Hunter & Prey: The Challenge (Wolfy)

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Once they arrived at the edge of the woods, Artemis wasted no time in laying down the ground rules. After all, how was she supposed to show him up if she didn't introduce an element of healthy competition?

"A little challenge to prove who's better," She stated, rounding on him. Never mind that neither of them had, so far, said that this was about who was the better hunter, she took any slight on her abilities as a challenge. "The first of us to take an animal down is the winner." After considering her words for a moment, she decided clarification was necessary "A good sized animal, a rabbit or fox is hardly sport at all."
They might be faster or harder to see, but smaller animals never seemed to be quite as alert, they were just easier, in her mind.

"Sound good?" She smirked.

[talbot]

The walk to the woods wasn’t particularly long, but Lawrence was somewhat surprised to find that he almost had a tough time keeping up with her. If nothing else, this little tart was fit. He’d be sure to find out just how much later on. For now, this was going to be a lot of amusement.

She rounded on him abruptly before they entered a thinning trail that wound its way into the woods and despite himself he felt his heart lurch a little in his chest. She wasn’t afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.

“Who’s better,” he replied with an infuriating smirk. He nodded a little. “You sure you didn’t just bring me down here to get me alone,” he asked with a teasing smile. “You better watch me,” he said. “I can be a bit of a dog sometimes when it comes to beautiful women...”

And while that flattery sank in, he nodded. He bowed with a demeanor that was truly gallant. “Sounds good to me, milady. We’ll just go our separate ways then.” He stepped into the woods and headed down a trail, whistling softly as he went and stretching out his senses in all directions.

The woods were positively teeming with life. As he passed a shaft of sunlight his shadow changed shape, melting and growing. Hands elongated and became claws, he kicked off the boots just before the shape was complete. Yellow eyes glimmered dangerously above a wickedly cruel smile. The whistle had become a song, the voice guttural and menacing.

“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf…”

[Deleted]

Artemis certainly wasn't afraid of the big bad wolf, but she was rapidly becoming incredibly irritated. Ignoring his insinuations, she simply vowed to show him up by bagging the most impressive animal she could. Depending on her mood, she either hated any hint that she might not guard her chastity closely, or she hated being reminded of it, so either way any sort of innuendo was going to put her in a bad mood.

She took a moment once he'd disappeared down the path to calm herself, to channel that irritation into a focused cool, because she would do no good hunting if she was too angry to aim properly.
Taking off into the trees, she veered off the path almost immediately, stepping silently into the undergrowth. Every step she took was carefully calculated to be as stealthy as possible, almost by instinct. She had been hunting for longer than she could remember, which was longer than a lot of people had been alive, and she had it down to an art.

There. Something dark and big, she couldn't quite tell what it was, but it was wild, and it definitely qualified as a good size. Moving slowly, her eyes fixed on the creature, she worked her way through the trees to find a clear shot.

[talbot]

The Big Bad Wolf moved nearly silently through the woods, flitting from tree to tree almost like a shadow. He stopped and sniffed at the air, catching the scent of rabbits, mice, a coyote, a deer…and…he sniffed again. The woman. His face split in two with a horrible fanged grin. “Mmm,” he said in a low and deep rumble in his throat. “She smells so…delicious.”

And she did. Any way you looked at it she did.

His ears perked suddenly and he heard a twig behind him. He swiveled his giant head, but couldn’t see anything. Still…he knew. There was something pricking at the back of his head. He felt the eyes on him. He knew he was being watched.

And it made him laugh.

Because an arrow? Now that was funny!

And he couldn’t help himself. He howled with laughter.

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The howl... there was something chilling about it, or there would be, for anyone but the goddess of hunting herself. In her, it evoked an entirely different emotion, despite the fact that it was a sort of laugh at her expense (not that she realised it), it was an entirely animal noise from a natural predator - a predator she was about to turn into prey.

It sounded like a wolf, but it didn't quite look like one, she'd practically forgotten the competiton, she just wanted to take it out to find out what it was. Finding a clear shot, she lifted her bow and took aim, drawing back the string with a calculating frown before loosing the arrow.
It sprang from the bow with a whisper of air, heading straight and true for its target...

[talbot]

Ears perked again, but just a little too late. The Big Bad Wolf heard the wind whistling through the fletching as the arrow left the bow. Though he was pretty sure it wouldn’t leave any permanent damage, he leaped to the side, though not in time to avoid getting hit altogether.

The arrow tore through his side, opening a gash and causing him to yipe in pain and then roar in fury. He turned and fixed a furious glare at the woman and roared again, sending birds and small creatures to flight as he shook the air all around them.

He knew what his prey was now. Yes.

The wound was already starting to knit, the flesh closing around but the ghost of the pain still hovering over him. He jumped into the underbrush and disappeared, leaving a slowly disappearing trail of blood on the foliage as he went.

Let her follow.

[Deleted]

Now that was interesting. The look that the creature had shot her was unmistakably...angry. Animals just didn't really do emotions like that, the yelp and the roar, yes, that made sense, but a glare?

Whether she was actually in danger or not, Artemis was not the type to heed the warning inherent in that pained roar, her curiosity was piqued and she was far too cocky to even think twice about setting off again, following the trail of blood to find out just what it was she had shot.

Besides, not finishing what you'd started was sloppy, and she needed to teach the creature a lesson for making her miss. She didn't like missing.
She also didn't like having trouble tracking things, and as the blood began to disappear, her irritation began to rise, and she had to slow down in order to make use of her other skills rather than just following the blood.

[talbot]

Wounded and angry, the wolf bounded quickly through the underbrush. He could feel the lesion on his side stitching itself up, and knew that there was something unique about the weapon that had shot him. That it would do that much damage in the first place had surprised him…taken him off guard. But he cursed himself the fool for not knowing the obvious from the onset.

She made the bow pop out of nowhere. Magic. The damn thing is magic!

It wasn’t a mistake he planned on making twice. He knew she was a good distance behind him so he cut to the left and started to circle wide back around her. The undergrowth cloaked him as he darted through the thick tangle of shadows and swept past her in the distance. She’d pay. Magic bows don’t make a bit of difference when you had a set of teeth at your throat.

Cutting left again he sniffed the ground and found her scent. The wolf face looked up in her direction, a wicked smile again fixed in place. “Time to teach her a lesson,” he said quietly and then stealthily stalked after her. It wasn’t too long before he could see her through a thicket of brush. He hid in the shadows silently as he watched her looking for his trail.

Wolf licked his chops.

And leaped at her with claw and fang.

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The trail was getting harder to follow, although the rapidly diminishing blood was now beginning to make Artemis suspect that whatever she was tracking was no ordinary wolf, and it certainly had some skill in hiding where it was headed now that the blood had dried up.

Had she been anyone else, she might well have been caught unawares by the attack - the intelligence in the move was not something a hunter was used to in something it considered prey, and he moved like a hunter himself, most hunters didn't expect themselves to be targeted, so the elaborate game of cat and mouse could end rather definitively when he leapt.

Unfortunately for him, she wasn't anybody else, and while she was just the same as any other in that she hadn't been expecting him to attack, her senses were constantly on alert and her reflexes were, well, just not human.

Spinning around to face him even as he leapt, she didn't have time to loose another shot from her bow, but much as she kept her powers to a minimum she still had them, so she moved, almost faster than it was possible to see, lifting her bow as she spun to face him where he had landed. Essentially, from his point of view he would have leapt, hit nothing, and come up with an arrow aimed directly between his eyes.

An arrow held taut in its bow by a very, very angry goddess.

"How dare you." She hissed "Do you have any idea what you're dealing with?"

((I hope that's ok hon, let me know if you want me to change anything))

[talbot]

Air whistled through the wolf’s claws as he swiped wide at the huntress. He bore down on her and a look of sheer astonishment crossed his face when she seemed to vanish before his very eyes. It dawned on him immediately as he landed roughly on the space she had been occupying a split second before. More magic.

He hated magic.

Looking up, the wolf was surprised yet again to be looking directly into the point of an arrow. The expression on the face of the huntress was fierce and wild. He considered her words for a moment and then that wicked pointy toothed smile returned. “I’ll tell you what,” he said with a voice that was like gravel crunching under a boot, “you give me just a little taste and I’ll tell you who I’m dealing with.” His tongue came out and circled his chops again. Then he tilted his head back and howled loudly, ignoring the arrow trained on him at the moment.

“Come on sweetie, gimme a taste!”

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Oh and wasn't that about the dumbest thing he could have done in the circumstances, not least because his dismissive flirting (if you could call it that) made the already furious goddess just that little bit worse, and when they said hell had no fury like that of a woman scorned, they were talking about a woman like Artemis.

The other stupid thing he did was speak at all, because even though his voice was distorted, twisted by a whole differently shaped body, there was just enough to it that Artemis put all the puzzle pieces into place and she realised exactly who and what she was dealing with - and she didn't care.

"I am Artemis." She told him coldly, pausing for a moment as if to let that sink in, but then remembering just in time that people here had an irritating habit of not realising what that meant. "The goddess of hunting, of wild animals - even mangy mutts like you."
He should be worshipping her, and right now she wasn't in any sort of mood to accept that things were different here, she wanted him to grovel and beg for her forgiveness... and if he didn't... well, she was sure she could think of some suitable punishment.

[talbot]

At her words the wolf stopped short. There were a good number of people who thought they were godlike, and more than a few reasons why she might want him to think she was a goddess. To be honest, Lawrence Talbot himself had lived in a world for as long as he could remember where he was the most powerful force of nature in the world. He was far from a religious man by any means, and had never seen one scrap of evidence in any sort of deity whatsoever.

But he had seen something flash momentarily in her eyes when she made her statement. For a brief moment, though he could never think of how to put it into words when he looked back on this moment in the future, but for the smallest space of time he thought he saw eternity flash in her eyes. It was gone before he could take another glance, but he knew what he saw, and her words echoed off of the canyon walls of his heart like rolling thunder.

And then memories, fueled by the crude of pride began to flood through his mind. Face after countless face, terrified, pleading for mercy, worshipping him. “No,” he said with a growl as his hackles stood straight on end and seemed to make him grow. “I am the god. And I have no mercy. I eat pretty girls for dinner and spit out their bones. “

He took a step forward.

“Now beg me to spare your life, and maybe I will let you live.” He looked her over. “After some fun time.”

[Deleted]

He really had no idea, did he? He thought this was just some little game, that they were talking about imagined power or what foolish mortals had been tricked into thinking. He thought she was just boasting, talking big to scare him away and protect herself.

The very idea that she would have to ever beg him to spare her life was so preposterous that she almost laughed. Once upon a time, a different her, she would have.

It was time to show this puppy just what she meant when she said the word goddess.

Letting her arm fall, the bow and its ammunition disappearing like so much smoke, she faced him unarmed - and unafraid.

"Sit." She snapped, allowing her power out to layer her words with compulsion, to force him to do her bidding. "Sit, and be quiet, while I tell you a story..."

Normally, she wouldn't bother with this sort of thing, she'd just punish them and be done with it, but there was something so irritating about him that she wanted to rub his nose in it for as long as she could, she wanted this drawn out. She wanted to see the moment he realised what he'd done.

((This is not finished. Sorry, I was in the middle of it but I couldn't make my brain work, will finish it later))

[talbot]

Another momentary flash in her eyes gave the wolf room to pause while she began to speak. It dawned on him that there was genuine conviction in her eyes. What she was telling him was coming from a place in her heart where she at least honestly believed she was telling the truth.

The arrow and bow disappeared. Somehow she looked more menacing than before, and for the first time Lawrence began to think he might have made a mistake.

Unable to control himself he sat.

Unable to speak he listened.

[Deleted]

"When the world was young, it was ruled by the titans - have you ever heard of them? They were truly terrifying creatures, monsters, borne of the earth and sky themselves. Their leader was Cronus, and he had seven children, which he ate - his own children - because he knew one of them would overthrow him. That child was Zeus, the god of the sky and of thunder, who overthrew the titans and imprisoned them, releasing his siblings to become the gods of Olympus, and he was their king. Do you know who Zeus is, doggy? He is my father. I am not playing games, I am not making up a title for myself based on the foolish reactions of easily impressed mortals. I am divine. Are you getting the picture?" She stepped towards him, leaning close enough for him to touch, to strike, and knowing he couldn't.

She lowered her voice ominously, but with just a hint of taunting to it.
"I have killed for the tiniest boast, had a man ripped apart for spying on me bathing... and what should I do with you, wolfy? What should I... oh..." Her mouth twisted into a devious smirk and she reached out with her power and found that little switch, that part of his mind that he hadn't even realised could be removed, and she took it away.