Heron Lake Plateau Tiptoe Thru' the Tulips with Me

Owen was still rather jumpy, and having some issues sitting still. Ironically enough this only increased his nervousness though because from somewhere deep in his mind little mini-movies kept popping up in a corner of his awareness, memories of the many times he'd screwed up the courage to venture out and about and paid for it rather sorely. (Damn things refused to minimize or X out, too; it was like the world's worst pop-up ads.) So really, it was much safer to just set down and stay put in one place, wasn't it? Only his feet didn't seem able to do that today. He ventured wide of the pups' rendezvous area and circled about a few times before deciding that if he wasn't going to be able to relax he might as well at least have a destination in mind. Carefully skirting the edges of the couple of small patches of snow lurking in the shade of the trees, he started wandering in the direction of the old densite.

He felt a vague dissatisfaction bubbling in his stomach, and didn't find this plan entirely satisfactory still, knowing that the dugout den was likely to be cold and dead and bare. (Unless something else might have taken up residence inside of it...but no, no no no, that was pretty ridiculous; none of the elder Redhawks would stand for such a thing here in the heart of their territory, surely...surely. Owen tried to talk himself down before he got himself all spun up again, with only limited success.) His steps were quite willing to find themselves diverted before they'd quite arrived, therefore, as his nose caught an intriguing array of strange plant scents, which as he hesitantly stepped nearer also acquired a slight scent of...Mother? It had been a while since she'd been in the area too much, but Owen's ears perked and his tail quirked upward even as his footsteps picked up speed at the hint of aroma buried under the decrepit flowers', nonetheless.

 There was a ragged patch of wilting and brown foliage in a gathered bunch as Owen pushed past the last bit of wild undergrowth and sniffed inquisitively. It all looked pretty much the same to him, but he drew comfort from that dim but once upon a time thoroughly spread scent of his mother's, along with a couple of other wolves' smells of varying degrees of familiarity. Raven's was the one that stood out to him as he sniffed around the somewhat overgrown garden, though; Raven's was the one that drew him to go cutting his way through the middle. The lines engraved in Owen's face grew shallow as he relaxed a little. It still needed a little bit of something else, however, in his still rather turbulently emotional state. Owen balanced himself somewhat precariously on three legs as he hitched a hind one up as high as he safely could, and added his own scent atop the others'. Yes. That was much better, he thought with satisfaction as he crept a few steps away and with a contented sigh at last laid himself down among the dessicated flowerstalks to get himself what he felt was a well-deserved and overdue nap.

Forward-dated! @Tywyll and Fire perhaps, if y'all are still wanting?  ;)  *offers piss-scented bouquets*

He was a mess; resembling something foul that would have been at home in a rotten cache, covered in pond scum, mud, bits of leaf litter, and the odd tuft of a goose feather. Tywyll hadn't meant to get so distracted or so lost on his adventure. He was home now though, slogging across the plateau to one of his favorite napping spots, completely unaware of the panic that his seven-day bender might have caused. He was tired. He needed a nap, a meal,  bath - maybe not in that order.

As he went, Tywyll yawned and half-waddled his way across the wilting grass until he spied a familiar figure. It was weird that nobody noticed him crossing back in to the territory; then again, most of the adults were probably out searching for him. The figure was busying themselves with the undergrowth. Ty sped up and burst from the grass with a yip, and tumbled in to the poorly maintained garden in the next instant, completely missing his intended mark. As his chin hit the dirt, the plants crunched beneath his body and he was left looking wearily up at Owen. But he was smiling anyways, and let out a pleased sigh.

Owen was startled from his pleasant, drowsy reverie with a snort, as the most disgusting odor he could ever have imagined came wafting along to tickle viciously at his innocent nostrils. His head snapped up and his eyes rolled wildly about before settling on a smallish black face planted firmly in the dirt not too far from his own. Sort of, that is: it was a face a little larger than his own, and once upon a time it had been black, but now it was smeared and defiled with a scummy, slimy, half-dried goop that spiked his once ebon pelt into the most hideous of mohawks e'er envisioned, crowned with a small bit of downy goose fluff. Owen froze, his face a mask of confused disgust and horror as his eyes trickled slowly down the form of Tywyll.

And it hadn't been just dirt that the kid had landed in, either. Eeeewwww! Owen's mouth worked in appalled silence for a moment before he could remind it of how to speak. Ffuuuaaagghh... gosh, what 'appened t' you?! He stared at the bigger pup another long moment before recalling with some embarrassment that he himself was probably part of the reason for the mess, and the smell. Owen coughed a little and scuffled at the dirt with one forepaw—a nice clean section of dirt thank you very much. Er, I mean, besides... right here and now. *koff, koff* ...Oops.

The smell of the urine was lost among the many other pungent scents he wore, but even if he could smell it nothing would've taken Tywyll's dopey, half-sleeping grin off of his dirty little face. He was content to lay there for a while longer, but the noises of the other boy made him begrudingly give way to conversation. Ty hoisted himself up and it was then, with his chest inches from the dirt, that he felt the chill of cold air against the warm(-ish) wetness holding between his chest fur. 

The voice was all he needed to remember who this was — a Redhawk, one of the youngsters competing with the Blackthorns for space and food and whatever else. Ty had nothing against them. He was, actually, quite happy to see Owen. Oh, Oh-wennn, he hummed the boy's name, sounding inebriated to some great extent, but it was the exhaustion slowing him down. I just had the best adventure. I mean, no, it was... It was pretty bad. I got lost, but I found these birds — these awful birds — another yawn pulled its way out of Tywyll and then, having lost his train of thought, he hummed and hawed quietly, too weary to continue.

Owen was sort of getting used to the smell... or at the very least, the other oddnesses and stories his fellow pup was sharing were distracting him, somewhat. Owen tucked his own ivory paws in under his chest and felt like his eyeballs were about to pop out of his head, as long and widely as they were riveted to Tywyll's face. There was a certain fascination, too, to the black pup's current state... Owen absolutely had not previously realized that a person could actually get just that dirty.

Whoooaahhh, breathed the younger wolf. Birds?! Birds! Owen liked to think he knew a thing or two about birds, having had a couple of little run-ins with them by now, some of them more traumatizing than other of course. He was in complete sympathy with Tywyll now though, as his vivid young imagination took off on its own flights of fancy speculating what might have occurred to get Tywyll into such a state. Probably he'd been picked up and carried off by some bird before he was able to fight his way free, falling back down to the earth from a height of a kajillion pawlengths and only just barely managing to make it back to the home Plateau! No wonder Owen hadn't seen much of his fellow boypup of late. The best worst, or the worst best? Yeah. Um. ...So you got away from them though, right, and...sheesh. What's your Mom gonna say when she sees your fur, dude?! Wow. Owen's nose had just caught a fresh wafting of the stench on a little lick of a passing breeze, and wrinkled itself into a tighter scrunch in fascinated revulsion. I thought I'd seen pups get the bath of their lives before, but...seriously! Whoah! Okay, it was starting to get less bearable again now, as the intermingling garbage smorgasboard of scents were pooling here all together. Seriously, what if you— like— rolled around a little, maybe, on the scratchier stems of some of these plants, here. Maybe that would scrub you off a little, dude, because... seriously. Whoah. Words really were failing him at the moment to encompass just how bad Tywyll smelled. Just how long had it been since the kid last had a bath?!