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[Keene Ward]

The seventy-second day of spring, 515 AV.

"Ward. Pay attention." Risabel was quite adamant that his full focus be given her, but with Seymour's growling tug of his boot in playful, though forceful, bounce of his head, Keene was having a difficult time keeping his eyes on the bushy headed legate, not wanting the dog to tear a hole in his already worn footwear.

"You want me-" Seymour let out a happy rumble of a growl, rapidly throwing his head side to side and taking Keene's foot with it. "You want me to catch whatever is leaving the trail." Again, for what seemed the hundredth time though was in fact only the seventeenth, Keene tried to jerk his foot free. The motion only seemed to make the dog all the more excited that his favorite human would play the game so well.

"Gods, Ward, stop playing with Seymour, this is important." It was rare for the young woman to ever sound quite so businesslike. Usually there was a hint of clever wit or snide remark. Risabel was, for the most part, very serious. "I don't want you to catch it, I need you to. I don't have to remind you what happens to apprentices who can't deliver." The woman didn't even need to point to muted sobs of a wizard who had, some how, managed to morph his entire hand off. Those who could not further the mission of Sahova were either promptly enslaved for testing or dismissed, both of which were far more insult than most of the mages' egos could handle, and Risbael was no exception.

"Very well, Ms. Timpel. You need me to catch whatever is leaving the trail." His voice was void of emotion, eyes blank but comprehending. Whatever it was Risabal needed, he assumed that the creature some in the Gug Andjak had called a "hedgehog" was a key part it in, if not the key itself. Seymour and hopped and skipped his way dangerously close the viscous residue, his furred paws just barely missing the sticky liquid as he jerked and pulled. "Is there anything else I should-"

There was a sharp bark as Keene's boot was released, and Seymour shot yelping back through the open door to the lab that Risabel shared with her master. There was a fair amount of shouting at the dog's whining faded into a soft whimper. Risabel rolled her eyes, shaking her head side to side at Keene's slightly raised brow. "The snot will shock you if you touch it, so I would suggest gloves." Risabel's name was called from within the room, and she gave Keene a serious stare. "So you'll do this for me?"

Keene returned her stare with his own, cool tones giving no indication of fidelity. "I will do what I can, Ms. Timpel."

A hand was batted at the air, a small smile returning to her lips. "Of course you will, Ward." And with that, the door was shut behind her, leaving Keene alone with the trail and the handful of bustling wizards far too focused on their work to pay the young initiate much notice beyond stepping around him as he stared down at what he imagined to be the leftover secretions of the hedgehog in question. Having never seen one of the animals, Keene pictured the creature as a sizable slug with a face not unlike that of a pig. As for the "hedge" part, the mental image sprouted leaves over the rounded rise of its back, creating a fantastical representation off of the information available to him. While perhaps a logical combination of facts, Keene had a difficult time believing that the beast was quite what he thought it, and decided it was simply best to follow the trail to its end.

Having no better place to start, Keene knelt down, slipping his gloves from his back pocket and fitting them over his fingers as he inspected the trail. From what he could tell, the leavings were spotty, but there was a definitive indication of direction in the way that the ooze seemed to drift at an angle, as if it had hit the floor several paces after the creature's passing. With the direction in hand, Keene rose to follow it. His journey was far more perilous than he would have though, having to duck and dive between, under, and around the various people and contraptions they carried with them. Fortunately, while Keene's focus was divided between the occasionally difficult to discern trail and the people around him, the people themselves made sure that the half-brained pulser did not disrupt their hard crafted work.

[Keene Ward]

As he pursued the phantom menace, Keene wove his way around the main hall for several chimes until the trail led down towards the deeper levels of the Gug Andjak. He paused at the threshold of the stairs, staring down with a frown. He had thought the building's shields would prevent the creature from leaving the twentieth floor, but it seemed he'd been mistaken. While he could not see the Gug Anjak's wards, Keene knew enough about the magic to piece together that the hedgehog was something new, or new enough that the existing barriers weren't tasked to prevent its passage. It was bothersome, but Keene had allotted most of the day to assist Risabel after receiving her letter, and the promise of information regarding her craft in exchange was more than enough incentive.

Taking the stairs with a bit more care than he had roamed about the hall, Keene steadily descended. The creature seemed to pass through the next handful of floors, choosing intstead to head in a mostly linear direction, weaving ever deeper into the island's crust. Keene kept a good pace, his legs far stronger than they had been the first time he had descended so low, and while his breath did quicken and there was strain felt, but the time he stood on the thirty-seventh floor, he needed no time to rest, instead continuing along the trail in the far more empty halls. The hedgehog's path had descended further down into the depths, but Keene wanted to make sure the creature had no left any potential clues. The area was far more saturated, though the majority of the goo seemed relatively old, little more than specks of drops here and there. The main path, the one that seemed most fresh, curled about the massive hall.

Several shut doors had indications of prior scrabbling, as the electrified goo was present around the frames, but there was no indication that the creature entered any of the rooms it had attempted to. Keene noted down the various laboratories and workshops in case they were important: 37-D, 37-G, 37-H, and 37-K. With nothing else to gain from the floor and knowing far better than to interrupt any of those within their respective laboratories and workshops, Keene headed back down the stairs, eyes checking every chime or so as he went to make sure the trail was still being pursued. The chimes stretched longer and longer, until the stairs began to become uneven and the ground decidedly less manufactured.

The lights had begun to grow more and more scarce, requiring Keene to ignite a very small flicker of res. It seemed the creature had grown either weary of or wise to the wizards' lack of interest, and had retreated down towards the Caverns. As his boots crunched against the far less even ground as the trail diverged into another hall, this time no indication that it had left signaling that the hedgehog was, most likely, somewhere within the cavernous room that spanned out before him. Stopping just within the archway's entrance, Keene turned, a slither of res slipping from his fingers to run along the cavern's floor. With a twitch of his fingers, he lifted up a strip of the rock below, pushing it slightly backward so that it acted like a makeshift buffer. The rock that had been removed had left about a three inch deep canyon, and Keene used the minor "pit" as further defense.

With a few steady breaths, Keene centered his focus on his djed, releasing it into the air in a cloud before he began to task it against the electrically charged ooze. First, he coated both the makeshift miniature wall in an icy frost of bright blue before slowly and carefully applying the shield to himself. He worked from his feet up, taking special care around any area that was prone to be unguarded by fabric or leather. Once he had finished, Keene carefully tapped the sticky secretion with a gloved and shielded finger, a healthy flare indicating that his protection would most likely hold. Rising back up to his feet, Keene stared out into the murky shadows that were broken only by the feeble glow of the metal wires that lit the area. There was a faint scritching coming from the very back of the hall, and as Keene took a few gentle steps towards it, the sound stopped.

The crunch of his boots had sounded several times louder than he had intended, and with a frown he looked down at them, unsure how he might proceed. The room was large, larger than the main floor of the Gug Andjak, which made the idea of chasing the creature around the room hardly appealing. He had already pushed the limit of what was acceptable in terms of his reimancy in the laboratory setting, and had Overseer Telerman ever deigned to venture so deep into the bowels of the island, Keene had little doubt there would have been a fine. So, he tried several more creeping steps, but again the echoing grit of the rocks shifting beneath him forced him to halt once more.

[Keene Ward]

Eventually, after considering removing his boots and attempting to shield the entire floor against his feet, Keene found his considerations both foolish and over complicated. He had been tasking against physical things so often and for so long, he had forgotten the basic nature of the shields he had created when he had first learned the magic. Once more kneeling down, Keene's sloughed off into the fluffy mass of cloud, wrapping around his boots while the intention to absorb and deflect sound was held constant and strong in his mind. The crystals of his djed melded over the leather, encasing the already present shield in a layer of silence, the frozen fractals all around. Continuing on to the other boot so that both were tasked and fitted appropriately, Keene took several more steps. The crunch was no longer present, but light steps were still required to keep the rocks and dirt from rubbing and knocking against each other.

Relatively satistifed with his work, Keene continued onwards, the slimy trail relatively easy to follow as, in its freshness, the meager light was easily cast off of the gel's sheen. His progress was slow, heavily hampered by the manner in which his feet were carefully lifted and even more carefully set down so as to make his advance as quiet as possible. With each step, he grew closer to the muffled sounds of scratching and shifting of the earth that had started up again about a chime after Keene had finished his secondary shields. From what he could tell, the noises were coming from the same direction, perhaps even the same location. None of the shut doors that lined the walls gave any indication that anyone lurked behind them, but there were plenty of forms of magic that hardly required fanfare. There were also a handful of magics - perhaps even more - that Keene didn't even know about, making each door a potential for new discovery, but for another time, if then.

The first thing he saw were the little sparks, sharp flashes of electricity, like the shadows themselves were blinking. The source of the irregular, sporadic pops of light had its head firmly burrowed into the ground, its little legs tenaciously tossing rock and dirt aside in its mission, though its progress was something that Keene was a bit loathe to term it. It seemed that the hedgehog, whether indicative of the species as a whole or not, was not adept at digging in the slightest. He continued his approach, slow and steady, taking extra care and time to both watch where he was stepping next as well as to keep his motions as minimal as possible. Though he had helped to mute the sensation of sound, he imagined that the hedgehog was not blind and would notice any quick, obvious movement. Of course, if the creature were blind, he supposed it was a wasted effort, but knowing nothing about it quarry he found it was far better to err on the side of caution than to gain a chime or so in his advance.

While dark, it seemed the creature was trying to burrow with its nose, feet and claws only a secondary tool. He found the display ineffective, though he supposed for what the hedgehog had available to it, the progress truly was progress. The closer he got, stopping each time the creature paused to silently snort out a few bits of stray dirt that had been caught in its elongated nose, the better able he was to observe just what exactly a hedgehog was. For starters, it wasn't particularly slimy, though the peculiar, stunted quills glimmered in the dim light, insinuating that the volt filled goo did indeed come from the little determined creature before him. The spines were its most defining feature, as the animal as a whole was relatively rounded, though he supposed the elongated nose was something of a characteristic as well. The goo, too, was something, and it seemed to drip from the animal at a steady pace, as if the thing was filled to the brim and it was escaping through miniature holes between the spikes of its back. Each time it paused to shake its head or glance about, flecks of the liquid scattered in every direction.

As he drew ever nearer, the hedgehog paused, turning to face him and regard the initiate with dark, beady eyes, its mouth partially open to reveal sharp teeth and pink tongue. Keene froze, his body stiff and muscles stiffer, keeping him in place as motionless as he could manage. It seemed, however, that his state of self inflicted paralysis was not enough to assuage the thing's increasingly vigilant state of alarm. Its body grew in size, spines sticking out in every direction, sending little jolts of snapping light into the air around it. Each crackle of energy made the animal seem even larger, and it began to make a low hum, similar to a bee. Unsure what to do, Keene took another tentative step closer. The hedgehog responded with a buzzing huff of air, tucking its head beneath the swell of spiny mass in what appeared to be self-defense. Apart from the occasional sparks of electricity that seemed all the more aggravated by the shivering shuffle of the spines, the creature seemed to remain immobile.

[Keene Ward]

After a few chimes of the huffing buzz of the animal's distress, Keene deemed it safe enough to approach. The thing made no indication that it would attack, and while he still moved with a cautious, light step, Keene focused more upon keeping his eyes on the angry vibrations than the exact point and place where his feet were placed. When he was close enough, Keene squatted down, hands at the ready for capture. As if by some serendipitous introspective realization of prophecy, the hedgehog's head shot up, a huff of air puffed into the increasingly diminishing distance between man and beast before it dashed directly for him.

The attack, while not quite unprecedented, took Keene by surprise. His hands moved a tick too slowly, at the rapidly moving ball of spines zipped between his legs, its sticky trail far less complete than that which he had followed. Somewhere, in the back of Keene's quickly adjusting mind, he figured that the creature had taken its time to descend the stairs, as it stood to reason that more goo left behind meant a slower passing. At the forefront, however, Keene gathered his wits and sprinted off after the surprisingly agile oval of puffing fury. As his feet pounded against the ground, sound shielded to give the slight click and scramble of the rocks he kicked up in passing the only claim to his passing, Keene found that the hedgehog was faster. It ran on spindly legs, almost comical had Keene had the mind for it, and in the blur of their pinkish might, the creature held far and fast away from him, pausing here and there to ruffle out a snort or airy grumble before taking off again just as Keene might catch up.

While the trip down the stairs had not caused him too much fatigue, the pursuit certainly did. His breath came quick, heat warming the chill of his fingers as the beast bounced off of the makeshift wall he had created just in case such an event did occur. The flare indicated that the liquid had been stopped, but the hedgehog did not seem particularly perturbed, instead turning to dart off in a different direction now that it knew its original escape had been thwarted by prior planning. Quite definitely certain he could not catch the animal on his own two feet, Keene's res drifted from his lips as he kept up the pursuit, feet pounding quietly against the dirt as he skidded to compensate for the hedgehog's change in trajectory.

With a flick of his fingers, the pale blue mist exploded forward, moving far faster than he could, surrounding the hedgehog that seemed not to notice the ethereal substance drifting about it. Planting both feet in a solid stance to better focus on the more delicate subtleties of the spell, Keene lifted the creature up into the wait with a gust of wind, gathering the res below and around the hedgehog to cast it up into the air with a carefully aimed force. It let out a livid series of buzzing protests as it sailed up into the air, the electrically charged goo flying in every direction. Pulling his res up and around it, Keene quickly and efficiently encased it in a sphere of res, the mist shifting to a liquid, then a pale white stone, within a matter of ticks. He kept the top untransmuted, using the res to hold the semi-sphere of marble in the air as he took quick steps to catch up to where it hovered. He could hear the hedgehog's protests emanating from its stony prison, the weight of his magic pulling at his center of gravity and required all the more effort to lift his arms so that the stone set comfortably in his care.

The res he'd used to hold the stone was drawn back up through his mouth, though the weight of the hedgehog's smooth casing was a bit more than he bargained for, teetering for a few ticks beneath the shift from weightlessness to a considerable number of pounds. Bending his knees to compensate, Keene found that while the curve had make the hedgehog's desperate scratching and scrabbling to get free as effective as a fish flopping in the middle of a desert to get back into the ocean, it was far too heavy to carry all the way back up to Risabel's laboratory. Frowning down at the beast as he set the entire thing on the ground, Keene stuck a hand into what was, essentially, a bowl with very high, curved sides. He was rewarded with another series of buzzing expletives and was unable to get a very good handle on it with the spines surprisingly loose along its back, making lifting it out of the stone without the threat of injury next to none.

Settling down, Keene took a few chimes to catch his breath, making sure to keep an eye on the hedgehog lest it devise and execute some daring plan to escape. He could catch it again, but he found that he preferred to simply keep it caught. When his heart had found a pace less excited, Keene set about tasking yet another shield against the hedgehog itself, his cloudy djed wrapping around the gloves in a second layer of protection. With that done, he reached once more into the stoneware and was immediately rewarded with an attempted bite that was repeated several times, each with its own flash, before he was able to extricate the animal from its spherical prison. In his hands, in spite of its exaggerated size, the hedgehog was a bit heavier than he'd thought it might be. Turning it over so that its spindly legs jerked and wiggled in tandem with the clearly frustrated grunts and working jaw of its elongated face, Keene found that the stomach was not spiny, rather it appeared relatively soft, if not a bit dirty and covered in the slime the things seemed to secrete. While he had not been able to clearly see the more minute details of the hedgehog before, wriggling in his hands as it was, he found it had short, curved ears and a little pinkish tail. It was a strange looking creature, whether part slug and bush or not, and Keene found it wasn't particularly to his liking.

[Keene Ward]

With the wriggling creature firmly in hand, Keene made his way back towards the hall's exit. His shields held steady against both the charged secretion that furiously dripped from the animal's back and front as well as the spines and bites that were directed in his general direction. His grip was tight, perhaps a bit uncomfortable from the huffing hedgehog, but Keene made sure that he did not cause undue harm to the beast as the stopped to stand before the raised, shielded barrier he had constructed which had served him well. Res snaked out from his boots, lifting and resetting the stone back where it had come from, filling the cracks to seal it once more into the ground with thin lines of pale white. As for the shield, Keene lightly pressed his boot against several points of the frosty barrier, unbonding the crystals until eventually the structure shattered. What could be salvaged of the djed was returned to him, and with a slight roll of his shoulders, Keene started up the stairs once again.

The journey was far more difficult than before, his weariness pushed aside by a slower pace, further hampered by the hedgehog's occasional burst of violent shifting that required him to stop and firmly shake the thing to keep it from escaping. As it had been on the way down, Keene met no other figure on the stairs as he rose ever higher, his only companion the infuriorated puffing of the ball of spines in his hands and the complete lack of sound as his feet hit stone, shielding against the usual tapping click of his boots' soles. So, when he heard the sound of footsteps, Keene paused, the buzzing creature in his hands continuing on in its protests. There wasn't anything necessarily wrong with what he was doing, but he wasn't quite sure what to expect if a wizard was to come across the sweaty, shielded figured of a young man holding a particularly irate animal. What Keene wasn't aware of, was that the sight wasn't all that strange to most of the researchers in the Gug Andjak.

A man appeared before him, dressed in a messily stained frock of sorts, leather gloves up to his elbows and hair tied back into a messy bun. When he saw Keene he paused, eyes glimmering with a muted recognition, but did not make conversation. Instead, he offered a gruff, "Initiate." before making his way around and past Keene without so much as a second glance.

Blinking, Keene gave the hedgehog a blank stare, partially surprised that the man had not found the animal as peculiar as he had, but his more rational line of thought reminding him that peculiar was precisely what most of the nuit in the citadel achieved in their quest for the truly powerful. With that in mind, Keene continued, his pace only a slight bit quicker than the nuit's languid motions as he pushed himself up ever higher up the stairs. By the time he reached the top, the hedgehog had calmed down some. While the huffing and puffing still sounded at random intervals, more silence passed than noise. Its body was still a curl of spikes, but the quivering had calmed some, making it far more manageable a package.

What he saw, as he crested the final step, was a very happy Risabel speaking to another Pulsar, this one thin and muscular, a symbol of the Hunters. He handed her a sack with a nod that was exchanged with a small, linen covered parcel that he tucked under his arm before turning and leaving through the main doors. Raising a brow, Keene made his way over to the bushy headed woman who had dropped the sack to the ground and began rummaging through its contents. With his footsteps silenced, Keene was able to approach without betraying his presence. Thus, when he spoke, Risabel's head popped up with alarming speed, sending her frazzled locks bouncing in every direction. "I've brought the hedgehog." As if to further emphasize his point, Keene held the thing up, much to the displeasure of the spike ball.

She frowned at him, over her initial surprise the tick she realized the unexpected presence was only Keene. "Oh right." Her lack of enthusiasm was apparent.

"Do you no longer need it?" There was little curiosity in his voice, though Keene did find the shift from near desperation to casual apathy quite a distinct one.

Shaking her head, Risabel huffed a small sigh, pushing herself back up to her feet and withdrawing some large, strangely shaped bone from within the sack. The brittle clink that sounded as it was withdrawn indicated that there were several more of its kind still contained within. "Harley already brought me some bones." She eyed the hedgehog with a flicker of interest before it was brushed away with a toss of her hand, adjusting the ever messy expanse of hair into something marginally more manageable. "And I don't really have time to butcher, clean, and prepare the bones. Not when I can just use these." She nudged the sack with her foot, her grin returning. "So no. I don't need it anymore."

Blank eyes blinking once before turning to regard the ball of fury in his hands, Keene spoke again, cool voice steady and unconcerned. "What do I do with this then?"

The clink of bones sounded once more as Risabel lifted the sack of bones up and over her shoulder. "I don't know, Ward. Figure it out." With that, she tossed a hand in farewell and slipped back into her laboratory, leaving both man and beast to face the other without any further assistance from her.

The creature was not particularly pleased, though he supposed it was more pleased not to be a lifeless pile of bones, even if it was unaware that that fate had just been narrowly avoided. He had no love for animals, but he also had little reason to kill them for the sake of simplicity. Each life had a purpose, and while the hedgehog's previous one had been to die for the sake of a legate's practice, it was now an ambiguous future. Turning, hedgehog still in hand, Keene decided to head back to the Cavern. The walk, he reasoned, would be time enough to decided what to do with the little animal that had begun to huff and puff once more, quivering in the secure and unfaltering grip of his shielded gloves. The more he thought about it, the more he figured that letting it go and find its own path was the most logical course of action. Thus, when he arrived at the cavern, he set the thing down outside of the cave's mouth, where it remained in a stationary bundle. The next morning, it was gone, a small trail of electrified ooze indicating that it had decided the world was far more interesting traveled than hidden from.

[Ink]

Skills
Animal husbandry 1
Investigation 2
Tracking 2
Reimancy 1
Shielding 2
Stealth 1
Hunting 1

Lores
Basic Anatomy of a Hedgehog
Unwanted Electric Hedgehogs

Special
From time to time after this event electric ooze trails are found near the Obsidian Cavern and later the Dendrik Ravine.