[o] Arachnophuckyou

Soleil

“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!”

It rings in a lovely screeching echo through the Hollow Forest, practically choral in its pleasantness. Less pleasantly, it’s accompanied by sounds of snapping branches and two - four - no, six, definitely six, pounding feet. 

Soleil hates spiders. Only right now though, normally she’s a big fan of the weird and creepy. For a Halo-native creature though the Crystal Spider she’s pissed off is clearly not very patriotic or neighborly. She wasn’t even planning on killing it when she first set out to harvest its webbing but Soleil is actively changing that plan now. 

Diana barks and the impression of a direction shoves its way into the sun-child’s brain. She dives sideways obligingly, rising on one knee to launch her spear at the spider while Diana bites and hangs onto one of its massive legs. With a twist of her hand the spear returns to her palm immediately and Diana disengages to skitter out of range as the spider…shrieks? It certainly makes a sound, though Soleil isn’t sure what kind. She’s not a Rae/Frey kid, and clearly for good reason if they make these sort of pissy, territorial creations. 

“I just wanted your webbing, dickwad!” Soleil shouts just to lower the stress rising in her lungs, hair wildly askew but hands steady as she lifts her spear, wary of the way the spider collects itself and spins to try and see her, clearly intent on revenge.

We will break away together, you the shadow and I the light

COLT

She ought to have headed back home after assisting Deimos and getting in some practice at the barracks, but there's enough wayward thoughts tangling up inside that the idea of getting away for a little bit and just going for a ride sounded nice. Some quiet to think, nothing but the steady sway of the horse's stride and the sound of snow crunching underneath to accompany her. It's cold, sure, but she's dressed for it, always prepared with heaps of layers and jackets when she visits Halo, especially post longheat. The chill helps sharpen her, doesn't let her fully drift into comfort, keeps her mind moving when heat might otherwise lull it.

At least, she thought she'd have nothing more than the tundra wind and the groan of trees adding to the whine of leather and the jingle of metal spurs on slackened boots for her chorus of thought. That doesn't seem to be the case though when an unintelligible chant rouses in the distance, and not long thereafter a series of barks. Curious at best, which is another way of saying nosy, Colt encourages Beans into a faster gait. She doesn't want to barrel in, but she wants to see.

One too many legs is what she does glimpse, which would have been enough to say nope and head out. Unfortunately, Colt might lose sleep, which she can't afford to keep doing, if she knows this woman perished in some hideous fashion to this creature. At the very least, she figured she and Beans could outrun it if shit got bad, and then she could say she tried, enough of an attempt to put her head on her pillow easily. So, with a dramatic sigh, Colt grabs her lariat from her saddle and tosses a loop towards the crystal spider. With so many legs, she figures her odds of snaring one are even better than with cattle. Ideally she'd get more than one, yank back and set Bean's weight in reverse to draw the rope taut and unbalance the pissed off spider, maybe enough to set it on its side and then the stranger could make a clean kill instead of just cussing about it.

If I go missing, don't bother looking, I'm probably just riding the wind
'Cause cowboys and sunsets, you can always count on them, but never to stay
I guess I'm a cowboy, 'cause there's a sunset on the way

Soleil

Colt's dashing - surely it was dashing, Soleil just missed it - entrance at first earns only a befuddled expression from the sunchild. Because it's less of an entrance to Soleil and more a 'hey, where'd that rope come from?'

Like a page from a children's book the lasso snags two of the spider's legs like a shepherd's hook and yanks it off balance, fuzzy evil ankles neatly pinched together. Soleil startles and nearly drops her spear when the spider's abdomen hits snow as it falls, far legs scrambling as they both try to figure out what just happened. Soleil's arms rise in tentative celebration (that is definitely premature), and finally spots her timely hero. 

Who looks, well, heroic. Far cooler than Soleil, with her hair exploding in every direction, covered in sweat and snow-damp, halfway to a failed hunt. No no - Colt is horseback, disturbed snow falling unfairly cinematically around her, looking cool as a moonshroom. 

"YEAH! Yeah, you - hey, no!" Soleil launches her spear with her mid-cheer hand when the spider rightfully reminds her it's not dead yet, and immediately makes a queasy noise when her weapon embeds itself a little too accurately in the spider's head. It dies pretty quickly - but in a lingering twitchy way that only makes the greenish look on her face worsen the longer it goes on. "I tried not to kill it, y'know," she mutters to the stranger, or maybe the world at large, because it makes her feel a little less terrible for having done so anyway. 

Diana returns to her side like a homing pigeon, eyes locked in an unblinking stare on the newcomer while Soleil is busy mourning herself five minutes from now, because that's the person who has to pull the spear from the spider's head. She opens her palm and calls it back so the blood and viscera doesn't get on her shoes this time at least, though the noise makes a sympathetic one come from her throat as she spins to look at anything but that. Colt is much easier on the eyes thank the Gods. 

"First, wow. You're really putting me in a corner here by saving my butt, looking cool doing it, and being gorgeous." Diana snorts at her knee and Soleil rams it into her without looking. "Second, I really hope you aren't going to use all that to extort me for repayment, because it would probably work and that would suck for my wallet." Because they've all got one life, and Soleil is the equivalent of a college kid with no impulse control, so her coin purse is already suffering. "Sooo...what's the name of my hopefully-philanthropic savior?" She grins as winsomely as she can, planting her spearhead into the snow to lean on it in a half-hug that would be charming if it wasn't for the purpose of catching her breath, which puffs out conspicuously in the cold.

We will break away together, you the shadow and I the light

COLT

She should have kept going. This woman is, a lot, and she's just invited all of it into her lap. Kinda makes it clear why the spider had been trying to kill her.

As the spider enters its twitching death throes around the puncture of the spear, Colt nudges Beans up a few steps with a faint press of her legs. It's enough to slacken the rope that he'd been keeping taut with the backward set of his weight. Colt's hand wiggles and waggles the drooping rope now, sending the movement up the line tp loosen the noose around the two long legs. "Better it than you," Colt offers with a shrug, in regards to killing. She gets it, though. Live and let live generally, unless letting live means she or her herds will die, in which case, murder them all. The void had certainly inspired some defensive bloodlust.

The lariat flops free of the spider after a bit of negotiating with the slack, allowing Colt to start to haul it back towards her, looping it around as she goes with a practiced and repetitive motion that permits her to keep her gaze on the woman and the wolf. One 'brow sketches up as Soleil yammers, though it earns a short laugh from her. "Easy girl," she says with a humored shake of her head. "You ain't much used to being offered a helping hand, are ya?" Colt smirks a bit, adjusting her seat in the saddle as she reaffixes the coiled rope to the side of it.

"Name's Colt," she drawls as she rights back around, hands folding over Bean's neck. "I dunno about philanthropic savior, but I don't need a thing from you honey." She tilts her head a bit though, attention flicking back to the corpse. "Wouldn't mind the story of this predicament though."

If I go missing, don't bother looking, I'm probably just riding the wind
'Cause cowboys and sunsets, you can always count on them, but never to stay
I guess I'm a cowboy, 'cause there's a sunset on the way

Soleil

"Yep," she pops the 'p' habitually even on a mumble. Soleil is a little too wild to care overmuch for what's really just scaled-up pest control - she's more bitter over failing to avoid fighting the thing when she'd actually meant to this time. 

Her companion's secondhand embarrassment is palpable when Soleil flushes so hard she gets the spins over the woman's clearly practiced 'easy girl'. In fact when she looks back Diana is conveniently marching off to the other side of the spider, leaving Soleil to her fate and belated gratitude for the way exertion and darker skin hide the visual evidence of the low bar Colt just vaulted over. 

"You must not be a native Halovian. Helping hands used to be cut off and eaten by cannibals not too long ago." Her grin is cheeky, dark humor skirting the edges as she pushes off her spear and slips it neatly over her shoulder into the holster on her back. "People are a lot subtler with their help around here; care packages on doorsteps, mysteriously paid tabs - you get the idea." Not exactly Soleil's style, but that's why she's more Halovian by name and nomadic by trade at this point in her life. 

"So since you need nothing from me, I'll need your forwarding address for that care package - to do right by my people's ways, you see." Her omnipresent smile slants into an angled expression that clearly implies she doesn't actually mean it. Neatly stepping over the spider's nearest leg, she works counter-clockwise while searching for any remnants of silk on the hairy limbs to add to the collection in her bag. "I'm Soleil. Ludo sent me on a quest to collect silk from one of these guys for...well, no noble or impressive reasons." Soleil wants to make sticky bombs just because they're fun and stupid, and she really doesn't need Colt hot-laughing at her a second time. "Aside from Diana -" a quick chin gesture toward her wolf-sister 'keeping watch' nearby "- I don't really have anyone to call on for hare-brained but otherwise proper hunts - so it was supposed to be a silent in-and-out. But since they can hear a fly sneeze halfway down the tundra if it happened to get a sniffle while flying too close to a web..." It's not much of an excuse for her failure and probably just paints her in even more incompetent colors, so Soleil shrugs her way out of explaining much further by winding a remnant of silk around her fingers to ball it up, sliding it into her satchel and turning back to Colt. "So thank you, if I didn't say it before. Both of you - is this your companion?" Her fingers itch to pet and pamper, but she just tangles them further into the webbing to suppress the urge.

We will break away together, you the shadow and I the light

COLT

It's all she can do from saying gods no to being a native Halovian, but given many native Halovians would find that offensive, she settles for a surprised laugh. "Consider me warned. Next time I'll yell out and ask if someone's a cannibal first." Humor lingers at the corners of her mouth, but she does take the undercurrent of the exchange as a reminder that she should be more cautious. She would not trade helping a stranger for losing a hand on any day, might not even for a friend. She'd much rather lose one night's sleep thinking about the unknown person lying dead.

Then, to set things straight, she arches a 'brow at Soleil. "You're not a cannibal, are you?" If her hands tuck in a bit closer to the saddle, what of it?

She can understand feeling the need to repay someone. Whatever the other person might say about the matter, if it's your code to trade in favors, it's usually an uncomfortable position to be under the thumb of an owed debt. She's about to suggest they head back into town where Soleil can buy her a drink and consider the whole affair handled, not particularly keen on a stray care package arriving on her doorstep, or the thought of Soleil being there. She clamps her mouth shut though from the subtle readiness to talk, because the more she's watching the woman lean and grin and rattle one, the more she's not sure a damn thing that's been said has any weight.

"You can send anything to the House of Midnight," she offers with a shrug, her smile edging back in. If she could turn any potential care from Soleil into Sunjata's problem instead, all the better.

Everything is nearly explained with quest, because who hasn't found themselves in some wild predicament at the behest of a god? Although she's certain, er—almost certain, that Ludo did not require Soleil to risk her life or be chased down by the spider, the risk is inherent with the vague task. "Makes sense," she offers her understanding, if it might alleviate some of Soleil's lingering embarrassment. "Had a similar predicament with some void ursurs near here." Proof that they're all kinda just trying their best not to die on any given day, whether by the hand of their choices or others. Her gaze flicks to the wolf, and Colt nods, finding a lot of faith in the four-legged. "Always value a good dog, or wolf, but the Monster Hunter Guild here might be able to assist, in the future." The only reason she'd survived the ursurs. The only reason she'd been near the ursurs too, but the living part seemed much more meaningful.

An easier smile drifts in, and Colt tips her chin. "Don't mention it." As for Beans, she laughs a bit, shaking her head while slapping his neck affectionately. She gestures with a hand towards him, invitation enough for Soleil to get her fill of scratches. "Gods no," she says around the remnants of the chuckle. "Much as I love Beans, not so sure I want him strapped to my soul. I'm a rancher, so I got plenty of good horses, he's just the one I brought out here for this visit."

She does eventually offer they head back into town, even extending her hand to let Soleil climb up behind her, eager to get back to warmth and away from spiders. They talk more as they head back in, until they reach some agreement on debts.

[FIN]

If I go missing, don't bother looking, I'm probably just riding the wind
'Cause cowboys and sunsets, you can always count on them, but never to stay
I guess I'm a cowboy, 'cause there's a sunset on the way