Timestamp: Tria 14 81381 The sun was beating down. Sheelal'inoth loved it. Ideally his favorite climate was one that was extremely humid, but a dry heat was favorable as well. The sun was just beginning to rise; halfway to mid-day. The sun wasn't his interest though; it was the deep-set tracks leading over this next rise. Shubla. Male . . . big brute too. This was a rare beast to find, and some collectors paid good money for the meat on them. The rough skin, when roasted with a rich sauce, was said to produce a crunchy and juicy skin that many culinary artists only dreamed of making. Or that's what the people who had paid Sheelal'inoth to hunt for one had told him. Sheelal'inoth had never tried this gourmet meal. It wasn't that the prize was too expensive for him, it was just so . . . extravagant. Yet the thought of it made his mouth water. He had smelled the exotic scents from a nearby kitchen as shubla flesh was cooked. He unwittingly tracked some saliva that dripped down from his jaw onto the sand, the droplets sending a plume of dust into the air before leaving a dark spot to the unmerciful heat. Sheelal'inoth was pretty bored. Shublas may have been rare creatures to find, but the excitement at discovering their tracks soon dulled once you followed the trail for a good hour or so. Sheelal'inoth had gotten up pretty early this morning, but his genetic traits refused him to move any faster than the cold airÂ’s reaction to his system would let him. He had almost missed the trail, but it was through good fortune that he had noticed the tracks. Now that his system was warming up and he was becoming more active, Sheelal'inoth slowly found himself to be losing focus. There was nothing in sight, not even an insect, although if he took the time to search for them, he might have found a few. Sheelal'inoth yawned as he cleared the rise but within seconds he was awake. Those were pits in the sand; a shubla homestead by the size of it. Several family members were inside if the amount of stool in the area was to be any indicator. Sheelal'inoth uttered a barely discernable growl to himself. It would be suicide to try and enter those tunnels head-on, especially with a whole family of shublas within. What would he do? Nothing that would get him his prize immediately made itself apparent. Fortunately, his parents had taught him patience. Sheelal'inoth remembered fondly the first time he had gone hunting, how his parents had shown him the wisdom in waiting for the right moment to strike. He would have died in that first exercise had his parents not pointed out the group of predators waiting in the wings, watching their quarry. When Sheelal'inoth and his parents had left his very first target, he was irritated until he heard the screams of the prey being torn apart by the predators. Sheelal'inoth learned quickly to survey, note, and heed all of his surroundings before attacking. There were no predators in the area now. On the contrary, shublas weren't often attacked around their homesteads. And yet, Sheelal'inoth decided to wait. On the top of the rise, Sheelal'inoth set his haunches down and sat, waiting for one of the adult shublas to appear. No one had tested the theory yet, but it was believed they were based on movement. If he stood stock-still, there was the chance that Sheelal'inoth could wait undetected for one of the shublas to trundle off to collect food before following it, slaying it, and return its corpse to his client. That was another problem that would have to be dealt with: getting the corpse of a fully-grown adult shubla back to the small lodge on the outskirts of the desert. It was an hours walk away from Sheelal'inoth's current position, and that was without the literal dead weight. Thankfully, it looked like Sheelal'inoth would have plenty of time to think on how he could get the task done. Man did that sun feel good.
<table width="90%" cellpadding=10><tr><td> <font face=verdana style="font-size:12px; line-height:16px;"> OOC: taadaa! you better not disappear on your worldly travels. d; i've got a cold right now and am not writing super coherently, so i'll edit it as i get better. -------------------------------------- - - - -- - ----------------- - - - <p style="text-align: justify;"> Sand, warmed by the relentless sun, tickled down her back and slipped secretively between her toes, vying for a place between the fur and underneath a claw. Sand. It was all around her, an ocean that she was all too familiar with, a scene that she had lived with all her life and all too well. The scent of sand was hard to get acquainted to. Most knew sand by the way it hung around the beach, but then there the strong perfume of the sea leached into, salty and open, taming the quiet smell of sand. Here, where the sun roasted those little morsels of mineral, one could smell sand like it was baking fresh in the oven. It has hard not to smell sand, really. It was all over. As she stirred from her nap, an arden not far from her crouched in wait for a fresh shubla meal. While Nyym herself enjoyed shubla meat very much, she didn't take to hunting them lest she was with her pack. And it'd been a long time since she'd seen <i>them</i>... A squealy yawn escaped the clutches of her jaws followed by a bodily stretch, arms extending and toes wiggling. And then up she sprang. The day was to be recommenced. Flowing on all fours from beneath the shadowy shelter of a jagged rock, she emerged from the shadow to peer upon the scene that was laid out before her. Amber ocean speckled by a stiff, hardy looking shrub or plant here or there. She'd slept most of the hours out of the midday sun -- anybody from around the desert knew better than to stick around in the stinking hot of the day. Some were even smarter and traveled only by night. She was not as wise. What's more, it did not help that in the burning hot she was the colour of shadows and smoky plumes, of soot and sleep. But ah, Nyym had a few tricks up her sleeve. If anyone saw her racing across the desert floor, quick as a fox, then one would notice the little coal-coloured thill turn ivory and tan, the colour seemingly spilling from the spine of her back. It was quick and easy spell, one not hard to hold for extended lengths of time. Carrying forward, she made her way toward an oasis that she'd visited in her youth. But something made her stop on the way there. It wasn't easy, either, to make one pause in the middle of the desert, not when they were making their way to cool waters and palm trees. But it was the sight of a brutish looking takula resting placidly nearby some open pits. The pits she recognized as shubla entrances but she couldn't understand what on Ramath a takula was doing in this area of the desert, especially alone. They tended to travel in packs hereabouts though back when she lived it was seldom, if at all, to see them. The anubi did not take lightly to having takula in their midst. Her great grandmother had once described the lizardbeasts as foulers of their sacred sands. Nyym, unable to shake herself away, sat quietly on a crest of sand partially hidden behind a stiff and prickly bush, one that hardly passed as 'greenery'. </font></p></td></tr></table>
