RP:Saurian Aurore Soval

Summary: The morning after Aurore teams up with Chasity to fell a rampaging deinonch, she decides to track its prints to an open field where a small herd of stegosaurids graze upon the grass. Bewildered by Lithrydel's fauna, Aurore considers her next move -- until a certain uyeer appears, hoping to lasso one of the saurians into submission. Despite Aurore's headstrong and socially awkward disposition, she proves herself valuable to Kreekitaka, who offers her a job. She accepts it... on her own terms.

Open Plains

Aurore rested well the previous evening, for she knew her journey today would be challenging. Uncharacteristically, she allowed herself to sleep just a bit past dawn, when the sticky heat of the Southern Sage roused her from slumber into action. The deinonch’s corpse, with its beady yellow eyes now glazed over with the beginnings of decay, was the first thing she saw. It lay mangled, bloodied by her spear and the lycan Chasity’s unarmed strikes. As the sun’s rays cracked through the canopy, Aurore went to work harvesting the deinonch’s scaly skin. Her pack is too full of its roasted meat to want for more, and the flesh is too near to rotting besides. She leaves it be, whispering a few words of thanks, and sets off down the hilly forest, following signs of its tracks. Curiously, it did not seem to arrive from the west, where townsfolk Aurore stalked had spoken of creatures matching its description. Its footprints are a steady eastbound stomp, beyond the treeline and into a plains region new to the huntress. The sun is climbing into its midday heights by the time she breaks for quick camp at the shaded nook of a steep grassy incline. There, she dines on deinonch, grimacing somewhat at its overly chewy texture. It is the sound of hooves that snaps her from distaste, and she crawls up from the incline stealthily, expecting horses. Rather, she finds a small herd of sizable reptiles with spike-shaped plates all the way down their backs. Stegosaurids. They graze on the meadow, their small eyes occasionally scanning their surroundings for threats. They have not seemed to notice the pair of deinonchs patrolling the perimeter fields, but given the deinonchs’ stature, the stegosaurids have definitely entered their own vision.

Kreekitaka had another pair of eyes watching the stegosaurids. Their presence here was just a shade baffling--he didn't remember capturing more than one or two. The presence of a herd meant that in his absence, they'd increased in number. He'd noted the raptors, too--their presence here must have meant that they'd followed one of his convoys out here and had been preying on the introduced saurians ever since. Strange, how one's attempt at profit can alter an ecosystem forever. His current target, however, were the stegosaurs. It wouldn't do to just charge them atop one of his mounts--as fun as that would be, the vicious spikes at the ends of their tails could be used to devastating effect. Instead, he had another idea: tail catapult. From somewhere off to the woman's left came a small "click" sound, followed by a wild ululation that came from an airborne crabperson sailing into the clearing, with a lasso in one claw and an jawblade in the other. As predicted, the sound got them to turn the direction he wanted them to. He braced his weapon with an arm and pressed the blue crystal in its hilt. With a sound like rolling thunder, a shockwave exploded out from it, aimed specifically to shift his trajectory to land him right on top of the biggest dinosaur. "Aha!" he called to nobody in particular, lashing the rope around its head.

Aurore tenses as she hears the click. Her shoulders tighten and she lifts herself a scant few inches from the earth as she draws her bow and readies an arrow, redirecting her attention toward the sound’s point of origin. “Calm,” she instructs herself. Whatever the source, she’ll be ready. The arrival of an oversized mudcrab soaring through the air howling like a savage beast, however, is not a sight Aurore is ready to accept. Despite herself, her jaw goes slack, and she briefly fumbles the arrow. She has to swallow hard to accept this new reality, in which mudcrabs soar in open plains, but she’s wandered the world for years and she steels herself and embraces the lunacy. Unfortunately for Aurore, this lunacy goes beyond her initial estimation; the mudcrab is bipedal in its descent, and wielding material culture in the form of a massive aquatic blade and a lasso not unlike her own. Before her mind can process the madness, the bipedal mudcrab has fired some sort of shockwave and gained a sturdy grip atop a stegosaurid. “That’s no mudcrab,” she decries. The stegosaurids are startled, panicking and running in a circle with their tails like battering rams to strike Kreekitaka true, but Aurore is loud enough that they notice her, too, and one of the beasts decides that she, too, is a threat worth ravaging. It kicks the ground with its hooves and starts its charge, dead-center for her person, and it’s all Aurore can do to return her bow to its strap and hoist herself wayward in a full-bodied leap. She narrowly avoids being trampled to death, and rolls deftly back onto her feet. Her knees are scraped and she’s panting, but she brings her bow out again, nocks an arrow, and looses. It hits the saurian in its tender side, and it flails, but she’s jumping back several paces and firing again. “Okay, Aurore! You’ve really gone and done it now! That’s okay! You needed the exercise!” In the distance, the deinonchs have decided that this is a chaos they can control. Cleverly, they surround the herd, hiding behind branches and within tall red grass…

Kreekitaka squat down and flattened his body against the top of the stegosaurid, trying to use its plates for cover. This, as it turned out, was a very secure position and he made a mental note to try hybridizing this creature with some of the flat-topped armored ones, as the plates would be great protection against incoming arrows while leaving enough room between them to throw spears through. A perfect living fortress. For now, however, he had to focus on taking control of this animal and getting it away from the panicking others. A hard yank of his lasso got it turning in the direction he wanted, and a whack on its backside with his jawblade got it moving forward. Herbivores always were easier to control. But in the process of moving away, he happened to hear a woman shouting. That was bad. A woman, caught in the middle of this mess, and not mounted? Uh oh. So he yanked his creature around again and drove it towards her, trying to call out over the din: "Hey! Hey, yissen! Cyimb on!" Oh, and she had a bow. Great! Now they could test out the whole shooting-between-the-plates idea--if she could hear him, that is.

Aurore is now being harassed by a stegosaurid whilst spoken-to by a not-mudcrab. Her head is spinning for answers to questions she can’t even comprehend. If this is Lithrydel, she might need to forage fast and see what awaits beyond her shores. She tilts her head uncontrollably, blinking. The confusion is quickly replaced with a decisive twirl, out of harm’s way and over to a more strategically sound piece of the hill. “Are you mad?” She calls back, lifting her bow again as the unmounted stegosaurid screams in anger and kicks dirt into dust. With expert aim, she fires, this time for the beast’s diminutive head. Too bad the stegosaurid has other ideas. Seeing Kreekitaka so close, it charges him, and Aurore’s arrow narrowly misses. Enraged, it willingly slams into the captured saurian, wounding it in a bid to get to its attempted master and commander. The beasts collapse, one atop the other, and it will take skillful positioning on Kreekitaka’s part to get his new prize back up and running. Aurore’s author breaks the fourth wall to predict he will either achieve this feat or do something else in a clever fashion. Aurore herself, however, is irritated that she missed. Another arrow is notched, and it soars through the air to take the overly aggressive stegosaurid in the face as originally intended. It dies with a windy final roar. There’s no time to celebrate, because the deinonchs have made their move. One jumps down into the mess of limbs that two tangled stegosaurids -- one a corpse now -- have created. The other seeks to ambush Aurore from behind, but she’s alert and barrels down the hill toward Kreekitaka, where she climbs aboard his collapsed mount for protection as if this were suddenly her idea all along.

Kreekitaka might be very good at commanding animals, but no amount of cajoling can make an entire stegosaurid weigh less than it does. As the two titans crash together and end up in a heap, the crabman feels it’s his best option to tuck and roll, and he manages to evacuate the premises by performing his best pillbug impression. Springing back to his feet, he just manages to spot the woman taking aim with her arrow as she releases it. He drops the rope and reaches out with that free claw in a futile gesture as its brain is punched through and the great dinosaur is slain. “No—no, I was going TAH!oo—gah!” He stomps forward, swinging that jawblade against the ground repeatedly to charge its shockwave back up. “You fooyish woman, I was going TAH!oo train iTAH!” he snarls, but before he can say any more the raptors are making their own move. Paddles clattering against each other in what is probably a long series of obscenities, he jukes sideways into the path of the deinonch that’s pursuing the woman and slams it with the flat side of his jawblade, actually lifting it off its feet and sending it sprawling. “HHHTHere’s anoHHHTHer one unDAH!er you!” he calls to her, trying to make good use of his compound eyes and warn her of the other deinonch.

/winces. She reaches out with her arms to exact a delicate balance upon the stegosaurid even as it stands desperately in the wake of the approaching deinonch. The deinonch, not anticipating such haste from the lumbering giant, takes a calculated step back and snarls. “Are you mad?” Aurore seems to be under the impression that now, while her whole body trembles to keep up with the saurian beneath her feet and an apex predator regards her for lunch, is an opportune time to talk back to Kreekitaka. “Train it? You were going to train it?” She almost topples over face-first. The stegosaurid is swinging its tail, spikes like a gauntlet, at the deinonch. In turn, the deinonch is rolling like the experienced acrobat to dodge the blow, but Aurore is not on the ground, and so cannot be the acrobat. She stumbles and hits her head on the stegosaurid’s flesh, and it’s a small blessing in its own right that this happens at the one point on its body past the neck in which neither plate nor spike protrudes from flesh. Still, it hurts, and she reels. As the stegosaurid begins to rush the deinonch, it appears as though all hope may be lost for poor brave, shortsighted Aurore, but just before she crumples down to the beast’s legs and is broken to pieces by them, she dares reach her left hand out to grasp one of its plates. She climbs it, regains her balance, finds her bow and draws it. “Alright, then!” It’s back to snark now. “If you’re so hellbent on foolishness, follow my lead!” An arrow is notched. An arrow is fired. The arrow takes the evasive deinonch in the ribcage, and it squeals and falls. The stegosaurid is bewildered, howling and crushing the wounded deinonch as it might have crushed Aurore. This gives it pause -- ample pause for a certain opportunistic uyeer to bring it to heel anew. For her part, Aurore wants no such tomfoolery, but leaping off of it seems unwise at current, so she remains.

Kreekitaka was not mad, despite this being the second time she asked the question. More raptors were approaching, and Kree was twirling his jawblade from claw to claw, making sure he had eyes on every one of the creatures which slipped from the grass. They were wary of him, and faked a few attacks to try and get him to commit, but so far he was managing to avoid distraction. When the stegosaur paused, Kree rippled his paddles again with anticipation. "HHHTHrow HHHTHe rope up!" he called, then took aim and fired the shockwave once more, bowling over his circle of attackers and launching him backwards and up, towards the air above stegosaur where hopefully his rope was waiting for him to catch a hold of and stop himself from flying right past the animal.

Aurore grabs hold of the rope and tosses it to a prime location, but now she can’t use her bow, and she’s had no time at all to holster it. So she stands there, challenging gravity for all she can muster and waiting for a not-mudcrab to climb aboard. This is all too much for Aurore, who has chosen isolationism as a rule because sedentary lifestyles are unknowable to her, and probably filled to brimming with lunatics like this one. Presuming Kreekitaka makes it to the stegosaurid, Aurore will trade bow for spear, and swing her body forward into a crouch as their mount panics in blind rage. From her crouch, she will ward off deinonch assault at various angles, clenching her teeth and hissing.

Kreekitaka grabbed onto the rope and came to a halt, dropping down heavily onto the stegosaur's backside. If nothing else, at least it was panicking straight forward. Kreekitaka holstered his jawblade and focused entirely on driving, using both claws to grab the rope and make sure the animal didn't go where he didn't want it to. It was a tough ride, but it wasn't an impossible one, and it was proving his concept beautifully--using the plates as cover, jabbing out between them with a spear--yes, this was going to be a fantastic addition to his collection. "You see? Training!" He angled the monster to try and trample one of the raptors beneath its elephantine foot. "On such a beasTAH!, iTAH! is as if you are fighTAH!ing from a yiving fortress!"

Aurore isn’t versed in social conduct, and even if she were, she’s headstrong to a fault, so Kreekitaka does not receive a doubter’s apology. In fact, it seems that Kreekitaka is not even present from Aurore’s perspective. She’s too busy cackling almost fiendishly at the raw adrenaline-pumping adventure of a backseat ride on a dinosaur which has unwittingly joined forces with her in destroying hostile threats. For every deinonch the stegosaurid tramples, Aurore catches another with the iron tip of her spear, until none remain, and Aurore is breathless with thrill. “Yeah!” With her spear held firm in her right fist, the woman vaults off of the beast, secure in the knowledge that its captor seems relatively unlikely to hunt her down, too -- and boastful in her estimation that even if he did, she’d get away. As soon as her boots hit the ground, Aurore reverts to her crouch, keeping her spear toward Kreekitaka in case of emergency as she examines the corpses and slices into their skin with her knife. Her eyes flicker back and forth between saurian and uyeer while she scavenges raw materials, including a rather pretty gem which had lodged itself inside one of the deinonchs’ throats.

Kreekitaka moved himself closer to the front of the dinosaur when she and fought to take more control, eventually drawing his jawblade again and whacking it on the nose to get its attention. "Cease your panic!" he shouted at it, and eventually it calmed down. Once it was calmed, he rolled off of it again, maintaining his grip on the rope, and climbed back to his feet, approaching the woman slowly. "I appreciaTAH! your assisTAH!ance," he said, bowing lightly, "an' I hope you enjoyeDAH! HHHTHe experience--I have severoh such creatures aTAH! my DAH!isposoh, an' if you wish, I can show you where I keep HHHTHem an' begin HHHTHe process of bonDAH!ing you wiHHHTH one." This was the perfect recruiting opportunity for a dinosaur knight. Someone who had actually fought on dinosaurback--and who seemed to love it--and was now right here, not running the heck away.

Aurore squints and rises from her perch. She observes the stegosaurid, docile as its name day. She observes the deinonchs, torn to pieces like ribbon. She observes the uyeer, speaking to her for longer than she has allowed nearly anyone in months. “I will not fight for you,” she states simply. “You may train me. This, I would allow. But you will not gain my allegiance. I would offer you in turn the items I acquire through my ranging, and a period of no longer than six weeks of my life. I will speak seldomly, but learn quickly. You will refrain from unnecessary banter along the way, for I lack patience with dwellers.” Whatever ‘dwellers’ means. “These are my terms. Accept them and we will begin. Reject them and I will take my leave.” Aurore’s emerald eyes study the uyeer skeptically.

Kreekitaka rippled his paddles lightly as he considered. Frankly, he was impressed--she got straight to the point, and set her conditions very, very clearly. Items offered from hunting, and a period of six weeks with which to train her--if she learned quickly, he might be able to cut the training early and save the remaining days for a moment in particular when he needed her--except for the whole 'not fight for you' thing. It'd be good publicity to have her out and about on a dinosaur, though. If she ran into someone else, and they asked how she received the creature, she could... best to make sure of that. "If someone asks where you yearneDAH! TAH!oo commanDAH! such a greaTAH! beasTAH!, you say iTAH! was me, as such woulDAH! be HHHTHe truHHHTH," he said, then extended a claw towards her to shake. "Your TAH!erms are accepTAH!abo." Of course, he figured he could always attempt to make her another offer of allegiance later on--something to do with payment in a war situation, or some such. Maybe make her an autonomous reserve unit until he needed a spy or something. Progress could be made from here.

Aurore furrows her brow in a mostly vain attempt to decipher why the uyeer would task her with validating the origin of her skills. She may be sharp of tongue, but Aurore Soval is no businesswoman. One generally must needs be willing to spend time within the walls of cities and towns to understand such matters, and she will go on avoiding them however much she can. Should Kreekitaka require her to do otherwise over the course of the next six weeks, she will feel it mandatory that she oblige. Luckily for her current mood, the thought does not strike Aurore just yet. “It will be as you say,” she agrees, and then she tosses him the gem. “That one is very aesthetically pleasing,” she explains. Maybe Kreekitaka does not understand these things. As far as she’s concerned, the only two things she knows about him are that he rides dinosaurs and is probably not a mudcrab. No sooner has she concluded their chatter than her uncomfortable stoicism has vanished. She’s back to picking at the corpses, and her face is back to grins and glee. She’s back in her element, where words are wind and nature is the only city in the world.