Horizon Ridge chasing the sun · pack meeting

OOC: I'm just gonna ignore Tulok here since he's no longer in HR, hopefully no one minds!

IC: She sat in silence, observing the others as they arrived. She recognized Pump, the strange female from the coast who had questioned her choice of food, for it hadn't been terribly nutritious. Jinx watched her with an unabashed stare as she came in, mentally remarking once more on the strangeness of those ears and the wavy pelt that she wore. Pump had pointed out that food used for anything but energy was essentially non-essential, and though Jinx had disagreed then and would disagree now, she had liked the woman well enough.

The other wolf to arrive was also black-furred, making a 3:3 ratio of black to non-black wolves, not that she cared too much what colour another wolf's fur was. This one bore acidic green eyes, and in her lips, a sand dollar. Jinx recognized it from Shearwater Bay, though there had been nothing but broken sand dollars there, crushed under the feet of exuberant youths running up and down the coast. She suppressed a scoff, finding this present much inferior to her own... But of course, anybody's would be. Jinx's was wrought with magical plants and reagents, so it was automatically better.

And that was all. She looked around with a frown as no other wolves arrived, her face pulling into a dire expression as her gaze flicked back to Akhlut. He didn't seem bothered by the lack of faces, but she wondered if internally he might've felt embarrassed. Of course, she didn't know there were other pack members who hadn't shown up; she assumed this was the entirety of his group of wolves, and what a sad group it was.

The following speech was grand, but it touched on a number of points that should have seen Jinx running out the door. The first was that the pack was one of Light. While Jinx didn't necessarily subscribe to notions of Light versus Darkness, she did believe wholly in Atka and Sos, who in Their own way, embodied light and darkness. She thought of it more as life and death, but that was not how it was taught in Shearwater. Akhlut went on to outline some of the behaviours he found intolerable... How ironic was it that Jinx, being still highest ranked of all the wolves but himself, was all of those things. A liar, a coward, a cheater; she hid it well, tucked close under her misleading smiles and eyes, but she was all those things when it boiled down to it.

There was also the issue of the pact, which Jinx had heard about from Robur Aqua (presumably, unless Chelsie just botched a timeline really badly), but hadn't believed at the time. This brought a small huff of breath from her nose, a sound of disbelief, but she didn't say anything; the look in her eyes was likely disapproval enough. It wasn't natural for wolves to share territory with other wolf packs, let alone to let those wolf packs within a mile's radius without some form of alarm. To do so was unnaturally pacifistic, and highly against her nature. But it was not her pack, so she couldn't argue it, at least not without good evidence against it.

He asked for news, and she supplied none. It was in her better interest to keep her own knowledge to herself until such a time as she deemed him worthy of it. She sat politely, hunching over her gifts in a protective manner... But still she said nothing.