THE WRONG ENDS BY THE WRONG MEANS ⁠— appearance

[QUIET]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]She screams because it hurts. Scorched by the morning sun, the transpiring dew on her skin ebbs and flows in waves of mist. Driving his claws into the dirt feels like dragging a leaden weight up a mountain, and though the crater is not deep, she feels every inch of its diseased surface, feels the fallout penetrating every cell and making her as ill as the rest of the forest's mutated wanderers. Perhaps that was how she came to be, a horrible mistake brought on by an irradiated earth. If there was a mother that was not the ground she walked on, there was a chance that her children were the same, blooming masses of flesh, if this creature was not the only one of her kind.

Oh, she wishes there were more of her, if only to distribute the suffering.

Sounds break up the wail of her cries, the call of voices from the perimeter of the pit. She reaches - reaches with a cloud of movement beyond her comprehension, a swarm of thought and feeling curling its tendrils out - and she hears it all. Something like sniveling and specimen and crawling echoes in a cacophony of noise that rings through her ears and drives a nail deep in her skull. Her stomach sinks at the word, the thought of being a plaything under the knife of another. Caustic may have neutral intent at best, but her anger flares at his voice, and that buzz in the back of her skull begins to whir again. She snarls like a feral animal and shakes out her pelt.

But there is no hair, there, only thick mats of chlorophyta that cling, sopping, to her pink and scarred flesh. Droplets of water are flung from each slimy frond, along with something else, too: flecks of dirt, maybe, or symbiotic insects that have made a home among the flora. They buzz helplessly around her body and land again, disappearing as soon as they were found. She bares yellow teeth at the lion, the wolf, the hound. She opens her maw to speak, but no sound escapes her. Only a hiss of breath escapes her throat, caught somewhere between a vicious growl and another scream.

A paw. An extended olive branch. She considers it, briefly - eyes flicker from one face to another, slow, steady.

No. Fool that he is, he believes she is a kind and gentle thing, a vulnerable thing. There's a gnash of her fangs and she lunges at the lion, aiming to snap her jaws down on his paw pads and then release him from her grip. A warning, if anything.