_____He had been about five seconds short of throwing a troublesome bottle of wine against a tree when a call raised up towards the sky and rushed through the thick wood of the forest. It was so sudden and unexpected that it jolted him enough to forget what he was doing momentarily; his tall ears perked sharply to listen while his hands froze with one on the bottleneck and the other still gripping the cork tightly. When it had started to die down, his desire to tear into the one dud bottle of liquor (Who in the hell put a wine bottle in with whiskey, anyway?) he had brought back days ago went with it.


_____So he set it down beside where he was sitting and rose to his feet, dusting himself off and for once actually meandering out towards the borders at his own pace. Though it wasn't as slow as he would usually take it—no sense in making anyone think no one was at home—and before too long he was able to pick up the pair of dark figures through the forestry haze and foliage. What he didn't expect was that it was Khaden and Ember. “This is a surprise,” he called out to them as he closed the distance between them, letting a smile play easy on his features. “I didn't know you two knew each other. But what brings you out to this neck of the woods?”

_____He was pretty sure he had heard of Shadowed Sun one way or another, albeit it didn't really ring too distant of a bell. Twilight Vale on the other hand, he knew about. He knew a few faces from there because they were the neighbour from the south… but he had thought they were better off than that. Laurel didn't linger long to that notion, only nodding plainly as Khaden spoke. It was Ember's comments however, that provoked a better reaction out of him. “It's a small world,” he chuckled, knowing the real truth in that. Damn near everyone was related to one another, he was learning. “But we've always got room here. I don't know about spare tents or anything but there might be a couple of things laying around you guys can have.”


_____But of course, if they were looking to stay permanent, which he surmised with himself, there were other things at hand. “And if you're looking to stick around for a while, even better. We could always use a few more hands to do things. Either one of you two have a handy skill?” And even if they didn't, that was fine too. Even menial tasks were good enough, especially when they thrived very much on the whole help one another to help oneself kind of thing. Talk about the sick shack and its inhabitants would come a bit later; he had already mentioned the sick to Ember previously but it was always needing a reiteration.

_____Despite all of the bad fortune that had been shifted to his side of the scale, Laurel thought that they were getting things in fair trade. Strike down a portion of the troupe with a mystery illness that made them speak in tongues and scream, get a bunch of folks who knew what the hell they were doing to fix it. End up with a group that was mostly full of folks who'd sooner eat all of the apples out of the nearby trees and drink, get a hunter. “Well, we really don't have ranks around here,” he answered; he wouldn't have been so quick to call them a pack either but at any point they were composed more of people who didn't travel than not. “Everyone around here takes care of each other and whatever skill we're best at is what I guess you could call the rank. We're all pretty much equals here too, for that matter. But we do need someone who's good at hunting,” at which point he grinned to Khaden, “and if you wanted to be some sort of counsellor or advisor thing, I don't have a problem with it. It sounds like a good skill to have to me.”

_____“Nah, nothing like that. But if you'll follow me, we can head back to the camp site and I can point things out to you.” And with that, he turned his back to the pair and headed back towards the depths of the forest, letting both the haze and fog envelope them along the way. “I will let you guys in on a warning though. I know I told Ember about the folks who are sick the last time I we met, but we're keeping them in a shack here that our carpenter built. His name is Laurent, big tall guy. But anyway, it's the only one that we've got around right now and that's where those folks are. We've got one in a shed, but that's only because he's a bit more hostile than the rest of them.” A bit more hostile was putting it lightly, because Laurel thought he had gone absolutely crazy the night he had thrown him in there. “I don't know what they've got and frankly I've kind of stayed out the way, but a couple of others and a girl from Inferni have been coming and taking care of them.”

_____As the camp site rolled up into view through the trees, Laurel's olive-tinted eyes scanned it over passively for a moment before shaking his head. “No caves that I know of, but I think there may be an old den somewhere in that direction,” in which he gestured, “that belonged to someone who was with us for a while. He moved on, I assume, since I haven't seen him since we came to settle here.” Free for the taking and if he came back, well, they'd just deal with that then. But Laurel didn't think that they would see him again any time soon because he had been so outrageously out of place amongst them to begin with. An eavesdropper turned companion. “Anyway, that's the shack n’ shed I was talking about. As you can see, the rest of us are pretty much scattered around in tents.” Being travellers and all, tents were easier to disassemble and pack up and go. Buildings were much more permanent in his eyes.

_____Though he couldn't remember if anyone else had ever asked about the other inhabitants of the camp site, Laurel played off his fumbling attempt to try and count how many of them had filtered though. With the way that they all went about their days loosely and wandered about, sometimes it hard to say whether or not they were still around or moved on. If some of them had moved on, they certainly lacked manners as far as goodbyes went. After a pause and a ‘hmm’ sound, he came up with his own figure. “There's probably six or seven others not counting myself and you two. I can't say much about all of them but they're good people through and through. They fit here pretty well, so all I can say is that it probably couldn't hurt to get to know them.” No doubt with all of their collective and sordid histories, the fact that so far they had all meshed together without conflict was good enough for him. But he had been preoccupied too long to branch far; just in the same sense that they hadn't planted their roots all that long ago. “Some of us are travellers, others are a bit more permanent too,” he went on to add, just because it would need saying. “So some of them will probably move on because that's just the lifestyle that they live.”