Avishraa Reloaded

Puugwol had said something about speaking to her gods, but she had - rather characteristically - failed to mention exactly when and where this would occur. So when she failed to appear in the lab for further experiments with Shyriath, it was reasonable to guess that she had decided to undergo this… procedure, whatever it was. But where had she gone?

Someone peering into her room would have seen that the glowworm-lights had been turned down. This was not part of their usual behavior, so evidently it had been done on purpose. In the dim light, there was no immediate sign of anyone around, But there was a scent on the air, as of recently-cooked mushrooms; some of them, sliced, sat on a plate on one of the tables.

On the wall behind them was a… a decoration that, a few vigils ago, hadn't been there. Someone had painted, in ochre or something like it, a kind of design. It was hard to say exactly what it was meant to be; nothing came to mind if one just stared at it… but, when glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, it was hard not to see faces emerge briefly from the shapes, only to disappear when one tried to focus on them.

At last, one might hear, from the vicinity of the angle between the round bed and one of the walls, a faint noise: a panting, edged with whimpering. Puugwol lay there, or at least surely it must be her, but she seemed to be having difficulty holding her shape; colors and textures moved and clashes across her body like waves on the surface of a pool. But it was possible to make out that her antennae were flushed and her pupils were dilated. Her gaze was fixed on the design painted on the wall.

Einriss was certainly not the type to get concerned about people's voluntary self-poisonings, especially when the effect was not likely to be a lethal dose, but he'd come upon Puugwol mainly because of the not directly explained absence. If something else had happened to her and she needed help, it would certainly have been prudent to check. And so he gave a mildly annoyed exhale as he quietly entered Puugwol's abode, approaching to check on her without deliberately breaking her rapt attention on the image. If she'd taken too large a dose, he might need to help; it would serve no one if one of her organs shut down. Hopefully she was firmly this side of not-dying - if the situation was anything else, he would have to intervene, and she wouldn't like that, and it would make things awkward.

As he approached, his alchemist's sense clearly picked up on the psychoactive substances sloshing around in her body, and the chemical signatures of stress. Her eyes flicked to one side to glance at him, then fixed on him, or at least in his direction.

She said something in her own tongue, though it seemed to contain his name: “Duune ta nAjnris? Nkat al-” She stopped, slowly blinking as if something were trying to hold her eyelids back, and then reached out and gripped his ankle, since it was the only part of him she could reach. She said, concentrating desperately on the words: “Please do not leave me.”

He hadn't expected her to interact with him, much less want him to stay. Biologically, nothing life-threatening was happening to her, so he had been mentally gearing up to leave before she reached out for his ankle. For a moment, he simply stood there in a kind of stupor, then shrugged the lethargy off his thoughts and sat himself down beside Puugwol, offering a paw on her shoulder. “Okay,” he confirmed, softly, but made no effort to further insert himself into the scene, other than to exist for her. That part, at least, was easy.

Puugwol kept her gaze on Einriss. The image on the wall was a focus, something to look at while communing, but at this particular point she didn't need it; the faces loomed out of everything, the messages came from all around, and it was overwhelming. But around Einriss they were not quite so powerful, his color was soothing…

“The… the Lords are not gentle in their speech this time,” she whispered hoarsely. “They bellow; their laughter is loud…” She shuddered as her face twisted up in a shape-change, then slumped. “Were there a shaman here, I would have undertaken this with their guidance; but all the shamans are where I came from.”

“You'll be all right,” Einriss assured her. He couldn't comment on the spiritualism, even if he were so inclined - he simply didn't know enough about her religion to comment meaningfully. Besides, this was a biological event that was screaming itself at him; thinking about anything other than the way her organs were fluttering with stress and her nerves were firing exaggeratedly took concentration he might have been able to muster, but only just, and the lack of familiarity prevented him from giving it an honest try. He did, however, place both hands on her now - even if that worsened the feedback he was getting - and petted her shoulder and arm soothingly.

The touch seemed to lessen Puugwol's terror; at least, the whine faded out of her panting and her transformations became slower. She transferred her grip from Einriss' ankle to a wrist. “Thank you,” she managed, and then added, demonstrating an unusual insight: “I know… you were not raised in the ways of Mangukal. This must not have much meaning to you. Possibly you may find the biochemical effects interesting - at home some alchemists have said that tracing the movement of the products of bilaak-tesh ingestion proved to be an insightful exercise…”

She trailed off. The teal of Einriss' scales really was capitvating. Neither her conversational skills nor her current state of mind lent themselves to poetry, but she wished she could manage the words to convey the sheer depth of color there.

Instead, she said: “Also… also… from this place within the mist, your scales seem very luminous.”