She had cooped herself up in her room in the Chien Hotel for much too long, and finally the day came that the girl could not stand to sit inside one more moment. It was not uncommon for Orin to leave her chamber and heft her books someplace outside to read, but suddenly she just had enough of it. Her brother, Niro, had been wanting her to get out more and more, and had been growing increasingly worried about her seclusion. Especially since the young girl was a naturally vibrant, social creature. Though for all his worrying, Orin had waved her brother off save for a few occasions.

She had spent the morning in front of her vanity mirror, playing with all the ways she could pin back her dreadlocks, but ultimately decided she liked them best when they were hanging free. All this inspection of her long locks made her realize just how faded they were becoming, and she began to worry over whether or not she would be able to find the proper dyes for her fur here in the Northern lands. She puzzled over her plight for a few minutes while she picked at her bushy pink tail fur, before promptly exiting her room and joining the real world for the first time in several days.

On a hunt for the right plants to treat her fur with, she wandered from her home in the Chien Hotel, and was gone on her hike for several hours, following a blind trail of scents and clues to the north . . .

. . . Despite how long she had been at a brisk jog in her Optime form, the girl was not out of breath yet. The hotel was in her sights, and she could not wait to get back and find her brother. She found one last burst of speed, and sprinted until she was at the hotel.

She stopped outside, walking around the perimeter of the building until she was under her brother’s window. She panted lightly as she picked up a few pebbles and rapped them against the paneling outside his room. Sure, it probably would have made more sense to just go inside and run up the stairs, but Orin didn’t feel like bothering with sense.

“Niro! Niro, wake up!” Being almost noon, he was probably already awake, and might not even have been in his room. She didn’t stop to consider this before throwing another pebble.

“Ooh!” she yelped in surprise as Niro’s window flew open, and she saw the rock she had just thrown heading right for his face. She cringed, and her cry of, “Niro, watch out!” seemed to come well after the stone had pelted him right between the eyes. There was a momentary pause of silence before her voice trailed through the window again. “Niiiiro. . . are you alright?” Oh no! I’ve killed him! were the thoughts rampaging through her head. She was still grimacing by the time Niro returned to the window.

Then she laughed. “Ohhh my god, I’m so sorry!” Her words were broken by her laughter. “That was a good one, I can’t believe I got you right --" Her words were interrupted by another bout of laughter when she noticed the shield he had brought with this time. Unable to resist the temptation, she picked up another two pebbles and tossed them up.

Finally she began to calm a bit, but as usual the smile would not leave her muzzle. She panted, the laughter that capped her long jog finally got her out of breath. She bent over a little, peering up at Niro’s window out of the corner of her eye.

“Well,” she huffed. “You just gonna stand there or are you gonna come down here and see what I have to show ya? Or we can do more target practice!” She grinned mischievously as she reached for another pebble. Although she didn’t really make an effort to keep the whole pelting her brother with rocks thing going. Instead, she decided to enjoy a little respite while she waited for him to make his way out to her. She quickly surveyed her surroundings, and then disappeared behind a tree that seemed to just be waking up from the waning winter.

The shaggy pink on the end of her tail undoubtedly gave her position away, especially to astute eyes like Niro’s. But, in her defense, she wasn’t really hiding. She whooped when the rock hit the tree, and made a half-barking sound that was uncommon for her in her Optime form. She shuffled behind the tree, trying to draw her body up and make herself smaller so the oncoming revenge from her brother may not be successful, but she was no competition! She glanced over her shoulder and stared right back at her brother . . . on a much shorter scale than normal. While he was preoccupied with the pebbles and coming down to see what she wanted, she had changed into her Lupus form.

Her eyes widened as she noted the inevitable attack, and just as she jerked to get out of the way the pebble pegged her in the leg. She yelped, though it was playful, not painful, and barked at Niro. “Hey! Didn’t your momma ever teach you not to hit a girl!” She snorted, trotting over to him and looking up, tail wagging. It was a rare sight to see Orin in her Lupus form.

She dropped her chest to the ground, wiggling her rump in that irresistible, universal challenge to play. “See how fast I changed? I’m getting better at it!” She boasted, and then butted her head into Niro’s hip.

With a yap, she bounded around him and snatched his tail in her mouth, pulling him around in a circle before letting go and bounding a few paces off. She stopped several yards away from him, paws and tail animated, and looked over her shoulder. “Come on, slowpoke! I’ve got something to show you!”

And no way am I jogging back there in Optime. She mused to herself. I’m fit enough, though I think I need to exercise a little more, but that form is just so slow. She was really quite a fast little bullet in all of her forms, though for true speed and endurance, she always preferred Old Reliable . . . her natural wolf body.

Once she spied Niro’s slate-colored form darting towards her, she bolted off again. She cut a clear path almost exactly from the way she had come (but not the way she had originally gotten to her destination, for that was round-about and askew), following her own tracks and scent. She led her brother North, through the streets of Lunenburg and towards the Shattered Coast. As they bolted through the mostly abandoned city, held together and kept up by a few pack members here or there, her eyes began to wander. At one point, she led Niro around the wrong turn and to a dead end, where she promptly spun around and pounced her brother playfully before dashing off in the right direction again. Sometimes, when she thought he might overtake her, for he could probably follow her light scent trail, she would dodge this way, or that, to throw him off, or trip him, or other games of devious sibling rivalry.

Eventually, the two made an exit from the city and flew into the territory of the Shattered Coast. Her tongue lolled out of the side of her mouth, and she panted heavily from the extended run, but still in her excitement, she would not stop until she brought Niro to her destination. It almost seemed that she would run right off the map, when finally, at the far end of the Shattered Coast, her jog slowed to a peppy walk. There was a heavy gale here, whipping cold winds through their fur, like the tail end of Winter not wanting to relinquish its reign to Spring. The waves crashed madly against the cliffs, and the oceanspray dappled their coats but did not penetrate her thick underfur.

She panted still as she trotted and looked at Niro. “You’re still here?” She yipped and bumped into his side before bounding a few steps ahead to avoid any retaliation. She glanced over her shoulder at him, taunting, and then looked ahead at their destination.

Before them, at the end of the cliff face that they padded on the northernmost tip of the Shattered Coast, loomed a portentous structure. It was marvelous - majestic even - the way it watched over land and sea alike, teetering on the brim of two worlds. Gulls seemed to float about its precipice, too lazy to bother to fight the winds and fly forward. Occasionally, the high tide that assaulted the rocks would crash with such a vigor that the waves would spray all around the structure and punctuate its very presence.

She slowed as she neared the great construction and stopped a few meters from its walls. Time had worn away brick and mortar here and there. A stair had crumbled away. A railing was being consumed by rust. But ultimately, the lighthouse was in great condition.

She peered up the tower and squinted at the lantern room that seemed to kiss the sky. She marveled that, from this vantage point anyway, it seemed to be fully in tact. She had never seen anything like this. Perhaps there had been some monolithic skyscrapers that far surpassed the height of this tower in the condensed cities of Florida, but she had been too preoccupied watching over her shoulder to take a moment to look upwards and marvel at the architecture there.

“Have you ever seen anything like it? Do you know what it is? I think I know, I’ve read about them.” She couldn’t bring herself to look away while she spoke to Niro. There was a somber, awed tone to her voice that made it almost inaudible beneath the waves and the relentless wind. Her eyes turned from the skytower to the stone stairway that led to the entrance. The stairs were well enough in tact to get them there, they would just have to skip a collapsed stone or two. “I haven’t been inside yet.”

She tripped forward a couple steps when her brother bumped into her rump, but was too preoccupied with the spire before them to retort. When he corroborated her suspicion of the purpose of this building, her face lit up and her heart skipped a beat. “Marvelous!” How simply marvelous this find was. “This place has everything, Niro,” she mused. “Heroes, horses, grand old buildings. . . all right out of my books!” It seemed she had forgotten what form she had taken, and almost started to make a grandiose gesture with her forelimbs before remembering she needed them for balance, so instead she executed a small hop.

“Hey, not so fast!” She snorted as Niro began to take off for the door without her. Her haunches bunched and she was soon in motion, bumping her shoulder into her brother’s rump to throw him off balance before racing to the stairs herself. She jumped in a great arch, clearing half the stairs in one bound, and soon was at the top pedestal, looking back at her brother and grinning her triumph.

Her nose got to working to ensure that they were not about to trespass in anyone’s home, but it had been so long since the last living creature crossed this stoop that the scents had all diminished. All that was left to smell here was dust, sea salt, and seagull droppings.

For a moment she considered shifting back to Optime, but the anticipation was too much and she couldn’t bear the notion of waiting any longer. She put her nose to the edge of the door and the jamb, and could see the old deadbolt had been broken some time ago. She pushed lightly, but the door would not budge. Exasperated, she looked for Niro, before pushing against the door with more force. This may have been a difficult but reasonable task for her Optime body, but this small wolf was no match for the rust-glued hinges of the great door. “A little help?”

She wedged her shoulder up against the door and helped Niro shove at the aged wood with all her might. When the rust finally cracked from the hinges and the door gave way, swinging in a wide arc, she tumbled into the darkness next to her brother. She did a somersault, and came to a stop on the ground on her side. She quickly rolled onto her stomach and stared up, wide-eyed, at the strange, twiggy thing that gaped back at Niro. “Wow!” She scrambled to her paws and was at her brother’s side in an instant.

This peculiar, unfamiliar skeleton wasn’t as alien to Orin as it had been to Niro. The majority of books she had read had been written about and by humans, and many of them had illustrations to accompany the text. It hadn’t been long before Orin was able to recognize drawings of humans – men, women, and children alike. And certainly in some of the more macabre tales she had read, there had been paintings of creeps and ghouls and skeletons too.

Her nose worked, sniffing at the bones but once again only finding the dusty scent of age and no trace of what a human may have smelled like. “It’s a human,” she informed her brother as she nudged at the ribcage and jostled the thing. She cringed and leaped as the skull rolled off of its precarious perch and clattered to the ground. “Or, well. . . it was a human. Look at how much smaller it is than we are in Optime. . . even me. I didn’t know they were that litte.”

She wanted to inspect the remains more, but was distracted by the interior of the lighthouse. Her eyes wandered as she took in the deep stone walls that had kept this little abode safe; there were broken shelves full of gear and old supplies, much of it still recognizable in its shape. Above there was no ceiling, only a winding spiral-staircase that took the occupant up into the lantern room. There was a living space off through a small hall, and she wandered towards it. She nudged the door with her muzzle and this one swung open freely. Inside, through the filtered light that came through the windows, she could make out moth-eaten furniture and the silhouette of another skeleton in the bed. She frowned, intrigued and disgusted by the bones all at once.

“There’s another one in here,” she said offhandedly to her brother as she trotted back. “Is there anything you want to keep?” And with that, the twisting stairway snagged her attention, and she began the ascent.

She stopped at the top of the stairwell and turned, peering back down for her brother but not seeing him past the first arch of the steps. She barked once, and the sound echoed down the cylinder, reverberating off the stone walls in a hundred directions. She laughed and barked again, amusing herself with the resonance until she could finally see Niro’s Optime form trudging up the stairs. “What took you so long?” But the question was clearly in jest, for she could see he had taken pause to change.

She pranced along the small platform to the door of the lantern room and peered at it in anticipation. She could hear scuffling behind the door accompanied by the occasional screech or rustle of feathers. “We can scare them off,” she muttered as she lowered her head. A deep growl rumbled from her chest, a sound that was utterly unusual for Orin to make, and did not seem it could come from her small, innocent form. Just as briskly as it had started, the growl dissipated and she looked up at her brother with a very wolfish grin. “Lets go!” She hollered, nudging the door with her muzzle.

The scent of ocean air poured into the room as the door swung open. This room had not been as well preserved as the living and working quarters downstairs, but was still astounding to behold. The entire room was constructed of several panes of shaped glass; the years and weather had shattered a couple panes, and cracked one or two more, letting the sea and avian life ravage the room. The floorboards were turgid with moisture, and on the far end were just about to give way to the wet and decay. “It looks like we got here just in time!” she celebrated. And suddenly her plans to fix up the lighthouse became quite clear. “These boards would have rotted through any day now, and then the ocean would have eaten this place alive.”

She braved a cautious step into the room. The floorboards creaked beneath her weight but seemed sturdy enough here. The lantern that stood in the center was untouched by the humans’ most updated technology, but Orin would not know the difference until she researched these structures in depth. Dander and feather plumes swirled in the air that rushed in from the broken windows. Whitewash littered the floor and the heady scent of bird was thick in the air. By the looks of several nests, occupied or abandoned, strewn throughout the room and including one constructed right in the lamp itself, the gulls had taken a liking to this shelter and several families of seabirds had made this their home. And now they were all staring straight at the intruding Luperci.

Her eyes peered up at her brother for a moment before she turned back to the gulls. Taking another step inside, she lowered her head and growled again, warning the creatures they had intruded upon. When they did not budge, she barked a warning, trying to scatter them out the open glass panes.

She tried to pay careful attention as she padded onto the waterlogged boards and chased off a few of the nesting gulls, but the more noise she made with her snarls and barking, the less she heard the groaning of the precarious floorboards. She had not meant to wander as far into the room as she had, but easily got carried away.

Realization of just how far into the room she had tread slowly came over her as Niro’s warning boomed from behind. He sounded really serious this time; though he often did, there was an urgency in his tone that not even Orin could ignore on her most adventurous of days. Something in his voice and the way he asserted himself sounded so like those days back in Florida, and it sent a small pang of fright through her. She froze in her tracks and peered back over her shoulder at Niro, the fur on the back of her neck standing on end.

The room was silent for a moment save for the frantic seagulls, and now that she wasn’t yipping and nipping at them they were beginning to settle back into their nests. Aside from that, everything was in it’s place, so what was Niro worried about? The wind was rushing in through the broken glass, the sound of the waves crashed against the cliffs, the floor groaned. . .

She lowered her head and whimpered softly as she realized the predicament she had gotten into. Somehow, she was all the way across the room now, and although the lantern room was not that large, it felt like Niro was a thousand miles away. She briefly glanced to the view outside, noting just how far up in the tower they were, and remembering how hollow the structure had been.

She took a step forward, feeling the wood with her forepaw and slowly lowering her weight onto it. She thought she could feel it bend, thought she could see it bend, and suddenly the ground was much more fragile than when she had made her brash entrance. “Niro. . .” she spoke in a shaky whisper, as though just talking too loud would seal her fate. “Niro. . . the floor doesn’t seem very stable here.” If she hadn’t been in such a plight, it might have been comical the way she stated the obvious, and only now acknowledged the obvious. She tried to brave another step forward but the burdened wood moaned, and she lifted her paw as quickly as she had set it down. “What do I do?”

Her eyes shut tightly as he explained to her what to do. The animal instinct inside of her made her feel like if she just couldn’t see the weakened floor for a moment, she would be okay. Did it suddenly just get colder in here? That could not be, the cold never bothered her before. She felt like her legs would start trembling, and that would do neither of them any good.

She forced her eyes open again and looked at the lamplight in the center. Surely there had been extra support built around it, and Niro had to be right. . . if she could just get over to it. “What if it’s too heavy there?” she worried, then remembered that there was no post running up the middle of the tower. There must have been support beams through the floor and ceiling holding the lamp in place.

Her brother didn’t respond to her fear, and it was probably for the better. He was focused, puzzling out how to get her out of the room safely when she herself did not have the calm to manage it. She looked to him and then back to the center of the room, and worried her paws wouldn’t move!

That was when he shouted, and it was like his voice liberated her legs. She concentrated on the dead-center of the room and lurched forward. Being fast and light on her feet was something Orin could do, and she called upon her unbridled gift now as she soared over the boards. She was just about up against the lamp when a paw came down. . . and didn’t stop. She yelped as she tripped, her hind leg going through the floorboard, but despite her stumble she was able to throw herself forward and keep her body from crashing into one spot and surely busting the insecure support beneath her.

She glanced over her shoulder at the small hole she’d punched in the wood. At one time this had been solid, reliable oak, but now it was little more than cardboard. “Okay. . . I’m this far. . . Now what? I think I can jump it.” Surely if she was able to leap far enough and clear most of the crumbling floor it would be better than not, but if she did not go far enough she may fall through upon landing, and there was certainly no way to manage a running start.