Fairy Blue

Another night, another dream.

Somewhere, a black vixen lay, soundly snoozing as the night clouds drifted slowly by. However, what took place in the realm of her mind, of her subconscious, sleeping thoughts was far different. Her leg twitched in reality as her dream self took a look around. She stood on all four feet in her usual form: a dark vixen with very distinctive, sickly greenish yellow eyes that darted around and took in her surroundings. Beneath her feet, sand of the purest white lay over endless miles and the midday sun beat down from the cloudless sky with such a ruthlessness her throat felt parched and her whole body cried out for water.

Fortunately, relief seemed to be nearby. A short distance away, on an acre wide, strangely square-shaped patch of black sand, grass grew and a lone, crooked dogwood tree... a dogwood tree with thorns, she realized, as she suddenly seemed upon it. Several of the cross-shaped, white blossoms floated tranquilly in the water as she walked around the odd plant. Dogwood trees didn't have thorns, she thought with a brief shake of her head. The grass was tall enough to conceal her form and protected her from the white, also thorny sun as she walked over to the clear waters and began lapping at it.

Grunty continued licking, alertly, as the strange vision of death approached near the lake and began taking its drink as well. She didn't like him. As a matter of fact, her fur bristled a bit at his presence. No snarl or other such noise of hostility accompanied her anger, however. She seemed content to simply stand there, snarling and looking ominous.

Somehow, though she possessed the powers of speech, the vixen didn't know whether or not she wanted to get this one's attention. Judging she shouldn't run from this strange, dead thing, lest it believe her scared and begin chasing her, she lifted her muzzle from the water, her lips writing in oscillating waves as she regarded it, now being a bit more vocal with her displeasure at his appearance.

The vixen took a few steps backwards, her chin low to the ground as she glared up at the creature before her. She wasn't going to blow him to hell right off the bat; that would seem somehow rude. Nonetheless, as he approached, she begin to feel something in the pit of her stomach akin to sickness... the sort of sickness one might get from seeing a live creature put into a meat grinder. She took one more step back, snapping at him as the distance seemed to not be growing fast enough.

And suddenly, something strange seemed to happen. She found herself lifted by the back of her neck, an oddly paralyzing posture. Soon a vision of the thing's red hand appeared and seemed to be skinning her alive.

And of course, she shrieked, feeling the terror of the unknown and the pain of feeling her fur slake off as easily as if it had been a banana peel drew long, ghostly wails from her throat. She felt no shame in this. It seemed only a natural reaction, but though her high pitched, fearful yowls echoed off of the desert sand like the report of a siren, the creature's laughter came in above it.

And with this laughter, she began to grow angry. Increasingly angry. So angry that the pain only increased her rage until her emotions formed a sort of positive feedback loop. Growls and screeches of rage eventually began to punctuate the screams until an expression akin to insanity came over the paralyzed vixen's visage, both in her vision and out.

Ball lightnings were thought in Japanese mythology to be expressions of the thunder god, Raijin's wrath, but now they simply rose about the vixen as a manifestation of her own rage at her inability to move of stop this pain and the creature's laughing. She didn't mind the thought of blowing herself up much at all now if it meant shutting this dark thing up. She couldn't even move her jaws to utter the oath that lay burning on her tongue, but the explosion of glittering lights that came to surround the area washed the land in electric power more forcible than any string of profanities.

Action: Used Scream of the Lytflies (Perfected)

The creature's wrath could hardly be abated by something as simple as the illusion dissipating about her like so much mist. Her lips still writhed over her fangs as she regarded this faintly familiar person.

It was only a few moments before she recognized him as a human she'd mated with once before she began eating members of his species. Very close friends they'd come to be, but she'd been avoiding him lately for much the same reason one might avoid a senile relative. Namely, she hardly let her guard down simply because this male appearing to her in a dream was a familiar one. It didn't seem she could let her fur down anymore either. Perhaps as an odd effect of the dream she was in, her hackles wouldn't lower. They stayed up, pointed like so many spikes as she sat down gingerly on the black sand. Now everything around them was black, even the white blossoms of the dogwood tree, that was now little more than a naked, twisted black branch above the water. The grass had altogether vaporized, but that didn't seem to concern her much. She took a tenuous drink of the water, never removing her eyes from this person who'd seen fit to appear in her dream. "Yea, ain't seen yer ass in forever," she said, a snarl still in her voice.

The vixen's growl became slightly muted, but she continued to growl nonetheless, the sound becoming background noise in the completely silent desert. Perhaps it was the ruthless heat that put her in a sour mood. Perhaps it was the impending sense of danger that didn't fade or even lessen with the disappearance of the skeletal creature.

She watched him laying there and still couldn't remove the anger from her voice as she hissed, "Things ain't the way they was before, yea?"

Namely, lytflies were simply her default way of dealing with obvious issues, and thus far she'd encountered very little that the little things couldn't solve. She scratched her back with a hindleg and found her hairs still stiff, a few of them falling out where she could observe them. She poked one with her paw and noticed its stiffness. Snorting at the sudden new ability she seemed to have gotten, she forgot her anger, caught up in the curiosity of this phenomenon. "Weird..." she commented aloud, walking a brief circle around the quill that had fallen out of her back. It seemed her hair had gotten longer as well before firming up. Perhaps this would work as some sort of a defensive ability if she could retain knowledge of how she managed to accomplish it.

“What’s… a porcupine…?”

Truthfully, Grunty had never encountered such a beast. In Koutaku shi, the sort of person who might be reborn as a quill pig yokai probably wouldn’t qualify to make it past the gates, whereas the fact that she’d never run into a creature of that nature on Earth was probably due to the fact that she hadn’t run into so terribly many yokai there in Yochi. Most of them seemed to be dogs and cats anyways.

She’d heard of them, but under a much less conventional name due to the fact that she was from the part of heaven that would be qualified as the “country”.