Wapun Meadow The Joyless Luck Club
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All Welcome 

Wow did she feel liberated! She sure had told them, and she was riding the high of telling her aunt that she was leaving all the way until she found herself in the meadow. Without warning, she felt tears prick at the backs of her eyes, and she gritted her teeth together to prevent them from falling.

That meadow was the last place she'd scented her brother before he disappeared. Some part of her felt as though she had done something wrong by not staying with him. Just before he'd gone, she had taken to doing her own thing. Piper had been motivated by becoming her own person, or whatever.

Taking a quick sniff of her surroundings, the Redleaf girl squinted her gaze against the horizon. If she were Lucas, where would she wander to next?
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careful and quiet, stigmata prowled half-heartedly after young piper. he was interested - read: nosy - to know where she was off to, or what had transpired before her near-frantic trot to the mouth of bearclaw, but his thoughts were also elsewhere. how did he convince a pack that thought themselves safe to move on into the unfamiliar? the wolves of the drenchwood certainly wouldn't have done it, but truth be told: they wouldn't have chosen such a tactless place to live from the beginning.

to be fair, at a glance bearclaw seemed to be the most ideal for a pack of wolves; perhaps short-term, it was. but it simply didn't have the means or accessibility to support generation after generation of his kind, and he was eager to provide those he considered to be his wolves with better.

he didn't realize that piper was just starting her own journey for "better," so when he came upon her, it was with the intention to join her for a while. "piper," he called in a (decidedly) warm voice, quickening his pace to meet her.
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His voice found her ears without issue. She splayed them and they swung back to catch anything that might follow. The only thing she noted was the sound of his paws as they beat against the earth in his pursuit. The Redleaf didn't want to slow her place, but she knew better than to keep him chasing after her.

Piper stopped and swung her head around to face him as he approached her. The tip of her tail wavered between her hocks. She tried to greet him with a smile, but it ended up like one of Tadec's shriveled little ones and she felt moderately disgusted with herself for even having tried.

“What's up, buttercup?” she chimed.
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though verbally piper implied that things were alright, stigmata knew right away that something plagued her, and that this wasn't some light-hearted traipse from the stonewalled valley. he looked her up and down, but unable to place the source of her distress, he decided to ask: "going somewhere important?"

by now he knew that lucas was gone, but as someone who had lost many family members to tragedy or wanderlust  (close siblings included) and simply moved on with his life, he wouldn't immediately understand that there was a new dedication to her life, and that it involved finding her missing brother. (literally) a lost cause, if you asked him.

he stood at her shoulder and tilted his smoky head towards her curiously.
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“I'm... going to look for my brother.”

For a moment, she had faltered in her answer. Silently, she cursed herself for having done so. It showed that she wasn't sure of herself and she didn't want to appear wishy washy in front of this guy. She anticipated that he would have something to say for it. Not wanting to have to shrug that off, she fixed him with a burning stare that invited the advice.

It seemed everyone wanted Piper to know that people disappeared and she had best move on. If she heard it from one more person, she was going to flip her lid, she swore it. Something in the pale gold of her eyes suggested that he would be quick to get an earful if he wanted to lecture her. Something was manic behind her poorly painted face.
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both a careful listener and a detail-oriented observer, nothing of what passed across young piper's features was missed by stigmata. his expression grew weighted as curiosity was replaced with seriousness; and though he did not agree with her choice, the male had never been inclined to try and keep company that did not want to be kept. "i see," the wolf mumbled. he inclined his long muzzle in a small nod, keeping the frantic shine of her champagne eyes locked in his snake charmer's stare. "and what will you do once you find him?"

because to him, there was no question that she would.
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The druid didn't see fit to stop her. In that, there was relief. Piper found herself lost in his swimming gaze for a brief moment before she forced herself to look away. She felt foolish for seeing his charm and believing it. There was something about the grizzled figure that intrigued her beyond what anyone had before his time there.

The question hung in the air for a long moment. The Redleaf girl thought it silly that he should ask such a thing; wasn't the answer obvious? Gathering the nerve to face him again, the flame of a young woman fixed him with a stare down the length of her muzzle.

“I'll bring him home, of course.”
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he found the line of his gaze broken for a moment as she turned away; stigmata watched the slim curve of piper's shoulders rise and fall, until she turned back to face him with a self-assured retort.

the smokehound licked his chops thoughtfully. "and if he refuses to return - much as you would refuse any effort i make to stop you - what will you do then, piper redleaf?" he queried in a tone that implied this was a question she needed to consider with the utmost care, and he leveled her with a grave expression. "will you return to us, even having failed? or are we to be abandoned as well?" he paused, glancing sideways as a gust stirred the foliage around them, then set the aptly named redleaf youth with a more bemused look.

"that boy has a mind of his own. he either chose to leave or was taken from us, and you must be smart enough to realize that neither option can be overcome by you alone. still, i expect you are simply dissatisfied with the lack of results your aunt and others have put up in an effort to recover him, and because i know nothing will change that feeling except checking for yourself, i will leave you with just a bit of advice, lest you spend the rest of your life living for the account of anyone else:

"you should never chase after a wolf that would dare to leave your side."
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It was the most she had ever heard him speak, but that didn't bother her. He seemed to be composed and rational in his words, knowing just how she would react to anything that resembled an emotional response. Instead, she listened to him with an intense expression on her youthful features. All of these questions that were posed, and she found her mind whirling to come up with an appropriate response.

It wasn't necessarily as simple as he made it out to be. Sure, Lucas was a boy who found himself transfixed by an odd assortment of things. It would have been fair to assume that he had simply gotten caught up in hunting for treasures and gotten lost for a while. The problem was that it had been far too long for him to just have been gone on his own accord.

There was a violent grating within her that urged her to step toward the smoky male. Something in her was drawn to him, but she was fearful of what that might mean. There was nothing she disliked more than finding herself searching for her own emotions.

“I am dissatisfied with a lot of things right now, Stigmata,” she informed him in a level tone. Then, a sigh broke the hard countenance that she had adopted. She felt the weight of what she aimed to accomplish, and it was enough to suffocate her. “I'll come back eventually. When I have answers. If I find that Lucas took off on his own and has no intention of returning – god – at least I'll know that he's safe,” Piper felt her limbs quake.

“I'm not just chasing after a wolf. This isn't some stranger who abandoned our pack and took off into the wilderness. I'm searching for my brother. Maybe that's something you don't understand.”
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"careful, young redleaf," he warned her gently, irresolutely. "confidence is a must, but you should never presume without objective proof that you know more about anything than another wolf... especially one my age." something he hoped she would keep in mind when encountering the masses of wild strangers that loomed about in the great beyond she insisted on braving.

stigmata sighed, adding in a much more reserved tone: "i fear you misunderstand me." the austere hound looked her over, as if for one last time, taking the time to appreciate what he could of her, and ponder over how she might come out at the end of it all. "brother or not, lucas is still wolf. and any wolf that is true to their heart - whether it be by blood or by bond - will remain near to who or what they love. it is better you understand sooner rather than later that if your brother faced some danger on his own, it was because he chose to stray too far from you in the first place." he was guilty of this recently, and would pay dearly for his windswept efforts.

"you deserve more than a life of searching, hunting down those lost to you. you deserve, as i deserve, to settle only for wolves who could never bear to wander too far or for too long from you... i thought you of all the young might understand this best - having seen firsthand the intense love your aunt has for your mother." he turned from her then, having finished both his cigarette-laden spiel, as well as his lasting appraisal of the girl before him, who would likely be a woman if he ever saw her again. "farewell, piper redleaf. do take care," he murmured absently, and then paused, before drifting languidly back in the direction of the paw-shaped fishbowl.
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I'm actually incredibly sad that I won't get to thread with you for a while. <3

The flesh of her cheeks burned a bright shade of red that would have caused her to turn away in shame if he had been able to see it. He warned her, instructing her to be careful about what she thought versus what she knew to be a concrete fact. Still, she was not certain that she had pegged him wrong. Stigmata did not speak of his familial loyalties, and she had never once heard him utter anything about the bond of blood, so her assumption had foundation in this and she had believed it to be suitable enough.

Unwilling to argue, too full of worry to truly combat against the one wolf she felt was truly capable, Piper simply flattened her ears to her skull and shook her head at the smoky figure. Logic and reason would have told her that he was correct in what he was saying. It was foolish of her to venture out on her own to search for her brother. He would have returned if he had wanted to, they all said, but she wanted them to be wrong so badly that she was creating her own reality.

Before she realized, Stigmata was turning away from her to return home. The sharp glint of her champagne gaze seemed to hunger for his presence for only a little while longer, but she did not have the words to tell him not to go. Instead, she gritted her teeth against the farewell that had hitched in the back of her throat and she watched as he trailed back to the valley. Only when he had disappeared from sight did she allow herself to become awash with her own feelings, and even then... she did what she could to smother them.

In another life, Piper would have been smitten by girlish desires for the smoky hound. He would have created a burning in the pit of her chest that she would never really understand at the age she was. Had her life turned out differently, she would have confessed her feelings to her mother in bashful delight before scurrying away. Instead, the young Redleaf had been burdened with a great will.

So, she turned herself away from her home and from all of the love that had surrounded her since birth. She turned and she did not look back as she set out into the wilds in search of the joyful Lucas and his endless smiles. Stigmata was right; she would likely be a woman by the time she returned to them. Time would only tell.