IT DOESN'T FEEL THE SAME / joining

[ANIMA B.]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-size:10pt;font-family:verdana"]She is hopelessly lost.

It happens more often than she would like to admit. Most things happen more than Anima would care to admit, but she doesn't let it phase her. Not much can do that anymore, after standing before a snarling dragon breathing fire and trying to scorch you into oblivion, not much can. Still, it makes for an entertaining story, and what is life but a collection of stories? Anima's are grand, tales of death and woe and highs. Her story is woven with tragedy, she knows that, but tragedies make for awful stories.

What's a heroine without a happy ending? Pitiful. Perhaps that is why she keeps going forward, trying to shed off the past like a snake sheds it's skin. Keep moving forward, keep amassing more stories and keep amassing more scars and keep herself in her own line of business. There's always another monster to slay, there's always another people to save, there's always another night to forget. If it's not worth remembering, she likes to let it slip out of her mind. She can't recall much from her past due to the wilful ignorance and will to forget what happened.

Forget the twisted corpses. Forget the smell of burnt flesh and cries of pain. Forget the city falling. Forget her mother and father dying. Drown it all in getting high and alcohol and the past becomes nothing more than a dream, a distant fuzzy dream. It drags her down when she remembers and threatens to swallow her whole and Anima hates that. So she forgets it all for the most part.

What is left for Anima but her pride?

The panther is an odd looking one as she approaches the Tanglewood camp. She can smell the barriers, and decides to wait on the border. The jet-black fur and muscular form are familiar, made for ambushing and stalking. The wings on her back are not, reminiscent of a magpie's wings, but far, far bigger. They fold at her side comfortably as she watches and waits with her one good eye. She doesn't bother with an eyepatch, letting everyone see the scarring on her left eye and the whited out iris. It adds to the aesthetic - a battle scarred hunter of monsters and killer of demons and chosen champion of a dead Goddess.

And yet here she was - lost on a strange group's territory. How fate worked in strange ways or rather, how Anima wasn't the best navigator.