For those that had been with Beck since he dragged them to this wretched swamp, it was fairly simple by now to predict his whereabouts though the day. Despite his erratic behavior, the poltergeist was a creature of habit just like everyone else, falling back on familiarity when his paranoia overwhelmed him. A coping mechanism; after a particularly bad encounter with his peers or slight coughing fit, Beck spun on his heel and sulked off into the labyrinthine forest, wandering and pacing and lurking. If he wasn't lingering on the fringes of camp or hiding out in his hoarder's nest, odds are he was out in the woods somewhere. It was great for him, actually. He spent most of the time checking his traps and setting new ones, collecting discarded human objects unearthed in the mud, or merely visiting a border to scare away any signs of life.

    It hadn't taken much for Beck to retreat back into the woodland areas he had grown far too attached to in his early days of existence. After stringing up a ground-level snare, whatever it was that upset him in the first place was mercilessly forgotten. Plucking at a taut wire with a muddied claw to assess the snare's durability, the grimy feline was eventually satisfied with his handiwork, and abandoned the hunting trap to do its work. Without a purpose, in either his mindless treading through the wetlands or his afterlife as a whole, Beck found himself plummeting into boredom at a rapid descent. Lantern-like eyes flitted side to side in an attempt to discover anything that would serve as his next distraction, an impatient itch making his apparition crawl and ripple fitfully. Ignoring the most recent tremor down his flanks that distorted his being into transparency for a nonexistent heartbeat, the boy stalked along the squishy banks of a pond, glaring beneath duckweed into murky waters. The little sunlight that filtered through the crowded mangrove canopy managed to reflect off a tin surface hidden among cattails, catching his farsighted eye by some amount of a miracle. Beck's freckled face brightened in hopes of discovery, and quickening his limp to reach the thicket of cattails, frigid paws shoved aside bristly stems to admire his newest treasure: a dented bucket reeking of old fish bait. He didn't seem to mind the smell, beyond the obvious wrinkling of his nose at first, flicking away mud clinging to the tin bucket as he yanked it from its grave. A sharkish grin warped his disfigured maw as he lifted the bucket closer to view it without a blur impairing his vision. He had been hoping for something cooler, like a tackle box or hooks he could use in his next trap -- but a bucket was just as good. Gripping the bucket by its thin handle in surprisingly ginger jaws, Beck shook burrs from his dappled pelt and circled back to return to camp.

    He didn't make it far before an emerald green vine coiled around his shackled wrist and wrenched his footing out from him, leaving him to trip and land on his face with a painful smack against dried mud. Teeth tightening around his bucket protectively, Beck remained face-planted until he forced useless air to return to his damaged lungs. His head turned to the side, expecting an awry root to have been responsible for his tumble, only for his narrowed glower to be greeted with a plant's leafy tendril a distance away. Ears flattened in slight confusion; how did a tiny thing make him trip from all the way over there? Clambering back to his feet with the bucket awkwardly swaying in his jaws at the sudden jerky movements, Beck hovered over the immobile vine, squinting down at it before reaching out a paw to poke its stem. In response, the vine flinched and slithered further away as if ticklish to his cold touch.

    At first, Beck recoiled in shock, stubby tail tucked at such a bizarre sight. Was someone controlling the vine? Disfigured snout crinkling in anger at the thought of a creature playing a trick on him, all signs of fear disappeared as he followed after the vine, leading him straight to... the rest of a plant, cowering under larger brush. A peculiar sprout, one he had forgotten the name of, yet recognized one of the few carnivorous species. What were they called again? Mouse traps? No, wait, fly traps. What an exotic fly trap was doing out here growing in a swamp was beyond him -- Beck stooped to gain a better view of the scrawny thing, amber gaze softening slightly. "What's a l'il plant like ya doin' out here?" the spirit found himself murmuring, tilting his head to the right in an owl-like manner. Surely, the little plant would wilt and die out here in the heat and pollution. On any other day, Beck would have scoffed and left the fly trap to its fate. But it was cute. A judgement he used sparingly. He couldn't just let it die, not when he had been abandoned to bleed out so many centuries ago.

    Impulse hijacked his control, his paws scraping up clumps of soil and mud to fill up the bucket until it was nearly spilling over. Movements clumsy and shy, afraid of accidentally hurting the fly trap, Beck dug a moat around the plant before it and its roots were cautiously scooped up and settled into the bucket. Patting the dirt down to secure the fly trap in its makeshift pot, the poltergeist once more took up the bucket in his maw and returned to his main trail back to the ghost town. The plant needed a name, right? It was his now, he supposed, and it needed a proper name. Thought was clear on his scarred features as he recalled the various movies and shows he had witness on a blaring television screen, and attempted to remember which contained the similar images to the fly trap bouncing along in his bucket as he limped along. There was a plant he could remember, what was its name? Audrey, Audrey II. So that would make his new friend Audrey III. A hoarse giggle slipped through his occupied teeth at his obscure reference, causing the bucket to barely tremble.

    It wasn't long before the commander proudly marched back into the overgrown camp, the newly-named Audrey III motionless and erased of all prior mobility as it numbly nestled into its recycled bucket of tilled soil. Beck failed to notice, and he failed to care as he weaved through restored houses and strangling foliage. While it wasn't his intent to attract attention -- he hated eyes watching him in the first place -- it was a rare sight to see the demonic entity genuinely happy about something, even if all it brought was a faint smirk to his ashen lips. He only halted from his broken goose-step when he finally neared the untouched cemetery, scrambling onto a low brick wall with Audrey III swinging around wildly. Placing the bucket down in front of him and balancing it on the wall precariously, Beck slumped over to stare at the fly trap in curiosity. Silently, he willed it to move again, even if it was a tiny wave of a spiky leaf or curl of a droopy vine, just to prove he hadn't been hallucinating again. He wasn't sure if he could go through that again. "C'mon, Audrey, I know ya can move," he mumbled to the fly trap, wrapping his paws around the bucket and drawing it closer to him.

/ tl;dr because yikes i didn't mean to make this so long
becky was out in territory like the forest hobo he is, found a bucket, and was about to go back to camp before he got tripped by a baby venus fly trap ( that totally isn't sentient because of mutations whoops ) now he's got a baby fly trap named audrey III in a bucket for a pot, and is sitting on the cemetery wall trying to get it to move again.

    Beck was learning just how stubborn plants could be, despite the thriving foliage reclaiming their forest in a previous man-made wasteland already serving as a lesson. Audrey held fast, the only sign of motion being a subtle bob of its clamped leaves, or for lack of a better term, "head". Rows of fleshy spines aligned as zipper-like teeth seemed to smirk back at him, matching a mocking expression Beck himself was normally wearing. A feeble growl rattled in scratchy vocal chords, the poltergeist pulling one paw away from the bucket-pot to irritably rub at his eyes with the back of his shackled wrist. He was seeing things again, wasn't he? He thought he was doing better, or he thought he was trying to.

      The samoyed's sudden arrival earned a violent flinch from the boy, bony shoulders jerking as if he expected an attacker to strike while he had been distracted. His paranoid stare glanced around wildly before noticing Morgan. Tensed apparition partially slackening, Beck gave a puff of stale air up towards his nose before his ears inclined forward to listen. "From the swamp," came the mumbled wheeze, Beck returning his attention to the fly trap as he continued out the side of his unscathed mouth, "This is Audrey III."

    He was more than happy to relapse into silence, until three more familiar faces strolled up at the unexpected scene. Lantern-like eyes narrowed into an annoyed squint at the similar questions -- did he have to answer them again? It wasn't like it was their business to know everything he was doing, right? That was his job. Despite his agitation, the mangy feline remained expressionless, one arm shifting off the brick wall to restlessly swing over the side. "Like I said, this is Audrey," Beck grumbled back, his gaze never leaving the plant to greet them. He wasn't sure who exactly was around him now, their mingling scents enough to confuse his distracted nose, but based on their voices, he could assume it was Amunet and Killian, plus the heavy scent of burnt charcoal in the air informed him of Fenrisulfr's presence. "I saw 'em move, like, really move," the entity explained, although his hushed words seemed more like he was attempting to assure himself rather than relate his own experience. His unbroken staring match with Audrey inevitably paid off; a scraggly vine offered a faint, blink-and-you'll-miss-it twitch of its tapered end, a cheeky little wave to its growing audience. The gesture failed to go unnoticed by the alert poltergeist, immediately perking up with a victorious sneer and crowed out, "See? It moved!" A freezing paw accusingly pointed at the dangling vine, and he turned to the others with a pleading look, expecting them to deny the observation and confirm his fears.