[center][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/adb01259-53a5-4c37-8dd0-07d9259d9823.png[/img]
[b]Alpha.[/b]

&

[b]Vrog the Accursed[/b][/center]

The jungle-lantern that had elected to lead Vrog through the rain was an old being, weathered and mossy, the pits on its stone surface inhabited by all manner of black specks that would probably have been insects if they were crafted by a more capable hand. The trail it led him on was natural, for a certain value of the term. No axe had beaten it through the shrubbery, certainly, but no ordinary forest was this full of malign will, either.

The tōrō-lantern strode on, dipping its hat-like cover only occasionally to indicate to the Avatar that he was still on the correct path, and drawing near.

Vrog’s tongues swiped about, sampling every trail of smell like sticks running along a xylophone. The constant reminder of meals wafting from distant shrines was a slight annoyance, but the thick, dusky air crushed under the treetops smothered most of it. More often, he felt breaths of death and some sinister omen that could not be fully natural, and his mouths broke into pleased grins.

As his luminous guide nodded once again, he bit down with one pair of jaws, as though just having remembered something important, and ran the ridge of a finger along his side. New stains of scum and rust blossomed over his armour, the air around him growing faintly dark with an unplaceable, but malodorous presence. When he lifted a foot for his next step, he bared a footprint of muck and squirming maggots. He brushed against a low-hanging branch that resembled, not all that vaguely, a grasping withered arm, and a green slimy blight crawled up its bark. Checking himself with a rapid sweep of a tongue, he cracked a satisfied snarl and hurried up his half-loping, half-shambling steps. The lantern had already gone a few paces further ahead.

A gust died just long enough for the sound of music to be audible from the gazebo ahead of the avatar.

[center][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0RJPFOpBlg]Tensei - Elevatorstuck[/url][/center]

Chopstick Eyes had just enough joints in her limbs to stretch out luxuriously under the rain-shaded roof, arms rolling out over the hammocks and around the ovens and braziers, laying easy on a bed of pillows. A pair of limbs strummed her guitar with lazy energy, while another set handled a marimba and a loose strand of hair worked the maraccas. When her sticks focused on the coming stranger, she put down her flute long enough to pick up an already-chomped limb of some large bird and raise it in merry welcome before chomping once more.

[colour=wheat]“Ey, sup,”[/colour] she announced, her mouth full. [colour=wheat]“You Narshak’sh friend?”[/colour]

The avatar raised two long segmented fingers and cocked them forward in what must have been some form of greeting. As if to punctuate the gesture, a chewed seed snapped against a supporting plank as close as it could get to Chopstick’s head. She tilted her head back with a lengthy stretch and admired the seed embedded in the timber, then turned back and nodded in sage appreciation.

[color=saddlebrown]“Something like that,”[/color] he hopped across the last steps dividing him from the gazebo, trailing rotting soil all the way, and perched in a crouch on the wooden floor’s edge. The boards under and around him immediately became covered with an ugly-looking greenish mold. [color=saddlebrown]“He didn’t figure why you’d been on the low ‘til now, so I got to do the checking.”[/color] He fumbled for something near his hip, then snapped his fingers and pointed back at his host. [color=saddlebrown]“You got a smoke?”[/color]

The sticks creaked for a moment, but Chopstick shrugged, rolling over on her pillows to reach for her backpack. [colour=wheat]“Sure. Pipe, cigar, or bong?”[/colour] She reached up from her laze just long enough to put a tin on the table, followed by the other two options and a ground bud in a paper bag. [colour=wheat]“Personally, I’m just gonna eat. I’ve actually been working…”[/colour] Yawn, accompanied by an enormous stretch. [colour=wheat]“Really… hard lately. Join me, the pulled pork is amazing.”[/colour]

The hooked fingers hovered over the familiar shape of the cigar, but moved sideways to snatch up the bong at the last moment, staining it with rust where they touched. A tongue probed the vapour rising from the mouth, then wrapped itself over it, topping the opening with a narrow coil. Minuscule jaws opened along its length to breathe up the smoke and let it slip through fine openings. The tip clicked appreciatively.

[color=saddlebrown]“Love to, but-”[/color] another tongue stretched out way longer than it had any business to, snatched off a whole leg from a roasting camel and pulled it back into its maw. Said maw almost immediately spat out a mouthful of fine grey dust. [color=saddlebrown]“-someone thought this’d be funny. Could go for a drink, though.”[/color] Vrog picked up the bottle closest to him and poured its contents into a cup formed by a third tongue. [color=saddlebrown]“Strange how some spit teaches you to appreciate stuff. So, figure I’d ask,”[/color] he tapped his belly with one hand and filled a second makeshift cup with another, [color=saddlebrown]“What’s up with working? Spit sounds boring as anything.”[/color]

[colour=wheat]“I work so I don’t sleep,”[/colour] said Chopstick Eyes, right corner of her mouth twitching. She discarded a bone. [colour=wheat]“I eat so I don’t sleep. Sleeping is terrible. That’s vinegar, by the way. Finest balsamic.”[/colour] The cloud of dust finally descended low enough to interrupt her chewing and she wheezed. [colour=wheat]“Geez, dude. Who did that to you?”[/colour]

[color=saddlebrown]“Slagface that really liked dust. Made of it too, far as I could tell. Orvis or something.”[/color] Chopsticks had started smiling in a curious way. Vrog raised the bottle to his middle mouth, for lack of anything better to hold it up to. [color=saddlebrown]“So that’s why. Thought it was just old. Gotta say, I like the sour a lot better even if it’s got no punch. Mind if I take it?”[/color] Without waiting more than a perfunctory instant, he twirled the container in his hand, and it was gone. [color=saddlebrown]“But yeah, it’s annoying as it looks. Hit it just when I was getting down from indigestion, too. Sleep’s the spit from what I’ve been hearing, but you gotta be trying to even go wrong with eating. You keep at it long as you can.”[/color]

[colour=wheat]“Mm, I will,”[/colour] said the goddess, knuckling her mouth with her burnt hand and an unfocused sticky gaze. She was still smiling. [colour=wheat]“I’ve got more vinegar lying around here somewhere, if you want it, but I have other stuff that has... More of a punch, I guess.”[/colour] She threw her bone into the air like a juggler’s club and rose with a spin- [colour=wheat][i]“Kum-ba-YA!”[/i][/colour] The fragments of the bone scattered, scorched by desolate magic. Chopstick left the fist with the burning ring in the air for a moment then withdrew it. She stretched again, but in an entirely different way.

[colour=wheat]“Well! I think it’s time I got back to work on something! Go grab that bottle of tabasco, mm, and that, uh, garum over there, and honestly, anything else that looks liquid. I’ve got some tests I want to run. And I’m gonna show you my lil project! Talk as we walk! Hey, do you like little guys?”[/colour] Chopstick twirled on a wooden column and made vaguely human-shaped motions.

[color=saddlebrown]“Remember I said indigestion?”[/color] Vrog hopped and rummaged about the pavilion, leaving a tangled trail of rotting footprints on the floor and traces of infectious growths and grime wherever he touched, which fit remarkably well into the accursed forest. Better than the picnic spread, certainly. Bottles, pitchers and anything that could have contained a fluid were swept up with hand or tongue, generously sampled, and carried along or put back - out of place - seemingly at random. [color=saddlebrown]“That was little guys all right. Got enough of 'em then to last me long as I've something to bite with.”[/color]

He reached into a fissure in his metallic skin with a free finger and pulled out a small pod-like thing with mournful eyes. With a disgusted grunt, he pinned it on the tip of his claw. [color=saddlebrown]“Try putting them in someone's food, though. It'll be hilarious.”[/color] A flick, and the podling was sent flying into an open pot. A tongue followed it to check it had landed where supposed to, then abruptly twisted around and pointed questioningly at the goddess. [color=saddlebrown]“Less you've got another kind there.”[/color]

[colour=wheat]“Another kind of what, little people? I mean… I guess. In a way.”[/colour] A frond of Chopstick’s hair competed with Vrog’s tongue for general stretchiness and scooped up the pot before retracting back into the jungle trail on which Chopstick was rapidly disappearing. She shook it, remarked a rattle, shook the pod onto her palm and threw it down her gullet. She chewed. [colour=wheat]“Tastes like... a bad pill. I’m Skraghnaphgh, by the way. You?”[/colour]

[color=saddlebrown]“Vrog.”[/color] The mass of metal and roiling sludge hobbled after her, balancing an armful of drinks and sauces under one hand and the bong in the other. With a spectacle of fingers contorting in ways they perhaps should not have, he managed to pour a few drops of something into the tube, then breathed up again and nodded, mostly to himself. [color=saddlebrown]“I like being open. You smell me, you know me.”[/color] A hooked digit scraped for another fleshpod, but failed to find any. [color=saddlebrown]“Except for the dust and these gutted things, that’s someone else. People can’t go without sticking stuff in here.”[/color] The loose finger scratched over his stomach. [color=saddlebrown]“That some kind of calling card thing, you think?”[/color]

[colour=wheat]“Probably. I dunno,”[/colour] said Chopstick Eyes, who was feeling at her throat with odd consternation. [colour=wheat]“It was somebody else’s name, but they’re not around, so I’m trying it on. Liv calls me Chopstick Eyes... Geez. You sure that thing is meant to be eaten?”[/colour] She plucked a cigarette holder from behind her ear as the two breached into a scorched wound in the jungle much too large to be called a clearing. [colour=wheat]“Oh, hey, Liv. This is Vrog.”[/colour]

The gardener crooned.

[hider=To be continued...]
Vrog and Alphasticks compete for general anatomical weirdness as Vrog rocks up in the Feasting Forest for a picnic. The vast amount of food Choppy is flaunting doesn’t do much for Vrog-boy’s temper, though it turns out he can still drink and smonk. His desires are… unconventional. 

Choppy tries to accommodate for his curse as he explains, and they introduce each other en route to Choppy’s big project. Vrog, perhaps justifiably, tricks her into eating one of Diana’s despair pods (results pending).
[/hider]

[hider=Might]

[b][u]Chopstick Eyes[/u][/b]

[b]Starting:[/b] 13 MP, 8 FP

[i]None spent.[/i]

[b][u]Narzhak/Vrog[/u][/b]

[b]Starting:[/b] 8 MP, 7 FP

1 MP spent on an aura of filth and infection around Vrog.

[b]End:[/b] 7 MP, 7 FP

[/hider]