Firestone Hot Springs these are the pros and cons of hitchhiking

Since Coelacanth has a relatively minor role in this thread, please feel free to skip her and please TAG HER if and when you interact directly with her. Thank you! ♥

The changes in Coelacanth’s demeanor and bearing were few, and so subtle that only those who knew her intimately would take note of them. She felt it, a new brittleness in her bones, sapped of warm, rich marrow — an old, familiar tension in her fluid musculature that had her shoulders riding high now and again. Every sense was tuned to its finest pitch, and sometimes, she turned too sharply to regard new stimuli, a personalized brand of hyperesthesia that she worked hard to hide. She regarded her surroundings with an odd sort of familiarity, retracing steps she’d never thought to take, and with that familiarity came foreboding. The sulfurous scent of the hot springs was abhorrent to her, not because of how it burned her sensitive nares, but because it too easily masked other smells. Seelie didn’t like feeling noseblind.

The approach of an unfamiliar wolf, larger than Coelacanth (but then, most canids were!) and painted in spectral shades of cream, tan, and pepperings of silver, dropped like an anvil on a pulley to raise the sheepdog’s guard. She lingered in a pocket of smoke — a Neptune-eyed shadow that was all too easy to ignore, a trickle of ink betwixt the clefts of stone — but she did not advance. She merely breathed a soft and lilting sigh of a whine for Maegi’s ears alone, offering her support should the Melonii girl require it, and offering privacy if she wanted it.