Author: Pook
Strange things were going on at the place Pook had made into her home, with a pile of bar rags of varying levels of cleanlyness arranged into a Pook Nest near the hearth downstairs at the Wisps and Spirits tavern. There was a lot of fighting lately, and a lot of people talking VERY LOUD, and all of her people seemed upset, even though MeeshMeeshMeesh was back.
And then one day there was a piece of paper put up on the door, and her people were gone.
Pook had gone a very long time without people. A very very very long time. So long a time that she couldn't even remember how long of a time it was. But now that she had gotten used to being around people she found that when she wasn't, she felt alone and sad like the first few times the seasons had changed all the way around after her Nightsaber mother was taken.
And so she set out to find her people.
At one point she found a jungle with a lot of big lizards and mean bugs. There was a cow man there who seemed to want to talk to her because she could change her shape and fix up hurts. He persuaded her, after many attempts at explaining, that he very much NEEDED some mushrooms and the stingers off some of the meanest of the mean bugs. There seemed to be many other people who could change their shape, cow men and women and people shaped like her with their long ears, doing the very same thing, so the cow man must have needed an awful LOT of these things for some reason. There weren't even hardly any mean bugs to kill!
She stood in an otherwise empty chamber in the squirmy bug place and poked at a pulsing sac hanging from the ceiling with one finger to pass the time until more bugs showed up...poke...poke...poke...
Suddenly some of her people appeared! The Girl with the Lion and the Sneaky Man and the Man with Shiny Skin! Together they all killed a VERY mean bug and she got the stingers that she needed finally.
Upon returning to the cow man with them, he made it into some kind of barb.
"Now," he said holding out the spear, "I need you to go stick a Devilsaur with this."
"Prrow?" Pook said, not understanding.
"You know, one of those. The really big ones," the cow man said, pointing out at a passing gigantic lizard so big that the ground shook when it went by. "Stick it. With this!" He made some stabby motions with the weapon.
"...Rrrow." Pook said with a deadpan expression and one eyebrow raised.
"No really! In the name of science! And Druids! Or something!" The cow man said with a grin. "This'll sedate it, but I don't know how quickly..."
Grumbling the whole way, Pook cautiously approached the Tyrant Devilsaur. Finally when its back was turned she ran up and THWACK! stuck the barb squarely in the back of its leg.
The Devilsaur turned and pondered this for a minute, and then pondered the little Night Elf frozen in fear and anticipation. It rasied its head in an almost contemplative manner.
And then it decided that the Night Elf needed to die.
"RRRRROOWWWWW!" Pook yelled, fleeing from the enraged, roaring beast. In her flight she happened to see her people watching her from afar. They seemed to think that this was very funny.
Later, licking her wounds and still very grumpy, she happened on the place where the Little Green Men lived by the water. And lo and behold, there were MORE of her people! MeeshMeeshMeesh and JinxJinxJinx and...the Man with the Bright Hair!
Pook was utterly fascinated by the hair of the Man with the Bright Hair. It was so...shiny! And red! And it was tied back like a tail, like it was just ASKING to be gnawed on! She had on many occasions snuck up behind him and tried to do just this, or take some hair, or just mess with it. He didn't seem to like this very much, but was usually gracious if a bit alarmed about it, even if he DID sometimes try to trick her with fish that turned out to be flowers and push her into the WATER, of all places.
Tonight, though, he was acting strangely. Well, everyone was acting strangely, really. They were dancing and stumbling around and not wearing their clothes. And when she tried to give his hair a friendly gnaw, he YELLED at her! And growled! And tried to fight her!
Pook hid in a corner for a while next to the Dead Girl with Flowers, and it took quite a bit of persuading from MeeshMeeshMeesh for her to come out again. Later she followed JinxJinxJinx into a room where MeeshMeeshMeesh was talking to another man with long ears like hers in whispery talk and oh, very seriously. With serious faces. She tended to try to avoid going in to rooms when people were like this, they didn't really seem to like it. She only had a very narrow grasp on what went on when people went together into rooms or under waterfalls or in secluded gazebos and bushes, but she knew one thing for sure, and that was that they didn't want other people coming around when they did. But JinxJinxJinx seemed to think that it was okay, and so she followed.
Everyone talked seriously for a while, and then excitedly, and then nervously. They seemed to be making a big deal about something, but whatever it was Pook didn't understand it. It was all right. She didn't understand most things. She was just happy to be around her people again. After a while they decided to let MeeshMeeshMeesh rest, and Pook was ready for some rest too. She curled up on the other bed, making a contented purring noise. She was happy to have found her people. They were all talking about something called a "Vay-cay-shun". Whatever it was, it seemed like a good idea.