Sojourner, Pt 11

You and Noir both creep softly down the hill and into the dark woods ahead of you, slowly and carefully. Being a cat, Noir is far more graceful than you could ever be. Still, you do your absolute best and pour some of your Temperance into yourself. The better you can control your movements, the quieter you can be.

The further you get deeper into the woods, dusk descends further, and everything becomes darker and darker. Silhouettes of the world around you deepen and dim the more the night matures, until they become indistinguishable to you.

Even your enhanced eyesight can barely keep up.

It's almost completely dark, and you can just barely tell what's going on. In fact, you can only tell when something is in front of you if it's less than a meter from your face. Certainly, being lost in the middle of a dark forest would be beyond frightening in any circumstance, and you easily feel that anxiety sink into your bones. It makes your fingers tremble somewhat, though you do your best to calm yourself.

Soon, it becomes outright impossible to spot Noir even though she's literally right in front of you. You can't see her, or hear her even with your senses on full blast.

You're forced to open a Network with her just to be able to sense where she is at any given moment. In this way, you can locate her psionically and with absolute precision, beyond your capabilities with your ESP-enhanced physical senses.

Plus the two of you can communicate directly, without emitting sounds or unshielded Telepathic waves. That's a nice, big bonus without a doubt.

But even then, the Network doesn't stop you from stubbing your toe on a tree root and nearly falling over in the dark. You try your best to remain cool despite not being able to see a damned thing around you.

I'm having a tough time seeing what's around me, you transmit to her. I'm basically floundering out here.

Dunno what to tell you, Noir replies. Always been able to see just fine around this time, so not sure what kinda advice I can give you there.

You can't really. It's down to us having two different kinds of eyes.

Oh, in that case, just change out your eyes.

You nearly snort with a laugh, but stop yourself just in time. Not just to retain your stealthiness, but also because Noir kind of has a point.

Well, you can't actually swap out eyes, but maybe you could use Temperance to adjust them a bit? Kind of in a similar way to how you make your blood flow smoother, or your muscles more efficient. Maybe you could play with the inner workings of your eyes to make you see better out here…

Gimme a sec, you tell Noir.

You lean up on a tree for support as the energies of Temperance flows through you. At the same time, you sense your eyes shift and move and adjust in various ways.

You sense your vision sharpen, then expand, then widen. At one point you try to narrow it, then reduce your focal length. As you do so, you adjust your natural sight picture until the world around you becomes more gray and less black.

The world around you becomes a kind of mix of greyscales and all manner of silhouettes come into focus. You continue to adjust your eyes to get used to the darkness to reveal the trees and shrubs and fungi and vines and grass around you.

Noir also becomes clearly visible to you, who appears to be waiting rather patiently for you.

You're fairly astounded at what you've done. It's one thing to have given yourself a kind of night vision, and another thing that it's actually good! Things are relatively clear to you, if in a low-contrast grayscale. You don't exactly see thin and small things, such as Noir's whiskers or the very tips of leaves - your vision is a bit fuzzy and lacks fine detail. And the world doesn't quite exist beyond 30 meters or so. It's simply totally dark past that.

But that's fine. What you can see is more than enough to keep going. More importantly, enough for you to stop stumbling around.

Okay, I'm set, you tell Noir. I can see again. Kinda.

Good, she replies.

Then the two of you continue on your hunt, deeper into the woods. The two of you trot further for some time - perhaps about an hour in total. At least, until the hill flattens out a little bit more. As you do so, she imparts her hunting instincts to you step by step. She tells you how she locates a good hunting ground, how to find a good position to start from, and how to locate the right prey once inside.

You try to soak up her knowledge, but it's a bit hazy to you. Mainly because it's coming from the perspective of a cat, a natural hunter. Some of her reasons simply don't make sense to you, a human and natural scavenger.

Still, you take in as much as you can, though in exchange you pay little attention to where you're going. You're not entirely sure where you are in the grand scheme of things, and you're fairly certain that you'd be completely lost without Noir, or without any psionic powers at your disposal.

Okay, we're deep enough, Noir thinks. Let's begin.

You sense her slow down and lower herself, so you immediately attempt to mirror her. She's an absolute expert at this, at stalking at night, and you can barely hear her footsteps on the ground. You're certainly being as careful as you can, and make as little noise as possible. But it's incredibly difficult to do so.

You're simply not used to the movements themselves - sneaking around in the city's shadows to evade predators is far different from sneaking around in a forest's shadows to catch prey. The former being faster and nimbler, while the latter is much more careful and calculated.

Your muscles strain from holding your stealthy pose for so long that your legs begin to shiver. Every step becomes harder and harder to do. Worse, despite how careful you're trying to be, you're still not perfectly silent. Part of that is your growing fatigue, another part is your size - your boots simply have more area to tread than Noir's paw.

As a result, you hear the soft crunching of dry leaves and sticks as you move. Hearing it annoys you to no end.

Stop, commands Noir.

You do as instructed and stop mid-step. Then you slowly lower yourself down until one knee is on the ground, stabilizing you. You also lean forward with your upper body, to lower your center of gravity and profile at the same time.

Can you sense the wind? she asks. Which way its flowing?

As she does so, she pokes her head up slightly so her nose is up high, then sniffs slightly. She turns her head ever so slightly as well in both directions, then dips her nose back down.

You immediately get the feeling that she's measuring the wind - where it's coming from, how fast it is, and so on. Of course, you've got no idea how to do anything like that.

Well, sorta. You do that thing you've seen in a few TV shows and movies, where someone licks their finger and sticks it in the air. Though you're totally unfamiliar with it, you do sense a very light breeze cooling your wet skin. When you spin and turn it, you can just tell where that same wind is coming from. But it's not very accurate at all.

Still, you turn your whole body to face that direction.

That way, I think, you reply.

More or less, Noir says. Now that we're here at our hunting spot, we want to stay downwind. Like I said, we wouldn't want our prey to smell us coming at 'em.

In that case, won't that freak out whatever animals are downwind of us? you ask.

You Scan for animal thoughts in every direction, for about 50 meters. And as you have predicted, any critters downwind of you seem to be moving away from you. Some more hastily than others. You also note that there's relatively few of them, at least in comparison to how many dozens are out that are upwind of you.

Oh, absolutely, says Noir. But if you're doing a good job setting up your hunting spot, you shouldn't have much at your rear. If you need to run for whatever reason, it's best to have a path out of the hunting grounds without running into anything else.

Gotcha. Makes sense.

Anyway, I'm gonna go forward and actually score a kill. You stay here and keep an eye out, alright? Pay attention to what I'm doing, and try to note why I'm doing what. But save your questions for when I'm done.

She slinks off upwind after you nod to her psionically. As always, she moves incredibly stealthily with very precise and silent steps. You note that she's moving towards some kind of mouse a dozen meters away. You don't exactly see it - it's too small for you to spot even with your night vision.

More than likely, it's hidden in the underbrush and foliage.

Your scan reveals kind of where it is, roughly, and kind of what it's doing, sort of. The thing seems to be nibbling on something - a mushroom perhaps. You can't tell exactly what it is, only that you can just about hear its teeth gnaw through something relatively soft and mushy.

Beyond what you sense normally, your Scan reveals thoughts and emotions that are of satisfaction, and the single-minded pursuit of it.

There's hunger as well, of course, that universal need to eat. Certainly nothing like the Chimera's bottomless hunger. The mouse's impulse is no more powerful than the fear that sometimes spikes through it. Or rather, it feels a kind of intense anxiety which bubbles up every so often, one that's filled with a deep sense of self-preservation.

You realize that it's worried about predators while it eats. Rightfully so.

Noir skulks closer and closer to the mouse, which is still munching away happily. Her movements are slow, deliberate, and barely discernible. If you weren't already paying attention to her, you wouldn't even have known that she was moving.

It reminds you of sniper training from a documentary you watched long ago. Or maybe it was a movie? Whatever it actually was, the trainees crawled through tall grass incredibly slowly, until they reached their instructor. Or at least, as close as they could manage without getting spotted.

Then they had to fire their weapon, again without getting spotted.

You remember it being impressive. But not nearly as impressive as what Noir's doing. This is the real thing happening right in front of you. The mouse is practically oblivious as she gets closer and closer, as its death looms.

At some point it perks its head up suspiciously, which causes Noir to stop dead in her tracks, midway through a step. She only continues once the mouse's fear and anxiety ebbs enough for it to focus on its meal again.

Noir gets to about a meter of the mouse before she stops outright. You sense her rear up and gather up her psionic energies. She then unleashes all of it into her Temperance and shoots forward in the blink of an eye.

She practically teleports to her prey in a fraction of a second, and slams into it claws-first. But she doesn't tear into it, or cut it up. She simply holds it down and stops it from struggling, then in another fraction of a second, she bites down at the base of its skull.

You hear a soft SNAP, then all of the mouse's thoughts and emotions deflate and fade and vanish quickly thereafter. Thankfully, the kill was so fast that it never even realized what had happened.

A few moments later, Noir pads back towards you exuding all kinds of pride from her psyche. In her jaws is her prey, lifeless but still warm. She plops it down right in front of you, like some kind of morbid gift or offering. Or perhaps, as some kind of trophy to inspect.

You also get a sense that she's desiring praise for what she's done, so you give her a few pets on her head as reward. She purrs healthily in return.

Just like that, she tells you. That's how hunting is done. Questions?

Of course, you kind of got the gist of it all but still have so many questions for her. How did she find this particular hunting grounds in the first place? How did she pick that one mouse to kill? Or maybe the question is why - why not the other mouse a meter or two to the left? Or why not a different hunting ground close by?

Instead, you decide to think it out.

You already know that you've got vast physiological differences between you - sight, smell, and so on. So however she chooses a certain path, it probably doesn't apply to you. Maybe these hunting grounds are just populous enough. Maybe the mouse smells just the right way, or maybe it was the less skittish of all the other choices.

Or maybe she simply needed an easy example to show you the basics.

It occurs to you that it doesn't matter how she came to those decisions, at least not to you. You gotta figure out your own prey for your own needs. All that matters is that you learn from her technique, which you think you understand.

I don't really have anything right now, you tell her. I think I got it, for the most part anyway. Be quiet, be invisible, be thoughtful. Then, strike fast.

Okay, great! she replies. Now it's your turn!