Disclaimer: I don't own Hololive, all rights to the owners.
One day I woke up, and asked myself: "What would Myth be like if they were giant, horrifying, humanoid abominations?"
And so I wrote this.
They always look uncomfortably human. These giant, twisted things Amelia calls monsters. This one is three stories tall with eight, bony, human-like arms coming out from the side of their ribs, each ending in slim, insectoid feet that cling to the side of the fallen skyscraper. The fur on their bony back is blonde. Just behind the back of their last pair of legs is a spider's abdomen and spinnerets.
Their faces are always the worst part. Eight, bright pink, human eyes stare down at her, their hunger clear. The face of this monster is empty of the fur that bristles along their humanoid back and spider abdomen, but that only gives Amelia a good view of how their top incisors have been replaced with tarantula fangs and parts of their upper jaw have swelled in emulation of bulbous chelicerae that dominate their entire face.
It's like someone grafted human features onto the body plan of a spider, but didn't fully go through with it, leaving a few extremities untouched.
Amelia ducks into the crumbled building behind her to get out from the monster's gaze. It's been trying to get her all day. Despite its massive size, the monster is totally silent as it moves. When Amelia peeks out a window, the monster is gone from its previous perch, completely out of sight, with not a click of its feet or breath being heard.
She hates monsters she can't hear. They're always the hardest to run from. She can never tell how far away they are.
Crouching low, she navigates across the cracked and broken marble tiling of what was once a… something. Her uncle would have known. He lived in a world with functional cities, cars, movies, people. A world before monsters.
Amelia hasn't. The world fell five years before she was born. She's never seen a car move, or used a cell phone. She's only seen another human three times in her life since turning ten, and none of those encounters ended well.
She moves out the side entrance, grimacing at the creak of the rusty door hinge giving away her exit. She makes a break for the next building and glances around wildly for the monster. She looks up first, then left, then right, then behind her.
The monster's leg slams down an inch from her back, splitting the concrete with a loud crack. Amelia weaves back and forth as the monster strikes down with leg after leg, trying to impale her like an ant on a pin.
An ear-shedding noise exits the monster's mouth when Amelia manages to throw herself through the window of the next building. She lands painfully on the wooden floor, and immediately rolls to avoid the leg smashing through the room, destroying a table and knocking over the chairs around it. Amelia keeps down for a few seconds as the leg scrapes across the floor, tearing the surface of the wood and sending splinters all over the room, before finally being retracted back out the window.
Amelia remains on the ground a full minute after the leg disappears, her heart pounding in her chest and her hands shaking. She slowly rolls onto her knees, ignoring how splinters dig into the exposed skin of her knees thanks to tears in her well-worn cargo pants, before pushing herself to her feet again and leaning on a nearby chair to help her nerves.
What doesn't help is noticing the eight eyes staring silently through the window. Amelia's breath catches, and she slowly backs away, only to fall on her rear when her hand moves off the chair and she has nothing to support her anymore.
She crawls after that, scrabbling to get behind a corner and out of sight. Rather than move on immediately, she finds the restrooms of the building, thick with algae and overgrown with moss, and curls up in a corner to quietly ride out her panic for the next few hours.
###
There's a trade-off to going into the wild. The wild has fewer monsters and more renewable resources, but has fewer places monsters can't reach if one does find you. Most monsters are plenty strong enough to knock aside trees if they want to, but they're rarely willing to smash every single building in the area just to find a single human. Depending on the monster, like that spider thing, they might not be able to smash certain buildings at all.
Amelia has been waiting for an excuse to go deep into the wild for a while now. She's stuck to the suburbs for years, and only recently started venturing into cities for supply runs.
She's been preparing. A sturdy pot and cooking supplies, several metal bottles, rope, dozens of spools of string, a packed sewing kit, an extra set of clothes, as well as a slew of tools including several knives, files, tweezers, scissors, a crowbar, a hammer, a hand saw, and a hatchet among other tools, all shoved into the toughest rucksack she could find.
That's not all. Even though she's going out, she's hidden tool and food cashes all over the suburbs near where she plans to leave, so if she ever needs to resupply she doesn't need to move quite as far from wherever she's going.
Because that's the thing, she doesn't know where she's going. Sure, she's seen maps of the country, of the world, but those are all from Before. The layout of the land in many ways is nothing like it used to be. Rivers have been rerouted, mountains have risen from flat plains, and forested hills have been ground into deserts. Just about the only consistent thing about the maps is the locations of cities (now ruins) that remaining humans use as scavenging sites.
She checked a map before choosing to leave, of course, but only so she could aim away from all the other cities. Her goal is to find some deep cave somewhere away from everything, block off most of the entrance so it's hers, and then live there forever away from monsters and people.
Of course, she needs to get past Big Blue first. Big Blue is the monster Amelia has been dealing with most of her life who roams the suburbs of the ruins of London. She's a skyscraper-sized humanoid with stiff legs that end in metallic blades which make up three-fourths of her height and forces her to move as if on stilts, lurching from place to place in long strides. Compared to most monsters she otherwise looks shockingly like a regular human barring their lack of pupils, mouth, and neck (though their head still moves as if attached, floating above her shoulders) and the three ever-turning metal spikes on the top of their head read more as a strange hair ornament than the actual part of their body it truly is.
(Amelia has timed the rotation of the spikes. They exactly match the hands of her uncle's watch. The monster has a clock on its head.)
Big Blue is passive as far as monsters go, roaming aimlessly around the city's edges but never going in, and with little interest in hunting or really anything at all. Her destination is never consistent, but her movement patterns are. She spends one hour moving, then half an hour resting, and then repeats. She's done this for years and years. Amelia has quite literally used her to tell the time before. Big Blue is also totally indifferent to Amelia's actions ninety percent of the time, and will sweep her eyes right over Amelia without giving any sign she saw the human at all. That's why Amelia has been living here for the last five years. Big Blue is almost a non-factor most of the time and can be safely ignored.
The monster has one frustrating quirk though. She can sense change. Amelia doesn't know how, or why the monster would care, but whenever Amelia is about to do something new and dangerous, the monster is always in her path. She blocked Amelia the first time she dared to go into the city, and she's blocking her now.
Big Blue stands between Amelia and her planned exit zone, eyes unusually alert and moving in sharp twitches across the streets rather than their usual, slow, sweeping movements. Amelia keeps low and pressed to the side of buildings, moving cautiously, keeping the noise of her pack to a minimum.
"You're always like this Blue. Always. You don't care until I try and do something new. Do you hate me improving my life? Is that it?" Amelia mutters, peeking around a corner up at the monster. Big Blue has long since stopped being scary to her. Amelia has dodged her for as long as she's been alone. If there is one monster she's comfortable handling, it's Big Blue. This obstruction was fully expected and planned for.
Big Blue's eyes snap to Amelia, somehow seeing her tiny head amongst all the rubble and clutter of the streets. In a familiar motion, the monster lifts her right leg up, folding it at the knee, and slams it down near Amelia's location in a long, telegraphed stomp.
"Maybe you could stop me if you actually knew how to aim." Amelia mutters, having already ducked into an alleyway. Be it that she's unused to hunting or just trying to intimidate, Big Blue has never once made an accurate attack against Amelia. The best she's done is wreck a building two meters away. The monster is simply too slow and obvious.
(Amelia knows that isn't strictly true. She's seen Big Blue fight other monsters or even animals intruding on her territory. That stomp attack has come out in half a second and gone straight through a wolf's head or a monster's eye with pinpoint accuracy. When Big Blue actually tries they're a terror unlike anything else.)
A massive hand, with nails darkened to blue and pointed like claws, scrapes down the alleyway behind Amelia, but she arrives at the end with seconds to spare and zig-zags along an open street as Big Blue clumsily strikes down with her clawed hands, for some reason never opting to simply squish her with flat palms and instead trying to spike her with fingers.
Another alleyway, and this time Amelia kicks an old door open and steps into the building, temporarily escaping Big Blue's line of sight. Amelia calmly moves through the thin back hallways of the building into the wider front, and casually pushes open the front door.
Big Blue's eyes find her immediately, but Amelia isn't concerned. She's almost made it. The edge of the suburbs is only two blocks away, and Big Blue is directly overhead. It's a trivial matter to weave through another alley, hop a rusted fence, and run and hide among the trees.
As she shuffles among the underbrush, Amelia keeps low again. The canopy will help hide her, but that's no reason to take chances. She can't hear Big Blue, which is good, but strange. Big Blue isn't a silent monster. Quiet, yes, but not silent like the spider. Her metal feet make distinct clacking noises with every movement that should be plenty loud at this close proximity.
Perhaps that's why, when Amelia looks back, Big Blue isn't moving. The monster is instead staring down at the human, eyes dim, back straight, merely watching as Amelia dives deeper into the forest.
Big Blue watches her long into the morning, still visible above the treelines for miles from the suburb. Only when noon strikes does the monster finally turn around and wander off, presumably returning to her usual pattern.
Amelia breathes a sigh of relief. She always tells herself that Big Blue isn't a big deal, and she isn't, but it's always a good feeling when a monster's attention finally slides off her to some other interest.
And Amelia is free.
###
Surviving in the wild is uncomfortable.
Cities might be dangerous, what with the monsters and rats and splintered metal and rocks everywhere, but it's easy to get a roof over your head, and enough searching will always turn up something that can work as a blanket, or just an actual blanket if you're lucky.
But while uncomfortable, the wild is safer. It has large animals, yes, and is easy to get lost inside, and Amelia can't find shelter from the rain in two seconds by ducking into a nearby building, but she hasn't seen a single monster yet, and even the weather and bears can't quite compare to giants that can kill you with a single flick of their oversized fingers.
So yes, surviving in the wild is uncomfortable… until she finds it. A small rocky hill with a beach on one side, mountains on another, and a forest of tall trees covering the rest. The hill has a cave at its base facing the forest, and an entrance just small enough for her to walk inside without ducking. It has two rooms, those being the main area which is three by eight meters, and a small back room that's maybe three by two at best with a large crack in the back wall that she might be able to squeeze through to get deeper but won't be letting anything big out.
It's perfect, and better, it's uninhabited. She finds no droppings in the cave or scratches along the floor from claws or hooves. A quick check of the surrounding area reveals a stream with fresh water only ten minutes away, a number of berry bushes, and plenty of small wildlife to hunt.
That's all the prompting she needs to drop her pack in the back room and set up camp. She uses her hatchet to gather branches and small trees to drag back to her cave for a fire, and carries her pot around as a bowl to gather berries for dinner. She then scrapes bark and gathers twigs for kindling, and takes some wandering time to find potential locations for animal traps and note bird nests she might be able to raid for eggs. She might be eating sparsely tonight, but with all the berries she won't have to consume any of the rations she brought along for the first time since exiting the city.
Amelia settles down for the night feeling excited. She has a fire in the middle of the main room, a covered pot with some berries she didn't fully finish so she can have some for breakfast tomorrow, prospects for more and better food, and a roof over her head. She closes her eyes to the crackling of warm fire and hopes for the future.
The next day, if anything, has even more excitement than the first. Amelia eagerly scavenges the entire day, grabbing more wood and more berries, setting snares, snatching an egg, and then spending the later portions of the afternoon exploring. She walks along the rocky beach, noting small tidepools she can search for food which also gives her hope that the waters might be viable to fish in if this much potential food is lounging around the beach itself. She even climbs a short way up the mountains, just to get a view over the top of the treeline of the lowlands where her cave is located.
Her appreciation of the view is somewhat undercut by a shape high in the sky. It's bright and orange and in the vague shape of a bird, but Amelia isn't fooled. Nothing that far away would be that noticeable if it was as small as a bird. Her eyes follow the monster as it circles far overhead, swirling around the mountaintops before lazily drifting over the forest.
"Well, no spot can be perfect I guess. Still, a monster that keeps so far in the sky that you can see them coming from pretty much anywhere… I could do worse." She thinks to herself, tracking the monster's movement. Even from this distance Amelia can tell when it flaps its wings, and if she's not wrong the monster's orange colouring seems to intensify with each flap of the wings. "Or maybe it's just passing through. Gotta wait and see."
The rest of her exploration that day is more subdued. Her eyes are constantly drawn skyward to the orange shape circling overhead. The monster flies lower and lower as the day drags on, but not so close that Amelia can make out details. Sometimes it takes a detour to perch on a mountaintop for half an hour, doing God-knows-what before returning to the skies.
In a way, the routine feels familiar. Work for a bit, check for the monster, go back to work. It's the same routine she had when working near Big Blue in the past: not calm, but not stressful either. She can work with that, live with it even.
When the sun starts to dip, an hour before dinner, Amelia does some more gathering. More berries, some crabs from the beach, and kindling again. The coals from her fire last night are surprisingly still warm, and it doesn't take much to spark another fire to life.
She's never tried to cook crab before, so she defaults to what's safe. She uses a rock to kill them, pulls them apart with a knife and removes the guts, and then cooks the meat over the fire with a small, portable grill.
There's nothing quite like freshly cooked meat after a week of eating nuts and berries and dried meat from her rations. She gnaws the meat until only the shell is left before storing those shells in a bottle for later. At worst it's fertilizer for a farm, at best maybe she can find a use for them.
As she's bedding down for the night, she listens to the forest outside her cave. There are chirping insects, the faint rustle of wind, and the faint clicking of something on stone. Maybe a deer or some other animal.
She wakes up to find a long blood smear across the ground in front of her cave.
Not only blood, but Amelia finds bits of brown fur scattered around and large gouge marks in the ground. The blood isn't totally fresh, having started to solidify already and seeped into the ground in many places. Flies buzz around the area, settling for coagulated pools of blood in place of an actual corpse to feed on.
Amelia swallows thickly while checking the gouges. They're the size of her entire hand, and just as deep, and come in sets of four, like the fingers of a hand. Some monster came by and murdered something big on her doorstep, and she slept right through it.
Tracking the smear leads her toward the ocean. The blood stain fades on the rocks where the water flows up, cleaning it away.
"Was it the flying one?" Amelia murmurs to herself, looking to the sky for the orange monster. Today, it is nowhere to be seen. "If so, why go towards the water?"
The more worrying possibility is there's a second monster. Amelia avoids the beach that day. She gets her water from the steam and checks her snares, and gathers eggs for lunch. After that, she fills her pot with water and sets about splashing the blood smear until the red has been diluted and the smell isn't so potent. The ground is muddy with all the water she throws, but mud is preferable to blood, and doesn't smell nearly as bad.
She hovers close to her cave the entire day, listening for noises that never come and looming figures in the trees that never appear. She sits atop the hill of her cave for dinner, staring out at the water, looking for shapes moving beneath the waves or an animal corpse somewhere along the beach.
Amelia watches the water until the sun goes down, and she's left with only the waxing gibbous moon and the light of her fire in the cave to see by.
With a shaky exhale, Amelia stands from her watch and turns to navigate her way down the hill. As she's slowly picking her way down, the sound of a deep inhale stops her in her tracks, and movement in the corner of her eye drags her attention.
"That's… is it kneeling?" Amelia gulps. "If it stood up, it might be as tall as Big Blue."
The monster's silhouette is imposing. Its head is easily visible above the treeline, resting at twice the height of the tallest tree, but with their back turned to the moon and a slightly downturned head, Amelia can't make out any facial features. She can, however, see a white veil on the back of the monster's head beneath which lies ragged pink hair, and nearer to the front of their head is a spiky dark shape that looks like a crown. The rest of their body is blocked by a thick black material that Amelia can't identify. Is that skin? Wings? Fur? Clothes?
(She doesn't know where some monsters get their clothes from, but Big Blue wears a loose white shirt with tight black pants, both with blue highlights, and this monster has a veil and maybe some sort of cape.)
The monster doesn't move, but it does make noise. A low, long inhale, and an equally deep exhale. The breathing is raspy, but consistent. It blends well with the wind and waves to be almost unnoticeable unless Amelia is specifically trying to pick it out.
Amelia doesn't take her eyes off the looming form until she's safely back inside her cave. That's two confirmed monsters in the area, with a potential third if there really is something in the water. This place isn't shaping up to be a paradise at all.
She sleeps fitfully that night; hyper-aware of the breathing mixed in with the wind and unable to unhear it.
###
Amelia didn't realize it was the full moon tonight. She could have sworn it was tomorrow! If she'd remembered, there's no way she would have risked staying out this long! She's too used to tracking the new moon for Big Blue, what a stupid mistake!
She keeps to the bushes, creeping back towards her cave at a slow pace. The sun is low in the sky, with daylight disappearing by the minute. Already Amelia can hear the world preparing itself. Birds fall quiet, but insects don't take over their duties. Daytime animals nestle into their burrows, but the nocturnal ones are reluctant to exit.
Every part of the world knows what a full moon brings. It's a call to the most basic nature of monsters with an animalistic bent that sends them stalking hungrily through their territories and those adjacent to them, looking for a meal or a fight, even if they're usually asleep during the night. (Not like Big Blue. She's a supernatural monster. It's the new moon that has her wandering ceaselessly all night, eyes bright with a sort of sharp intelligence Amelia doesn't see in her at any other time.)
And Amelia knows monsters will already have begun to stir. The moon is already visible in the sky, even if the sun's waning rays currently block most of its effects.
A cold knot forms in her stomach when the last bit of red disappears over the horizon, and an eerie quiet blankets the world. Amelia can only hear the faintest bit of wind, and the faint crash of waves on the shore.
"Just a bit more, I think." Amelia squints. The full moon casts the world in a deceptive amount of light, but it's a dim light, and still not enough to make navigation easy. "Is that the big tree? Or maybe…?"
She better not have gotten lost. Getting lost now would be a death sentence. She takes a right, finds a familiar fallen log, and knows that her cave should be coming into sight in a moment. She reaches the edge of the forest with a quiet sigh of relief, only to suck in a breath a moment later and press herself to the nearest tree when large red eyes swing her way.
Up atop the hill her cave is dug into, is a monster. It's too small to be Mourner and the wrong color for Kite (what she's taken to calling the orange flying monster), but now Amelia knows exactly which monster made that blood smear in front of her cave.
The first thing that really strikes Amelia about the monster is the mouth. It's a huge, rictus thing, distorting the edges of her face in a permanent, grotesque smile filled with thousands of pointed teeth like a shark. Her eyes are a dark, cruel red, and framed by choppy white hair littered with seaweed and crude hair ornaments made from shells. The moonlight shines off her in all the worst ways, making her teeth gleam and their eyes shine with intent.
Claws the length of Amelia's whole body grip the top of the hill, digging into the dirt as the monster elevates her upper body, scanning the forest for something. She needs to use her arm to push herself up because Amelia can very clearly see the bungalow-sized shark tail that is her back half. A few more aquatically-inclined features are also visible on her body, like fins sticking out from the back of her forearms and slight webbing between her fingers.
That might not sound as horrifying as the spider monster, but only because Amelia doesn't have words to convey just how uncomfortable the monster's mouth really is. Its shape remains fixed as the monster swivels its head, and doesn't change the slightest bit even when the monster's eyes furrow and her nostrils flare.
And then, a noise. Not from the monster, but off to Amelia's right. The monster's head snaps to that direction in an instant and she goes completely still except for her eyes sweeping across the trees, looking for the source of the noise.
A huff, a grunt, some shuffling. Amelia can tell it's a boar just from listening to it. Dangerous if confronted, but she has bigger problems right now.
"LIIIHHHTTTLE THHHIIINNNGGGAAAH."
The noise is guttural, with repeated clicking and growling thrown in as the monster's throat and tongue garble the vocalization into something unrecognizable and alien to Amelia's ears. It might be an attempt at speech, it might be a warning sound, or it could be something else entirely. Amelia resists the urge to press her hands to her ears to block out the grating noise. She can't give away her position.
The monster's noise scares the boar into moving. Amelia can hear it make an obviously animalistic snort and startle into the bushes. That's apparently not the noise the monster wanted to hear, because Amelia gets a front-row seat to a horrifying display.
The jagged teeth of the monster were scary enough with the unusually large smile, but it's even worse when the monster opens her mouth. Her mouth opens, and opens, and opens, stretching until the gap between their upper and lower jaw is enough to fit an entire whale inside without even scraping her teeth, all while keeping her rigid smile. Her eyes harden and her hands clench the hill while her shoulders hunch and her body pulls back, compressing like a spring, until they push off with their hands and snap forward like an elastic, bursting into the trees off to Amelia's left (and knocking several over) and prompting an alarmed squeal from the boar.
Amelia doesn't miss her chance. She sprints for the cave without a second thought and all but dives inside, and only then does she let herself shake and quiver. She pulls herself to the very back of the cave, inside the secondary room, and curls up with her backpack. She stays like that for a dozen minutes until her heartbeat gets under control and she feels well enough to crawl into the main room and quietly nibble on some berries, keeping an eye out the cave entrance.
She hears the loud dragging of the monster's tail not long after. It comes from her left, and then it stops just barely off to the side of the cave entrance. Amelia hears a noise not unlike a hose put in reverse, sucking in air, and then the dragging moves closer and closer until the monster's clawed hand appears in front of the cave entrance.
Then, a second later, the sucking noise repeats, the monster's grinning maw blocks the entrance of the cave, and Amelia realizes it can smell her. She again hides herself int the back room with only her head poking out to keep an eye on the monster's activity.
An unearthly screech startles her and distracts the monster, causing the monster to quickly pull away from the entrance. For the next five minutes Amelia can hear noises from both this monster and some other monster as they… converse?… outside the cave. She hears something beating the air repeatedly, and then a dragging noise, both of which quickly fade into nothing.
Amelia listens for a long time, expecting to hear something return, but nothing of the sort happens. Eventually she nestles herself into the back of her cave and, after keeping her ear towards the entrance for an hour, weariness finally pulls her eyelids down and she descends into a fitful sleep.
###
Despite the presence of no less than three different monsters, Amelia stays in the area. The resources are plentiful, and with time she can learn their patterns. Besides, from what she's managed to figure out the three monsters don't fight with each other, which makes this location likely very safe from roaming monsters as there will be three local monsters to handle outside threats rather than merely one.
(She's not sure any of them can hold a candle to Big Blue. Her sheer size made her a menace to deal with, and only Mourner compares, but Mourner is even more passive than Big Blue. Kite and Snap (the shark monster) are more active, but are only the size of small houses rather than skyscrapers.
Amelia still hasn't seen Kite or Mourner up close, and she's more than happy to keep it that way.
Since the night of the full moon, Amelia has seen more of Snap. The aquatic monster regularly crawls the forest, though she never takes position atop the hill again. It's easy to figure out where Snap travels because the paths she takes are obvious from the lack of plants due to her tail dragging behind and ripping up bushes and knocking aside trees. She seems to have a regular patrol path of sorts that covers most of the forest within a five-kilometer radius of her cave. That said, Snap's activity schedule is very inconsistent. She can be active anywhere from noon to midnight, but never early morning or late night.
Amelia has had more than one close call with Snap when foraging, but at the very least it's easy to hear her coming. The tail makes her noisy. Amelia has also opted to only visit the beach for scavenging during the morning, when she's fairly sure Snap is sleeping.
While Snap is by far the most active and immediately problematic monster, there are still two others to deal with. Kite is a frequent visitor, though Amelia suspects the forest isn't their home range. The flying monster seems to live in the mountains, perhaps on the other side of them, but soars overhead regularly. They occasionally swoop down to attack something or to interact with Snap.
Amelia has never gotten close enough to get a good look, but she's seen from a distance how Snap and Kite make noises at each other, chase each other, and wrestle in the trees. Monsters that get along are rare, but it is something Amelia has seen before.
Sometimes Kite brings an animal corpse in their claws for Snap, and sometimes Snap will drag a whale out of the water to share with Kite.
Kite also seems to have fire powers. It's easiest to notice when they wrestle with Snap and the fire jumps off them in sharp flashes, though somehow Snap doesn't seem bothered by it. It's just another reason Amelia doesn't want to get anywhere close to them.
Mourner is nocturnal, and almost never moves. She's always somewhere a few kilometres to the left of the cave's entrance, and rises to kneel over the forest every night. She doesn't enjoy facing towards the moon, instead preferring to sit with her back to it. Amelia knows even less about what Mourner looks like than Kite due to her always being cast in shadow, but Mourner is also the least problematic monster in the area by far. Amelia is rarely out at night anyway, so Mourner is basically a non-factor in her life aside from a small 'don't go too far in that direction' reminder in the back of her head. She doesn't know how light of a sleeper Mourner is, but she doesn't want to be the one to wake her up and find out.
Despite Snap's presence, Amelia has made her cave into somewhat of a home. She's gathered enough small branches to make a simple lattice bed frame that she can put all the smaller twigs and leaves on top as padding, has rolled in some stones to make a fire pit, and has tentatively started a garden just outside the entrance by picking seeds out of berries and fruits and burying them in the dirt in rows. She also buries food waste between those rows for some low-effort trench composting to hopefully help them grow.
(Snap seems to have taken an interest in the garden. Amelia has seen the monster studying the lines in the ground and even making marks with her claws in imitation. She hopes this interest means Snap won't ruin it, but it might also encourage Snap to stick close, which isn't something Amelia wants either.)
Amelia has also been preparing for an… expedition of sorts. She thinks it's about time to check that crack in the back of the cave and see where it goes. It might not go anywhere and be an immediate dead end, but waving some torchlight in front of it seems to suggest it goes on for at least a little bit. If there's a small cavern behind it, maybe she can mine out the rock and get some extra space.
She's been preparing extra food, torch bundles, and water for the trip. It could be five minutes, or five hours, or a day.
When rain darkens the sky in the morning before the new moon, Amelia takes it as an opportunity. She'd be stuck inside anyways, so she might as well explore.
With a small waist pack attached to her body and a burning torch in hand, she squeezes her way through the crack to see what she'll find. The squeeze isn't all that tight, surprisingly, and the path opens up quickly after. Amelia finds herself standing in a long, down-sloped, wide, tunnel. The stone all around her is smooth, with not a jagged edge to be seen. It's just tall enough for Amelia to stand in, and wide enough that she can hold both arms out to her sides without brushing the wall.
Her torch gives Amelia a few meters of vision as she slowly shuffles down the tunnel. She wonders what could have caused such a neat path. It's like something dug through here and ground down the walls over repeated trips.
The air is damp, but oddly warm. In fact, it gets warmer the deeper Amelia goes, and she's been walking for ten minutes at this point. The slope is gradual, but Amelia has to pace herself. If she were to fall and start rolling, she has no idea how long she'd go for.
Down and down and down she goes. The path gets wider and wider, until Amelia is wandering on a tunnel that is five meters across and three tall.
She stops in her tracks when she sees a figure standing in the shadows in front of her. Her torch barely illuminates their short frame, but it's enough to see their pale skin and long, shiny, purple hair.
Amelia really shouldn't have to say this, but humans don't have purple hair. Most of them don't dress in skimpy black dresses either, or have strange tufts on their head. Still, the figure is small, and Amelia has never met a monster smaller than five meters in some dimension. Maybe this girl is some sort of crazy hermit. It would explain what she's doing in a random tunnel underground.
"Uh… hey." Amelia ventures after a few seconds of no one speaking. "Nice to meet you, I think. I'm Amelia."
"It's been a long time since we've had visitors." The figure whispers. Her voice is silky soft, and brushes past Amelia's ears like gentle wind. Her fingers steeple in front of her as she steps forward, allowing Amelia a better view of a face with only the most delicate of features, a calm smile, and closed eyes. "Though, I suppose you've been here for almost a month by now, haven't you?"
"Yeah." Amelia says slowly, eyeing the girl. Colors aside, there's something a bit off about how she speaks. "How do you know that?"
"I pay attention to my surroundings, Little Thing." The girl says. "The others speak to me, and I them. We would be terribly lonely otherwise."
It's not that her mouth doesn't line up with her voice. No, the lip flaps are perfectly timed… "It would be less lonely if you didn't live in a cave I think. Who are these 'others' anyway?"
"You've seen them plenty already." The girl murmurs. Amelia starts moving to the left, trying to see behind the girl, and the girl tilts her head. "Little Thing…"
Amelia knows what's wrong now. The girl's voice isn't actually coming from her mouth, it's being carried along from further down the tunnel. Amelia can't see that far, but trying to look around the girl allows her to see something anyways.
The girl has a fleshy tube attached to the back of her neck that trails off into the darkness like some sort of freakish umbilical cord… or like the lure of an anglerfish.
"...you're quite observant, aren't you?" The eyes of the 'girl' open, revealing empty sockets. She smiles in a way that would reveal teeth, if she had any, but her mouth is empty too. She doesn't bother to keep up the act of moving her mouth as she 'speaks'. "Such a clever little thing."
Amelia takes one step back, and then another.
"There's no need to run, Little Thing. We have no interest in hurting you." The monster whispers. She stands aside, gesturing deeper. "You wanted to see the cave, didn't you? I could guide you."
Amelia takes another step back. Her heart pounds in her chest, and her vision wavers. She feels dizzy. Did she forget to eat? "N-Not likely."
"Whyever not? What has you frightened?" The monster asks. Their smile fails to be reassuring in any way with Amelia knowing full well their body is just a puppet. "You are in no danger from me."
"Your words m-mean nothing!" Amelia shouts, her voice cracking and her breath racing. She tries to take another step back, but moving backwards up a slope is tricky, and the back of her heel catches on the stone, sending her falling onto her back and her torch clattering down the slope towards the monster, who calmly leans down to pick it up. Amelia tries to push herself up to her feet, but ends up slipping down towards the monster.
She devolves into a full-on panic as her hands scramble against the stone to try and pull her away from the monster. The monster says something, but Amelia is far from listening. She crawls up the stone incline until her feet get back under her and then, despite the lack of light thanks to the monster still holding the torch, she starts running. Amelia doesn't care that she's careening into the darkness, she just wants to get away from whatever that thing is!
Amelia runs until she crashes into a wall, entirely unable to see where she's going, and uses one hand to keep track of the wall and move at a rapid walk while the monster's voice follows her up the tunnel.
"Don't run Little Thing, you'll hurt yourself." The monster croons. "I have your fire, come back to me."
Amelia keeps moving, half-running, until the tunnel narrows to a point where it can only be the crevice in front of her. She finds the crack with her hands and squeezes herself into it as best she can. Without being able to see, she's not nearly as efficient about it as she was when she was entering, and her back leg gets twisted and pulled painfully in the crossing, but she manages to force her way through anyhow.
She gratefully collapses against the wall, but her relief is cut short by the glow of light creeping through the crack in the wall, and it occurs to her that if she can get through, so can a thinner, smaller 'girl'. She's not safe here at all.
With only a brief thought to all her stuff being left to the monster's whims, Amelia stumbles towards the entrance and out of her cave into the rain. Her left leg twinges painfully with each step, and her stumble turns into a limp as she's forced to slow down thanks to her injury.
Amelia has no idea how much time has passed since she went down into the cave. Has it been twenty minutes? Twenty hours? It was impossible to tell time down there, and the overcast sky is no help in making things any more clear.
The rain soaks her shirt and hair quickly and mud sucks at her boots, not helping the pain in her leg as she has to yank it out of the mud with every step. She's cold, and quickly going numb, but at least she's away from that monster. It can't hurt her here, can't ensnare her with soft words and false promises.
(It won't matter much if she dies out in the wilderness, but she's not thinking about that right now.)
Amelia is only vaguely processing the secondary knowledge that the monster could talk in a way a human could understand. She's never been quite sure as to the intelligence of monsters, but this isn't a reassuring sign. If they're all this intelligent, it means that there are a number of monsters that deliberately hunt down human survivors rather than doing it on some baser instinct. Monsters aren't malicious out of stupidity or naivete, but are so intentionally, and with calculated evil in their hearts.
She keeps stumbling blindly through the trees, over logs, and around rocks, until she finds something that looks like shelter. That shelter ends up being a wall of black stone that abruptly juts out of the ground in the middle of the forest, and that folds inward with a large, thin overhang. Amelia hauls herself under cover, moves to the very back of the fold, and falls asleep within three minutes out of sheer exhaustion.
###
When Amelia wakes up, it is not raining, and she is dry. One of those things makes sense in the current context, and it's the weather, because rain rarely lasts forever. Amelia, on the other hand, has no right being dry after trudging through a rainstorm and flopping down under shade without even taking off her clothes.
She gets her answer very quickly when she rolls over and comes face-to-wing with burning feathers.
Amelia yelps and scrambles back, but her back finds the wall far too quickly. The wall doesn't feel like stone, like she thought it was. It feels more like leather, but that's a secondary concern right now. She's got a monster in her face.
The monster in question is Kite, and it's the first time Amelia has seen them, or her, up close. While less outright disturbing than Snap, Kite's distorted face is still horrible to look upon. Her mouth is stretched forward into a beak, visibly stretching the skin further than it's supposed to go. Only the edge of the beak is made of bone, and it stretches the skull and face to accommodate it like completely overwriting her chin and flattening her nose until it's simply a part of the beak itself. Instead of hair, she has small feathers near the front of her head that become longer as they move back, giving somewhat the same effect but ultimately looking wrong.
The rest of her body is where the mess is. From the neck down she's covered in brown-orange feathers, but Amelia can still see where parts of a human body are stretched to accommodate avian features. She can see where the individual finger knuckles are in the largest feathers (she's fairly sure that's not how bird feathers are supposed to work, but that's how it works for Kite), and where her legs gradually turn into chicken-like feet. Her spine is visible on her back, and Amelia realizes that Kite is actually quite thin underneath all those feathers.
Also, the feathers on her back are on fire. Just all of them. Her front is not on fire, her back is. Plain and simple. Despite being less than three meters away from her, Amelia is merely warmed by the fire. She's quite warm, admittedly, but not burning.
Kite is sleeping. She's wedged herself between Amelia and the rest of the forest, completely blocking Amelia into the small crevice, and as happy as Amelia is to be alive and dry she's less happy about being trapped between a monster and a suspiciously-textured wall.
With shaky legs, Amelia approaches Kite and ducks under a wing, and then is forced to lightly lay a hand on one of Kite's legs to balance herself while the weight of the wing on her back tries to push her over. She worms her way between Kite's limbs, hyper-aware of every little twitch of Kite's body and how it would only take a small flap of her wings or flick of her legs to kill Amelia.
Amelia can hear the monster's steady breathing as she carefully steps between Kite's talons. She squeezes between the wing and a large hip muscle, and finally manages to get out behind her.
The heat of the fire is stronger back here, yet somehow still not scorching. Amelia waves her hands in front of the flaming feathers, but the heat never burns. How strange.
Without Kite in her way, Amelia can move out from under the overhang to check the sky again, and she freezes at what she sees.
Nighttime, and not a moon to be seen. Right, tonight was a new moon. She didn't notice before thanks to Kite's fire providing light. Mourner is probably going to be more active, as will that… thing… underneath her cave.
Something shifts, a low, creaking rumble, and Amelia spins her attention back to Kite, but the avian monster is still sleeping peacefully. The sound repeats again, and Amelia can see something moving.
The thing moving is the wall, and the overhang. Amelia slowly pushes her gaze up and up and up along the black wall until she's staring at a dark crown and white veil, and two flat, pink eyes staring down at her.
Amelia is running before her conscious mind catches up with her. Her left leg still aches from how she twisted it, and she's quickly forced to slow down to stop it from throbbing. At the very least she knows which direction to travel because of Mourner. Mourner is always to the left of her cave, and she knows vaguely the direction she came from.
She stumbles back to her cave, glancing up at the sky to meet the watchful eyes of Mourner every few seconds. She has a brief scare when she catches a glimpse of Snap through the trees and the monster's eyes swing towards her, but she manages to hide behind a thick tree and move on after a few seconds (though she does hear the dragging of Snap's tail somewhere behind her).
When Amelia reaches her cave she's limping again, but when she checks the back room she finds no creepy puppet girls, so she spends twenty minutes hauling the rocks she'd used for her campfire to the back room to block off the crack, and collapses into her bed again.
For the second time in one day, Amelia falls asleep thanks to exhaustion.
###
When Amelia wakes up in the morning, there's a dead dolphin on her doorstep.
That's not a metaphor or an exaggeration. There is a dead, bottlenose dolphin with large bite marks along its side resting only a meter in front of her cave entrance. The kill looks rather fresh, as flies haven't even found the corpse yet.
"This has to be from Snap, right? What else could make bite marks like that?" She thinks, cautiously approaching the cave entrance. "The dolphin looks mostly intact. Snap didn't actually eat any of it, so why is it here?"
A quick peek outside the window doesn't reveal Snap anywhere, so Amelia drags the dolphin into the cave.
Food is food, and she didn't eat at all yesterday. She gets to work cutting up the animal and stokes her campfire. Her stomach growls the entire morning as she tries to figure out how to butcher a dolphin and when the meat is cooked enough to eat.
In the end, her meat ends up very well-done out of paranoia, but at least it's edible. She drags the parts of the carcass she's not eating well away to avoid animals taking an interest in her cave.
(She sees giant red eyes watching her from the right when she's dragging the corpse. Despite her terror, she pretends not to notice them, hoping that Snap is more interested in what's left of the corpse than her. She makes it back without incident, and does her usual routine of curling up on her bed for a few minutes to stop herself from shaking.)
Amelia spends most of the day in her cave, anxiously checking the crack in the back to see if Puppet is there and jumping at every noise. Never has she been more aware that there are four monsters living in her area, and she's now had a direct run-in with all four of them and somehow survived. Kite could have killed her. Mourner too. She's not sure about Puppet's actual capabilities, so she doesn't know if Puppet's, well, puppet is capable of fighting. Snap also could have killed her several times over with all the close-calls Amelia has had with her, though she's not sure how often Snap actually knew she was there.
A thump shakes Amelia out of her thoughts. She looks up. Outside the entrance, a dozen meters past the small clearing and into the forest, she can see Snap swallowing the dolphin corpse. That's not the cause of the noise though. No, the noise comes from Kite landing nearby, screeching at Snap. Snap makes some distorted, indignant chirps in response, and Kite stops beating her wings quite so hard. Kite's head tilts as if thinking of something, and she abruptly takes off, making another shrieking noise at Snap before she leaves.
When Snap has finished eating, she very obviously moves to the edge of the clearing, settles on the ground, and stares into the cave, making it clear in no uncertain terms that Amelia is being watched.
Amelia wants to hide in the back room, but she's hyper-aware of the crack in the wall and the possibility that Puppet will be there, and so she stays far back in the main section of her cave and cleans and organizes what she can while steadfastly refusing to look up at Snap and acknowledge the horrifying reality that she's currently trapped inside her cave.
One hour passes, and Kite returns. She lands directly in front of the cave and drops a deer in almost the same spot Snap had left the dolphin. Snap, watching this, makes a huffing noise, and Kite gives a short squawk in response before hopping back a few steps to settle at the edge of the clearing, staring expectantly.
It's at this point that Amelia realizes the monsters are feeding her. She stares at the deer, wholly uncertain what to make of this development.
Kite fidgets impatiently in her spot, beating her wings, and Snap chuffs at her and gives a small vertical wave with one hand that prompts Kite to settle down and lie on the ground next to her, watching the cave entrance.
"It's like they're waiting for a mouse to come out of its hole to grab cheese." Amelia thinks. She slowly approaches the cave entrance, keeping a wary eye on Kite and Snap. She grabs the legs of the deer and awkwardly drags it into the cave.
Kite trills triumphantly. Snap chuffs again, her tail swinging lazily behind her.
She still has leftover dolphin meat to eat, but Amelia sets about butchering the deer anyways. A weird part of her brain tells her she doesn't want to offend Kite, because if these monsters have for some reason decided not to kill her on sight she wants to encourage that.
"Does this make me a pet?" She wonders while removing the deer's guts. "I think this makes me a pet."
She doesn't bother dragging what remains of the deer too far. She leaves what she's not going to use just outside the entrance, and Kite happily eats it.
With two moderately-sized carcasses gathered from, Amelia has more meat than she's going to need for the rest of the day, or even the day after that. She spends most of her day inside the cave cooking, though she does have to go for water at least once. She gathers all her bottles, as well as her pot, into her pack and nervously pokes her head out the cave entrance. Snap and Kite are no longer directly watching her, but she's heard shuffling and the occasional screech from them over the course of the afternoon all around the surrounding forest.
When she determines they aren't in the immediate area, Amelia makes a run for the river. She fills her bottles one by one and then cleans her pot and fills it with water to carry back.
She doesn't jump when she sees Snap peering through the trees, watching her. Just like with the dolphin earlier, she pretends she can't see the monster and walks back to the cave at a brisk pace that hopefully doesn't make her look as scared as she actually is.
The rest of Amelia's day is spent in that cave. She cuts meat into various shapes, hangs it up over a smokey fire (for the dual purpose of smoking the meat and chasing away insects) with a hastily-constructed smoke catch overtop of it using her spare shirt to hold the smoke as best as possible, and tries to figure out how she's going to store these extras. She doesn't exactly have a pantry, but maybe she can just leave them on the rocks for a day or two, relying on the protection from smoking, and eat them before long-term preservation is an issue.
"I need woodworking tools." She thinks as she cooks. "I could use a cupboard, or a chest, or even a box. Especially if I plan to survive winter here, I need some way to store food and water."
She knows where to find woodworking tools. She has some as part of one of her tool caches, but that's going to necessitate a trip back to the suburbs, and with these new developments among the monsters she doesn't know how they'd react to her trying to leave.
That's also acting on the assumption that she plans to stay here with at least three monsters who know exactly where she lives. Big Blue was never that personal. Big Blue knew she was around, and stepped in at predictable moments to be inconvenient, but never had an interest in Amelia's day-to-day life. A comfortable distance, a balance. Big Blue scared off the other monsters and didn't bother Amelia too much.
Amelia pushes those thoughts aside for the moment and focuses on the fire and the meat. She cooks even after the sun sets and both monsters have left until all the meat has been smoked and she can curl up on her bed with a full stomach.
Thus begins a new normal for Amelia.
###
Snap and Kite visit frequently. Snap moreso. Amelia can count on her dropping by around noon every day. Kite is more inconsistent, visiting every other day at random times.
Amelia still stays within her cave when the monsters visit. Snap will drag herself to the entrance and peer inside, and then be on her way after a few minutes (though she'll stay in the area for an hour or two, easily visible if Amelia takes a look out of the cave into the forest). Kite is more volatile. She'll drop into the clearing, often with an offering of an animal or sometimes a branch of a fruit tree with the fruit still attached, and will flutter around impatiently until Amelia drags the gift inside. Only then will Kite take off again, and Amelia will be able to see her flying low over the forest for the entire afternoon.
Around a month of this goes by before Amelia properly meets Mourner.
Mourner doesn't really move. She stays far to the left, towering over the forest during the night and dropping back down during the day. In the last month Amelia has been able to tell Mourner is looking in her direction. The monster has twisted her body so the moon shines on the side of her face just so she can face the cave.
It finally gave Amelia the chance to get a decent look at her.
Mourner reminds Amelia of Big Blue the most. Her eyes are giant, dull spheres of pink, with no whites or pupils to speak of. The face beyond that is gaunt to the point of looking skeletal, with every contour of bone visible underneath tight, pale skin. Her veil usually covers her face, and whenever she gets the chance she adjusts it to do just that.
Beyond a skeletal face, most of the monster's body is covered by a thick cloak (at least, Amelia assumes it's a cloak), but Amelia has seen from some rare movements that the monster's hands are just as skeletal as her face.
Both Kite and Snap visit Mourner almost every night. Kite will land on Mourner's head or shoulder, and Snap will climb their way up Mourner's side. Mourner doesn't react much to them, and never brushes them off.
Meeting Mourner is an intentional choice. Amelia waits after night has fallen and climbs atop the hill her cave is built into and stands there with a torch in her hand until Mourner sits up and looks in her direction.
It's not much of a meeting. Mourner doesn't give her food like the other two, and Amelia doesn't get anywhere close to her, but for the first time they properly acknowledge that the other exists. Mourner inclines her head slowly, deliberately, and Amelia waves her torch.
Is she saying hello? Is she telling Mourner to stay away? She doesn't really know. Amelia is trying not to think too hard about the madness she's wrapped herself up in. She's simply existing, taking problems day by day rather than thinking ahead, because if she starts to think then she starts to panic, and she'd rather not do that.
She successfully ignores her anxiety until the next new moon rolls around.
Amelia had planned to sleep for the night of the new moon, just as she slept through the last full moon. Even if these monsters are ostensibly 'friendly', there's no reason to take a risk and do anything when they're agitated. Amelia doesn't know the exact effects of full and new moons (they seem to energize bestial and supernatural monsters respectively, but there are also sometimes unpredictable behavioural changes) so she doesn't know if the monsters will continue to be friendly under their effects.
It's not so different from how she usually spent her nights, except for a conscious decision not to investigate noises and poke her head out of her cave to say hi to Mourner or entertain a nighttime visit from Snap.
That was the plan, at least. That plan was interrupted by a whisper.
"Little Thing…"
Her blood goes cold at that familiar, haunting voice. Amelia is curled in the back of the main room, not having entered the back room for a month, but she can hear the voice all the same.
"Little Thing…"
Puppet's voice is still soft, gentle, deceptive. Honey to the ears to lure the unwary. Amelia has seen many monsters over the years, but a monster with such a sophisticated lure, a monster that can speak, is still horrifying to think about even a month after first encountering it.
"Don't hide Little Thing." Puppet murmurs. Her voice leaks from the back room, past the obstructing rocks, and slither into Amelia's ears no matter how firmly she presses her hands overtop of them. "Talk with me."
"Go away!"
"I only have the energy to act on new moons, Little Thing, and you've sealed me off from the others. Won't you at least talk to me in their stead?"
Sealed her from the others? Because of the rocks? No, no, she shouldn't be listening. She should sleep.
"Let me out, Little Thing." Puppet coos. "I'm not mad…"
That means nothing coming from a monster. She shouldn't listen. But she feels compelled to. She has nowhere to go. Nothing to do but listen.
"If the other monsters see me like a pet, what's to say Puppet doesn't as well?"
She groans and curls up on her bed. That's the sort of thinking that leads to dangerous choices. She's already risked enough by indulging Snap and Kite, is she really going to let out Puppet? A monster who can easily fit into her cave? Her cave is her only security measure. However much she might trust or distrust Kite and Snap and Mourner, they can't get inside her cave. Puppet though? Puppet can fit. All she has to do is move a few rocks and the monster can step right in.
Is she lonely enough, foolish enough, to take those rocks away just so she can talk face-to-lure with a monster?
"I haven't spoken with anyone since Uncle died." She reminds herself dully. "Not a single conversation in years, until Puppet."
Maybe she is desperate. Not suicidal, but desperate. So despite her better judgment she stands out of her bed and shuffles into the back room. Even with only the flickering light of the campfire from the other room, she can see a sliver of the pale-skinned 'girl' behind the rocks. Closed eye, pale skin, serene smile, just like before.
"Hello, Little Thing."
"Puppet."
"A name? You're too kind, Little Thing." Puppet says. "It's been too long since I've had a name."
"That implies you had one before."
"I did."
"What was it?"
"I don't remember."
"Why not?"
"How old are you, Little Thing?" Puppet asks suddenly.
Amelia narrows her eyes. "Twenty."
"Too young to have been around for the Change." Puppet murmurs.
"The Change, huh. We humans call it… well everyone has their own term for it." Amelia admits. "My uncle called it the Giant Virus, even though a virus had nothing to do with it. I just call it the End."
"I had a name before then. But I can't remember what it was." Puppet says. "Before I became this."
"Became this?"
"There's a reason all of us look somewhat human, Little Thing."
She'd never given it that much thought. Amelia had always tried to avoid thinking about what was, and what might have caused her situation. There was no use hoping for a solution, not in the world's current state, and as all she ever knew the cause didn't really matter to her. Her uncle's tales of a world passed were just that, tales.
"Some of us remember more, some of us less." Puppet continues. "The flying one remembers the least of us, and the sitting one the most. The swimming one cares not to remember more, and I wish for nothing greater than my memory."
Amelia nods, not feeling like it's proper to speak. Hesitantly, she starts pulling rocks loose from the crack.
"My memories feel as if I experience them running underwater. Distorted, muffled, with words made illegible and sights twisted into unrecognizability. I remember some things, but I could not tell you what those things were if I tried." Puppet says. "The others say much the same, when they speak of them at all. The one who sits is lucky, or maybe unlucky. She remembers a single sentence; complete, untouched."
"What is it?"
"That is for her to tell."
Amelia nods mutely. She hefts the last rock out of the way and takes two quick steps away from the crack. Puppet carely slips her lure through, and Amelia gets a full view of her again rather than the restricted view through the crack. The chord coming out the back of her neck winds through the crack with ease, and Amelia has to wonder how far it stretches.
Wait, she can just ask. "How far can your… lure… go?"
"Just beyond the entrance of the cave." Puppet says. "At least, that is the case until I find a way out of the tunnels."
"There's space down there?"
"Not much." Puppet says. She walks into the main room and sits at Amelia's campfire, and Amelia sits on the other side from her, trying her hardest to ignore how surreal it is to sit across from something that looks like a human being for the first time in years and trying doubly hard to avoid looking at the cord. "It's tight. I can barely move. I am thankful for my lure, or I would never have seen sunlight."
"Your lure doesn't have eyes."
"Yet it can still see with eyes closed." Puppet hums.
"How did you get stuck down there?"
"I have been stuck there since the Change. I do not know why I was there before I became what I am now. I can see no signs of human habitation."
"Are you working on a way out?"
"No. I do not know if it would be safe for me to break stone. I would not want the tunnels to collapse on my head."
"That sucks."
"Perhaps. At the very least I have company, in my imprisonment. The others visit on the new moons. Though, knowing you live here, perhaps they are more hesitant now."
"I wouldn't call them 'hesitant'. Snap and Kite, that's swim and fly, have been giving me gifts for the last few weeks. Meat and fruit mostly."
"They are friendly, aren't they?" Puppet hums.
Amelia wouldn't quite use that term, but she'd rather not offend Puppet by insulting her… friends? Kite and Snap still scare the shit out of her, no matter how many gifts they give. There's a reason Amelia keeps her distance.
"Little Thing, I have a question for you now."
"Sure."
"How long do you plan to stay?"
Amelia stares into the fire. That's the million dollar question, isn't it? "I don't know. I came out here to… start a new life, I guess. I found this cave and it seemed like the perfect place. That was before I realized it was right in the middle of the territory of four monsters."
"That's not such a bad thing, is it?"
"I guess not?" Amelia says, unsure. "I'm used to only having one around who mostly ignored me. Big Blue was a lot less chatty."
"Perhaps if you approached them you would be less wary."
"I'm not eager to get eaten."
"You are much more likely to be cuddled than eaten, Little Thing." Puppet says with a smile. She stands from where she's sitting and moves towards the cave entrance. "Come and see. I'm sure they're waiting for me."
Amelia is hesitant, but follows nonetheless.
The others are, in fact, waiting for her. As soon as Puppet steps outside the cave Snap drags herself down off the top of the hill and makes a growling noise into the trees. Kite comes shuffling out a moment later, waddling awkwardly on her legs rather than flying.
Amelia has never seen Mourner move before, but the excitement of Snap and Kite and the energy of the new moon must have motivated her. She covers the distance between her resting spot and the cave in three long strides and takes a seat in front of it.
Kite nearly bowls Puppet over in her excitement. The bird-like monster squawks and nuzzles Puppet with the top of her head, accidentally bathing Puppet in the fire that perpetually consumes Kite's back.
Puppet shows no signs of being burned whatsoever. She runs her fingers through Kite's flaming feathers, speaking in a fond murmur that Amelia can't hear. Snap swiftly joins in, nuzzling Puppet from the side. Mourner is less forward, and instead sits at a distance until Kite and Snap are done before lowering a hand and gently stroking Puppet's hair.
When Puppet turns to Amelia and gestures for her to join, she's hesitant for obvious reasons. All the monsters' eyes have turned to her, watching expectantly.
The logical thing to do would be retreat back into the cave. Then again, the logical thing to do would have been not let Puppet out in the first place.
"Well, I've taken the suicidal option once already. Might as well make it twice." Amelia thinks sarcastically, taking a cautious step out from the cave. "If they kill me, what will I tell Uncle in the afterlife? 'Oh yeah, I was doing just fine until I trusted the word of a creepy fetus and got eaten by a monster with teeth as large as I am.' I'm sure he'll be so proud."
Amelia almost passes out when Snap repeats her nuzzle of Puppet on her instead. The monster's nose roughly presses into Amelia's neck and head, and Snaps's teeth glint in the fire generated by Kite's body, reminding her just how fine a line she's dancing on right now.
(Snap's breath smells much less than Amelia was expecting. Mostly she can smell brine rather than dead fish. Actually, her teeth are quite clean. Perhaps monsters understand the concept of personal hygiene?)
Kite is eager to join in next, and makes a (rather quiet) chirping noise while butting her head in. Amelia flinches away from the flames, but can't avoid being touched by them. No pain greets her face when the feathers brush her. She feels warm, sure, but despite the very obvious fire in her face she's somehow unharmed.
"Magic?" She wonders, somewhat hysterically. "Or maybe I'm actually burning right now and Kite's fire has anesthetic properties?"
Snap and Kite abruptly yelp, and Amelia watches in awe as Mouner grabs each of them under the stomach and lifts them off the ground and away from Amelia like disobedient puppies. It really gives Amelia a proper sense of scale to see that one of Mourner's hands is the size of Snap's entire torso.
Mourner places the other monsters down, and Amelia cowers in place when Mourner leans down to see her better and very carefully extends a finger in front of Amelia.
It takes her embarrassingly long to understand she's being offered a handshake. She grabs the gloved, boney hand and tentatively shakes it up and down.
Snap and Kite whine while pacing several meters away from Amelia, none too happy with how Mourner has monopolized Amelia's attention. They keep whining until Mourner turns her head and speaks in a low, raspy voice.
"YOOOUUUHH SSSCCCAAARRREE HEEERRR." Mourner says. It's hard for Amelia to make out the distorted words coming from the monster, but she feels like she should be able to. The tone sounds admonishing. "LIIIHHHTLEEE THHHIIINNNGGG ISSS FRRRAAAAILLL."
"SHHHEEE KNNNOOOHHHSSS USSS!" Snap protests.
"WEEE FEEED LIIITTTLEEE THIIINNNGGG!" Kite warbles. Amelia can almost make out what she's saying. It's so close to being recognizable; closer than the others at least.
"Little Thing has given us names." Puppet interrupts. "All of us."
The other monsters stop quarrelling. Their eyes turn to Amelia expectantly. Somehow, despite three supersized creatures standing not a few meters away from her, the world is very quiet. If monsters can look eager, Snap, Kite, and even Mourner definitely are.
"Uh…" Amelia swallows. She would have put much more thought into the names if she knew she would be saying them to their faces. Still, Puppet has put her on the spot, so she doesn't have much of a choice but to go ahead and give them. She starts with Puppet, just because Puppet already knows and there's less pressure, and then goes around the semi-circle. "Puppet. Snap. Kite. Mourner."
Kite starts beating her wings and making excited squawking noises. Snap's large tail lashes the ground, spraying pebbles all around. Mourner simply nods.
"NAAAYYYME!" Kite screeches, and fully extends her wings. "KIIIYYYTE!"
"SNAAAHHHP!" Snap growls, and bites at the air. "SNAAAHHHP! SNAAAHHHP!"
This time, Amelia can understand what they're saying, if only because they're repeating her words. It's also occurring to her that she can just talk to the other monsters and not just Puppet. Somehow she never pieced together that the others could understand English until just now.
"See?" Puppet murmurs, quiet enough that the celebrating monsters can't hear. "Nothing is wrong, Little Thing. You're fine. Cuddled and not killed."
Somehow that manages to sound reassuring, patronizing, and teasing all at the same time. "Fine, fine, you've made your point."
"Have I?"
"Yes. I won't block up the crack again." Amelia says reluctantly.
Ina claps her hands. "Wonderful. Now, I do believe you planned to sleep. Please, do so. Perhaps next moon we can talk at greater length."
"Yeah, uh, sure." Amelia mutters, rubbing her eyes. She'll take any excuse to leave right now. She staggers over to her bed, ignoring the pleading noises that come out of Snap and Kite's mouths, and quickly falls into a deep sleep.
###
Amelia has strange neighbors.
One is six meters tall, has a tail, and spends three hours a day hunting for food in the ocean. Another has a thirty-meter wingspan, naps on her roof, and tends to rip entire trees out of the ground to transport fruit. Yet another sleeps the entire day, and is awake the entire night, but rarely moves except to wave. The last slumbers deep underground, but has a small fragment of herself resting in Amelia's back room, waiting for the one night each lunar cycle that she can wake and interact with the others.
Amelia lives in a cave. She's been living here for a year now. She has tools and a bed and a nice garden outside that the others know not to tear up, and sleeps until noon every day so she can stay up after sunset to talk with Mourner. She usually wakes when Snap makes noise at the entrance and drops a dead animal there. Dinner is usually accompanied by something Kite found, either fruit or another animal.
The midnight meal is usually leftovers from what Kite and Snap gave her, if they brought her something that day. Mourner doesn't eat, but she enjoys being present for the meal anyway. Kite and Snap are happy to eat whatever Amelia doesn't.
Snap is a carnivore, Kite is an omnivore, both of them don't need to eat nearly as much as their size would suggest. Mourner 'eats' moonlight but cannot store the energy she gathers (which is why she sleeps all day). Puppet doesn't know what her diet is because she's stuck underground.
During the new moon Puppet gains the energy to move, and Mourner is more active. For Mourner, this shows less as movement than an increase in sociability. Everyone gathers outside the cave during the new moon to talk and play with Puppet. They break from their usual schedules to spend the entire night awake, keeping Puppet company for all the time she has.
During a full moon, Snap and Kite are energized, and their predatory instincts are heightened. Snap stalks the forest with more speed than her dragging tail would suggest she can manage and lunges at anything that makes noise. Kite soars the night skies, shining like a beacon, and dives at anything unlucky enough to be caught by her sharp eyesight.
If that thing happens to each other, they wrestle. If that thing is Amelia, she must endure aggressive nuzzling before being carried back to her cave by her shirt in Kite's beak or Snap's teeth like a disobedient kitten. They don't like her being out during the full moon. They think it's dangerous for her.
Sometimes the neighborhood gets a visitor. Usually that visitor is driven off by a beak and talons and fire. Failing that, claws and fangs will join. If night falls and all else fails, a giant drives them away. Usually that's what happens, but not always. Sometimes the visitor causes no trouble, because sometimes the visitor is Big Blue.
Big Blue rarely stays for long. Maybe a day or two. She doesn't interact with Amelia like the others do, instead keeping a distance and wandering the forest.
"She's shy." Puppet tells Amelia at some point. "She's been keeping her distance for so long she doesn't know how to change it. I also think, now that her Little Thing has left the den, she doesn't know what to do with herself. She still worries about her Little Thing, so she comes here."
"You make her sound like my mother."
"She did protect you for twenty years, and challenged your reckless decisions to ensure you were prepared."
It's a strange thing to realize the monster she spent all her life avoiding was watching over her. All those times Big Blue tried to stop her from doing something new were out of concern. Those obviously telegraphed attacks were intentionally so, and never intended to hit her. Big Blue had struck down every other monster or vaguely threatening animal with the express purpose of keeping her safe, but rarely communicated with her except to be an obstacle.
Amelia waves at Big Blue when she sees her now. Big Blue rarely reacts. Whenever Amelia needs to take a trip back to the suburbs for supplies (a trip of only a few hours on Kite's back), Big Blue keeps a close watch the entire time they're around, hovering protectively near the building Amelia is rooting around in but never reacting to any attempt to talk with her. Even when Kite lands on her shoulders, Big Blue does nothing more than shoo her off.
(Maybe, just maybe, Amelia thinks Big Blue glanced at her during the last supply run. Progress is progress, no matter how minimal.)
There are still things that need to be done. Puppet is still stuck under the ground, everyone's memories are still hazy and unreachable, the reason for monsters existing at all is still unclear, and Amelia will run out of tools and supplies eventually, but those are problems for the future.
For now, she can rest against the warm feathers of a bird-girl-thing with a warm meal in her stomach while a shark-girl-thing tries to climb a giant-girl-thing's cape and a fetus-girl-thing laughs nearby.
She can live like this. She will. A roof, food, company… what more could a girl ask for?
What the fuck even is this AU? Hey, let's turn Myth (and Kronii) into terrifying humanoid abominations, but stick to the usual "scary but friendly" plot I do with every story? Like, why? I love it, but why? I don't understand my own ideas sometimes.
I had more in mind for this AU. Could have expanded more on the lore and the survival aspect, other monsters outside of the main four, and the initial idea actually involved Amelia meticulously cataloging the quirks and schedules of each monster. I cut a lot, and this fic is still 13,000 words long and feels like the main conflict is resolved too quickly.
Whatever. I've spent long enough on this fic. I like it, and that's good enough.