Thread: [CLOSED] Pulp Inc. Presents: Thrilling Tales of the New Continent! [Deante & Lasciel]

The ground wasn't moving. It was the first sign Siona had that something was amiss. The past several weeks of her life had been spent aboard a vessel that lacked the good grace to stay still for more than a heartbeat at a time. Now, the stillness felt almost as jarring as the constant motion had been. Of course, she'd spent some time shipboard before almost everyone in Ulchark had, as the country seemed almost to have a fetish for ferry-based travel. But there were significant differences between spending a few hours on a shallow-draft vessel barely graduated from a raft that sluggishly made its way along some far-inland river, and spending over a month on the open seas aboard the HMS Horizon Skimmer . On a good day, the steam-and-sail-powdered craft rolled like a belly dancer's hips, a rhythmic undulation that one could get used to. But on a bad day and bad days were shockingly many on the open seas, the deck would lurch and jump and buck like an unbroken dire ostrich! Siona had known of these differences... in theory. The difference between theory and practice, however, came not in her mind, but in her stomach. She had spent nearly as much time enjoying the scenery as she had with her head in a bucket, and if the deck saw fit to give her a moment of calm, the fox was hardly in a mood to complain. In fact, she hardly felt in a mood to do much of anything at all, save to pass back into the pressing darkness that had held her for the past several... hours? Days? Slowly Siona realized she hadn't any idea how long she'd been wherever she was. But as awareness returned to her in fits and starts, she became increasingly confident that wherever wasn't the HMS Horizon Skimmer . The surface she occupied was too damp, and warm, and yielding to be any sort of deck, but still too solid and close to be the hammock she'd been calling her bed. That was her second sign that something was amiss, as she felt blindly at the ground under her and found coarse sand rather than smooth wood. Between the presence of texture and the lack of inertia, she concluded that wherever she was, it was not where she should have been. Worse, she hadn't the slightest clue how she'd gotten there. The third sign came when Siona's bright amber eyes finally slid open, and her vision was filled with a blurry mix of bright blue sky and lush green foliage. Foliage that her academic training immediately recognized as tropical, and foreign. Foliage that had no place aboard a ship. Foliage that irritatingly danced in an out of focus, making the world seem to jump and spin, forcing the fox to slam her eyes shut again lest her spinning vision incite nausea to rival that which she'd suffered during her journey. Oh yes. Something was very wrong. In addition to her dizziness and an overall sense of malaise, Siona found herself hungry, incredibly thirsty, and aching in approximately every muscle in her small body. Compact was the word she typically used, describing a frame that brought the tips of her ears below the muzzles of most folks while making up for what she lacked in height by way of the width curves of her hips and ass. Curvy and petite were other words she'd heard, but whatever fool was unfortunate to utter such in her earshot would usually be swiftly corrected. Not that she felt in any shape, just now, to bash in the heads of those silly enough to call her delicate or cute. Her whole body ached, and she felt soaked to the bone besides, her dense white fur plastered to the black skin underneath such that she looked less the intrepid explorer and more the drowned dog. Similarly, her shoulder-length locks, usually a brilliant copper, were instead water-logged and sand-filled, sticking awkwardly to her cheeks and falling into her mouth. Everything tasted like sand and salt and iron, and her tongue felt as if she'd been chewing on a cotton ball besides. Trying to move as little as possible, Siona assessed the state of her head finding everything roughly in-order save for a few bruises, she moved downward, checking for any signs of obvious trauma. But besides being wet, and exhausted, and achy, with a fair assortment of scrapes and scratches and bruises, nothing seemed terribly out-of-place. She made another go at opening her eyes, this time managing to fix the elephantine leaves that hovered overhead into a single point in space. From there, the fox levered herself up into a sitting position, and moved to free her usually voluminous, presently-sodden tail from where it had been uncomfortably crushed beneath her. This, too, she inspected, but found no signs of breaks or fractures among the many small bones not that she would've been able to do much if she had, as splinting a tail-tip was about as effective as splinting a broken toe. She moved then to the task of trying to stand, taking three tries to succeed and feeling frightfully shaky once she'd succeeded. Though standing hardly made her feel better, it made her at least feel less vulnerable, and surely that was worth something. Better, it verified to her that she could still stand, which Siona finally admitted to herself that she'd had a very real concern about the subject. Standing provided a superior perspective, and gave her a chance to observe her surroundings. There was... sand. And water, lapping gently at the sand not too far away, though clearly the tide was lower now than it had been when it deposited her. Somehow the thought seemed right, she had been in the water, and then she'd washed up here. And here was likely the New Continent she and the rest of the crew aboard the HMS Horizon Skimmer had been sent to investigate. But what had happened to said rest of the crew? She searched her memories and found only chaos. She'd been on the ship, and then something had happened, and now she was here. The rest, Siona hoped, would come back to her in time. At present, she had larger issues to worry about. There was no familiar weight on her back, which meant she'd lost her pack and all it's valuable supplies. Gone were her notebooks and pens and inks, gone were her tweezers and vials and spirits and pressing-paper and salts and wax and everything else she'd brought to capture, catalog, and categorize all the things that lived on the New Continent. Gone was her lantern, her meal kit, her spare clothes, her small collection of personal effects. A quick pat-down revealed that she'd retained a well-sized knife, her spell-pouch, an empty water-skin, a ball of twine, a charcoal pencil, a handful of silver pieces, and a few assorted pieces of junk of the kind that accumulated in one's pockets but defied description or use. She had her clothes dark gray trousers with a tear in one leg, a green button-up linen shirt now missing it's bottom-most button, water-logged soft leather boots, a soaked but sturdy leather belt, and her undergarments. Though it hardly mattered, her garments remained in solid enough shape to keep her decent, even if so dampened they clung to her small bust and her trim waist and her thick hips and shapely thighs and calves like a third skin her soaked fur acting as her second. Her cloak, a lovely navy-blue garment with a silver leaf-motif pin serving as the clasp, seemed long gone. As did her revolver, though Siona supposed as damp as everything else was it was unlikely the weapon would've worked anyway. Most alarming was the fact that she hadn't the slightest clue where her spellbook had wandered off to, and without such, the fox knew she was as helpless as a newborn babe. With her top priority thus set, Siona set to searching for a sufficiently-sized branch with which she could draw a reasonable approximation of a circle. The beach, at least, seemed ready to provide her with more than sufficient driftwood for the task. In short order, the fox had prepared for herself a tidy little space with which to conduct a Ritual, one of the simplest and yet most commonly-used. It had a proper name, but she'd long since forgotten it, knowing the technique only by it's common name of Find My Keys. It required little from her a strong visualization of the item she sought, and undeniable ownership over the object in question. The former was simple, and the latter Siona could only pray she possessed. But within moments of silent, focused meditation, she could feel the telltale tug at her navel, pulling her in the straight-line direction to her lost belonging. It was not another two hundred feet down the beach that she found her spell book, wrapped in kelp and snuggled up in a pith helmet that had similarly been liberated from it's resting place and finally meandered on-shore. Siona took both the former was water-proof and both items were thankfully undamaged. She quickly skimmed the tome until she found the spell she sought and prepared and cast it with only a few simple words and a flick of her elegant, black-padded fingers. Immediately, the water seemed to spring from her fur and hair doing nothing about the tangles in the latter, of course, evaporating into so much mist that shimmered in the sunlight. She dried her clothes, then the helmet in a similar fashion, before aligning the headpiece's cutouts over her ears and settling the hat on her head. It cut the worst of the glare from her eyes, and it's shade provided a modicum of relief from the unrelenting sunshine that felt almost oven-like to her more arctic-minded sensibilities. Of course, Siona knew the warm weather would cause her body to quickly shed it's thick, white coat in favor for something thinner and more brown, but it was hardly an immediate process. As she took stock of her situation, she elevated heat stroke in her list of concerns, above dehydration but after starvation the quick recovery of her spellbook had knocked at least one of those three down a few pegs. There was plenty of water, and though it's native form was far too saline to drink, it was only a small magical effort to purify the volume she drew into her water skin. This first quantity was guzzled immediately, as was the second, both helping to relieve dry and scratchy feelings that plagued her mucosal membranes and blunting the worst of her gnawing hunger. She filled her water skin a third time, banished the salt Siona still was unsure as to exactly where it went , then used a steady dribble to wash the salt and sand from her face and upper-body. She ran her small, dextrous fingers through her hair, trying to comb the worst of the snarls out, but only found that her blunt nails and sand-roughened pads would catch and tangle and make the entire mess even worse. The task was quickly abandoned she would need either to find a proper comb and some sort of grease or oil to help repair her hair, or, worse, have to give up entirely and shear herself to the type of pixie cut she hadn't dared since her schoolgirl days! Personal appearance, however, ranked low on her overall list of concerns. There were still matters of food and shelter to tend to, though her very first thoughts were as to the fate of her companions. Had they lived? Were they nearby? She lacked both ingredients to track them via the Ritual she'd used to find her spellbook she neither knew their current visual condition, nor could make any claim of ownership over them. Neither could she track the ship's food supplies, or her own belongings, as she couldn't claim ownership over the former and had no idea as to the appearance of either. Only her spellbook, bewitched as to be nigh-impervious to damage, could she have a reasonable assumption of the consistent appearance of. Of course, there were other means to track people and things, but... they were spells beyond her skills. Siona was a simple biologist, her specialty in botany, in the study of nectar-bearing flowers, though she knew a fair bit about plants and animals in general. She'd had no small amount of experience in discovering and cataloging new flora and fauna species across other territories Ulchark had acquired. Though, such territories tended to be physically contiguous with the country, and expressed only small variations in the climate and conditions she'd grown up with at home. The journeys she'd made before had always been short, multi-day affairs at most, ensconced in a team of wilderness experts who could insulate her from the worst of the threats and discomforts of life in the field. Siona knew how to purify water, how to build a fire that she wouldn't have to magically sustain, how to build a small snare and how to set a net to catch fish in a river. She could orient herself, hike cross-country, climb a tree, build a rudimentary shelter, and suss out what plants were safe or unsafe to consume. Such had been in the required skill set for her current mission, and she'd expected to perform most of the tasks... with the assistance of others. In a team. With other people. She was alone! The thought terrified her, and she shoved it down, trying to ignore the black claws of fear that tore at her mind and tried to shatter her thin veil of composure. First in her head, then aloud, she repeated her list of tasks as a soothing chant. Find the crew, find the site, find shelter, find food, stay cool, make water, find the crew, find the site... Her voice, normally a rich and somewhat sultry alto, came out scratchy and hoarse as if she'd been screaming. Perhaps she had? She still couldn't remember, and it was so frustrating. Siona was, she realized, pacing in a circle. Her dizziness had mostly fled, and her steps were no longer shaky. Her stomach still gnawed at her, and every part of her compact body still seemed to ache in one way or another, but she could walk. Which meant it was time to start on her list. She looked around again, pupils in her amber eyes narrowing as she stared out at the glittering water, then scanned left and right along the beach. She then turned to regard the jungle, dense and close and dappled with the morning afternoon? sun. Beyond the crashing of the waves she could hear the hooting and hollering and crawling and chittering and flapping and climbing and fighting and mating sounds of a thousand animals and more, each note strange and alien to her speckled ears. Her nose, similarly peppered with white dots among the black skin, found an equally alien bouquet of smells when she paused to inhale vanilla and citrus and leaf-mold and salt and pear and cut grass and mildew and jasmine, and dozens of others that Siona lacked the words to describe. Siona turned again to regard the beach. No sign of anyone, but... it wasn't as if she could see very far. Nor did she yet feel quite up to climbing a tree for a superior vantage point. So instead, she walked along the beach, in the direction in which the sand seemed to span the farthest, to see what she could see and to give her aching muscles a chance to warm up and relax from whatever ills she'd suffered. And, perhaps, if she was very lucky, she could find something to eat... a loud gurgling from her stomach punctuated the thought. Last edited Mar 11, 2019