Mice or Men?

A drop of water.

An experience.

Iskra cracked a blue eye open. The scene before her bore many differences from the one she'd shut them on hours ago. She still recalled the warm sun shining down, the rays gradually heating her skin and the fur beneath them as they often warmed the rolling fields and their life-bearing soil.

Hanging in the sky before her now like so many vultures were a growling array of thunderclouds. The frowning sky sent fat drops down towards the roof where she lay, and the wind, like a nagging fury, lent speed to the rain, making it into so many little stinging arrows. She felt they would not hurt her, but they remained terribly annoying.

The beast turned with a wide yawn that soon turned into a brief drink, and she licked around her teeth as though a gnat had flown into her mouth.

The Matriarch of Rasvamaal couldn't say her life was as simple as it was in the past. A number of odd things had tumbled into her life: An odd book of strange tales and concepts, all linked to the memory of scents; her perpetually growing city that seemed to run itself at points, though she was dimly aware of her two officers, the charismatic incubus Run and the odd little thunder rat Lion-O; a traumatized little kamikonjou that may or may not be bearing her seed; and as always, the souls of the dead she'd consumed always saying things. She'd ignored them before now, but in this time she felt they might have important things to say.

Specifically, the leucrotta felt herself becoming overwhelmed. Where had the days gone of lying in the forest, without a commitment to a clan or a care in the world? Where was the simplicity of Paike's gifts, the rain and the sunshine and the endless meat of the land there for the eating? Where was the world she knew, comprised of herself and her food? Where were the customs, the males on the bottom and the females on the top as Paike had created these things long ago? Where were the humans as mere chattel, eaten today and forgotten tomorrow?

[ EXP: 402 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

No, these things had all gone. They'd been replaced by a world of abject complexity... a world of words and abstractions that talked to her. Pride and madness and death and conscience... these things she'd been guiltless of and ignorant of before.

Was this the world she'd been receiving when she wanted a life like a man, a life she wasn't designed for? Now she knew why the human race had such powers... they came joined to such problems! The magnitude of the issues and their complexity...

But this couldn't last forever. The beast turned and trotted off, making her way silently back into her de facto throne room. This same problem had troubled her for entirely too long, and if nothing else, she wanted a solution to it.

Maybe the book could talk to her? Maybe the book could tell her. There was a place in the night... a darkness in her soul where the pages resided. It was the same as a creature in that its pages could be consulted on a whim.

So she consulted the book. She pawed its pages open and she lay before it, staring into the pages.

[ EXP: 211 ]

Her reverent trance was abducted rather abruptly when her two officers burst through the massive doors with a shout of alarm.

"Lord Iskra!" they shouted, their voices conjoined like a choir.

One was a masked fellow who stood off to the side, clearly winded. His midnight-black hair glistened wet with either rain or sweat and draped attractively over his face and his curly, ram-esque horns. Between the moist tendrils, a single eye opposite the one covered by the mask looked out and up at his current master. He might have knelt, but his hands were on his metal-shielded knees for support. He heaved audibly through the mask. His scent was intoxicating, Iskra thought. Then again, that smell was the mark and lure of his kind, no different from the pheromones of a female spider or the honey of a flytrap. A seductive thing... but this devil was half angel, and so his conscience forever had its claws in him, compelling him to attempt good deeds despite the evil his heritage built him for. He was in the same sort of predicament as her, it seemed... except instead of seeking knowledge to rise above a bloodline of ignorance, he was seeking to give free pleasure where the ability to impart such a thing was only bait in a trap as far as his kind was concerned.

[ EXP: 254 ]

The half-breed clearly needed a rest before he could speak, so the other figure stepped forth boldly, almost jauntily instead.

The rodent snapped his tail smartly and gave a stiff salute. He was a yellow creature, and like most yellow creatures, his auroral hue only served to advertise a hidden defense: a powerful current coursed through his veins. This was an ability inherited by his entire clan that thickly peopled this ruin that Iskra had claimed as her own. Such powerful electrical fields he could produce from his form that his long tail, with its mark of lightning at the tip, existed solely to ground himself and thus protect his body from its own powerful surges.

The defenses nature had seen fit to give him weren't enough, it seemed. Even now he was equipped with a wooden pole a little longer than himself and wound all about with bandages. He used it for quick offense. Perhaps he preferred the mobility of martial combat to the dangerous thunder in his cheeks. Honestly, it had never occurred to the beast to ask her subject why he would bother with a stick when he had a phenomenon that the humans often referred to as the Fist of God at his disposal.

[ EXP: 235 ]

Today would not be the day she asked, however. The thunder rat spoke with an imperative note in his tone that even the increasingly aloof hyena found difficult to ignore.

"My people bring me news of devils... of destruction. They burn everything in their path and kidnap and murder with abandon. They march through the southern forests."

Run seemed to resume command of his breath long enough to nod and agree. "Yes, I... saw them myself, but... I recognize one your... servant Jack?"

Iskra wrinkled her nose. Far be it from her to reprimand her friend when he was doing what parak do, but she understood a bit about fire, and if there was a wildfire, it could easily threaten her villagers. They'd seen fit to build most of their habitations out of straw, and that could be a very real danger if she was away when that happened.

"Jack?" the little rat barked. "That guy who helped you get rid of Mumm-rat? Well, I guess we owe him one." Lion-O sat on the dusty dirt floor, his eyes staring at a point in the ground. He was plainly troubled. "But he's acting evil, and I don't really trust him like we trust you."

Run blinked his one exposed eye and looked up towards the hyena. "Of course, we will follow what you say about this."

Iskra sat herself. For a moment she didn't say anything at all. She just looked blankly at the two standing there. This was precisely the sort of thing she didn't think she could deal with.

Finally, she spoke. "Do whatever you feel you need to do to protect the people here, but only do it in defense. Jack respects and cares about me, so I doubt he'll be injuring my people. I... have to go. I will return soon."

With that, she simply walked past the pair there.

[ EXP: 342 || +1 TEXP (5th post) ]