. Cole leaned against a tree to catch his breath. He had to calm down. Rushing was probably only getting him /more/ lost. With the rangers’ warnings of weird wolf activity lately he’d meant to be back hours ago, but between his terrible sense of directions and losing the freaking /map/, he’d gotten completely lost. . He’d been hiking uphill so now he was just heading down the mountain hoping to find a road or something. At least with the full moon he could still see pretty well. . He straightened and turned to start heading downhill- more calmly, hopefully- and froze. He hadn’t heard anything, no howling or snapping twigs. The forest was quiet but he’d blamed his own blundering for that. Clearly not. . There were three of them, that he could see. Two fierce-looking wolves that he /would/ have described as big, if the one in the middle hadn’t been freaking /huge/. It was seriously as tall as he was. The other two were pale ghosts in the forest, but the big one practically /glowed/. It might have /actually/ glowed when it stepped forward into a shaft of moonlight. Baring its fangs. . Cole gasped in a shaky breath and took a clumsy step backward. The little ones started moving smoothly around to come at him from the sides and he fully lost it. He screamed, stumbling as he tried to both turn around and run at the same time but managed to catch himself and keep moving. . One snapped at his heels and he screamed and jerked away and then he /did/ fall, rolling just far enough to drop over a ledge. It wasn’t a long distance and he’d stopped rolling so he managed to get his feet under himself and start running again, not knowing or caring if he’d bruised anything. . Was that… was that a /light/ ahead? He angled toward it, yelling at the top of his lungs again, screaming as one of them managed to get its jaws around his leg but not quite fast enough to prevent him from pulling free. . “Help me, please!” he cried, he was nearly there. It was definitely a man-made light of some kind and he- . He felt something slam into his back, knocking him to the ground and landing on top of him. He screamed and thrashed as all three wolves descended on him. He’d gotten someone’s attention, though, he could hear shouting from just ahead. . “Gods, is that… is that what I think it is?” . “No wonder the pack has been worked up late- what the hell, Mike, geez! Put the gun down! Do you know how much hot water we’d be in if we killed it?” . “/It’s/ killing someone /now,/ what do you /want/ me to do?” . “Shooting it would only piss it off! Get the silver in the trunk, idiot! That’ll distract it. And hurry! This confusion charm is already wearing off.” . “We need to call in a medical emergency-“ . “We need to stop them from actively /eating/ the guy! /Focus,/ Mike!” . “Okay, I’ve got it! Here! . “Chuck it over there!” . “Is it… working?” . “I think so… here, help me grab him and pull him over toward the car.” . “That looks like a really bad bite on his shoulder, do you think it was…?” . “Too big to be either of the other two.” . “You think the stories are…?” . “That’s not our problem right now, Mike. And it won’t be his problem either if we don’t get him healed up. /Now/ is when we call in the emergency. They can have everything ready by the time we get…” . Cole couldn’t really follow the conversation anymore, after that. He couldn’t really feel his body, either. He felt a bump and a flare of pain every so often, but wasn’t aware of much until suddenly everything was /way/ too bright, and people were shouting again. He caught words like wound, bleeding, anesthetic… Then he felt a hand on his forehead, a wonderful coolness spreading from it, and he collapsed finally, fully, into unconsciousness.
I think you’ll like this one. A child brought in this battered old logbook saying he’d found it on the beach near his home. Barely half of it is legible, but the lab techs claim everything on their end checks out, so the higher ups want you to take a look. I’d love some answers to one of the most famous mysteries in aviation as much as the next guy, but honestly, historians (you included!) have agreed for decades that if Captain Ro used an enchanted logbook, it was lost with the airship, so my money’s still on it being a fake. It’s a damn good one, though. Enjoy! -Levin
“…making good time. None of the other barrels were contaminated so we shouldn’t need to cut rations. There’s some rough weather on the horizon so I’m going to have the crew check and secure everything this afternoon. They’ll grumble, and the Skymage says it should only be a small squall, but there’s something about those clouds I just don’t like.”
“…storm was brief, as promised, but it left the ship covered in strange mites. They look rather like thundermites, but there was no lightning in that storm and they’re too small and the wrong color besides. You can almost see through them, and they catch the light in odd ways. Skymage Mar says that his spells slide right off them, and now the crew want to scrape them off by hand. We still haven’t gotten clear of the cloudbank, so that should keep their minds occupied in the…”
“…don’t come off cleanly. Half the ship is now covered in a slippery, foul-smelling slime. Some of the crew tried to scrub it off, but I ordered a halt when one cabin boy became violently ill. He’s already developing a fever. I’ve asked Skymage Mar to try some more mundane spells to clean the worst of it off, and hopefully we can prevent more exposure and illness. I’ve told the crew to resume their normal duties.”
“No one can find the ship’s cat. It’s too smart to have fallen overboard, and has its protection charm besides. But after nearly two days trapped in the fog of this accursed cloudbank, with everything that’s happened aboard since the squall, I’m having trouble keeping the crew calm.”
“The cabin boy is dead. And I’m afraid Skymage Mar may be responsible. First Mate Dena was going to check on the boy when Mar burst out in a frenzy and attacked her. She managed to subdue him, but he was knocked unconscious and the cabin boy was found to be dead. None of the crew knows for the moment, and I’m hoping to keep it that way until we get some answers. Everyone’s been behaving a bit oddly with all the mites and the remains of that noxious slime everywhere, so I don’t know if Mar was in his right mind or if this is his own version of the boy’s illness. We’ve done our best to immobilize him so he can’t do anything rash when he wakes, with his direct connection to the ship I don’t like to think what he could-“
