Ankyra Sound No, I haven't had no dope, lift up the velvet rope

By now, Wylla was mostly at home in the strand, so wandering across the black beach in the dark felt safe enough. The occasional crab scuttled by underfoot, clicking claws at her in a threatening manner if she got too close, and sometimes a misstep would send her ankle down into a tide pool, but the bay's shape was familiar now. She could navigate even in the low light, though surely not as well as a wolf who hadn't spent the last year or so inland.

She stooped at the edge of a particularly deep pool, its surface inky and black from the sky's reflection, and breathed a subtle ripple over its face. Down in the depths there nestled an octopus. Not as well versed in what was appropriate fare and what wasn't as her brothers, the little huntress began to devise a plan to fish it up, and some twenty minutes later she had done just that.

It was a while before its long arms stopped squirming around. When they stilled enough to hold, Wylla bit into one and immediately regretted it as the still-active cup on its underside found a grip on her tongue and stuck there.

For @Chusi but anyone's welcome.

It was hard for her to do anything but wander over the borders like she had done for nearly a year while she was being groomed to take Arturo's place. Anytime she did, she felt like a part of Arturo and her family was still with her. She let out soft, mournful cries at night too, hopefully never too loud to wake anyone up. But perhaps her family would recognize it. And they would come live with her. And then she'd be the happiest wolf ever.

But tonight was different. She had no urge to walk over the borders and instead went closer to to where the sand touched the sea, the winter air still as cold as ever. But the night was, for a chance, not dark and full of terror. It was home. Under the night sky, she was free - on the beach, she was home. But under that same sky and in that same home stood a figure, seemingly busy with something. Did she recognize her? Chusi couldn't say she did.

She trotted up to the figure with a soft "woof". Hiya. She said softly, hating the thought of waking someone up.

If Wylla had known that the source of the nightly howls—not loud enough to wake her, but Wylla was oft about at that hour and was made inexplicably irate by simple and innocent things—was this very wolf, then her reception of the unfamiliar figure would have been more along the lines of telling her to shut up. As it was, she spotted the white blaze on the other girl's chest first, making its way toward her on the pebbled beach while she grappled with the offensive tentacle. She didn't recognize Chusi, just as Chusi didn't recognize her.

Good thing. If Lycaon was jealous and possessive of Ingram's attention, then Wylla, starved for familial contact, was downright proprietorial.

Instead she rose to her feet with the tentacle dangling from her lips and slowly unfurled her tongue as Chusi drew closer. The black wolf cut an odd figure, with a long and narrow face, a broad chest, legs laced with muscle where her own were stilts, and a curiously droopy pelt, but Wylla excused it all as a trick of the light. In lieu of a greeting, she displayed the sucker that was firmly attached to her tongue and rolled her pale yellow-orange eyes balefully up to the other wolf as if to say, whatever did I do to deserve this ultimate punishment?

Oh. She let out, surprised at what was dangling from the other's muzzle. In the dark of night, she did not recognize exactly what it was meant to be, but it was clear that it was not supposed to be anywhere on the face of a wolf.

Having never heard of stranger danger, she stepped closer to get a better look. Uhm, lemme just... ya need help? She struggled with her words as she tried to decipher what she could do to remove the pesky thing. She sniffled at it, followed along the length of it with her eyes, but her only kind-of solution was to pull and hope for the best. Ya mind if I pull?

There were so many crude jokes that Chusi could make regarding Wylla's compromising position. She had a long and thick something-or-other crammed in her mouth. Had the roles been reversed, Wylla wouldn't have hesitated to make so many jokes, but she was the devil incarnate. Luckily, the other was a saint and didn't utter a single obscenity. Instead, she offered aid.

Maybe it was possible to have friends after all, even for her. The sucker was firmly attached to her tongue at this point, but she proffered the tentacle for Chusi's inspection. The rest of the suckers were probably dead and wouldn't grab on, but then again, what did Wylla know about octopi? The other offered to pull and, hoping that it would be just that simple, Wylla hesitantly nodded.

Chusi had always been quickest to offer aid and was a firm believer in "do to others what you'd like them to do to you." If she was in the other's position, she would want as much help she could gather to rid her of whatever was stuck to her body. Besides, her jokes never landed. She wasn't mean enough to joke around.

She approached the thing carefully, and took it in her mouth. She regretted doing it because it was slimy and wet and everything sea-y and gooey. Shortly; it was awful. Still, she was a wolf of her word, and help she would! With a jerk of her head, she pulled as hard on the thing as she could, hoping she was stronger than the sucker but not as strong as the other's tongue muscles... Having your tongue ripped out seemed rather painful.

It took only two blinks for Chusi to close the distance between them, grasp the tentacle, and give it a hard yank. Admittedly, Wylla didn't have any other ideas to offer. But when her head was wrenched painfully forward, a crick developed in her neck at the same exact moment that the tentacle peeled free of her tongue, removing about six layers of skin with it. With a furious yowl, Wylla backpedaled and began working her bleeding tongue across the roof of her mouth with an accusing glare.

"Ow!" she whined, pinning her dark ears back as she attempted to twist her neck to the side and stopped short when pain built in its base. "That hurt, why'd you have to be so rough?" Again, Wylla didn't have any other bright ideas on removing tentacles from tongues and would likely have offered the same sort of assistance, but it was always so easy to take physical pain and morph it into emotional anguish as well for her that doing so came naturally.