Private Wrong Turn at Hastings

[Damsy Callat]

Below surface,
Rychel’s moon
Ressa 'Keo' Quane​

Damsy had lost her grip on Tapas hours ago, even before beginning to wander the permafrost lunar landscape. She was wearing precious little in the grand scheme of things – things being the weather – having left her jacket, scarf, and gloves back with the crash survivors. Like hell she would leave a starving woman and her child to freeze before she could bring back some food for them and the rest. She was a monster, not monstrous.

And not even a good monster. There was nothing to hunt out here and hadn’t been for the last klick or so, not that she could tell because her HUD gauntlet had long since frosted over and refused to boot. Even if there had been, she doubted she could go for her trident or even give chase. Each trudging step siphoned off energy she was scared would run out next stride. Equal was the fear to take her hands out from under her clenched armpits. Maybe they had gone literally black. Felt kinda like it. Well, actually, not much felt like anything, but therein lay the problem.

She had finally happened upon a pond frozen solid. Hutt-fat chance of fethin’ fish, she thought, but approached the ice for other reasons: to strike it with enough lighting to make a humanoid-sized hole and then ease herself into the frigid water.

She didn’t even give thought to Syreni before knocking on her realm.

Metamorphosing set fire to the nerves the tundra had seared numb. For once it her life, the pain had a purpose. Warmth blossomed throughout her changed body through thick blue ice shards bobbed all around. It wasn’t a lot, but enough that could stretch her brown fats and blubbers to turn into survival. It would still be a race against time, though.

Ready, set, go.

The squaloid dove.

 

[Ressa 'Keo' Quane]

The Ak turned its head away from Keo, looking towards a ice cave in the distance. Keo paid no attention to the cave save for a cursory glance, before refocusing on the Ak. If there was something that the Ak had been spooked by then the hunter only had a moment to act.

Throwing up pulled back, her spear‘s tip aligning with her eyes before she took one soft step forward and silently tossed the weapon. Moments before impact, the Ak turned to the sound of the soft wind that had been stirred by the approaching spear. It bolted, running straight ahead. Keo had accounted for this as on its second step the spear’s tip hit the neck of the small roe. The point hit just above the shoulder blades, Keo’s best hit ever, and the creature ran a few paces before stumbling and hitting the ground.

The hunter’s feet fell softly with each step across the snowy knoll, before she bent down beside the fallen prey. Her and fell on the head of the creature, tears falling from the hunters eyes. Having the mind of the beasts so close to her own thoughts meant that hunting was no pleasure, but simply a matter of survival. This Ak had thankfully suffered less because of her improvement in her technique, but she still felt the pain and sudden loss of being.

“Malu. Malu. Malu canastralya. Fukstra wanamalu.”

With her prayer of forgiveness and thanks completed, Keo’s senses were lit up by a feeling of transformation echoing through her mind. She looked up and towards the cave mouth. There was someone there.

Before investigating, she had to secure her kill lest it be wasted or eaten by some roving Jalbeast. The moment she did though, the cave would become her new hunting ground.

| Damsy Callat |​

 

[Damsy Callat]

The cold was exhausting: that was a kind way of putting it, as if the subsurface waves had feelings, which Damsy knew they did. They had always been kind to her across the galaxy's many planets, so they must have had some sort of emotional hivemind as well. She locked her jaw, not daring to let her fangs chatter lest the tides keep away the bounty that was bound to be down here...somewhere.

Whether or not her nerves could feel the chill in all its glory, her muscles sure did. Swimming was getting hard, and progress slow. The only option was to breech. Hopefully find a place to float. Rest awhile.

All of those things came to be in the cave entrance a native woman wandered into. As Damsy surfaced some meters away from her and near a medium-sized waterfall; miraculously unfrozen, perhaps because of its shelter; she found a nearby outcrop to latch onto.

Ressa 'Keo' Quane

 

[Ressa 'Keo' Quane]

“Kak!”

The creature from the water had surprised Keo, with her expecting something to be in the cave but not below the ice. Nothing lived under the ice except the Volia. This creature had arms...so it was not a Volia.

In spite of her inquisitive nature, Keo knew well that she could not assume good intentions from this new animal. It could well be a predator, a carnivorous and veracious killer. Until proven otherwise, she would be at height alert.

Her spear was already drawn and its Ak-bloodied tip was pointing towards the fish-person-thing.

“Kak!”

Keo approached the waterfall slowly, one step after another cautious, sure footed step.

| Damsy Callat |​

 

[Damsy Callat]

Damsy moved with new vigour infused into her muscles by sudden fright:

Let go of her anchor.

Swam backwards.

Turned towards the spear-brandishing woman.

Over the next moment, she was unsure of what to do, but she finally rose her hands slowly out of the water. She didn't have any idea was kak meant - it was Huttese to her even between her Kaminoian, Basic, and Mando'a vocabulary - but she assumed that the universal sign of peace would get the message across.

Though she could only raise her webbed hands, not put down her weapons, as the talons were very much extensions of her fingers.

Ressa 'Keo' Quane

 

[Ressa 'Keo' Quane]

Keo paused, bringing her spear point to bare on the creature across the small lake. It’s talons extended in what seemed like a threatening manner. Given that it had not responded to her verbally, Keo started to wonder, even to the point of assuming, that the creature could not speak.

She hated the though, but the creature would feed many…

”Kak!”

Reaching forth with her hand, Keo directed her minds eye to the depths of the frozen lake. There she found the minds of the Folluk, a school of them. The dual-limbed eel like creatures swam up from below, filling the lake with a circulating mass below the ice.

The moment the creature across the lake dared to look down, Keo was prepared to throw her spear at it.

| Damsy Callat |​

 

[Damsy Callat]

Look down she did.

Then she spoke. Rather, exclaimed:

"Chit!"

A pained groan ripped its way out of her throat almost immediately after. The hunter's aim was good, but Damsy's reflexes saved her from it just slightly. She moved a couple hairs' breath over to one side, not quite out of the way of the projectile, but enough to avoid a wound through her shoulder. Instead, the side of the spearhead ripped through the contour of her skin instead.

Damsy dove, salt immediately kicking at newly exposed nerves. She jerked through the water, almost falling, until she recovered control through the fire. She extended a hand upwards, where she found an underwater portion of the rock she had been holding onto at the surface. Here, she took a moment to muse over options. It was hard to think about much of anything beside the throbbing rhythm of blood through her veins though.

Even harder when something bit at her tailflute. Damsy beat the water before glancing down to see her newest aggressor, but when she did she saw the rest of the Folluk school closing in around her.

She was supposed to be the predator here, not the prey.

Chit.

Ressa 'Keo' Quane

 

[Ressa 'Keo' Quane]

Wounded!

Keo had spied blood from the creature. She bounded across the slippery surface of the ice, barely making any impact with its surface with her light steps, before jumping onto the rock the creature had been upon. She drew her jagged, stone blade, her hand holding it at the grip made of a dried, woven flax called Va’al.

Crouching on her haunches, she spied the being below the surface of the water, and scooted back just a little for her own protection. Her eyes locked intently on the being below, but her mind wandering to the Folluk that swam in circles below the surface, and around the mystery creature. The Folluk began to shimmer a light blue that was barely noticeable in the white-blue of the ice cave and its water, but the light that the Folluk emanated slowly increased, with arcs of electricity beginning to ripple across their surface.

Keo stretched out her hand, and clenched her fist…leading to a slowly shrinking circumference for the Folluk’s path.

Whatever this thing was, it needed to be taken with some life in it, just to satiate her curiosity, but preferably with not so much life as to be a risk to the native hunter.

| Damsy Callat |​

 

[Damsy Callat]

She was slipping.

Mentally before physically.

It was panic, all of it. Setting in, her mind went blank enough to forget its involuntaries--like treading water, blood circulation, heatbeat. The process was slow, beginning with the steady decline of her will to fight. Her tail stopped trashing, which was just as well because her tail barb wouldn't be able to reach the Folluk as they closed in anyhow. Then she let lost her grip on the rock holding her steady.

And began to sink like the dense muscle mass she was in this form.

Ressa 'Keo' Quane

 

[Ressa 'Keo' Quane]

Reaching the sinking creature had been no mean feat for Keo. The speed at which it had began to sink had necessitated the use of the Folluk in a way that she had never tried, as bouys. She had been able to keep the creature afloat just long enough to reach into the icey water and pull it out. It was then, and really only then, that Keo understood that this creature was not simply an animal, like the Folluk below. No this creature, seemed more.

---

Pulling both the water-person and the Ak she had killed had meant that Keo did not return before sundown. It was dangerous to be out this late, so that as she approached the camp, there was quite a stir as people declared her safe. Such was the curiousity over what the send animal was under the shroud that she had laid over the water-person, that Keo had had to satiate their intrigue by giving away her recently killed Ak. That would have fed her for some time. Now it would feed them all for a day or two, and provide bedding for one of the tribe's newly arrived young ones.

Getting the water-person out of the grasp of her xenophobic people was hopefully worth the sacrifice. Keo took the stretcher with Damsy upon it, back to her cave on the far outer edge of the encampment. She pushed her head around the Ak-skin covering over the cave mouth to find one of the children of her village exploring through her pouches of ingrediants.

"Vak! Mulag rastrana...pik...Vak! Vak!" She said, cursing the curiousity of the little one. The child jumped with a start and bolted past Keo, who did not stop the child in their escape.

Keo pushed into her small abode, and rested the end of the stretcher on an outcropping of rock that was regularly used as a seat by the rare visitors to her space. Her first intent was to check the well being of her patient, and discover a bit more about what it was. Though as she uncovered her prized catch, she took a step back in shock at what she saw before her...

| Damsy Callat |​

 

[Damsy Callat]

The trudge from there to here had dried Damsy off...in a manner of speaking.

The water on her skin had not evaporated, but frozen into a layer of delicate frost covering her body. In any case, the freezing had been enough. Her body had transformed silently, little by little, on Keo's sled and under her shroud before they came into the cave-house. If the concoction of exhaustion, frigid water, and electric shock hadn't lulled Damsy off to sleep, Keo would have noticed that something was amiss with her catch a long time ago--for Damsy would've been making a ruckus. But, she needed so badly to sleep that she did like a log and not even the fire of live metamorphosis could wake her.

Water-person no more--with skin instead of scales, two legs in place of a tail--but rather a person who came out of the water, Damsy lay rather still as she was uncovered. Her eyes screwed tighter shut as light seeped through her eyelids unadulterated by cloth, but no movement beside that gripped her. Involuntary? Maybe rest yet held onto her.

Keo might have started doubting what she had seen hours earlier, though, on closer inspection of the stretcher, a bit of fin lay underneath Damsy's back where the creature she had been had had a long ridge along its spine. What's more, some blood splatter soaked around the area as well, which was strange because if Keo was to turn her over, Damsy's back appeared uninjured and whole, excepting some bruising. The only wound on her person was the shoulder graze that the hunter had inflicted.

Ressa 'Keo' Quane

 

[Ressa 'Keo' Quane]

Hands. They were quick to work. Keo pulled at limbs, ran fingers over the patients person indiscriminately as all semblance of a medicinal propriety went out the door and was replaced with unbridled curiosity absent decorum. No portion of the patient being was spare the poking, stroking nor the tugging, as Keo sought answers to what had transpired.

She finally rolled the patient over, and saw the fin, the blood and the healed region where the wound should have been. She dropped the fish….the woman….back on to the sled in shock and stumbled back several steps. “Valac mala tan-kree,” she gasped.

She was already rummaging through her medicines, looking for the aromatic spice used to bring sleeping patients back to a full and ready alertness. Keo wanted to understand this woman, and the strange change that had clearly taken, or rather was still clearly taking place.

Keo dipped a smooth piece of wood into the jar of spices, and walked to her patient to hold it beneath the woman’s nostrils.

| Damsy Callat |​

 

[Damsy Callat]

Sleep was gross; she was never going to do that again.

That was the decision Damsy roused back to conscious reality.

But, when she fluttered her eyelids open—

"Ahhhh!!"

—she added a condition: that she definitely wouldn't be doing that again if it was going to get her strange visitors in addition to a head full of grogginess.

She worked her legs underneath her own body and tried to scramble backwards on her haunches with her arms out to brace.

As if she had any right to be the startled one.



**
Ressa 'Keo' Quane

 

[Ressa 'Keo' Quane]

Eyes alight with amazement, and a smile across Keo's face, she jumped forward to touch the woman, who had apparently once been a fish-thing. Gone was any thought of propriety nor caution, hands just needed to touch to understand.

"Valum mactra tikrosa. Tikrosa!" She exclaimed, while pulled at the woman's flesh in a pinching fashion.

| Damsy Callat |​

 

[Damsy Callat]

"Ashla! Ya'know what?!"

Damsy tried to get to her feet, but lost her footing at the local jammed her fingers in her now very human skin. She was quickly remembering who this woman was, and how fish skewers had almost been for dinner.

"Hey hey hey, no! Chit, I know—no more scales—woahhhh!"

Damsy held out a hand, trying to stave of physical expression of the woman's curiosity.



**
Ressa 'Keo' Quane

 

[Ressa 'Keo' Quane]

"Vo'lah," Keo whispered over and over as she continued to poke and prod her guest (captive?), taking the offered hand and examining it quickly, though thoroughly. She all but nibbled on her fingers to find out something from each of her senses.

"Keo! Keo! Mala kastra nok krane'eh, Keo!"

The booming man's voice grabbed the tall, white haired woman's attention immediately. She turned back to her guest quickly, and started pulling, pushing and near stuffing her into a nearby storage nook in the back of her cave. Keo pulled back the animal hide that covered the entrance to the cool dry storage nook, and looked at the fish-woman. "Fook. Fook...pala mik jarka...fook," she whisper yelled while pointing into the nook.

| Damsy Callat |​