Your friend in the dark

Kiyo had left Aki to her duties and had wandered nearby to take a look at some fungi that had caught her attention at the base. They clung there, swirling their way up the side of the trunk in a stair-like formation and she pulled out a small pouch of cobwebs from her medpack. She knew this type of mushroom very well, it was elephant ear mushrooms. They were edible and, when boiled for a soup, could be quite delicious. The biggest thing that stood out for them at this time, however, was that they were glowing. In all of her years, she knew for certain that it was not common for them to glow, and elephant ear mushrooms were quite common indeed. They could be found in most any wet environment, clinging to pretty much anything. She placed the cobweb across both of her dainty paws and sat back on her haunches, reaching out to grab at one and pull it off, careful not to touch it with her paws.

A voice from several feet away startled her, making her drop the fungi to the ground. There, it oddly seemed to spasm for a moment before losing the glow it had had moments earlier, despite still being separate from the base of the tree. She frowned, making a mental note of the finding before getting to her paws and turning toward her company. She noticed immediately that he was incredibly scarred in many ways, from the scars that littered his chest, to his poorly cropped ears, to his badly cropped tail, and, finally, the missing portion of his lower back right leg. This man had obviously encountered great misfortune in his life, but she kept her ghostly silver gaze trained on his purple ones, using only her peripheral vision to take in his form. After all, it was rude to stare. “I am trying to investigate that very thing,” she replied with a friendly smile. “Are you out looking around as well?” she inquired, though she was sure the answer was obvious.