after strife.
Shortly before her departure, she'd acquired some coral root (a sedative), a psilocybin mushroom cap and some mysterious volatile substance (likely something she'd used as a binding agent) and mashed it all together, forming a viscous, downright unpalatable paste. Afterward, with Vlad as her lickspittle assistant, the wench had pinned Lusca to the sands and forcefully smudged the blend 'neath her tongue.
With no hallucinogen tolerance to speak of, the effects immersed her tiny body within the hour––a slow vignetting euphoria at first, closely followed by conjurations of closed-eye visuals and the groggy blurring of all fleshly sensation. Colors came alive! The earth breathed against the soles of her feet! The seawaves roared full belly-laughs as she swung sloppily around the sound at a ground-eating lope, drifting in and out of a straight line, her vision swimming like a shoal of fish as she went.
Caiaphas' intent to keep Lusca laid up on Saltwinter's territory while she and manchild squared were MIA (an intelligent woman she was, knowing her snide peon would seek recourse from the wolves of Donnelaith were she to accompany the trio)... was without a shred of doubt executed with criminal genius. Get your captive high as a kite, that'll take care of it. Remarkably irresponsible. But genius.
After a bit of wandering, Lusca found herself sitting by the tide pools. Her paws were anchored firmly in the sand, but her body was floaty, a balloon tethered to a block of lead––cernuous and tilting as ghost fingers prodded her shoulder. She dazed, droopy-lidded, upon a crab for what felt like an eternity and faint audio hallucinations slurred in her ear. "You say something?"
Nausea onset by motion sickness flipped her stomach and Lusca's mouth tugged back with a hrk, black lips receding over her teeth as a gobbet of bile gathered in her throat. Hunching over, she purged a beauteous pile of partially-digested matter onto the crustacean chilling in the bulk of her shadow, gums now pale and frothy from her sick. A look of misery sagged on her jowls for a moment, but disappeared once she noticed that her little trip-sitter had disappeared under her stomach contents (which, in her presently altered state, appeared before her eyes in mesmerizing technicolor). While trying to clear off the vomitus with her foot, she hissed behind her teeth like a shaken and cracked open bottle of ginger beer. "Siiiick." She spoke to the crab––which was, more specifically, just a rock. To any sober individual, that is.
A sudden horror washed over her. Visible in her puke were bits of red shell. What was it that she'd had for lunch? Mmmmyikes. Seafood? She chewed her cheek. "Oh dude... That might've been an amigo of yours. I'm sorry." The girl rambled. "They died for a noble cause. Like, circle of life type stuff." On. "I didn't really enjoy them much anyway." And on. Pause. "Not a shellfish kinda gal, dig? Take it to the tramps, or take it to the chumps." And on.
Out loud, none of her words were intelligible, but instead a long yabbering series of delirious tongue-fumbles.
Hope ya don't mind me :P
The blue eyed soldier had been guarding the borders of the pack, when his brain gave him a 'kick' into another personality (goofy, once again). Confused, he moved away, wandering through the cold land. Suddenly, something caught his eye, or more like his ear. He squinted, wondering for a moment of what animal made that sound before deciding he should go check it out.
A dark wolf appeared in the distance, and her speech was clearly gibberish. How James should've reacted, he didn't know. He just stood there, debating if he should run or attack the insane wolf. Being a pretty nice guy, he finally chose to just
ask if the wolf was okay.
He nudged the wolf, then began nervously,
"Uhh.. Are you okay?" He was a wolf that usually was pretty chill, but now, he was kinda creeped out.
He stood there, wide eyed, really freaked out.
not at all! thanks for hopping in. lol @ the gif
His concerned nudge (a gesture that would never been carried out to fruition in the original copy of Old World Lusca) transferred to sound as an attention grabbing hey you! She slowly turned to stare at James; his face was presented to her in high definition, then as it spiraled out in fractals her head traced circles following it. "Why do we yell?" She uttered. There was an edgy expression on his face but she was too fascinated by the incremental movements that made his entire outline pulsate gooey, infrared patterns.
Distorted soundbites melted from his mouth, oozing off his tongue and his enamels. She focused on this, squinting as the "uhh" liquidized and spilled from his lips onto the sand underfoot. In her color enhanced world, where the sea sighed in kaleidoscopic texture, how could she
not be okay? She'd settled into a corporeal sensitivity and mental acuity that felt incorrupt to her. For a mind often mired in negativity, the sensations were new and in that moment they were everything. All in all,
"not bad, not bad." Lusca nodded her head for approximately twenty seconds longer than gesturally necessary, before craning her neck to view him from a new perspective––
upside down.
"The plants make you see feelings. I didn't even know I had feelings before but now that I see them I think I understand their purpose."Hopefully those words came out intact because great googly moogly, it's all gone to shit.
He just stood there, regretting every moment that had led up to this. He glanced behind himself, making sure all options of escaping were clear, before bringing his attention back to the crazy wolf. Sadly, this time, James had no jokes, no tricks, nothin' up his sleeves (actually, he didn't have sleeves anyway). She did some weird stuff, that, to James, has never occurred that any creature could do anything like it.
Either this wolf was possessed, or it was intoxicated. And James didn't know anything about herbs, resulting to him wondering if he should try to get the demon out. "Soo," he began with a anxious laugh ,"What's your name-" He stopped himself from addressing her as 'crazy wolf', which would defiantly not be considered nice.
"Emmm.." She drudged her eyebrows over her eyes, troubling her memory at the male's request to identify herself. Why was it such an endeavor? "Mosh... pig?" She responded less-than-smoothly, one eyelid drooping as the sedative administered to her flexed its muscles, threatening to haul her into its undertow. The sheer industrial strength of her resistance to the lace was something for the books.
A strange splicing of his figure enthralled her, and she was momentarily distracted by the way his features whirled in a maelstrom until the effect could sustain itself no longer, and Lusca's attention on James perked back up to a present state. She flailed towards him asudden, sticking her face in his ear to slur: "hey. We should stage a coup."
By far, this was the weirdest name he has ever heard. Mosh Pig. Who even names their child 'Mosh Pig'? Suddenly Mosh Pig jumped near him. "Hey, whoa, whoa. No. Personal space, jeez," he said, stumbling away.
His tail twitched, his blue eyes searching for a conversation starter. "Moshy, you wanna... uhhh...," he started ,"wanna go hunt crabs?" He asked as his eyes fell on the red creatures. Honestly, he thought he was a pretty good hunter. Maybe he could pick up some food for the alpha.
"Personal space is a social construct." She said, giving him an incredulous look when he stumbled backwards as though she were afflicted with an execrable case of leprosy. Whatever, someone out there thought she was sexy enough to be titillated af when she invaded the, in her eyes, variable and subjective distance that measured "personal space."
Something in her stirred when he called her Moshy, like a smothered reminiscence––a hairsplit memory––gasping for oxygen in her chest. Silver fretwork etched underfoot in the wet sand and microscopic crabs flocked to it, wrecking it with their claws the moment her eyes beheld it. Slack-jawed, Lusca stared, then scattered the imaginary creatures with a furious shooing gesture of her paw. But the design had been scuttled into nothing and with it her faint memory.
At his asking, wordlessly she swept to his side and loped ahead, pitching her head back over her shoulders with near grotesque flexibility. "Yo, I forgot your name."
*has a gif problem, and this is the only character i can use gifs on* help i can't stop
James followed the black wolf,
raised eyebrows and slightly confused expression, with the growing urge to fling himself into the sea.
"James," he reminded her curtly. It seemed Moshy had a memory issue, in which would be a slight problem to the grey wolf.
He soon spotted the spider-like crabs, their bright red shells gleaming. He dashed, and for once, did not slip and cause a major injury. He caught the small creature and brought it back, proud of his achievement. Then he remembered that he was with a lunatic, the emotion clearly visible on his face. James wanted to congratulate himself for the successful hunt by feasting, but more things were at risk (like him also losing his sanity). So, to keep the wolf quiet, he nudged the crab towards Moshy.
"Here, you can have it," he said, averting his eyes away from her, just incase it encouraged her to do something weird.
i heard there's a twelve step rehab program
but
The naivety that had to be present for James to think it was possible that his actions could somehow shape Lusca's eccentric behavior whatever way it suited him could be seen as somewhat endearing––misguided, but endearing all the same.
Together they frisked the strand; while James took his enterprises seriously, Lusca was a mere blur in the background, shovel-like snout dragging deep ruts in the sand as she smeared her face and shoulders across the beach like a cur would drag its ass across a shag carpet. Formidable hunter.
As the silver agouti male edged near her, she jerked her head up, wet sand clumped to her face like a dead-sea beauty mask. Her eyes fell to the tiny red creature he deposited at her feet.
"Is that it? Jaaaamiiisooooon." She groaned, throwing herself in a heap across a rock like it was a chaise longue, and she, the Victorian era demoiselle stricken by female hysteria.
"Is sooooo smaaaalll." She said, a few small sobs eking from her throat.
"Fetch me that, over there." She flicked her wrist dismissively towards the sea, whereupon its gusting billows her gaze found the hallucination of a colossus King Crab, frisking about on its legs.
Now, not only was James weirded out and misnamed, he was also insulted. He would correct her endlessly, his hate for being misnamed, with now little hope for her to remember his name. "Its James," he pointed out. "And its not that small..." he mumbled, his confidence slowly diminished by this insane wolf.
But when Moshy told him to go some sand, he wondered if this would be the end of his sanity. Nonetheless, he kept the black wolf distracted. He came back, dropped the sand, like how a young child would, showing off. His expression was on the other side of the spectrum, an adult, tired of babysitting the metaphorical child. "Here is your sand."
His sulky correction over her flubbing his name went in one ear and out the other. A subway of ignorance that she boarded time and time again, and had no hope of ever disembarking as long as she was alive. As James tramped away to collect her wares––the magnificent crab she was making eye-teeth at across the room––Lusca kicked back and brushed her tongue against the sand, the sensation of the individual granule scouring her taste buds flushing every nerve ending in the skin of her nape.
His return was punctuated with a small mound of sand plopped before her. "Thanks." She said. Then, frustrated, swept her paw across the pile and sent it airborne. "BUT IT'S WRONG!" Lusca tantrum'd, a petulant child's black look drawing her brow. "THAT! That! Over THERE!" Thrusting her snout out to the desolate sea, she indicated pointedly––like how obvious could it be.
James, who had great reflexes, just stood there as sand flew across his face, only closing his eyes. As Moshy Gordon Ramsay-ed his pile of sand, he rethought all his life choices that had led him up to the day where his pile of sand was being judged by a lunatic named Moshpig.
"Moshy, there is nothing there," he pointed out. "Are you sure you aren't just imagining it?", he asked, getting very close to figuring out the truth. "Nah, why don't you show me where it is?" he asked, completely dismissing the idea, mostly because he is a stupid potato. A tilt of his head signified her to go ahead, as he had gotten slightly comfortable with the crazed wolf.
"gordon ramsay-ed" is my new favorite verb.
It was as though his request was the heaviest burden in the world the way ugh sloughed from her throat as she flailed around on the back like a capsized tortoise, before finding some sense of equilibrium and drudging to her feet. The minute she was upright, the world around Lusca droned like machinery and she looked to find that the butter-slathered king crab had since ascended from being planar on the horizon to a a higher throne amongst the cloud rummage. Her ears drooped sadly and she craned her neck back, squinting up at the sun. "It's there."
James giggled. Maybe it was because he had finally lost it. In fact, he probably lost it. He was rolling on the ground by now, hysterically laughing.
"There is no crab!" he exclaimed between laughs. He slowly stood up, still softly laughing.
Had anyone seen this, he would never forgive himself for losing his pride. He shook his head,
a small smile still there.
"You know what, I'm not hungry, lets go," he said, but made no movement, to see if Moshy would object.
sorry, just started school so my online presence will be slow going for a while!
There is no crab! he hooted, crumpling into himself like a crushed soda can as he threshed and roared with laughter. Lusca snapped her head aslant, features sullenly laden with her brow yanked down upon her scowling gaze. How dare he ridicule her?! As she exchanged glances between him and the sun, her expression heated with resentment like the sunflares above.
James rose to his feet, lungs apparently emptied of laughter––Lusca lobbed her ears back and sulked. "It was there." She huffed, squinting upwards a final time.
Without any better plans to be had, the omega wordlessly accepted his invitation to follow. "Know what's fun as an activity? Mutiny." She casually said, prancing ahead of him with a lash of her tail.
haha what is scho- OH MY GOD I HAVE HALF A WEEK LEFT OF VACATION
He followed after the dark wolf, wondering what they should do. And as if Moshy could read his mind, she suggested a
not so fun activity.
'Moshy, I am not leading the next french revolution,' he would've said, if he knew what that was. But sadly, he had to go with a less intelligent answer:
"No, that's bad."
He was well aware of painful consequences of rebellion, despite his lack of knowledge. And honestly, he didn't have anything against his alpha whatsoever.
No, that's bad. So nebbish, this one! Despite her vehement disagreement, Lusca didn't have the clarity of mind to argue her point. Instead, she moped, stopping in her tracks and pulling a face at him. "But just a little one." She promised.