“#%+*$&..”

The long legged creature upon her shoulder continuously produced chittering sounds, dispersing certain spaces between with signals of clicks. Her attention was fully absorbed in those clicks, for they directed her through the endless stream of the desert. If she missed a chirp, she would be sent off the path, doomed to wander aimlessly as a ghost, but there were other ways it directed her. Its rhythmic chitters eased her, plucking a wheedling string in her brain, like how the noise of rain battering against thin metal soothes and reminds her of home. Home, where rain pours spontaneously, singing a harmony of thunk, thunk, thunks against the roofs of the houses, coating the green scene in a misty blue..

“$:?#}- •• ••• • •• ••••”

She peels her mind away from the memory, listening to the clicks, the certain series of such corresponding east, west, what not that she had to face. Her body stilled to hone all of her attention upon the relayed information, absorbing it fully. That’s how she knew it was off. The creature on her shoulder pointed her in the direction of which she came, when she should’ve gone somewhere forward. There was no way the oasis could suddenly reappear behind her, which meant the creature was tracing something else. Somebody else? She didn’t see anybody on her way here, not since the reststop. She wrings her neck to try and look over the dunes, to find what had alerted the creature so. Surprisingly, there was something there: a grey, blobby shape agaisnt the yellow, seemingly crawling its way out the sand.

“Hah..?”

As the creature returned to its chittering she began to approach, trudging through sand to grt to the something. In better view, the thing that was wriggling and writhing looked pitifully unequipped for the desert; it had no bottom legs, instead fleshy flaps for locomotivon, and its arms were much of the same. Those wouldn’t help with burrowing, and its grey hue struck out greatly against the sand: a prime snack for any predators, especially concerning its size, too. It took her a moment to connect that the beast on the sand was a baby seal, but when she did, she snapped alert.

There was no way a seal could get here naturally, and there were many, terrible avenues that could explain this fact. Either there could be an undiscovered animal, one strong enough to fly its way from ocean to desert just to drop off a seal, or there was a magics wielder nearby. Looking about once more though, and once again it was only her, the creature on her shoulder, and the seal. The seal had managed to slip out of the sands at this point, and already seemed to be beaten by the heat with its small, yet heavy breaths. Pitying it, she lifted the seal and nestled it close to her, draping an arm over it to cover it in shadow. By the time she was finished arranging the seal, the creature paused, then begun to reintroduce the clicks, this time in what supposedly is the correct direction.

“Continuing on, then,” she whispered to the seal, heaving it up as she took a stride outwards, back towards the oasis.