Silvan Spelunking [Hyza]

[Aurelio Quezada]

Even for the keepers, killing an entire forest seemed a bit excessive.

Maybe they were designing weapons, maybe they were just being their usual destructive selves. But for whatever reason, there was hardly a leaf that wasn’t lying on the ground. And the brittle little things weren’t just dead brown; here and there they were sporting various shades of red, yellow, and orange. This might have been very beautiful, if not for the fact that he didn’t know if it was safe. And then there were the trees themselves, an endless stretch of naked branches everywhere. It was eerie and surreal and brought to mind comparisons to skeletons.

There were those certain trees, of course, the ones with the pleasant smell and the unsettling, spiny leaves. Those were fine. But those unnatural things were probably the work of the keepers as well. For all Aurelio knew, they were what were killing the other trees.

At some point, it has occurred to him that whatever was going on, it might have an effect on more than just trees. Two minutes of stubbornly tramping ahead later, he wasn’t feeling ill or otherwise unusual. That left the very real possibility that the unseen killer was just slow-acting, which was also a very much ignored possibility.

After all, stuff like this wouldn’t be so easy from now on. He’d shattered the illusion that he was well-behaved enough not to go wandering off of the Fallen’s territory on his own. His superiors knew to keep a better eye on him now, so this might be the only chance he would have for a while.

So far the only real danger was the crunch of his footsteps. This carpet of dead foliage wasn’t doing much for his attempts at traveling silently, but at least it was good camouflage. He made himself as small as possible, slinking along with his ‘leaves’ pressed flat against his back. Meanwhile he mentally rehearsed the story for if he met one of the residents of this territory. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to meet any of the backwards-shifting cats that lived here – that was actually the plan. Aurelio just didn’t want them to find him before he found them.

[Hyza]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style, width: 495px; height: 700px; background-image:url(http://i.imgur.com/xBICM.png)] Was he ever going to get used to the strange place, with all its trees and enclosed spaces? The large lion huffed and cracked one eye open as a stray beam of sunlight filtered through the bare brown branches and landed across his face. These trees, they were probably one of the stranger things here, besides the giant magic barrier that kept them all here. And the weather that was controlled by humans. And all the strange shifters. Honestly, the cats he had run into wanted him to join their pride. Him! He who should lead the pride if he so wished, and they wanted him to bow down to some strange little white female. As if any male lion grown into his adult mane would bow himself to a female. The very idea made a rumble echo through the otherwise quiet forest. Luckily for everyone involved, Hyza had never been much on pride life. Maybe one day he would look for a nice bunch of females to fuss over him, but for now, he was quite happy being a lone male on the move. That was how he had ended up here in this strange place with it's large trees of many colors. He'd managed to hunt down a small deer, the remains of which were being pecked over by various scavengers a few yards away. The lion ignored the annoying birds and bugs. Such was the way of life, and it wasn't as if he would be coming back for the paltry meat that was left. Let them have their fill. All things had to eat. He'd settled himself down on the trunk of a fallen tree, the dark brow of its bark doing wonders to camouflage himself. It still was very new to him, and startling every time he caught his reflection in a pool of water, but he was beginning to appreciate the coloration. It would have served him poorly in the hot, open expanse of the African savannah, but here, especially in the forest, he blended in well. Leaves crunching was his first warning. Then a strange scent drifting in on the breeze. Hyza shifted minutely to turn his nose into the wind,and studied the forest there. Not that he could see anything. So he squinted his eyes into tiny slits and inhaled deeply, leaving his mouth slightly open so that the air flowed over his tongue. Almost instantly, the world became shades of blue and green, with bright specks of red and yellow. The smaller points of red he dismissed as the native wildlife. The largest in the area, though, he zero'd in on, watching it move through its heat signature. Each time it laid a foot down, a crackling of leaves accompanied. So this was his intruder. Certainly not big enough to be a threat. "Trying to sneak up on me with all that crunching?" he rumbled, opening his eyes and blinking his vision back to normal. Now that he knew where to look, he could make out the outline off a very strange creature. What kind of cat was that, anyway?

[Aurelio Quezada]

Instantly he pressed close to the ground, practically a disappearing act if not for the unhelpful crackle of some bracken he wasn’t careful enough of. There was no time to bewail the atrophy of his skills; Aurelio was too busy waiting for a stranger he’d need to spring on and rip the face off of. Somehow it seemed ill-advised even to look over in the direction the voice had come from. There was maybe a sliver of a chance that whoever it was, they hadn’t pinpointed his location after his little slip-up. Except…after a few heartbeats of tense waiting, logic caught up to instinct. Maybe there wasn’t a call to mutilate wildly just yet. Slowly, slowly, he turned his head to the left, stretched his neck with less caution, and found it.

Outside the dome, Aurelio had always hoped to spot a jaguar on his many forays into the forests. Of course, according to everyone ever, jaguars kept to a narrow range on the other side of the country, which would explain why he never had the chance to realize how stupid his wish was. In the menagerie, though, there were not only the elusive spotted felines, but others sporting stripes or weird neck hair or whatnot, but all of them the huge, powerful creatures that had made seeing one so appealing in the first place. Perhaps, as he observed ringmates who took the forms of these particular beasts, he should have realized then that meeting one in the wild was likely to go badly for him. The jaguar could have easily crunched him up for a meal, or mauled him for being on its territory, if that was a thing they did. These cats were many times bigger, infinitely stronger, their teeth and claws more deadly, and many were more experienced than him. It should have convinced him of the potential danger, not that it would be far more exciting to meet such creatures in the form of someone who was an actual threat. As opposed to someone who was a danger only for the drudge work they might assign him so they wouldn’t have to do it.

So there it was, one of the cats with the abnormally shaggy necks – a lion, right. The dark fellow was hard to distinguish, and it had startled him when Aurie first spotted him. Hopefully that hadn’t been too obvious. Hopefully there wasn’t any trepidation in his voice, either. “Where I’m from the leaves stay on the trees, instead of getting in the way like this. It's probably going to make hunting a bit trickier than usual”

It was decided at the very beginning that Aurelio wasn’t doing this halfway. He stared for a moment longer, and then trotted forward. He kept an eye on the huge feline as he wove and ducked through the underbrush, but there was no hesitation. Even when he reached the log, Aurelio leapt right onto the stranger’s perch and settled a couple of feet from him. His long, fluffy tail curled around his feet, though his posture wasn’t completely relaxed; he was ready, in case this guy was okay with eating the smaller of his kind.

Just in case he looked too tense, Aurelio gave his customary little sniff of disinterest. “We don’t have folks quite like you, either. Do you big cats come from forests outside, too?”