you throw me into the deep end

Aplomado awoke to an ear-splitting headache, and for a few moments just lay prone with her eyes clenched shut, fighting off a sudden wave of nausea. Her limbs were leaden and a thick fog clouded her thoughts. The mushroom had been from her personal stash, tried and tested and free of mold, so perhaps she had just overdone it. Groaning, she kneaded at her forehead with a paw and rolled over onto her side - she didn’t usually feel this rotten after one of her forays. Evidently a trip back to her cave for a nibble of willow bark was in order, but she hardly felt that she could move at all. 

A squawk and gentle tug on her ear brought her back to the present, and she sluggishly swatted the crow away. His cawing and pestering did not cease even after another pointed swat, however, and Aplomado risked opening her eyes - but only a slit, lest the sunlight intensify her migraine further. Her immediate surroundings didn’t particularly look like her regular haunt, but then again, she was known to wander quite distantly while under the influence, so that wouldn’t have come to a great surprise to her.

What did come as a surprise was the shrivelled little plant at her feet. It had lost its leaves to frost and would have been easily overlooked as any other winter dormant plant, except for the tiny starbursts along each branch. Her crow fluttered down to inspect the plant at eye level and pecked at one of the spidery blossoms. Clusters of fine yellow tendrils radiated out from a series of purple nodes - flowers in the technical definition of the word, but most unorthodox ones. “Witch-hazel!” she yelped, and immediately regretted her outburst as the volume sent a fresh wave of pain through her head. This was a northern plant she had heard of only in tales from elders and travellers - it did not do so well in the desert lowlands and highland forests of her home. She swung her head upwards to fully take in her surroundings, and found that while the aromatic woods with towering pines did resemble her territory superficially, it was not quite right. The pine was of a feathery-needled species she had never seen before, and evergreen ferns were peeking out from the lee side of a slope in the shadow of a mighty oak. 

Immediately energized by the prospect of rare plants and new stock for her coffers, Aplomado awkwardly rolled to her feet and gave the plant her equivalent of a circle check. She gave it a cursory sniff and snipped off a branch at its base, spitting at the bitterness but continuing until she had gathered a small pile of sprays. As far as she could recall, it was the bark that was particularly useful. “Come help carry some of these, will you,” she motioned to her corvid companion, who gave a mechanical-sounding gurgle and scooped up a beakful. “Now it’s just a matter of, uh, finding our way out of here and back home.” Wherever here was...
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 He wiggled.
 At last, the desert was no more. At last, he'd found his way out of that disaster and into the world of the living. Vowing never to return to that awful place without a good reason, he strode forward as the trees swallowed him up. The weather changed both slowly and abruptly, somehow. The heat dissipated from his body and at last, Sam started to feel a bit more comfortable. His fur stopped shedding, though he had to shake himself out many times and even rubbed against a tree to dislodge loose hairs.
 As Sam strode through the forest with a newfound energy, he heard some yelp out a word, witch-hazel, and changed direction toward the noise. There hadn't been many he had met along the trail — he was beginning to feel the effects of that bitter thing called loneliness. It made him realize that somewhere, somewhere in the before, he must have had a family who loved him. He felt the love stretching thin over his heart, and the more he tried to grasp it, the more he forgot what it felt like.
 When he found the wolf responsible for the noise, she was gathering plants alongside a black bird, which seemed quite comfortable in her presence. He smiled, friendly and welcoming. “Hello,” he greeted simply. “What are those?” Sam didn't know anything about plants. Actually, he didn't seem to know anything about anything.
 Samwise? Samsonite? He might never know.

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Aplomado's ears swivelled to the side to capture the sound of another's approach, and the rest of her head followed suit as the stranger offered a simple but friendly greeting and a question. The crow skipped backwards and eyed him beadily, but Aplomado was all smiles. “Oh! Hello,” she returned, punctuating her reply with a light swish of her tail. “It's a special kind of plant you can use to help wounds heal. At least, I think so.” She gave a sheepish shrug. “I mean, I know it's the right kind of plant, just not really how to prepare it, because it doesn't grow where I'm from. But I guess I can just dry it out for now and hope I don't mess it up later.” A nervous chuckle followed. Well, now she just sounded like some kind of mad scientist, at large and poisoning her test subjects out of incompetence left and right.

“I've never seen a lot of the things here before, actually. Do you know anything about this place?” Presumably he was local to the area and could at least provide a bit of geographic guidance, and perhaps Aplomado wasn't as far from home as she thought. Or perhaps this stranger, too, was hungover and had just woken up in the middle of the woods without any recollection of having travelled there.
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 The woman answered with equal positivity, and Sam responded in kind with a wag of his own tail. He came closer to her, eying the odd little plants and wondering how one was supposed to heal a person with them. He imagined some kind of occult practice, envisioning a bunch of women standing in a circle with the weeds and praying to them. He quickly decided that she didn't really seem like the occultist type, and figured maybe just eating them would do the trick. He sniffed at one, still firmly rooted amid the clover and grasses. They didn't smell very edible.
 Apparently she was learning herself.
 “Uh,” Sam blinked. “There's a desert across that way,” he pointed in the direction he'd come with a toss of his head. He didn't like the desert. “But I'm also new — uhm, where are you from?” She seemed like she remembered getting here. He had assumed he'd been the odd one out and had just hit his head until finding others wandering the desert.

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A desert? Aplomado's ears swivelled forward with interest, and she looked to the direction he had indicated as if willing herself to have x-ray vision, but her field of view was simply full of trees from corner to corner. The geographical tidbit wasn't much, but perhaps it was a lead worth following up on. At the very least, it would get her out of the stuffy woods and back into more familiar surroundings. Then, once she had regained her bearings, she could return on an expedition on her own terms to see what else she could find for her plant pantry.

“Well, I lived in a place sort of like a desert, but then I sort of just woke up here.” She lowered herself to a seated position and glanced down at her paws briefly. “I've wandered off in my sleep before, but I don't think I'd be able to get this far in just one night.” Aplomado decided to leave out the part about her recreational fungus use - the mild-mannered fellow probably already thought she was a bit off for playing around with flowers without knowing that additional piece of information.

“How about you? You said you were new here? I'm Aplomado, by the way.”
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 “Oh,” he answered, somewhat perplexed. He had been convinced this was the afterlife, and so far all of it seemed to fit that way. He didn't remember dying, but nobody else he had met remembered where they had been before. The stranger was the exception. She remembered living somewhere, at least, even though she didn't remember getting here. “No,” he agreed, thinking it would be pretty weird to sleepwalk to a place you had never seen before.
 Sam didn't want to tell her he was pretty sure they were both dead. It seemed like being overly negative about an already weird situation.
 Sam sat too, observing Aplomado's strange little bird companion. “I'm Sam,” he answered cheerfully. “And him? Or... her?” Sam had no idea how to tell boy birds from girl birds.

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Prompted by Sam's question, Aplomado turned her head to look at her feathered companion, who had apparently occupied himself trying to uproot one of the witch-hazel plants in what he apparently thought was a helpful gesture. Either that or he was simply bored. “Oh, him,” she chuckled, looking back to the grey fellow. “I'm not sure if he has a name. I call him cacalōtl and he listens and sometimes even talks back, but that just means crow.” The small corvid looked over briefly as his "name" was spoken, but upon realizing that his assistance wasn't required, soon resumed being busy. “As long as I give him shiny things and share my scraps, he sticks around and helps me gather plants.”
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 Sam watched the crow pulling up plants, fascinated by the relationship. He'd never tried to befriend a bird, although the ravens had always been very helpful in finding carrion or injured animals. He wasn't sure why he remembered that, but it seemed that in his former life, he'd hunted at least once at some point. He couldn't help but smile at the way it — uh, he responded to Aplomado.
 “That's so cool!” Sam grinned, tail flopping on the ground. “I didn't know they were smart,” he admitted. They seemed to have two modes: loud and louder. He would never have guessed that the crows could 'help' a wolf in any way other than following the smell of food.

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*touches him* D:

---

“Yeah, me neither,” she agreed with a chuckle. Her first impression of crows was similar. Their larger cousins were more recognizably intelligent and useful from a wolf's point of view, but the small versions just seemed to fly around and make a lot of noise for no apparent reason, or spend what seemed like more time than was necessary harassing hawks and the like.

“So what's next for you, huh? Going to keep travelling?” It sounded like he was on the move, though it was hard to say how exactly far the greyscale fellow had travelled already. Maybe lush forests sprouted up right next to deserts here; it wouldn't be the weirdest thing she had experienced today. The quaint little woodland seemed like a pleasant enough place to stay if one was partial to such landscapes, but perhaps he had grander plans.

And so they chatted for a few moments more about their future plans before cordially parting ways, onto the next adventure.
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