Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a tropical base. Overgrown in places, covered in vines and wrapped up in foliage: nature was retaking this place, eroding steel and stone and wooden hut alike.

Lurks had his bony legs dipped in a murky pond, his tattered cloak wrapped all around him, shaded by the canopy. Black moths danced along his knuckles, held up to the concealed sky. They were a flurry around him, a vortex of gossamer black.

"Hello," he said, and it was hard to tell who he was talking to. Despite the rough tone of his voice-- a bit unnatural, a bit too eager-- Lurks, as always, sounded very much like a child full of inquisitive wonder. "Are you a hunter?"

And then he turned his head well beyond the normal range of motion that a human could, much like an owl. Or a dead thing.

"Oh!" Lurks exclaimed, climbing out of the water with no small amount of splishing and splashing. His cloak was bedraggled by the end of it, dripping over the grass and moss.

He took a moment to examine her weapon, his bony little fingers reaching out for half a second before thinking better of it. For once.

"I do not know how to stop having funny ideas," he lamented, the swirling moths descending to land on his horned head, forming a shadowy crown. "Sindri tells me to try and contain them in a pouch of cowhide, but by the time I had put apart the cow and dried the skin, I'd had many many funny ideas."

He beamed, his orange eyes aglow in the dim. "I do like hunters, but I also get hit by them a lot, and then we have to fight, and if you want to do that I want you to know I do not mind it personally because your hair is not red."

"Of course!" Lurks trilled, condescending. "I love humans very very much, and I am not a bad guy at all!" He blew a raspberry at her, the epitome of offended.

He got a little bit closer, encroaching ever closer if Maebe ever stepped back. "What is religion? Is it a thing you can eat or touch or hear?"

Lurks paused, blinking at the hunter with confusion. He opted to sit on the ground, beginning to idly pile up a collection of leaves from scraps all around him. A few shadowy spiders crept out of his mouth and eyesocket, advancing on to crawl around Maebe's feet unbidden. He seemed to ignore everything they did.

"I do not lie," he pouted, patting the ground sulkily. He was building a castle, or something misshapenly like one. "I believe in the Mother. I believe in the shadows, and I believe in me. I believe in home and family all for me, and I like humans because they are shiny and bright and alive and I want to pet you and keep you and feed you all myself, because I am responsible."

Lurks flopped onto his back, staring up at the canopy, wiggling into the mud.

"I found a blond one-- he looks like you, sort of sort of-- with freckles and scars and I tried to hold him but he wouldn't sit still. I don't like it when they're impatient. Are you?"

More shadowy bugs poured out of his ribcage-- moths, now-- that came to fly around her head.

Lurks gasped, clutching his chest like a woman clutching her pearls in shock, and had the gall to look offended.

"But they want to be friends!" he wailed, flipping onto his belly to crawl towards her like a scrabbling beetle, sliding upwards to draw himself up to his full height-- which was only a hair over five feet tall. "Look, I will show you."

All of his shadows contracted into his body, all moths and spiders and centipedes retreating back into him-- for Lurks was finite, and only had so much FEAR to use-- for a quiet moment. And then the Famine threw back his head, coughing up as many moths as he could, swarming around them both with tiny, fluttering wings that melded into nothing at the barest of breezes.

They dissipated as her trident waved against them, splitting into smaller moths that peeled away from her and back towards Lurks, until almost all of them had returned to whence they came.

Lurks had, during this time, plopped himself into the snow, sitting cross legged in the white. He was a mark against the pure white, an ugly landmark of doesn't-belong and not-quite-right.

"I just want to know you," the Famine explained, "and so do they. How else will we know if you are good enough?"

Dinner wouldn't be entirely inaccurate.

"For keeping," Lurks said, as if it were the clearest thing in the world. As if he were explaining to a child, instead of being the child himself. He wiggled his fingers, and began making a tiny little snowman.

"Do you have a family that loves you?" The human words sounded alien in his mouth: as if Lurks didn't entirely believe they were both real and legitimate things to talk about.

"Oh," Lurks Beneath explained, more interested than ever. "The last family of humans I met was very big, too." He grinned toothily, and got a sort of reminiscent look in his lantern orange eyes. "But not anymore!" The Famine laughed to himself, clutching his face in the process.

And perhaps Lurks would not be the one to initiate the fight, but he was disregarding Maebe's directive. Crawling closer and closer still.

"It is okay if they are trouble. The Mother says it is good for you, and Sindri says that if I meet it, I must turn around thrice and speak to the sands of the West."

Closer still, stretching and reaching up just enough to try and curl a bony finger in her pretty, blond curls--