The Mossy Gnoll

[Kuzo]

Continued from Heavy Metal

It had all happened too fast, and honestly even for the typically borderline paranoid Neri Rashal, too unexpectedly.

After all, who can honestly say they are prepared for a vegetative monster to come rampaging suddenly out of a side tunnel while they were studying MOSS. By the time her hand had moved reflexively to the blaster she still carried slung low on her hip, it was over.

But WHAT exactly had just-

Neri swore under her breath.

"Have you always been a Forcer, Logain?"

She slowly stood up from her crouch, head turning back and forth, the light casting across the hallway but all was clear again.

"You know what, that's none of my business, forget I asked," she muttered then, waving her hand as if she could wave the question away. Neri had no particular issues, one way or the other, with Forcers. Just didn't have much truck with them. As far as she could figure, the biggest issue was that they were just regular folk with a lot more capability of making a MESS if they weren't careful. But then, so was anyone with a big enough explosive.

"What did you *do* to it?" That was relevant.

Even as she asked though, she was lifting the small vial with the moss sample up to get a better look at it now. The thing, whatever it was, had been close enough to see the texture, the way it glowed. Mossy. And it had come out and after her ONLY after she'd taken the sample. Ambulatory plant? Something akin to a butterfly, with completely different adult and juvenile forms? Her mind was racing and it had nothing to do with the near miss just now.

[member="Elias Logain"]

 

[Zef Halo]

Sweat had broken over his brow and his heart slowly steadied down to a normal rate. Invading minds was one thing, invading minds of something completely unknown to him was something else completely. Elias had never seen, read or heard about the creature they had just witnessed.

He gazed at the tunnel in which the monster had fled to leaving a wet trail behind it. Neri asked him a question he answered with silence and she didn’t opt to push. Instead she took to asking a different question, this one not out of impulse.

Elias could’ve been laconic, as always, but something with Neri seemed to push him to spew more words than usual.

“Scared it.” He said with his eyes still locked at the tunnel as if he did not want to miss even the opening credits of a highly anticipated holomovie. Then he slightly turned his head at her looking at her picking the sample. “Invaded its mind, made it see me as a scarecrow.” It sounded ridiculous that anything other than pesky birds would be afraid of a scarecrow, so he elaborated a bit further. “It’s not the sight of it that scares it but the symbol - the feeling - of dread that I imprint in its mind.”

He stared at the sample and added. “If you want to carry on with me further, Rashal, you should know that when I entered its mind I felt an unusual...motherly instinct from the creature. It might’ve been my imagination though.”

Elias couldn’t explain it any better but Neri perhaps could. It is why he wanted and even needed her to tackle this unknown plant-like creature. She had the knowledge he lacked.

[member="Neri Rashal"]

 

[Kuzo]

"Scared it."

Well okay. A.... scarecrow. Literally. Honestly though, Neri couldn't say boo about it. It had WORKED hadn't it? Sometimes a weird concept just had to be shrugged at and accepted cause it had worked.

She wasn't going to throw stones.

Beyond people waving lightsabers, tossing things around, and some lightening, Neri didn't have a lot of truck with the Force. She had the same general idea that it did a lot more than that, but most of her interactions with Force Users had been little things like trying not to die. Her own complication with the Force was still unknown and unfound.... side effect from the event that tied the two of them together, even if she didn't know it. For now, that epiphany waited.

The next part came though even more deadpan than the first.

"Motherly. Instinct- Logain are you chitting me?"

She peered at the moss in the vial, then down the darkened hallway.

"If that was real- the feeling you had- it'll be back. No amount of fear would keep that feeling at bay for keeps." She didn't speak from personal experience, but from watching it from the outside.

"If I want to carry on?" She looked up at him, eyebrow lofted and lips curling into a smirk. "Logain you couldn't leave me behind if you tried."

She tucked the vial into a pocket of her pack, then added the journal to it before slinging it back on over her shoulders.

"Let's go."

[member="Elias Logain"]

 

[Zef Halo]

He intently listened to her and gave her a short smile when she told him there was no way he could stop her not from coming. There was something about redemption in that brief smile.

"Very well then."

Elias took point and ventured forth into the side tunnel the monster had fled to. It left a clear wet trail to follow before the trail abruptly disappeared at a small intersection where the light was flickering. Just as the monster hunter was about to scan the immediate area for anomalies, vines with the strength of steel and the unyielding bite of an anooba hound wrapped his arms and pulled him upwards like a doll on strings into the roof of the tunnel.

The source of the attack - the same monster which somehow glued itself on one of the intersection's upper corners.

Thorns dotting the vines pierced his arm blood hurried down his arms.

"Don't let the vines get you!" He yelled out in pain as another pair of vines were coming for Rashal.

[member="Neri Rashal"]