I couldn't help myself with the title... This is obviously for the boardwide event. :)
@Scimitar This is the one I was talking about!
Fox had awoken this morning feeling decidedly
uneasy. She had gone to the creek for a drink, only to find herself unable to lap up any of the water. And when she thought to dig into one of the caches, she could not even force a single morsel of food down her throat. The morning went on like this, Fox feeling queasy and just a bit
off, no matter what she tried to do. Perhaps if she were a smarter wolf she would have gone back to bed and slept it off, but she simply couldn't bring herself to do anything but pace along the creek's bank. After awhile, she moved to the border, prowling and wondering if it was some sixth sense to warn her of intruders.
It was about four hours into this that the sky began to look, well,
wrong. Fox heard herself whining, a gurgled sound that trickled from her throat. She didn't know what was happening, and if there was one thing Fox feared, it was the things she did not understand. Where the birds had once been twittering and cawing above her head in the trees, they now fell silent, creating an even more eerie setting.
A lot of the references in here will confuse anyone unfamiliar with the game
Ōkami.
Here's the Wikipedia link.
Amaterasu stared up at the sky as it progressively started to look weirder and weirder, and suddenly the sun slowly became blotted out by something dark and foreboding. A little sliver of pitch black that was moving across the sun with the slow, uncaring confidence of a continent. She stared, but made sure to keep her gaze slightly to the right or left of the sun. And the more it went on, the more terrified she became. The sun was dying. Amaterasu was dying! The wolf Goddess of the sun! She was being... drowned out by... something! What was going on? Was the Earth doomed to destruction? Had Yami - the Lord of Darkness - come back to life? How was that possible?
And then she had an even weirder thought: Was she the real Amaterasu, reincarnate? Was she about to go on some adventure like her namesake had so long ago? What? That would be impossible! Wouldn't it? It could happen, she supposed. But then... If she really were Amaterasu incarnate, wouldn't that mean that she would be dying right now, since the sun was dying? She shook her head. She didn't know... She just didn't know. She lay down where she was and hid her face beneath her paws, feeling quite sick to her stomach.
Danica's fur had been on edge all morning, but she had dismissed it as perhaps a bit of indigestion. As the day wore on, though, it failed to vanish, and her unease grew. Then the day began to darken far before it was naturally supposed to. Her ears tipped back as she glanced at the sun, looking away just as quickly to save her eyes.
At first she wasn't worried. She had seen a partial eclipse as a pup and recalled the dimming sun. Her father had explained to her then that such things were natural, not to be feared, just one of the unexplainable wonders of the sky. However, as it continued to grow darker, she glanced up once more, then took off towards the main meeting site of the pack. If something strange was going on, she wasn't about to stay out here isolated. Her instincts screamed pack and she followed without hesitation.
Danica - I hope it's OK that I assume you made it to the meeting site!
Edit: Arses -
@Fox, I thought this was the pack-wide response to the Eclipse! >_< Sorry!
@Danica - perhaps these two could go find Fox at the border?
Bazi was a practical creature. She had zero tolerance for the idea that there might be something beyond the law of nature, and greeted every situation with a
realistic mindset, if not always a very patient or understanding one.
But this was new. It was as though they were frog spawn in a puddle, and something large was leaning over to get a better look. For all her beliefs in common sense, Bazi struggled to keep fear at bay, and - like Danica - she rushed for the rendezvous site when the situation did not seem to be getting any better.
Her cream-coloured comrade was already there, looking uneasy but markedly less stressed than the frightened Beta, who arrived panting and wide-eyed at the meeting point. Without a word, she brushed up alongside Danica and stayed, breath puffing quickly out of her nostrils, as close to her packmate as possible.
You're both fine! Since I'm not sure of Amaterasu's status, you can go ahead and skip her in the posting order for now. She's not near the lot of them, from what I gather.
Suddenly feeling rather vulnerable at the pack's border, Fox turned inward, scampering as quickly as she could to the clearing that served as Swiftcurrent's emergency plan. When she arrived, she was not completely unsurprised to see two of her packmates had already made it there: Bazi and Danica. Fox gave them a half-hearted look, and then sat uneasily in the grass. It felt as if the world was on pause.
“What the shit is going on?” she asked breathlessly when the sky darkened to a shade of twilight. It was more of a rhetorical question, but she would gladly listen to any explanation given to her.
Alrighty ^^
Bazi was the first to get the same idea as she, charging into the clearing practically on her heels. She appeared not to be taking the phenomena well, not that Danica could blame her. The longer it progressed the more uneasy she felt. She might have seen something similar to this before but that didn't mean it was exactly the same.
The Beta moved in close and Danica, normally one for boundaries, made no move to prevent her from it. Her ears laid back as she heard pawsteps fast approaching, but relaxed a bit when she took note of Fox coming in fast. She wasted no time in vocalizing what the rest of them were obviously thinking.
Danica shook her head. "
No clue. I've seen the sun go dim before, but never like this, and it never lasted this long." She resisted the urge to growl, hating the writhing nerves in her gut. Danica was not a wolf who liked things to be out of her control or knowledge. The fact that she didn't know what was going on was pissing her off, even moreso than the situation itself.
A breathless Fox arrived next, looking as distraught by the whole thing as her co-leader. Only Danica managed to retain some modicum of calm, but soon revealed that this was not the first time the world had ended in her presence - a revelation that earned a suspicious look from Bazi until common sense restored itself as a feature of her personality.
There was nothing they could do. Fox sat down and Bazi copied, keeping close to Danica's side. "I don't like it," the fretting girl grumbled, stupidly turning her eyes toward the sun. She yelped with fright at the uncharacteristic intensity of it, turning her scrunched-up, stinging eyes into the crook of their only eclipse veteran's shoulder. "Is it getting stronger?"
Fox watched on, unable to keep herself from glancing up at the sun that was overtaken by shadow. It didn't make sense. This lasted for several minutes before whatever just happened began to do so... in reverse. If the other two ladies had made any remarks, Fox only had deaf ears. The phenomena that was the sky today slowly but surely went back to some semblance of normal, although Fox still could not remove the feeling of unease from her gut.
“Whatever the fuck that was, it seems to be going away.” The girl shifted her weight between her two front paws, wondering if this would somehow become a common occurrence. She certainly hoped not. Having some weird pseudo night in the middle of the day was not Fox's idea of fun.
Fox was obviously far from paying attention to anything but the phenomena, not that Danica blamed her. Bazi, however, seemed to be relying on her proximity to Danica for reassurance. Not that she minded. Honestly, she was enjoying the contact a little more than she should given the present situation. Heck, she never claimed to be good at denying temptation.
Danica shut her eyes as the apex hit, not opening them again until Fox reported that it seemed to be ending. "I don't know what that was, but let's not have another one." She responded, looking at her companions. Her nerves were still on edge but the adrenaline had left her and she felt a bit heavy for the loss. Might be time for a nap, she thought.
Bazi squeezed her eyes shut against the weirdness (umbra or penumbra or whatever the hell it was; the frightened wolf knew none of those words and did not care to learn them), but she couldn't help but feel the total absence of sunlight for a brief second as the phenomena reached its zenith. When she eventually opened one eye into Danica's fur, the whole thing was over - and the first opportunity to feel a twinge of embarrassment for not facing the music presented itself. "Eh.. sorry," she grumbled, withdrawing her face and bum-shuffling awkwardly away. After confirming that the sun had returned and looked to be staying, she asked of Danica: ".. do those.. 'things' happen often, down here?"
Fox pricked her ears forward, also listening for an answer from Danica... since she seemed to be the de facto expert on this particular phenomenon. Fox had certainly never seen anything like it, but perhaps it only happened once every two years. In that case, it would make sense that Bazi had not seen it either, considering the Alpha believed her Beta to be roughly the same age as her.
She thought nothing of the close quarters that Bazi had held with Danica. The two were pack-mates, and huddling together when frightened only seemed natural. If Fox had not been scared out of her mind, she might have done just that.
Danica ignored Bazi's apology, not out of rudeness, but because she wasn't in any way bothered by her proximity. Instead, she addressed her question. "Not to my knowledge. I've only seen one before, and like I said, it wasn't that long." She glanced dubiously up. "Not sure if they are a regular occurrence or not. I hope not, in any case."
She shivered. "Well, at least it's over now."
Bazi nodded at Danica's assessment, and was about to fire a number of follow-up question at their de facto naturalist when she felt her insides turn and twist - the gastric aftermath of the kind of stress associated with the end of the world. The petite wolf pressed her tail against her belly and grimaced. Time to leave. Suddenly and without so much as a muttered goodbye, Bazi scampered off towards the bushes - with any luck, neither Fox nor Danica would follow.
Exiting!
Fading out here. Thanks for the thread!
No sooner had Danica finished her answer did Bazi suddenly depart. Fox didn't ask, but she did shoot Danica a quick,
“I need a drink.” If wolves drank beer, Fox would have been all over that shit. As it were, Fox would have to settle for the cool, calming water of the creek.