Wheeling Gull Isle And I don't even care about what people say

Tossing waves had thrown a variety of objects up onto the shores. Lucas strode along the Strand, nose lowered as he sifted through piles of still-wet silt in search of anything useful. He knew by now that seaweed could be used for binding limbs and sealing wounds, and there was no shortage of that around, but what he was really looking for was something more edible. Here and there, deep sea fish that normally couldn't be found near the shore were buried in the sand, waiting for a passerby to find them.

He wasn't overly fond of fish himself and would happily pass it up for a juicy rabbit, but Lucas knew it was a taste he was going to have to acquire if he was going to stay here through the winter. Nosing through a promising pile of sand, he encountered a mud-brown flounder, which he unearthed with heavy scoops of his large paws. Hoisting it in his jaws, the Guppy wrinkled his muzzle against the salt taste on his tongue and turned inward, to where the ground was firmer and it could be safely buried for someone else's consumption.

Moorhen had been swimming, trying to rid her legs of the powerful urge to range far and wide. She'd done quite a lot of travelling in the past week or so, and yet, her restless energy still was not spent. Even the formation of her formidable wood pile hadn't winded her for very long.

In the water, she looked like nothing so much as a wave-tossed log, but two ruddy eyes tracked the movements of the burly boy as he dug about on the beach. Moorhen was already suspicious of the boy, and in high dudgeon over his decision to waste all the driftwood he came across - but it seemed he was just looking for scraps to take to the caches, and Moorhen could find no fault in that.

The Cairn woman made her way back to the beach, emerging from the waves with her pelt clinging to her body, the pale bands along her ribcage making her look almost skeletal as she stalked toward the boy, intent on making a formal introduction. When she was near enough to have a hope at commanding his attention, she said, Hello. I im Moorhen. Akhlut. Destroyer of worlds. Protector. With that, her bloodred gaze turned expectant and a titch impatient - the boy was already in her bad books for having "threatened" her precious woodpile.

He'd barely made it to where sand became the soil that led away onto the coastal plain when a voice summoned his attention back. Turning with the flounder held limp in his jaws, Lucas was surprised to find himself face-to-face with a formidable looking she-wolf. She was drenched entirely; the scent of salt was cloying in his nose as she introduced herself, and something else barely detectable under that smell that he was yet too young to act upon, but noted all the same. She'd fixed him with a glare of sorts that he was stupidly oblivious to as he smiled, dropped the fish, and said, oh, hi!

Was she here to protect him? That was super nice of her! It didn't explain the way she was looking at him like he was supposed to be doing something other than what he was doing... so he chocked that up to just being her face. I'm Lucas! he returned, giving his tail several shakes in greeting. I'm uh... a Guppy, I guess. Maybe someday he would be something more impressive. Akhlut sounded like an important title, and if she was a protector for the island, then that meant she must get a lot of respect. Comparatively, being a Guppy afforded you no respect at all... though Lucas liked to think that his charming personality made him likable enough.

The boy did not seem alarmed by her irritable state, nor intimidated by her size and title. His continued levity helped ease her sour mood somewhat, and Moorhen found herself giving a tentative wag of her tail to echo his own, despite the irascible expression still settled firmly across her features.

Hello, she repeated, her voice dour as she struggled to remember what she'd wanted to say to him as well as hold on to her bad mood. ... you move my wood. Except it hadn't been hers. She had just been planning to add it to her pile eventually.

Well, this was a bit of an awkward conversation. Lucas usually never had any issue talking to anyone, but there was something about Moorhen that was just a little... off. She said hello again and he replied with a another, hi, but his tone hesitated a little, as though he felt weird about repeating what had already been said. Luckily, they weren't doomed to just chase each other in circles of awkward greetings until one of them decided to go do something else; Moorhen spoke again in her strange, semi-broken way, and he beamed.

Yes! Everyone's working so hard to clean up the place, I figure I gotta do my part too if I wanna call this place home! Wagging his tail, he cast around for another stick and saw one sticking out of the sand some ten feet away. Leaving the sand-crusted flounder forgotten, he trotted to the stick and hauled it out of the sand. It was a small thing. A perfect throwing stick, he might say.

Still completely oblivious to Moorhen's ire or the fact that she had said it was her wood, Lucas turned back his head and said around the stick, you can make a fun game of it, watch! And in an ill-advised maneuver, he swung his head to the side, then flicked it frontward and released the stick from his jaws, sending it sailing through the air to land in the surf.

Moorhen did watch, bristling silently as the boy pranced around her beach picking up her sticks and squandering them for his stupid game. Distantly, she recognized that these emotions were not things she would usually feel toward such a silly offense.

"Why do you - " Moorhen grit her teeth for a moment, irritated with herself for not having a word for this in any tongue. Sully is what she meant. "You should not throw into ocean," she said after a moment, bloodred gaze narrowed as the brunt of her ire fell upon the boy. He was not the cause of her sour mood, but an unfortunate outlet.

He couldn't be any more oblivious to Moorhen's feelings as he was when he sent the stick sailing, though when Lucas turned back to face her, he began to read the emotions writ across her face. That was an unhappy frown, not a thoughtful one. Her eyes were narrowed not with mirth, but with annoyance. Finding himself on the receiving end of a wolf's displeasure for the first time in his life, Lucas faltered.

Should I... not throw them in the ocean? I thought we were cleaning up? he wondered in an uncharacteristically self-conscious tone. His tail, which ordinarily wagged at all times, came to a gradual stop behind him as he tried to better read Moorhen's mood, but he could only tell that she was unhappy. With him. And that sent a sinking, swooping feeling down through his gut that made him feel rather cold and hot all at the same time.

Although Moorhen was unhappy with the boy and thought he was an idiot for throwing sticks into the ocean, she couldn't really explain why. The woodpile had been a private and largely useless endeavor, and it was finished now, anyway. And Doe had made her to worship the sea in her youth, but she was not a little girl anymore. The sea was just a body of water, and it didn't care if Lucas threw sticks into it. So why did Moorhen?

Waste of time, she said simply, her voice a bit more modulated and a bit less irritable, now. It was still faintly challenging, of course - Moorhen was out to ruin someone's day. After all, she was in a bad mood. Why shouldn't everyone else be, too? Small sticks are no trouble. Waves wash them back to sand.

Oh, Lucas quietly intoned, feeling worse and worse by the second. Stupid. He should've known that, shouldn't he? It was so obvious. The waves swept back and forth across the beach at all times, so it only made sense that small things should wash back ashore. He could have forgiven himself for not realizing, seeing as he had never lived on an island before, if only Moorhen's face wasn't arranged into something between irritation and judgment. It made him wilt a little on the inside to be disapproved of, and he instantly hated it.

And he had never hated anything in his life.

Um... what should I do with them? he asked, surprising even himself with the cheery inflection he delivered at the end. He didn't feel particularly cheery, but unlike Moorhen, Lucas wasn't one to infect others with his bad mood. In fact he preferred to inject happiness into everyone he met. Making other wolves made him feel good about himself; it was so much better than this somewhat glum feeling he had in his belly now.

Moorhen shook her head at the boy. "Small sticks will decay. Will bring good earth to islann. You should not worry," she told him, her irritation somewhat soothed by his continued good humor. Lucas was a difficult wolf to be mean to - at least for Moorhen. She turned and indicated the wood pile. "Big piece or trip piece, we gather up to be safe. Small sticks do not hurt."

These were weird things for her to say, probably, but for some reason I got it into my head that I was gonna stick some haikus into her posts so there you go. Anyway. Moorhen didn't really care that much that he was moving small sticks around. She did think it was a waste of time, but she'd decided to forgive the boy for his earlier transgressions. He obviously hadn't done it nefariously, as she suspected of Mou.

"Come help me?" she suggested, giving a slightly less stiff wag of her tail. "I will show - bad sticks."

It was going to take a little while for Lucas to shake this one off. Eventually he would. It helped that Moorhen was explaining with a little more patience now, and he lifted his pale eyes as she motioned to the wood pile. Small sticks would just decay and get sucked back into the ground or something. Big sticks were the problem. Okay, he guessed that made sense.

Sure, he agreed, falling in behind Moorhen. He still felt kind of bad about himself for giving anyone a reason not to like him right off the bat—that pendulum had swung back so that he blamed himself now. But he kept it from his face as best he could, smiling warmly as he followed the Akhlut and took mental notes on how best to help with the island clean-up in the future.

Can fade here or continue, whichever works best!