Blackfoot Forest The Unicorn Lived in a Lilac Wood, and she lived all alone

OOC: BTW, if someone wants to make this into a stinkbug or bombardier or something for the lulz, you should absolutely feel free to do so. :P I do not intend for this thread to be ttly srs bzns.

    The skies above were just beginning to darken, the near-cloudless expanse of bright, even blue pulling back as evening encroached, deepening its cloak to midnight for the late summer’s night. The lowering sun stretched shadows long and threw into stark relief every bump, every rut, and every imperfection in the texture of the strange landscape. Galahad dragged his weary feet along another few steps and then paused to examine the rough gray bark of a nearby tree. It looked just a little strange, and smelled stranger, this silent guardian of the forest; like the rest of the environment here, on its own it wasn’t that different from the lands where he’d grown up, but taken as a whole the gestalt was just “off” enough to his senses to be unsettling. Rarely had he missed his family more acutely, if only for the familiarity of them, but the young pup refused to admit this even to himself. He sniffed warily at the tree and then sketched a curving path around the obstacle for himself, giving the weirdness of the thicker forest a wide berth.

    His perturbation showed itself in the small furrow in his black brow and the too-serious expression his face wore, unusual in one so young. His apprehensive mien intensified, then relaxed somewhat, as he spied a strange beetle crawling its way up a long strand of grass just ahead. First he paused with one large ebony paw lifted uncertainly, and then he crept cautiously forward, golden eyes wide and intent as they fixated unblinkingly on the small insect. He stopped just short of the beetle, crouching down a bit and staring in fascination as the insect carelessly resettled its wings and scrubbed its feet clean. “Never seen one like that before,” he muttered, commenting aloud to himself as he was often prone to do. He half-reached out a paw to poke the thing in curiosity as it sat there, then drew back again, reconsidering. Should he?

Sunset. Lonely valleys. Quiet streams. Nothing and no one in sight except a long, peaceful dump. Wait -

His eyes swiveled in their sockets as his ears flattened. Large ears. Eyes like almonds. Cute over-stuffed paws. Fluffy body. A sniveling, disgusting pup. Why was new life always so helplessly badly-proportioned and troubled by stuttering, high pitched accents? As the creature spoke aloud, Gramps' ears nearly fell off his head.

"Eh!?", he shouted back at the pup, approaching. A second after he said it, the helium-alto voice echoed away in his head enough to understand what the thing had said. "What?", he added, for good measure, having heard.

He walked to stand a comfortable distance away from it, lest it accidentally do something "cute" like sneeze or poop or fart. "Give ya a noogie if you stick that up your butt. Two if you stick it up your nose and it crawls out yer eye-sockets.", he snickered. "Whatcha makin all that racket for, kiddo? Waiting for the booger-snatchers to come gobble up yer bones? Then you'd be boneless. What would you do now? Just wobble around like sea sludge?", he pictured sludge giggling like Jello.

:D <3 This character of yours = win! And methinks these two’ll contrast nicely, lol.
But yeah for everyone’s good I should probably stop pontificating pseudophysics past midnight, sorry >.>; MY WORDS ARE GETTING MOAR UNMANAGEABLY PRETENTIOUS AS I GO UGH I’M SO RUSTY ;.; This post feels as much a mess as Galahad. *flails*

    His paw sat there quietly suspended, indecisive; frozen in time for an instant, a paradox resembling that of Schrodinger: for that one moment in time, before the box was decisively opened and the truth revealed, the world teetered on a pivot of possibility wherein either, none, or both measures could possibly be true. Galahad’s overlarge toe trembled with the effort of delicately reaching itself forth to break that barrier of possible-impossibility, gingerly attempting to lay only the lightest of touches upon the object of its desire like a butterfly coming lightly to rest upon a flowerhead.

    And then with a squawk, a noise as undignified as his simultaneous awkward flailing in surprise, he recoiled backward and spoiled the moment entirely, his carefully-maneuvered paw colliding with its insectoid bullseye in slapstick fashion, sending the object of his curiosity flying sky-high as Galahad reacted in a most violent manner to the utterly unexpected noise from behind him. For just an instant his mind wondered incredulously if the beetle had spoken, and if so how such a small creature could have made such a loud, gruff noise, but this notion was quickly swept away by the collision of both the more logical side of his brain and the appearance, as he fell backward and spun about, of the looming, corpulent form of his fellow canine that confronted him—though in that first shocked moment of recognition this wolf’s appearance was so large, so bizarre, and so unexpected that he might as well have been an alien. From freakin’ Mars. For a long, dismayed moment of silence, Galahad gawped up at the intruder. And fortunately for that intruder’s sake, there was still some reasonable distance between them, because that moment was then interrupted by the reentry of the bug from the orbit whence it had been launched—and it landed in that most unfortunate of places, right smack in Galahad’s up-tilted left nostril.

    The pup choked, gagged, coughed and spat thusly in response to the stranger’s torrent of queries, at last expelling the most unfortunate of insects onto the patch of grass whence it came along with a fair quantity of watery snot. Wheezing and with tears leaking from the corner of his eyes, Galahad squinted up at the other wolf once more as he caught his breath. His body huddled up wretchedly upon itself and tried to comport himself with some measure of dignity once more as his slabs of paws braced akimbo and his breath whistled in and out more slowly. An “adorable” picture indeed, this pup. The youngster wasn’t sure if his insect interruption had interfered with hearing the old fart correctly, or what, but somehow not a darned one of the questions the other had posed (now that Galahad had a moment to breathe again and actually consider them rationally) made one single bit of sense. Surely…surely the scruffy white wolf with the wide wide middle hadn’t just told him to stuff that bug up his butt? He couldn’t really be speaking of booger-snatchers and sludgy rubber wolves—a fellow juvenile perhaps might come up with such tawdry introductions, but surely not any responsible, full-grown adult. Adult wolves simply did not speak so. No, adults spent all their time upbraiding uppity young pups for gabbling about such nonsense themselves. So what in the hell was this insane oldster talking about?!

    Galahad’s reply was both appalled and bewildered. “What? You didn’t— no—what, why; that is— Why would I stick an insect of any sort under my tail?! That’s— doesn’t make any sense!” It was that lack of sense mainly that prodded this initial yelping outburst, and then he shrank back in upon himself much more dramatically, leaning away from the crazy old man before him. He hoped to escape the expected scolding, but dismally figured there was little real expectation of that. “I don’t wanna noogie,” he burbled in tearful dismay, wilting. His unruly hair was already enough of a trial to him as it was, even half-puppy-coat as it still was. …Compressing his hunch-shouldered gangling frame into as small a profile as possible as he goggled in consternation at his presumably-supposed-to-be-wiser elder, the pup did indeed bear a bit of a passing resemblance to the aforementioned wobbling sea sludge as he whimperingly displayed his wimpier side.

Nice writing.



It was not in Gramps nature to be impressed, though it was entirely common for the opposite. What happened next - the pup taking up the challenge without wasting words and completing it in a comparable fashion - wiped away Gramps smirk and left it with a silent gaze of slight reverie. That emotion had last appeared several years ago, the occasion of which he couldn't remember.

Now was the time to congratulate the youngster for his accomplishment. "Hmpffff.", he huffed with indifference and a scowl, which was old-man-speak for the congratulations.

As the pup tried to recover from the feat, bodily liquids seeming to ooze from over possible place, he winced, turning his head as if trying to unsee it. His stomach knotted and a retch threatened his throat. He quieted his disgust with his usual favorite thoughts of disdain: why were pups always sticky, why were youngsters so horribly proportioned, why was cute so disgusting, and so on and so forth.

The littler one seemed to gawk in surprise, to which Gramps met with an empty gaze. So what he'd said didn't make sense? "Neither does eating a bug.", he responded coldly. His description was far from what had actually happened, but he wasn't one to be floral with his words unless a piggy-back ride was involved.

In a vivid display of theatrics, the pup made himself smaller, a natural sign of submission, which Gramps enjoyed - it was about time someone around here paid him the respect he was owed. But the rest of it was nauseatingly energetic.

"You waste too much energy.", he stated dismissively, always one to be a negative downer. He wished he had the mobility to knead his eyebrows with the brewing headache of motion sickness, as if having ridden a rollercoaster. Merely watching the pup was surely the equivalent of such. But, did that make him old? Should he just consign himself to the nursing home and Depends now? He willed himself to rise above the desire to haze the kid for merely being too fluffy, too wide-eyed, too talkative, too ... too ... too annoyingly existent.

"Go fetch your old man a bee-", what was the equivalent? " -beeig red mushroom.", he corrected. "And I'll tell you a story.", he plopped down on his rear end, as if the ground were a lazy-boy, with matching groan. "A is for asexual. Whenever a girl says she's that you're not trying hard enough. B is for bitch. That's a female. And also someone who's mean. See how they're the same thing? Haha. C is for coit...", he began to tell a sexist, profane alphabet, not minding the fact that this child wasn't his son, that the alphabet wasn't a story, and that this was hardly appropriate for children.

He had forgotten to respond about the noogie in his old age. Had he remembered, he might have had a good come-back.