Marie/Day 2-3 of the scouting mission
We've been hiding in this cave for a day and a half now, and the thing stalking us is still lurking outside. It waits just long enough to make us think it left before its legs cross our view again.
I'll start from the beginning.
It was almost a peaceful morning in the rainforest. The owls hoot-ed softly before going to sleep. The morning dew rolled off of the trees. Multi-colored ants the size of chiwawas walked trails across the ground.
We even thought our search was over when we saw a deer, but a stringy parasite unraveled from its antlers and screamed at us. Our vision doubled, and the deer was gone. Despite this, it felt like we were embraced by nature today. Ron was nearly embraced literally as a giant leaf peeled away from a tree and tried to eat him.
Blain pulled him away just in time. The plant floated harmlessly to the ground and Blain poked it with his spear. Apearently, nothing gave in a fleshy way as Blain remarked, "just leaf," and pressed on. Leaf and teeth would have been more accurate.
Okay, so things were not incredibly peaceful for us, but it seemed like the forest was not overly cruel to itself. Also, aside from Mute, we were all quite talkative. Even Ron was amiable and happy to be doing something. Maybe it's because we were all talking that Mute saw it first.
A waterfall poured into a stream between the trees up ahead. It was like a Disney movie watering hole. The place where all creatures gather peacefully to drink. Predator and prey both enjoying a break from jungle law.
Across the river were two deer with leaves steaming from their antlers and covering their faces. One of them looked up towards us with its mask of leaves covering its eyes, but the leaves parted like the cowl of a cobra. Like a multilayered cowl full of stringy parasites making a cocophony of light screams.
The face of the deer itself was eaten through to the skull. It looked at us with its one remaining eye as the leaf pulled several tiny strings directly out of the dialated pupil. It twitched and rolled around in the socket before righting itself and leaning in to casually drink from the river.
A whole colony of fuzzy bottomed poison rabbits and a cluster of large ants all painted with blue and red camouflage were cleaning their poison in the river. Downriver from them, soaking up the poison and bathing contently in the deep water was another chimera boar. Perhaps it is more of an omnivore than the lion teeth suggest. As amazing as it was to see them interact, we didn't want to push our luck, so we ventured upstream instead.
I walked up to the waterfall barely twice my height, and being the curious lass I am, I sniffed it for poison. There was a smell, a far more animalistic smell, like the wet hide of a lizard. Like the smell of a frog times a hundred. A long and flat snout poked through the curtain of water to return the favor, and I found myself staring at large reptilian nostrils inhaling just above eye level.
Speaking of eyes, they opened one at a time in that sticky way alligators blink. And this thing looked like an alligator in every way, except that it stood on legs taller than me.
I slipped on the rocks as I backed away. Its claw came to a rest on my chest, and water from the waterfall flowed around it and through its teeth to soak me. Just as it opened its maw, Karla stabbed it in the top jaw and left the spear wedged in its mouth. The dinosaur struggled to snap its jaw closed for a mere half second before the spear shattered into a million splinters.
We booked it back down the creek at the chimera, which rose from the water and ran for its life. The smaller creatures scattered as well.
We ran through the former poison bath and slid into a crevice at the end of the creek. The crocodile maw dove in after us and snapped around desperately for its meal. Blain and Mute must have stabbed it two dozen times each in the nose before it gave up.
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No one has died from our breif swim in the poison bath yet. It is a running stream, so maybe we got lucky and came in behind the poison. My legs will go numb either way if I have to squat in this hole much longer.
Now that I have time to think, it looked like the Cenomanian period Kuprosuchus, except with thicker scales. Its claws prowl around the entrance, just outside of our thin view of the outside world. Once every couple of hours, its claws tense up and spill rocks into our cave.
As it does this on its final pass, it freezes at the sound of a whistle in the distance. A melody as inviting as it is creepy. A human melody. The 'Kuprosuchus' didn't react to the noise the same way it reacted to us humans, though. It ran. I think we are going to run for it to.
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Wendigo Island (ONC2024)
हॉररYour greatest fear is monsters in the dark. The last thing you expect is to become the monster in the dark. This story is not about heroes. This story is about ripping away any pretense you have about what it means to be human. At the end of the day...
