Oh look a bear

[canhazcookie]

Who: Raisa and Riza
What: Exploring and caves and stuff
When: Backdated to the first week of June
Where: Helind
Warnings: None


Raisa felt…rather stupid, all things considered. She had said the snows should have gone by now, and they had—for a week. Then after a morning of beautifully blue sky, the afternoon was suddenly filled with glooming clouds. The hawk laguz warned of the winds beginning to turn foul, and there was a brief scramble for shelter before the cave had been spotted.

No, not cave—cavern. They had time to gather extra fuel from the scraggly alpine trees, but barely so—the storm swept down out of the mountain with such speed it left Raisa bewildered for a moment.

The wind didn’t seem inclined to chase them too much beyond the rocky doorways, though the chill would deepen as the light faded.

The back walls, though, seemed riddled with holes like some sort of cheese; some a mouse would find tight quarters, others quite big enough for two horses and their carts stacked high with something or other to pass simultaneously. The rest were somewhere between.

Raisa busied herself attempting to peer into the darkness beyond one of these bigger entranceways, tailtip flicking back and forth.

Comments

[fullmoonhalfbreed]

"Well, this is a great situation we're in," complained Riza bluntly, standing just out of reach of the snow and wind as she stared out at the blizzard. Weather just wasn't something you could punch, but the foul look on the werewolf's face said she was considering it. "Guess we're gonna have to delay our count of just how many damn mountains this place can have..."

By now, most of those in the party knew of Riza's lack of enthusiasm when the trek through the mountains turned out to involve far less exploring, raiding and fighting than it did climbing up sheer cliff faces and other uninhabited terrain. It wasn't an unshared sentiment among many of her fighters, but still they soldiered on. The sudden blizzard seemed to be taking a lot of wind out of those sails though.

[canhazcookie]

Though Raisa was better suited to all of this rock scrambling business, she wasn't precisely enthusiastic either. There were new plants to take note of and samples to collect, new prey to hunt, but an entirely new territory to get used to. Lower down there had been elk and hares to chase, but those seemed to disappear like magic the closer one got to a crossing point. There, little tailless rats that scrambled and melted into the rocks, pigeons that seemed to deliberately try to shit on their heads and falcons with more bravado than sense mobbing the hawk laguz a hundred times their size.

The biggest quarry here were those odd goats, though they stayed mockingly out of reach no matter how the cats tried to ambush them. At least until one of the hawks came up with the idea of dragging the goats off of the mountainside. Quite clever except for when the horns of a buck shattered on the rocks too close to them and sent Raisa skittering away with splinters in her tail.

It was still bound with a few bandages, but that didn't stop the tip from twitching.

"I hear something," Raisa said, both ears turned forwards. Distant chittering bats...and something breathing.

[fullmoonhalfbreed]

Facing the other way, Riza had yet to notice anything, but at Raisa's voice, turned back, her wolf ears popping up on top of her head as she listened.

"Yeah?" After a moment, she heard it too, face changing to something between caution and anticipation - anything was better than just sitting here, but getting chased out into the snow by some unknown threat was hardly appealing. "Look alive, boys, we're not alone in here."

[canhazcookie]

Raisa's form shimmered and melted and changed, until she stood on four feet instead of two. The light from the transformation made whatever-it-was in the dark grunt, then growl in a particularly raspy way.

"Sounds like a bear," the laguz said, tail lashing a bit despite the injury.

And, in proper bearish fashion, the creature charged at the figures illuminated by the light still filtering in through the first entrance.

[fullmoonhalfbreed]

Riza sniffed the air as she changed her own form, arms changing into the huge, furry paws that she fought with.

"Smells like it," she agreed. Those things didn't exactly prepare them though for the size of it as it came charging out towards them. "A big one, huh!?"

That description didn't even really begin to cover it. Compared to the bears down in Lerrian, this one was like their big, angry uncle - bristling with fur, huge claws and teeth. As big as it was, if it stood it would probably brush the ceiling.

"Looks like we finally get something fun to do..."

[canhazcookie]

Raisa practically bounced out of the way like some kind of furry superball, hissing and spitting as she did so. The bear barreled through the space where the cat laguz had been,

Large bears tended to be of the "I can hurt anything that annoys me" mindset, and this one was no exception. The expedition party annoyed it, so it charged at the next available target--Riza.

[fullmoonhalfbreed]

"Yeah? Bring it on!" It wasn't as if Riza couldn't dodge it... at least, physically. But when she saw a head-on attack like that, how could she back down from it? It'd be a disgrace to werewolves.

Sidestepping those huge jaws, Riza lunged in so the claws only grazed her back and she punched the beast in the chest before starting to grapple it. The bear seemed momentarily stunned but... it was obvious who had more weight in a wrestling match, which this had turned into, since Riza couldn't really disengage without leaving herself open now.

[canhazcookie]

The moment Raisa can gather her footing again, she springs back, the momentum of her leap carrying through to her claws as she latched onto the bear's shoulders. She sank her fangs into the back of its neck, but couldn't reach through all that coarse fur to do much appreciable damage.

Still, it was enough to make the bear disengage to roar and spin and swat at this new annoyance.

[fullmoonhalfbreed]

This was the perfect opportunity for anyone to back off an assess a new line of attack.

Instead Riza used it to pull back her arm, then sock it in the throat with one paw, claws sinking in... sort of.

"Gods, he's got a lot of fat on him!" she yelled right before the bear, coughing but not exactly slaughtered the way most things were after taking a blow from Riza to the throat, turned and knocked her off her feet. With their leader out of the way, some of the other raiders closed the gap to start fending the monster with their own fists or better yet, spears.

[canhazcookie]

Raisa's ears perked at that, and she started to climb the bear's back, with her claws acting as big crampons. The bear was torn between dislodging this attacker on its back and fending off the spears from the front. It couldn't put up an effective defense this way.

It took a bit more effort to make the beast fall, but one of the raiders got in a solid blow with a spear, one to the bear's chest. It sank in up to the crossbars and seemed to hit something important--and from the injury from Riza and the subsequent blows afterward, fall it did.

The laguz stayed on her perch as the creature fell, then hopped off of its back during its death throes. She landed a ways away and stayed standing until the bear had died proper, and only then sat to clean the blood off her claws.

"Well, that was exciting." Said with only a bit of sarcasm. That confrontation was the most exciting thing to happen so far for most of the week. The other was when one of the shamans almost lost their footing on a mountain pass waiting for the hawk laguz to carry them over in relays.

[fullmoonhalfbreed]

"Yeah!" agreed Riza without any sarcasm. "I wonder if there's more inside? He's kind of big though, so maybe he likes his space..." She sounded almost disappointed. "Well, we'll have to look around in here at some point or another, and as long as the weather's not letting up, we can't look outside. Whaddaya say?"

[canhazcookie]

"A big boar like that won't like company," Raisa mused. Riza was right, though--there was nothing new to look at outside, anyway.

And she'd get out of the initial butchering this way! As viscerally pleasing as it was, it was still a huge pain in the ass--especially for something that big.

"If there are more wasps in this cave I'd like to know where they are." The cat bobs her head in what was probably assent, gets up from where she had been sitting, stretches--and begins padding over to the secondary entrance immediately after.

[fullmoonhalfbreed]

"Guh, wasps... that's the only thing I can thank the cold weather for, chasing away the bugs." Cleaning off her paws and motioning to her men, Riza followed. "Alright, some of you grab some torches. We're gonna take a look around and make sure we don't have any other guests staying here with us, okay?"

[canhazcookie]

Raisa was...slightly--slightly!--jealous. Though the shamans followed her, she had not quite earned the same level of obedience. Her commands were more suggestions, to be considered as a group--suggestions that were often heeded, to be sure, or otherwise only slightly modified.

In this instance, less verbal communication was needed; just a swish of the tail, lifted ears and a paw raised as if frozen midstep before the decision was apparently made. One shaman was enough; no need to have everyone tramping about all over the place, with how insulated the cave already was.

The laguz reverted, rising up to two feet, and waited by the cavern mouth, peering into the dark to try and discern the first details.

[fullmoonhalfbreed]

Riza's following came from two things - her tendency to fraternize with them more as equals than superiors outside of missions, and impressing the others by kicking some unruly asses when necessary. By now, everyone in her squad at least knew not to make a big deal of her half-breed lineage and think that somehow made her weaker.

Joining Raisa over by the entrance to the deeper areas the bear had come from, she sniffed the cold air.

"Storm's making the air go in... I can't really tell much. Guess we'll just have to step inside," she said, taking a torch from one of her raiders and leading the way deeper in.

[canhazcookie]

Something about cats and dogs would go here.

In any case, Raisa was already starting to miss her whiskers. She fell into line behind and to the side of Riza, tail flicking this way and that. There were signs of the bear's recent habitation; a heap of leaves drawn up into a crude nest. The cavern sloped downward, with a few tumbled heaps of stone in the way, but progress was otherwise still easy.

"I don't hear any more ominous breathing, at least."

Her ears stayed in almost constant motion anyway, turning to identify sounds as she heard them. That was a cluster of bats, over there was a drip of water, and as they went further and further down--a change in the echoes, like a room had suddenly opened up above their heads. A moment later the entire party could see, with the torches illuminating a much, much larger cavern.

It seemed like the mountain had been hollowed out on the inside, at least from Raisa's point of view; miles of stone probably still stretched above their heads still. But still!

The cavern walls were riddled with yet more holes, warrenlike; some were shallow, some were deep enough to be proper tunnels leading off elsewhere. The sound of dribbling water had intensified; a collection of fanciful stalagmites grew up from the floor, as if they were trees. The occasional drop of water splashed down on them from above, but the ceiling was too tall for the flickering torchlight to reveal much in the way of details.

"Well. Left or right?"