Once upon a time, in a land not so far away...
You wake to the feeling of being watched. Of a set of unfamiliar eyes, of warm breath on the back of your neck. A jolt back to the land of the living, and it's gone. No matter how quick you are, how sneaky, the source of the disruption has long since disappeared, so you have no choice but to try and ignore it. To continue on with your day and try to set that moment of strangeness aside.
You eat, drink, speak with others. Perhaps you explore a little. Whatever it is you choose to do for the day, that feeling from the morning won't return. And by the time the sun sets and the moon glows brightly above, you've likely set those moments of strangeness aside. It's not like it's anything new, after all.
It's the same again for the next few days. No better, no worse. Something best ignored, right?
A speck of blood on the doorframe. That wasn't there before, was it?
A snap of twigs in the distance. A crunch of leaves.
Claw marks gouged deeply into the door.
Into the wall above your bed.
Scraps of red fabric, turned darker with blood. Pieces of fur. Of flesh.
Do you run and hide? Do you fight? Whatever you choose, it's definitely time to make sure your body parts aren't scattered next...
...what a horribly big mouth you have.
--------------------
Since first waking up on the island, characters have been stuck with that feeling of being watched. It isn't a constant. Isn't more than a few seconds at a time, dotted throughout the day. Investigation has never turned up much, and there's never been any sightings of the cause of it all.
Until now.
Throughout the first half of the week, characters will find themselves suffering from that feeling of being watched on a far more constant basis. Rather than it being a one-off, few seconds occurrence each day, that feeling will last for minutes at a time, and on multiple occasions.
However, it isn't until the fifth day that they'll start stumbling across physical signs of their monitoring. There are claw marks on doors. Spots of blood on the paths outside. A crack of twigs in the forests, or the imprint of bloodied paws in the snow.
Ten days in and those signs start finding their way indoors. Wet footprints, tinged with red. Claw marks in the walls, the floor. Torn sheets and the smell of wet...something. Whatever it is that's been watching you, its finally decided to come and say hello.
Two weeks in and characters will begin to have sightings of the creature, its fur dark and its eyes a glowing yellow. At times it looks like a wolf, prowling in the distance. At other times, it's walking on its hind legs, almost human were it not for the muzzle full of gleaming sharp teeth. Get too close, and it slips away like a shadow, gone between one blink and the next. It decides when to reach out to characters, not the other way round.
It's after characters finally get a good look at the creature that it starts leaving...gifts. Characters will start to find familiar items from their home worlds amidst the mess. The remains of a childhood pet, perhaps. Photographs of loved ones, faces torn almost beyond recognition. It's only once it delivers its final gift that the creature retreats to the trees again: a blood-splattered item of clothing that clearly belongs to the person the character misses the most at the time, alive or dead.
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fablelands2018-08-27 11:34 pm
Oracle-Babs | DC Preboot
[For a woman who only recently woke up on a forest floor, sprawled out in front of her wheelchair, surrounded by mysterious items, she is... actually pretty calm, really. It is the utter calm-angry-annoyance of someone as inconvenienced as humanly possible by their situation. She has no computers. She has one (1) batarang. She is mildly annoyed that she has it instead of her escrima sticks. At least sticks aren't in short supply around here. And she doesn't remember ever seeing a single ramp in any fairy tale ever filmed or illustrated.
It took her half a minute to collect the stuff and get into the chair, and a few to start looking for somewhere halfway decent to set up camp and survey the situation.
High ground. She'll need high ground, since she can't cover the chair tracks. A hill that isn't too steep, with trees thick enough she has to pull herself between some of the trunks to fit through.
And that creeping feeling of unseen eyes on her at all times has her wondering if she's died, and this Hell's Poetic Justice Department tailor-made for her.
And the first person who comes across her gets something heavy gets tossed just to the side of their head. She's not flinging a bladed weapon at a stranger when she only has one. So the warning shot is with just a plain old rock.]
Willows Whiten, Aspens Quiver The Wolf
The first thing it leaves is her father's pipe. The one she snuck down to smoke when she was 14. It smells like blood instead of tobacco.
After that, it's scraps of purple fabric. A ticket stub from Haley's circus, untorn but stained. It's the broken coffee cup that really sets her off. What's left of it shatters against a tree as she tosses it as far away from herself as possible.
You really think going there is going to scare me?! Seriously!?
You have so much more homework to do.
no subject
with wheels?
confusion sets in briefly, before he's holding his hands up in, what he hopes is, a placating manner. he isn't there for a fight. not even close.]
Apologies, my lady. I didn't mean to startle you. [because something makes him thing that using the word "frighten" here wouldn't go down well.]
Are you alright? Um-- Or as well as you can be, given that you've been brought here too.
shoot sorry I was out of town and missed this!
Sorry, guess I'm just a bit jumpy. Being kidnapped tends to do that to me. How long have you been here? [please don't say centuries, trapped unaging in some fairy tale hell]
The Wolf
He is honor bound, instinct bound to listen however so when a gossipy pine tree says "help, help!" There's a big pair of bright red eyes staring down at the woman in the wheel chair from above the spot where she threw the mug.]
No reason to throw things.
no subject
[Barbara looks up. Way, way up. Swamp Thing is a towering presence, even over people who can stand up.]
Doctor Holland. It's been a while. I was still in the cowl when we worked those kidnappings in the Slaughter Swamp. [Years ago, there'd been a bright young redhead wearing the Bat's emblem who'd worked with the Swamp Thing. This woman is not that girl anymore, but it's easy to see where that girl became her.
She is also the daughter of Gotham City's police commissioner, which may or may not be within Alec's notice.
Normally, she'd be more cautious, but Swamp Thing is not exactly known for gossip.]
no subject
What did we fight against. What came from the swamp.
[An abomination to the green, the rot's attempt to poison his world.]
no subject
I do understand that I looked taller then.
[She smiles a little]
no subject
I had to be sure.
[He holds his hand at his side.] The magic that's brought me here is keeping me here. That doesn't happen.