Wild World: Noir

Wild World: Noir

(Max's POV)

A long, pleased sigh escapes my lips as I sink into the large, wooden tub containing my bath. It took a while to cool the water down enough that it was safe to bathe in, but fuck does it feel good to be able to soak again. Up until I'd found that hot spring deep underneath the hill Annette, Siren and I call home, the only way to clean myself and my clothes has been with a cold-as-balls river that's a bit of a trek from here. Well, I mean I can just jump there in a couple short minutes but it's still pretty damn far away. Plus, having both of my mates teasing me for not being able to handle the cold water well was a little on the emasculating side.

Things have been going pretty well for me lately and my little slice of this world has been calm and peaceful since I had my mini-war with the lions six weeks ago. Has it been six weeks? I think so. Honestly, all I have left to keep track of time now is just counting days and I got tired of doing that after Siren moved in. Also distracted. I was getting "distracted" pretty often as well, thanks to my two mates. Of course, I did plenty of "distracting" myself when the three of us were feeling particularly adventurous.

"Your erection is showing." Annette suddenly says in her usual deadpan English, making me jump slightly in my bath.

"How are you so damn silent in a stone cave with hooves on your feet?!" I ask, gazing down to see that she was right. I wasn't exactly all the way there, but I was pretty damn far from flaccid too. Probably shouldn't have let my mind wander to sexy places. My mate certainly wasn't helping matters any right now, sauntering towards me in the nude with the torches in our bathing room seeming to make her glow as a soft smile grew on her face.

"That's my secret to keep, Max." she teases me, coming close and sitting down right next to the tub. "And I'm not the one breaking your little bathing room rule, you know."

"The rule is no sex in the bathing room. Being aroused isn't having sex." I reply as she starts giggling softly in the cute voice of hers. Her sarcastic sense of humor's only grown on me more and more since I met her. My parents would have loved her....well, after they got over the whole not-being-human thing anyway. "So what do you need, love? I doubt you only came in here to tease me."

"True. Teasing you is just a nice bonus." she says, leaning over and kissing me quickly. "I just wanted to tell you that the last of the huts that the tribe who moved next to us have been finished. They want to hold a festival soon, to celebrate their freedom and their new home now that all the hard work is finished. Of course, we've all been invited."

"Neat. Is your tribe going to come and celebrate too or...?" I ask her, repositioning myself in the tub so I can look right at her without needing to crane my neck.

"No, my old tribe doesn't want to come anywhere near here if they can help it. They're still convinced that the lions are going to come and attack us. I know they're being silly. The lions definitely would have done it by now if they were going to, but you can't convince the paranoid. Still, at least mother is visiting from time to time. I was a little worried she'd never want to see me again for a while there." Annette replies, leaning her head near mine against the side of the tub. I reach my arms out of the tub and draw her into a wet hug.

"Your mother loves you far too much to ever abandon you willingly...even if she doesn't like me." I tell her sweetly, laughing softly as she pulls away from my wet arms and starts smoothing the fur I messed up. "I'm not apologizing. I think you look sexy wet."

"You think I look sexy period." she happily snarks back to me, getting back to her feet and stepping out of hug range. I smirk a bit, knowing she really hates having to dry off. Guess I can't blame her. Takes a lot longer with fur, especially when you get wet at night. At least we're past the colder season, so she won't be uncomfortable....well more uncomfortable.

"Very true." I answer her, blowing her a playful kiss that she just rolls her eyes and smirks at. "So this festival... anything I can do to help?"

"I knew you were going to ask that." she says to me with a sarcastic grin. It's true, she does know me pretty well at this point. "The festival could always do with some more food. It can always be stored if it goes uneaten. Maybe just don't tell them you got it specifically for the festival. Your obsessive need to be helpful is a bit odd to them, especially when you're supposed to be the reason they're able to celebrate."

"I've gotta be true to myself, love." I say back, turning around and sinking back into the tub. "Will I see you in bed tonight, or are you going to stay up all night again trying to get through my textbooks?"

"Don't come to bed wet again and we'll see. Enjoy your bath, Max." she says to me. I hear the soft clack of her hooves on the stone as she leaves the bathing room and wonder again how the hell she managed to sneak up on me earlier. Well, I'm sure I'll figure it out one of these days. For now, I'm just going to enjoy my bath until the water starts to cool down then figure out how the hell to dry off quickly before I go to bed. Fuck, I wish I had a towel.

Maybe I can find some cotton in this world...

~

I force myself to come to a stop after bouncing a couple times onto the hard ground. I've been travelling via super strength jumping for about forty minutes now and I'm way past the point where I'm actually starting to feel that really unpleasant tingle you get when you land from a high jump in my shins. I let my body relax, feeling the super strength leave me as it always does. I can't help hissing in pain as I start to walk off the unpleasant tingle, knowing it'll go away in a few moments as long as I take it easy. Yeah, I probably overdid it.

I take in my new surroundings, trying to figure out what kind of biome I've ended up in so I know what sort of stuff to look for. I mean yeah, it's a forest but what kind of forest it is makes a huge difference in what kind of stuff I can find in it. The forest closest to home is tropical, very much like a jungle. Very wet, very humid. I absolutely hate it. I grew up in the desert and lived a pretty long time on America's west coast where it usually didn't get too muggy to handle thanks to cooler weather. This forest, on the other hand, definitely strikes me more as temperate. Maybe subtropical or something. Feels like the parks did when I'd visit southern California.

So I should probably be looking for berries, maybe some fruit...definitely mushrooms. Fuck, I've grown to love mushrooms since I've come here. Back on Earth, I was definitely a meat and potatoes guy but that's not really an option on this world. Animals tend to be people here after all. The two big exceptions I've learned about to that rule are fish and, weirdly, fucking chickens. Yeah, chickens! I mean I've never seen one but Siren tells me that apparently alligators are known to raise the things like ranchers. Er...alligator Anthros I mean.

I sigh loudly as my train of thought gets me thinking about home and all the foods I used to eat there. Now I eat veggies, berries, some fruit and...well, fucking bugs. And the worst part of that? I've come to fucking love eating bugs. Yeah, no shit. I mean I'd never eat the fuckers raw or anything, but I've gotten pretty good at cooking them with Siren's help. Annette's adventurous, but she's a vegetarian through and through. Siren will eat just about anything that she can with that beak of hers. Which is to say, as long as it doesn't require any hard chewing. Wait, what was I doing again? Right, food and stuff for the party!

I focus up and start looking around me for goodies, coming upon some brown mushrooms pretty quickly and tossing them into my bag. I spot a few bugs that look like they'd be pretty tasty, but skip them. Either I kill them and they're no good by the time I actually get my ass back home or I leave them alive and they eat everything else I was gonna eat...and maybe my bag too. I keep looking around, finding a few flowers, bunches of healthy grass and a few bushes with berries that I can tell aren't going to be edible. They may make good dyes though, so I make a mental note of their colors in case I ever decide to come back this way.

I get into a good flow of things pretty quickly, going here and there while looking around. In next to no time at all, the dull tingling ache of my legs is gone and I've got a bag half full of mushrooms, some nuts and berries, a few new flowers I haven't seen yet and even apples! I can't believe this world actually has freaking apples! Granted not a ton of apples, but still...

I freeze up when I suddenly hear the sharp crack of leaves being stepped on. Somebody else is around here. Somebody a lot bigger than any bug. I let my body fill with strength and make a large leap up into the taller trees so I can keep an eye out from a vantage point. Leaping from tree to tree as quietly as I can, I start circling around to where I heard the noise in hopes that I can find whoever it was that made it. Hopefully it's not hyenas or lions or something. I'd really rather not fight when I've got a bag of goodies that would be at risk.

"(Oh no! No, no, no! What have I done?!)" I hear a woman's clearly upset voice ask in Yoto. I hope through the trees, being as quiet as I can when I finally spot who has to be the source of the noise. On her hands and knees on the forest floor is a woman the color of...well actually, she looks blackish or like a darker gray. A bit hard to be completely sure with all the dirt and dust built up on her body.. It's pretty easy to tell that she's had a rough go of life for a while now. Her hands shake as she tries to gather up the little berries that have been spilled all around her and I can tell by a large, colorful puddle underneath her that she somehow fell on a bunch of them as well.

It's a little hard to tell exactly what she is, you know species-wise, but she's got a short tail with some fur on the end of it. I can't actually tell if the rest of her body has fur or not, largely due to how dirty she is. Haven't really met any non-furry anthros in this world aside from Siren and I'm not sure I'd argue that she doesn't count herself. When she stands up, maybe I'll be able to get a better idea. Oh wait, are those things on her head her ears? Wow, those are big. Like...holy shit, is she an elephant?

I peel my eyes away from her and her scramble to save whatever berries she can to start looking around for others like her. It's pretty unusual in this world to find someone by themselves, outside of extreme circumstances like when Siren came crashing into my life. Even she had a tribe though, before she lost them. Every species I've come across in this world has had a tribe, even the evil dipshits. I can't really believe that she wouldn't have a tribe or something similar.

I spend only about five minutes or so looking around in vain for others before I decide to head back over to the woman. She's moved from her spot but left behind her large berry juice stain, so I start leaping around the trees again to look for her. I probably ought to leave the poor woman alone but I'm just too curious now. I mean, she's an elephant after all. What does an elephant even really look like as an anthro? I mean besides naked of course, I'm used to that by this point.

I manage to finally find the poor woman with her stomach still all covered in squished berries but I barely even took note of that. Instead, my attention is stolen away by her hands. They're human hands! Five fingers, not hooves or claws or anything! The only non-human thing about them are her odd skin color. Well if the sooty, ashy blackish grayish color is her actual skin color. It's honestly hard to tell with how dirty and beat up she is.

My curiosity burns inside my head as I try to comprehend what I just saw. I have to see what the rest of her looks like now. I mean, what if I was wrong about the elephant thing? What if this is what humans look like in this world?! I ramp up my strength, forgoing much more stealth as I make a huge leap to get in front of her. I see her head whip around for a second, keeping her face out of view for a little bit longer as she looks at the spot I was just in. I lean forward a bit, just enough to get my face past all the leaves and wait for her to turn her head back towards me.

She cautiously faces forward again and I finally get my first good look at her face. Well, there can't be any doubt now. She's definitely an elephant. Her nose isn't super long, but it's certainly an elephant's trunk. She has teeny-tiny tusks that I almost miss entirely and I see the lines of her closed mouth extend just far enough across her face that I can see them past her nose. A better look at her feet shows me that she's got an elephant's flat hoof-thingies too. Are they hooves? I'm not really sure. Not an animal expert after all. I take a small leap back towards another tree so I can continue looking at her. She's not fat like you'd expect an elephant to be. It's just a solid roundness...well, except for her breasts. Those are pretty fucking big. Double D's at least, with areolas and nipples that are like a shade darker than the rest of her skin. No hair anywhere.

Most striking of all to me though, is the look in her eyes. Whoever this poor woman is, she's been through some shit. Her eyes are tired and hollow. A big part of me wants to jump down there and see if I can help, like I did with Siren once upon a time, but I'm not entirely sure that's a good idea. I mean, what if she's just depressed because a family member recently died or something? Is suddenly having some weird alien creature, AKA me, pop in front of her going to do more harm than good? Fuck, Annette's right. I do have a compulsive need to help others. Maybe I should just do something small...

"(Hello?)" I call out to her in Yoto, keeping myself hidden from sight. The elephant woman jumps slightly, dropping a few more of the berries in her hands as she looks around frantically. "(Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to scare you.)"

"(Who is there?)" she asks, swinging her body around wildly in her attempts to find me. "(Where are you?)"

"(Call me Max. Sorry, I am not really coming out but I am...sensitive about my appearance.)" I reply, smiling though she can't see it. The name thing throws everybody off the first time. It's actually kind of funny.

"(...I can understand that all too well.)" she says, so quietly I almost miss it. "(So...Max. Is that like a chief or maybe some kind of scout?)"

"(I mean I do do both of those things, but no. Max is my name.)" I say, watching as her face twists in confusion at the word, name. Like I said, kind of funny.

"Name?" she says, not realizing she just spoke her first word in English. "(What is a name?)"

"(It is a word that refers to one specific person or thing, completely separate from titles or jobs. So for example, you could think of me as Max the scout.)" I explain for what may literally be the hundredth time. It should probably be getting old, but I still find the novelty fun.

"(Oh!)" she says, her face lighting up in happy epiphany for a brief moment, "(So a name would be like how we call water that stands still a pond or a lake, but if the water runs then it is a river!)"

Holy shit. I sit on my little branch in the tree and just blink for a second, taking in what just happened. Somebody besides Annette just totally got the fact that Yoto technically has names too, though even she had taken a while to figure it out. Granted it was more because she always busy consuming books as fast as she could, rather than any sort of lack of intelligence. Still, I'm impressed.

"(Actually, yes.)" I say to her, my voice conveying a little of my awe. I see her smile brightly for a moment as joy lights up her whole body but whatever has been dragging her down quickly digs its claws in again and brings her right back down to that defeated look she had before I spoke up. It's a terrible shame. She's actually quite beautiful when she's happy, berry stain and all. "(Are you okay? I came across the big berry puddle a little bit back and followed the trail of it to you. You seemed sad, so I wanted to say hello and ask if I could help.)"

"(No...)" she says sadly, her voice as hollow as her eyes again appeared to be. "(I am not okay. I do not believe I have ever been okay, but at least I am not hated anymore.)"

"(Hated? Why would anybody hate you? You seem like a nice person to me.)" I ask.

"(I do not wish to talk about it, save that I know all too well about not wanting to be seen by others anymore...)" she says to me, walking to a tree and sitting against it. She seems tired. Exhausted really, in the truest sense of the word. A feel a twinge in my heart and that urge to help her thumps in my chest right next to my heart.

"(Okay.)" I respond softly. "(I know this might seem strange, but I would like to help you a little if you'll let me.)"

"(Help me how?)" she asks, not even bothering to look around for me anymore as she crosses her arms and droops her head down onto them.

"(Well, you are having trouble carrying food with you. I have some baskets back home and I would be happy to give you one as a gift if you'd like. I probably will not be able to make it back until tomorrow but if you will still be around this area, I am happy to come back here and look for you again.)" I offer her.

"(Sure, if you would like. Thank you.)" she says, her exhaustion even more evident now. "(I think I will go to sleep for now. I believe I may be hearing things...)"

"(Alright...)" I say, turning away for just a moment before an idea pops into my head and I look back over my shoulder to say one last thing to her. "(By the way, you are very beautiful when you smile. You should do it more often!)"

I leap away, not looking back at where I left her as I land a good distance away. I really hope that a good rest is all she needs to feel a little bit better. If not, maybe a good bath will help too. She was pretty dirty. I wonder what she'd look like clean? Her true skin color is probably a dark grey or something. I suppose I won't know until I actually get to see it. Still, she seems very nice. Maybe tomorrow I can invite her to the hill as a guest...

~

"(We thank you for these gifts.)" the antelope tribe leader said to me as I handed him a small basket filled with half of what I'd collected from that forest I met the elephant woman in earlier.

"(It is not a problem. I wanted to add a little to the festivities after Annette told me that you were all planning to celebrate your new home now that everything is..built.)" I reply, looking around and inwardly wincing a bit at the simple huts they had all built. My inner architect was screaming at me to 'fix' them but I don't really feel like that's my place. Especially not after getting glimpses here and there of how hard they were working on making these all with no formal education in construction. Still, it's not like I can shut my brain off. Maybe I'll offer some suggestions another time, after they've had more of a chance to settle in.

"(That was not necessary, but thank you all the same. Will you and your mates be joining us for the evening?)" they ask me. Man, I really wish I could tell if I was speaking with a man or a woman. Their chest is completely flat and since they moved in, they've taken up the odd (but honestly a little appreciated) practice of wearing sashes around their groins to cover up. I'll have to remember to ask about that later.