How It's Going, I

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As a fox, she was fast. Faster than a snake, if she tried with all her might. Heart pounding out of her chest, she pushed her feet as fast as they would carry her. She was a weak beast, with no stripes, but that was because she was young. She had trained for this. She felt more alive in her animal form, which seemed common among the males as well - the difference being she more often stayed human than them.

In truth, that was a large part of why she left. She was tired of projecting, protecting, keeping up appearances even if her hometown insisted they accepted her as she was. Being chased by a two striped feral was not part of her dream, but using her natural given skills of swiftness of both body and mind, was.

In a split second, Shuule made a hard 90 degree turn, attempting to throw the predator behind her off her scent, off her direction. Every time that large serpent had to change direction, she would gain some ground. Eventually, she would shake him off her trail, she figured. It would have worked with leopards, with lions, a bear would have been long done. Eventually she would tree herself to rest, but she needed the snake out of earshot.

As seconds turned into minutes, minutes turned into an hour of breakneck speed. She had been sprinting for a full hour, and the snake had not slowed down. Her legs had become numb and fueled by pure adrenaline, which was now spiked with panic again.

Shit. Snakes apparently had stamina on par with the fox clan, and he was clearly biding his time until she had run herself to exhaustion. Shuule suddenly distinctly realized what boar must feel like when run down by wolves. This was a terrible way to go.

Frantically, she tried to think of a new plan.

There was none. She was prey, and she was about to be devoured. Her only thought was to try and change direction back over herself, slamming herself into a sliding stop, with the intention of running into the opposite direction. Before she was able to make a move backwards, a familiar black prison surrounded her in a flash, but this time, the snake snapped around to face the fox, darting so fast that Shuule was sure she was finally about to be eaten.

Ears pinned, eyes closed, she braced backwards, as the serpent snarled forward, at the last moment opening his great jaws wide and hissing, screaming as loud and aggressively as he could. Fangs bared, he vented his dominance, his anger, but as she opened one eye timidly, she now found the young man's face staring back at her, but with the same eyes, and same livid expression.

"I ASKED YOU A QUESTION, MUTT."

Shuule didn't want to shift back. It would leave her even more vulnerable, but she also couldn't communicate with anyone other than other foxes and wolves in her animal. In an attempt to try anyway, she lowered her head, her ears still back, chirping and wagging her tail against the ground.

The snake glared at her down his nose, raising an eyebrow. "Stop that."

She tried harder, lowering her whole body onto the ground in submission, though in truth her legs had no strength left anyway.

"I swear if you don't shift back in three seconds I'm eating you, finally."

Shuule knew it was true, so with a sigh of resignation, she sat down, shuffled her feet, and changed. On the jungle floor now lay a woman, sitting on her knees and holding her arms across her bare chest. Her eyes were lowered in defeat, her long red hair falling into her line of vision. Her pointed human ears could not show the resolve, her sadness. She always felt crippled when she used them, but she felt the need to look as normal as possible, in this moment.

The silence felt like a thousand years as she kept her eyes in the dirt, the snake staring at her. If Shuule had looked up, she would have seen that the man's face had moved from anger to awe, but she didn't dare meet his eyes, until an ice cold hand gripped her chin between his thumb and index finger, bringing her face towards him.

"What the hell are you doing out here."

As the girl trembled under his touch, the snake pulled his hand away quickly, looking back down at her with a wild expression. Shuule first thought it was a look of disgust, a look she was certainly accustomed to from the males in her tribe who feared her existence, but to her surprise, she detected a hint of... sadness?

"Put some clothes on," he shook his head slightly, seemingly snapping the sorrowful thought out of his mind, back to being irritable.

"I can't," the girl spoke for the first time, and even in her predicament of being captured, her own irritable nature spit out of her mouth. "You scared my pack horse away and now the only pair of clothes I have are miles away where I leapt out of them."

Again, there was awkward silence, as the snake then tilted his head to the side, the same curious look that Daddy Aaron would give when looking at something he found strange. On a snake she found the look far less endearing.