"I don't care what he's become... a Yeti, a minotaur, some horrible ogre ... we're staying here." Jon replied. "We're not letting him come between us and that grove."
"GO AWAY!!!" shouted a voice from the woods.
Jon and Zoe were at the back corner of the church, near the edge of the woods and the small grove that was their intended campsite. Jon was a slug-girl, and Zoe was now a slime mold girl who was going to break into spores and respawn at some point. Someone needed to look after Zoe while this happened, in a natural environment such as the grove.
"We're not going! We're in desperate need of this place!" Jon shouted back.
"These woods are MINE!!!" the voice growled.
"We're still not going." Jon replied.
There was a growling, or a groaning, in reply. "GO!"
"We're not going away." Jon said, doing her best to remain calm. "We know it's you, Steve. We just need to use the grove. Zoe needs to go through a slime-mold life-cycle thing."
There was a strange sound from the woods. Jon couldn't tell what it was. Was it grumbling, or was it laughter? Or was it something else?
From the trees emerged a creature. It appeared to be a centaur of some sorts. The upper half was indeed a man, one resembling Steve 'The Stud' Farber. However, where one expected the lower half of a centaur to be a horse, this creature's lower half appeared to be a donkey.
"See?!?" Steve 'The Stud' shouted. "See why I'm trying to scare everyone away?!?"
"Because you're a ... donkey centaur?" Jon asked. "There's worse things to be than that. Lots worse. We should know."
"Are you kidding? The day I got transformed, I ran into three of the guys from school! Do you know what they said? 'Ha ha! Look at Steve! He's made an ass of himself!', or 'There he goes making another half-assed attempt to get the ladies'. Even my old buddy Moose Matthews was making fun of me!"
"They weren't laughing when I smashed the windows of their houses and exposed them to the sunlight, let me tell you!"
"And then my dad got in a fight with me and kicked me out of the house! I've got nowhere to go! I've got to hide in here and pretend I got turned into some really horrible monster just so people will leave me alone!"
Jon and Zoe weren't sure what to say. "Look, we won't tell anyone what happened to you if you don't want us to." Jon said. "Just as long as you let us camp out in that little grove over there, all right?"
Steve 'The Stud' Farber appeared to calm down for a bit. "Maybe." he said. "But you'd better not tell your friends about ANY of this." He began to head back into the woods.
Jon and Zoe looked at each other for a bit. "I guess we can set up camp in that grove now."
