Wolf RPG

It took a whole day and a half for Saena to realize the locusts would not harm her or her pups, but still, venturing out beyond the broken ridge is difficult. Everywhere she steps there are locusts, some crawling along the strand, others just dead carapaces littering the sand. The sea that laps at the shore is laden with dead locusts that drift in-and-out with the tide. Beyond the ridge, the forests are spindly and what green has unfurled there is stripped away. With it goes Saena's desire to remain on the coast, herself oblivious to how far the plague truly goes. She vows to give her wolves a few more days to rest, then they will move on to where the land doesn't crawl with bugs.

For now, the pups are in the care of some wolf or another at the ridge—no doubt they're either thrilled or terrified by the locust swarm—and Saena is free to wander. She trails down the coast, her steps slow and meandering, with eyes to the territories beyond. The Ravensblood that stood so proud beside the plateau is stripped bare of foliage and appears far less ominous than it ever has before. Gyrfalcon's Keep, normally swathed in thin trees, now resembles a moat of very elongated spikes. And though the coast offers the locusts little, they still flutter in a choking cloud over the sea and shore, and Saena shakes every few moments to dislodge them from her coat.

His curiosity gets the best of him, and he decides travel further up shore to see how far the locusts reach. It seems there are more of them now; they tread across the sand in search of more grass and there are hundreds if not thousands swarming in the air... in there wake it is not hard to miss the stripped fronds and bare brushes. It is not hard to fathom how bad this could be.

He lifts a paw to bat a hitchhiker from his nose, and his ears twitch whenever one brushes past them. There are locusts as far as the eye can see, and he is certain his stay up north will be a short one. But he plods along for now and ahead, through the curtain of insects, he can see another wolf. She is fairing no better than he, for as many locusts fly around her as him.

One flies within a paw's length of his snout, and he snaps at it, catching it and smashing it between his teeth. "You know what," he comments as he draws to within speaking distance, tail swishing in a relaxed, friendly way. "These dang things aren't half bad as a snack."

Saena draws her breaths in short puffs. She's fearful of a locust lodging itself in her nostrils should an updraft of breath draw it there, and with so many clogging the sky, it's a distinct possibility as far as she knows. One lands at the base of her ear and she can hear its mandibles grinding and crunching whatever it has in its grasp. She gives a violent shake of her head, and in so doing, her vision comes 'round to a smokey figure in the near distance.

Saena freezes, anticipating a potential confrontation, but the wolf's approach is suggestive of a laid-back attitude, and his words go far to dissuade her uncertainty about a stranger. Saena's red-backed ears cup as she seeks the confidence of leadership and arranges her posture to tell of her rank and standing without outright flaunting it, but she's silent for a moment longer as she scrutinizes Rexxar. He's a lofty wolf, not unlike her father and Lasher in that sense, and her eyes are drawn to the dark smudges around his electric blue eyes. Not many wolves bear markings like her own, and it makes him stand out immediately.

Even without his unique appearance, however, Rexxar is memorable for his attitude toward the locusts, which pulls a grimace across Saena's face. She can't imagine eating one of them. The spindly legs sticking in her teeth, the clacking mandicles pulling at her tastebuds... she pulls a face and says, "they're all yours, have at 'em," with a sweep of her snout as if to give him the buffet. Yet in spite of how disgusting eating a bug sounds and in spite of her vivid, nausea-inducing imagery, Saena is curious, and when she thinks Rexxar isn't looking, she presses her tongue out the side of her mouth and makes an effort to wrap a flying locust up in it (and, of course, she fails at this).

He hums thoughtfully as he lifts his head and his blue eyes drift across the many bugs that surround them, from the ones in the air to the ones that crawled about their feet. "I don't think I'm that hungry," he muses with a casual roll of his broad shoulders, before her turns his gaze back to her.

She is a small, young wolf with curious, copper accents. His drab coat of grays is rather dull in comparison, his own accents simply darker shades of what he is made of. Yet the most curious thing of all is her missing tail, and though a joke about the ravenous bugs is quick to form in his mind, it does not come off his tongue.

"Have you ever seen anything like this?" His head whips around to snap at a locust who tickles his flank as it crawls across him.

The tip of her tongue wiggled enticingly, but she slurped it back into her jowls with a shudder when a locust dared to actually light upon it. Luckily for her, this all occurred before Rexxar's attention returned to her. Her ears perked almost guiltily when his gaze returned to her, but the sheepish Alpha female's curious actions went unseen, presumably. That, or the stranger had an impeccable straight face and was able to keep from her the knowledge that she'd been caught.

She agreed with him. There was likely no wolf in the world hungry enough to attempt to consume the horde overhead, and she didn't want to think of what might happen to one who tried it. The locusts were dirty and vile things from the look of them, and from their ravenous behaviour, they were as like to eat the wolf. She pressed that thought away.

"I saw a tornado once," she shared, "but that was just wind." Just wind had irreversibly altered the landscape of her first territory by bringing lightning and fire, but she didn't share that.

"I've never seen a tornado," he shares. "I don't know if I want to. I have heard of them and have seen some of the destruction after they have gone through..." he pauses, and his brows furrow in thought as he recalls some of the damages he has seen from the swirling winds. They wreak havoc on a landscape, but though the walking may be more treacherous and some covers may be changed for a long time, life went on fairly uninterrupted from what he has seen. But as he peers around the hoard of locusts, and having noted what little is left behind once they have fed, he opines, "I would probably prefer a tornado to this though. Something tells me things could get a whole lot worse than just bugs in your fur."

Saena glanced overhead once more, inadvertently placing one pale eye in a locust's line of flight. It pattered against her eyelid and she started and squinted, then irately turned her jaws to snap at the offending insect. She missed it by a hair's breadth.

"There are signs of it still in these lands," said Saena, who assumed the ridge she currently settled with her wolves was another example of a tornado's impressive strength. But she neither invited Rexxar to see it nor expected him to go seeking it, even as he said he would prefer a tornado to the current swirling vortex of locusts.

"Are you nuts?" asked Saena with a note of disbelief in her voice and a nervous shift of her form. It wasn't hard to tell she was personally affected by Rexxar's perceived nonchalance about tornadoes, though she ought not to have been. Just moments ago, he'd said he didn't want to see one. "Tornadoes destroy your home. These are gross, but... they're just bugs. They don't even bite hard." Naturalists everywhere would be ashamed to know Saena was once one of them, for the lasting destruction to foliage and the consequences of it passed her by completely.

"Just a bit, but not enough to worry about," he quips with a roguish smile and a twitch of his ears. It is not missed on him that he has touched a personal cord with his comment, but he is not one to pry for details. "Tornadoes might uproot trees and make a mess of the land," he explains, "but these bugs... They are eating everything. Just look." He gestures with a jerk of his head toward the brushy banks, and takes several steps in their direction. Peering close between the locusts, it is easy to see the creatures feeding, and even easier to see the stripped fronds and limbs of the plants they have already eaten. "I got a bad feeling," he says with a slow shake of his head and his mouth drawn into a pensive line. "If this has affected as much land as I bet it has, that this is going to put things out of balance. It's going to get worse. Wolves are going to go hungry."

She misunderstood him a second time, and parted her jaws to protest his rogue attitude. She took him to mean that tornadoes did only a small amount of damage, taking herself (and him) much too seriously to realize that it was a joke. It was a sad state of affairs. Saena was once quick to quip and join in, and now she couldn't even recognize a joke when it slapped her in the face. Before she could compose any words and throw them out at him, though, Rexxar rejoined with his theory on the insects, and she clapped her jaws shut when she realized he was probably right.

She followed the line of his sight to the undergrowth, which was losing volume by the minute. The lone wolf had a point. Yet Saena was unwilling to believe that little bugs were capable of unseating the balance of nature—something not even a large animal could do easily, and these were miniscule—and she masked a scoff by coughing lightly. "No one will go hungry. You just said they're edible, didn't you?" the Alpha female pointed out, thinking herself quite clever indeed. "And anyway, it'll grow back. It grows back every year, so it'll grow back after this." She misjudged how quickly the land would recover, of course. With how quickly the leaves came in the springtime, Saena assumed they would be just as quick to come back from this. My, how wrong she was.

"It's just like an extension of winter," she tried to reason, though her tone quavered with uncertainty as she watched a pack of locusts devouring the long blades of grass fringing the coast.

He raised his brows, gazing at the pale she wolf with a benign smirk and slicked back ears as she tried to seemingly convince herself that hard times were not on the way. "If I were you, I'd get to filling my belly while I still could," he commented, stepping back shoreline brush and away from the insatiable insects. Perhaps he would find that not as much land had been devastated as it would seem, but he bore sincere doubt of that. "That's what I am going to do, anyway. Good luck to ya!" He tipped his muzzle to the copper-accented female, and turned away to lope down the shore. True to his word, he would get to hunting and scrounging up what food he could before all that was left was twigs and dead bugs.

Saena's lips quirked into a disbelieving grimace. Her concern was hardly on filling her belly so full she couldn't move. She had displaced wolves waiting for her to take them somewhere safe and prosperous, and pups who were just now old enough to start understanding their situation. Their words would soon come to mouth, assuming Saena hadn't unintentionally stunted their development. No, while Rexxar had the time of the world to find food and gorge himself, Saena was an Alpha and barely had time to sleep properly.

"Good luck to you as well," she told him, rolling her shoulders in a passive shrug as he turned and walked away. As he left, she leaned down to pluck one of the insects off the ground, chewed it thoughtfully, and made a face. Disgusting. The advice of a stranger wasn't always wise to heed, but she would think on what he'd told her for days to come, whether or not she believed in it.