Karyn was about ready to kill whoever created this stupid world. What the hell had that been all about? She couldn't imagine that there was an instinctive urge to fondle oneself for no particular reason; had it maybe been a misfire on the part of her subconscious, from when she was trying to rub some heat back into her body? She hoped nothing like this happened again; it was more startling than unpleasant, but it would be mortifying for anything like that to happen around other people.
Still, though, it may have been unsettling, but it wasn't what was keeping her from going anywhere. Karyn looked down at her tail, still wrapped around the tree trunk. Why was it being so stubborn about this? What good was it to sit down in one spot when what she really needed was to keep moving? Maybe her body was just getting out of whack from the cold. She needed to warm up, but how? There were a variety of loose branches around that she could use to build a fire, but they all looked a bit damp, and she didn't have anything to light them with.
Well, in the absence of tools, maybe she'd just have to do things the hard way; there wasn't much else she could do, until her tail stopped being stupid and/or obstinate. Ranging as far afield as it wpuld let her, she gathered several armfuls of loose branches and piled them into what looked more or less like a workable campfire. Sighing and grabbing wo small stick, she began rubbing them together vigorously.
It went even worse than she'd expected. Karyn rubbed them back and forth so vigorously that she looked like an electric meat carver, but she didn't get so much as a spark. This was a joke, a complete friggin' joke. Whoever came up with the story about early humans using this trick to make fire had obviously never tried it.
With this newest hassle, Karyn moved beyond irritation and began to get downright angry. Stupid sticks. Stupid fire. Stupid forest. Stupid world. She didn't even want to be here, she just had to rescue Jon from the stupid game, except that instead of doing that, she was stuck here with these stupid sticks while Jon was out somewhere doing God-knows-what. Stupid sticks, why couldn't they just burn already? Burn, dammit, burn!
She was so pissed off that she was barely even surprised when flames leapt from her fingertips and set the pile ablaze; it just seemed like the sort of thing that would happen when she was this angry, until she stopped and thought about it. She had just used magic, once again subconsciously; geez, was every problem she encountered going to be solved by sitting back and lettting autopilot take over?
Well, at the very least, her tail finally managed to stop being retarded, and she laid down on the ground and arced her body around the fire. The heat felt very good on her snake half. Karyn figured that she could rest here and absorb the heat for a few hours, and then she ought to get moving; she didn't know where Jon was or what he was doing, but he might really need her help.
Jon didn't really know where she was or what she was doing, either. She was somewhere in the forest, but she had absolutely no idea where; it seemed that she'd been moved while she was out, and she was even more lost than before.
Jon wanted to try and find her companions, even if there wasn't much she could do to help them, but she didn't know where they had gone, or how to figure that out. Maybe if she waited, they'd come and get her? But it seemed like she'd been out for some significant amount of time and they hadn't come, and she couldn't afford to just sit around in the middle of nowhere in case they did come back; as much as she hated the idea, Jon had to accept that she probably wasn't going to see them again for a while.
But if she was going to be on her own, then what? Where should she go? To some kind of civilization, she supposed; as had become pretty obvious, she wasn't really cut out for the feral lifestyle. But as to where to find civilation, she had no idea. The forest looked to extend indefinitely in every direction. Well, if she kept walking in one direction, she had to reach an edge, right? And once she was out of the woods, if she could re-engage her auto-pilot or figure out how to fly consciously, she could do an air survey and figure out where to go from there.
Having a plan, even a vague one, was heartening, and Jon was all ready to get going. But there was a nagging feeling somewhere in her brain, a signal that was extremely familiar, yet just slightly different...
Oh God. She had to go to the bathroom.
