[Slate Seraphine]

War upon stone and it grows weaker.
War upon man and he grows stronger.

Which shall your wall be built of?

❝

Night had fallen, and with it her makeshift camp. Slate pushed her way through undergrowth for the umpteenth time, cursing all the way. Just when things were starting to pick up, too. She'd had a drinking buddy for a while, had time to relax and unwind and pick out a hair of the dog - and then, Ursas, barreling through the surrounding trees and fading sunlight into the clearing with echoing roars that split the air. There had been no forewarning, no rhyme or reason to their appearance - but they wouldn't be monsters if they could be so easily predicted and held back, would they?

Like any good pit fighter, the wolf Faunus knew when to cut her losses and run. Your body was your only source of income, and you had to keep it strong or risk losing that income if you weren't able to fight. Without your rep or a huge lien payout on the line, it wasn't worth it to throw everything at a difficult fight that wouldn't even pay the bills for patching you up after. And taking on four Ursas at once for a camp that she could set up again without that much trouble was definitely a fight that she didn't need to be picking.

Gotta conserve my strength. Night's still young, and it'll suck if I get ambushed again a second time.

So she'd picked her shit up and ran, large loping strides into the forest easily out distancing the Ursa behind her, soon lost behind the trunks of the large pines that grew all around. It had been easy enough - rucksack in one hand, slung over a shoulder, and she was off like a bullet, leaving only the embers and ashes of the campfire she'd built scattered around her campsite where the Ursa had stomped through.

That had been more than half an hour ago, and what had started out as a full tilt run had quickly dropped to a slight jog, and then an easy walking pace. It was easy enough to see where she was going even if she only had the light of the stars and moon to go by - that was plenty for a Faunus. She wondered idly what it'd be like to be a human, blind and deaf to the world around them, and snorted to herself. No tail to keep your balance, no fur to keep even part of yourself warm in the winter, nothing that any other Faunus could boast of, just plain old baseline human, like every other human in existence.

Wasn't it a boring way to live?

Thoughts interrupted by the rustling of underbrush beside her, Slate whipped around with her fists raised and dipping into a defensive stance, only to find another student instead of the Grimm she'd been expecting. For a long moment, she simply stared, eyes slightly wide, before she came to her senses and, with a hurried glance to her weapons, lowered them to her sides while straightening up, tossing off a casual salute. Despite being run off out of her own place, she was in a far better mood than she had been earlier, especially now that the headache had passed and she was feeling better about herself, and it showed in the way her ears were relaxed and her tail sweeping idly from side to side.

"Yo."

REPULSE (SEMBLANCE): [RANK E]

BURN IN: RAGE AGGRESSOR [RANK F]
BURN IN: EXPLODE ENGAGE (AGILITY) [RANK F]
BURN IN: INFERNO CRUSADER (DURABILITY) [RANK F]
BURN IN: AFTERBURNER (SPEED) [RANK F]

DETONATOR: IGNIS (WEAPON): [RANK F]

@ ● 559 words ● 559 total words

MADE BY MIZO

[Lily Finnian]

This had not been the most difficult trial wood of Lily's life, but as she'd matured in body, she had accumulated scars that had put this in the running for most mentally taxing. Only one trial wood stood above this one in that regard, but she couldn't think straight now. She'd been running for some time now, without the assistance of her semblance in order to conserve her aura. She'd been staying out of the trees after a terrifying brush with a nevermore earlier in the night, and was feeling the thick trees closing in on her. Were she educated in psychology, she might have been correctly able to determine that she was having a panic attack. She'd felt like a beast hunted ever since her campsite had been overrun. She was sweaty, which was not uncommon for one having spent all day in the woods, but this was a cold sweat born of fear.

The noises of the forest no longer sounded like the natural workings of the world around her, but like thousands of threats gnashing at the bit to be the first to place her back into peril. She was running blindly now, no longer keeping tabs of natural landmarks and the area around her as she passed, only focusing on getting as far away from where she'd been as possible. Perhaps that was why she didn't notice the steep decline in front of her until it was too late. She was tumbling forward before she even realized she had come to a slope. It was not a terribly far tumble, but when she found herself surrounded by brambles and vines, she nearly screamed. It was darker here, the light from the moon and stars didnt make it this deep, and even her faunus eyes had trouble making out what was in front of her.

She stopped herself from thrashing, and lay there a moment. Nothing was chasing her, or rustling the vines further. There was a quietness around her that she hadn't noticed in her panic. She lay there for a time, and before long, tears began to stream down her face. She wasn't sure why, but in that moment the panic faded, replaced by a whorl of emotion too complicated for the girl to pick through. It wasn't all awful. In some ways, she felt immensely better for crying, but she had to force herself to stop when that feeling began to lose out to a building accusation of weakness echoing in her mind.

She did what she always did then. She shut herself off, she deadened herself to what she was feeling, and committed herself to a course of action.

Stand up.

She commanded herself, bitterly drying her tears once she was on her feet. She clawed at the vegetation over head, managing to push half of her arm out into the cool night wind above being funneled through the narrow forest chasm.

She pulled down on the vines and branches and managed to pull her head into the night air as well, for all the good it did her. She could see nothing but leaves vines and brambles in front of her face, and quickly retreated back down.

Pick a direction and move.

The inner command took hold of her, she didnt think, she just did as she had to. She began slashing a path through the thick growth with her Final Embrace, and before long she heard something from up ahead. A voice?

She felt panic surge up in her anew. She couldn't deal with a student right now. She could barely manage herself, let alone manage the extra stress that came from meeting new people. She didnt recognize the voice, but it was coming from just up ahead.

The tangle around her had gotten less dense, and after a few more swings she found herself coming into the moonlit clearing where the student stood.

Lily was wholly unprepared for what she saw. Her face was red immediately, she'd never seen so much exposed skin up close, and it made her anxious and nervous in ways she wasn't familiar with. Her eyes lingered on the brown thighs and ample cleavage as Lily drunk the girl in. She opened her mouth to offer a greeting, but no words came out.

She'd developed a few tricks for dealing with her inability to speak up at times, and decided pretty immediately that the best tactic here would be to stop looking at her while she tried to talk, so she turned back toward the bramble and said shakily.

"H-Hello, it's a-a relief to find another student out here."

It was, too. She had been initially extremely anxious to see another student, but seeing her standing there had filled Lily with a strange warmth that had taken her out of the forest entirely, if only for a few brief moments. She was reminded of the way she'd felt when meeting Carmim, or Aegle, or how she'd felt for a while after Argent had held the door open for her. She couldn't explain what the feeling was, and she had no idea why these other encounters with unrelated students were popping into her mind.

For that matter, she couldn't explain why she was suddenly so cognizant of how she must look right now. She was glad that her gut reaction had been to turn around. How must she look? Her hair having been battered and tangled beyond recognition by the brambles she'd just traversed, her eyes puffy and red from crying, and the cumulative grime of a hard exhaustive day on her. Normally things she wouldn't even register suddenly seemed like huge issues.

[Slate Seraphine]

War upon stone and it grows weaker.
War upon man and he grows stronger.

Which shall your wall be built of?

❝

Having no prior knowledge of the other Faunus, Slate simply grinned as she watched the younger girl's eyes rove over her body, and her face rapidly descend into its best impression of a beet. The wolf Faunus was no stranger to wandering eyes due to her attire, but most of them weren't near anywhere as entertaining for her to watch in return. Most of the people in her village wore similarly revealing attire, especially those that, like her family did, made their living on the ocean. Long clothes only bogged you down in the water, and the salt ate away at clothes quickly, so there was no point in wearing anything too covered up in the heat. Hell, she'd only begun wearing shoes instead of sandals or just going barefoot when she started her work as a White Fang courier on the mainland. Besides, the warmer months were easy enough to handle, and the winter months were either spent mostly in the comfort of a heated vehicle or indoors, once she'd gotten into the pits. There was no point in buying more clothing types if you were comfortable with what you had, after all.

That being said, Mistral, and Haven, by extension, was a lot colder than anywhere else she'd been, in no small part due to the high altitude and it being the winter months. More covering clothes would be a necessity once the snow started to fall, but for now, these were all that she had, other than a single change of clothes she had left back in the room that she'd been assigned. Those, truth be told, were pretty much the same as what she was wearing now, actually - so when it came down to it, the girl before her would still be staring, either way.

Slate couldn't help herself when the girl started to visibly gape, however, and broke out into a small guffaw, which she managed to curb after a moment. The temptation to tease the girl a little, however, was too great to resist, and the wolf Faunus gave in to that without more than a second's struggle. It was a game she'd played many times before, usually on an unsuspecting tourist to the city - but this time she wasn't gunning for a free meal or drink, just for some entertainment at the girl's expense. Tilting her head to the side, she winked a very obvious wink and leaned over slightly, resting a hand on her hip, the better to accentuate her curves.

"Like what you see, ragazzina?"

When the other Faunus turned away, though, she reigned in the snort of amusement that was threatening to come out through her nose, and simply began making her way closer in large strides. She didn't plan on overdoing it, but with the way that the girl had reacted, it was clear that she was totally unversed with how to handle such a situation. Probably best to rein it in a little, and maybe pick it up at a later date.

"Si, si. All the Grimm running around this place really puts a crimp on the vibes, eh, amica? Not someplace I really wanna be alone in, but that's been out of my hands for a while."

Bumping her fist gently into the younger girl's shoulder as she reached her, the wolf Faunus offered up a friendly grin with little trace of her former flirtatiousness, stepping around to the side so she could see the other Faunus' face.

"If you don't got anyone else you're gunning to spend the night with, I could use someone to hang around with, eh? What do ya say, amica?"

REPULSE (SEMBLANCE): [RANK E]

BURN IN: RAGE AGGRESSOR (STRENGTH) [RANK F]
BURN IN: EXPLODE ENGAGE (AGILITY) [RANK F]
BURN IN: INFERNO CRUSADER (DURABILITY) [RANK F]
BURN IN: AFTERBURNER (SPEED) [RANK F]

DETONATOR: IGNIS (WEAPON): [RANK F]

@ ● 607 words ● 1166 total words

MADE BY MIZO

[Jay]

XP Distribution:

Slate Seraphine: 11 x 200% (event bonus) = 22
111 + 22 = 133

Lily Finnian: 9 - 5% (no TWC) = 8
8 x 200% = 16
69 + 16 = 85