[Hide Your Kids] Tricky and Tegan [Slenderman]

She glared at him without fully realizing it. She growled a bit as she spoke, "Everything can get killed in some way. And nothing gets away from me once I've targeted it. It'll just be a matter of experimenting for a while until I figure out how to." She allowed the death grip on her swords to relax a bit and let out a sigh, then a short humorless laugh. "I guess I should apologize for dragging you into this, huh? If you'd rather not risk the chance of getting horribly murdered, feel free to leave. I can't say I'd blame you, and maybe if we're separate that thing can only trap one of us here - or whatever the hell this would be called." She waved her index finger in a circle, from where they'd left the town to where they stood.

Anyylen shook her head. "I have no idea. I don't know what this thing is; what it can do. If it just messes with our minds then well, we're probably not in a good position to be tackling this. Especially right now. I sort of stole you away from getting some sleep back at the tavern. I'll keep an eye out for anything strange and try and think of something that might be of use while you rest. If you don't mind though, I think I'd like to be a bit further away from the town before then. There's something unsettling about it." She turned as if about to head back into the forest, but stopped and turned back toward him to wait for a reply.
The world looked distant, dreamlike. She felt a wave of dizziness pass over her. Something strange was definitely happening.

Anyylen smiled warmly. "Don't worry about me. My people don't need as much sleep as humans do. And hopefully we can move away from the town without that creature deciding to turn us back around. I just want it out of earshot." Her ears angled back, pressed slightly against her head as she turned to leave once more, waiting for Mask to fall into stride with her. She felt her head throbbing, as if something were trying to pull her mind. She set her jaw and glanced around, thinking of verses, muttering lines of poetry just to keep her mind occupied. Tree roots became skeletal hands, leaves were vilified, the fog hated them, and the creature that stalked them was nothing more than a bard's exaggeration. It worked better as a story than in life. She gave it a happy ending just as they came across a small clearing.
She leaned on a tree. "I wonder if that creature is an ancient god who's upset that it's been forgotten. It keeps people here so that it has followers...kind of. I've heard of it happening before, though never quite like this. It must have been a very angry god even when it was known."

Anyylen knelt in the grass nearby. Two chakram were around each arm, ready to strike. She set her eyes on the twisted trees standing guard directly in front of her first, looking through the branches and trying to find anything strange. Her ears twitched at the slightest sound - squirrels, birds, and creatures digging homes beneath the ground. The signs of life came few and far between, as if everything were afraid of everything else. She turned her head and scanned to the left just as she had before.
A twig snapped behind her.
A chakram on her left arm was sent spinning into the darkness of the trees. She heard the thunk of metal connecting with wood. A slow, deep laugh filled the air. Anyylen readied another chakram, one on her right arm. The face that appeared before her was like a blank slate. Pale and featureless, though she remembered it as looking like a skull. It stood taller than any person she'd ever seen. Its body blended in with the darkness behind it. She aimed at its neck.
The disc soared through the creature. Literally through. The creature should have been beheaded, but it only looked amused. She listened as the chakram landed among the leaves. The creature raised an arm and the next moment, Anyylen realized that its fingers had been shoved through her abdomen. She placed her hands over the wounds, knowing that pulling the knife-like appendages out would only cause more damage. Blood trickled through her fingers.
She swore once. The creature said something and she replied, but within the same breath she'd forgotten what either one had said.

Anyylen opened her eyes and jolted up. Her stomache ached as though pins had been shoved through it. She brushed her fingertips over the fabric of her shirt, finding it whole and without any tears.
She wondered when she'd fallen asleep. She hadn't felt tired at all, and she didn't remember starting a campfire - and yet one was blazing brilliantly before her. She rubbed her head. "I'm just hungry," she muttered. "My stomach hurts because I'm hungry. That's it."

Anyylen hardly twitched her eyes to look at him when Mask bolted up and looked around. She stared into the fire, listening to voices who's words she forgot almost instantly. He was sweating, clearly distressed. He'd must have had a nightmare as well, worse than her own probably. She wondered if she was supposed to try and comfort him. Or at least calm him down. Panicking wouldn't help. She knew he knew that as well.
"I always say that trees are liars," she said softly, but loud enough that she knew he'd heard. "They hide things...Predators. They stop the sun from reaching the plants on the forest floor. And that creature...From a distance, you wouldn't be able to see him among the trees."
She turned her head and looked at her pack. "I had a dream that it attacked me and I attacked back. Two of my weapons are now missing. I saw the scar in the tree where one had landed in the dream, but that creature must have stolen it. Somehow."
She had the feeling that she wasn't doing a very good job of being comforting.

"Of course it's fucking with us. Otherwise we would have been able to leave hours ago. I don't even remember starting this fire. Or falling asleep." She shivered. "And it shouldn't be this cold sitting this close to the fire. I feel like I'm freezing. We can't fight this thing. My chakram just went right through it. " She wondered if she should tell him about the fingers that had been shot through her stomach. Her hand unconsciously fell there, still surprised not to find blood. Her fingers searched for loose threads - anything to prove or disprove what had happened.
The pain in her gut had faded to a dull throb, making it easier to tell herself it was simply hunger.
"If you don't mind me asking, and who knows maybe it will help, what happened in your sleep?" She wasn't sure how it would help. Maybe she was simply going insane, thinking that since her weapons hadn't worked in a dream they wouldn't work in real life. She figured that anything at all might have the potential to prove useful.

Anyylen was silent for a long time, looking into the fire. The image of the crying women; the man holding the child's body wrapped in a blanket, filled her mind. "That thing kills children." Her own voice sounded distant to her. "In the village..." Blood flashed through her mind. Limbs were severed from torsos. Fingers and toes from hands and feet; stacked neatly. It was over in a second. Maybe even less. She remembered how bloodstained that blanket had been. Had they even recovered all of the child?
The sound of laughing filled her ears.
Something deep in her mind told her that no, they hadn't.
She shook her head to clear it.
"I want a drink. Drinking always makes things better." She hugged her knees to her chest.

Without fully meaning to, she leaned into the touch. She was silent for a few moments before quietly replying, "I'm glad of that." She contemplated looking at him, maybe speaking more, maybe having a normal conversation. But she knew that the fear and confusion were settled nicely into her eyes - even if it were perfectly normal for that to be the case, she didn't want it to be anymore obvious than it already was. So she kept her eyes on the fire. If she stared at it long enough, the tendrils of flame began to look like the tall creatures arms, reaching up; out; toward her. She blinked a few times, returning it to a regular fire.
"It won't let us work by our own rules. We have to use its, but it hasn't told us what they are." The pain in her stomach sharpened for a moment. Her fingers tightened their grips on her knees as she remembered the creature's fingers running through her. "And trial and error will probably get us killed."

She inhaled a deep breath and waited to exhale it until she realized that she was still leaning against Akar. He was keeping her warmer than the fire had, even as much as it looked like it should have been throwing off heat. The feeling of helplessness permeated them both, but together she felt it subsiding, if at least a bit. She gave a small, slow nod at the option to form a plan, but she didn't feel articulate enough to voice her worry of failure. Trying to put the words 'we're most likely going to die horribly' into euphemism was beginning to prove harder and harder the more she felt the need to remind them both.
And the one thing she certainly did not ever want to do was be any where near 'up close and personal' with that creature. She listened to him as he muttered ideas more to himself, trying to think of her own. If physical contact didn't work, maybe some other sort would prove to be what they needed.
"Would you by any chance know any sort of magic?" A spark of hope flickered in her eye for a second or less when she looked up at him to voice the question.

Teleport? She watched him stroke with the fletching of the arrow; different from the rest, she assumed it held some meaning toward this new teleportation development. The ghost of a smile streaked onto her face when he inquired as to her own magical abilities. "Unfortunately, not all elves are magical. I am one such who is not." She let the last sentence drop from her lips, heavy in the hopelessness of their situation. "I am however in possession of a magical item." She fiddled to open her pack, and searched for the items at the very bottom, covered with an extra compartment and emitting the faintest of magical auras - that, more than once, had piqued the interest of friend and foe alike. She hoped that Akar would be able to sense it as well, once she drew the chakrams. She held them between her fingers to show him. "They are more than just some sort of bonded weapon in their ability to always return. And if for whatever reason worse comes to worst, they won't get themselves lodged in a tree trunk and stolen." She added the last part with a lopsided grin, hoping that he would hear it as more of a joke than her own worries had permitted.

"Maybe we'll get lucky and you can just teleport that thing out of existence. Though if that's the only arrow you have that can do that..." she wasn't entirely sure how to end the sentence. And she didn't want it to seem like her idea - her fault - if he tried and ended up losing the arrow for good.
Still, she had to admit that at least having the slightest bit of hope, the basic concept of something that was trying hard as it could to be a plan, came as a great relief. With no idea of whether the creature would only come when summoned somehow or whether it decided on its own when to show up, there wasn't much more she could think of to do to help their situation. So for the time being, she decided it would be best to sit and wait at least until one of them came up with something better to do. She settled onto her calves and placed the pair of chakrams around her arms.
The possibility that he'd been drugged by the bartender crossed her mind as she watched Akar try to nurse the headache. The idea was scrapped almost instantly. Why would he have drugged on and not the other? She hadn't noticed anything off at the tavern. She decided that it was the few hours of nightmare plagued sleeping.
Or was it a sign the creature was approaching? Already there and watching them?
She clenched her teeth and swore under her breath.

His sudden display of intensified pain had concerned her. She'd been about to suggest that she have something to help in her pack, when the attack came. She'd been on her feet as he hit the tree.
She'd let out an unceremonious string of cursing and incoherent stanzas as the creature showed itself. The chakrams slipped from her forearms to around her fingers. If she was lucky, she decided, there'd be time to be concerned for Akar in a few moments. If she wasn't, then there was no need for concern at all anyway.
For a moment, she thought her nightmare had come true, but the next second, she realized it had been her imagination. Or maybe the creature had put it there. She focused on the ring around her left finger, twirled it thrice and let it fly. She did the same for the one on the right an instant later, aiming a bit lower than the first, which had been aimed at the clavicle.