Welcome to Gaia! ::

Slowly, the terror of the fog turned to something more tolerable. When she first arrived, she hadn't moved. She'd frozen, and awaited the fog to fill her with insanity, returning her to the monster that had previously taken her life.

But the moment never came.

Eventually, she opened her eyes, one by one. She checked her skin, and found it just as smooth and purple as ever. The fog was, at least for now, just a fog.

And she had better things to do than sit around waiting for it to take her life.

She surged forward, using her tentacles as feelers in the fog to find her way - but instead, she found something better.

It was warm, and alive, and breathing, and unconscious. She wanted to dig into it's body almost immediately, but she reminded herself. Keep one alive. Just one, she promised herself.

Just one.

She picked up the male with her tentacles, held him swinging in the air, and ducked down on all fours to begin hunting for more prey. She would have taken her own kind, if she'd found it; but she had a taste for humans now, and if she couldn't find any, her first catch of the day was in danger. She was not a patient creature, after all.

It was with great exhaustion, and anger, that her patience was only rewarded with a situational change - moments later, she turned from predator, to prey. The shadowling horse bore down on her moments later, intruding into her mind without her permission until she was nearly unconscious from fighting against it.

We will consume you and your Fear will be ours.

She laughed, though she still swayed from nearly blacking out. I'd like to see you try. She challenged it, before leaping backward and screeching as she carried herself, and her prey, away.

The speed of the vehicle was fast, but not fast enough. She saw the horse coming closer from the little mirror on the side, but she lost a view of it seconds before it careened into her and sent the vehicle into a spin. It was this accident that enlightened Riley to the wonder of safety belts.

A little late. But better late than never.

It was a long, long time before Riley even wanted to stop the car. She knew the portal was within sight, and wondered if driving through it was acceptable, but eventually she stopped nearby and began to unload her cargo.

Her cargo had been awake for some time now, and what he'd seen was a massive, squiggly black mass in the driver's seat of a car he was currently the only passenger of. He'd never been more scared of anything in his entire life, and he'd managed to slink as far down into the leg room as he could until the car had finally stopped, and the thing slid out. He took this chance to exit the other side, and started to run as fast as he could.

Or at least, he thought he was running. Really, he was several feet up in the air, being held up by the black tentacley arms of the monstrosity that had captured him.

Stop fighting me. A voice in his head said. Rufus took that as a cue to start fighting even harder, punching anything that touched him and kicking anything that moved. It seemed to simply take his attacks without much care for several minutes, before Rufus' face and the floor had a sudden, remarkable reunion.

He was unconscious again, and Riley was preparing to throw him headlong into the portal, when she realized - a little late - that the direction she was throwing him into no longer had a portal.

His body skidded across open road a few seconds later, and she was left cursing in a strange, foreign tongue as she dragged him back into her car and drove away.