planning ahead

The greyscale woman was busying herself in the storage den, sorting through bundles of hanging herbs, turning them to make sure no mildew had crept in, pushing bundles and bowls on shelves this way and that, trying to find the best layout for what she still held while making room for what would need to be harvested from her own garden, if she could even call it that after Otis’s haphazard planting attempts. She was almost convinced he had just taken the seeds they had so carefully preserved from the year before, chucked them in a bowl and convinced Chips to fly up and drop them all down on the carefully turned sod while she wasn’t looking.

She clicked her tongue and glared at the fat opossum, laying on his back in front of the small hearth lined with embers to keep the damp out. One of these days, she would have to come up with some sort of door for the place. Probably before the next snows set in. Perhaps there was a hide large enough to hang in one of the other caches about the place… Or maybe she could turn sourcing one into a lesson for Katori?

The voice outside her door was so small that she hadn’t quite heard it and almost bowled the poor woman right over as she exited the den, catching the last of her greeting as she leaned her whole body back. She pulled up short, her head recoiling so as to not poke the poor thing in her pretty purple eye. She took a moment to look the other wolf up and down, her eyes narrowed as she made no effort to hide the fact she was judging the other woman, and then her expression melted into a grin and her tail waved at her back as she sidestepped into the open air outside her door. Finally, it seemed she wasn’t the only one without whacky colours or monsterous height around here. “Sure, what sorta questions?”

“Speech”