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The Watcher in the Mud (13) : With so much rain lately, it's not surprising to find muddy patches throughout the city. Aside from being very slippery, there's nothing notable about most of them. Most. At first, there's only the strange sensation of being watched--and then, you see why.

The eyes. There are eyes in the mud.

Two, staring up at you, and nothing else. No face, no form. Sometimes the mud is totally flat, sometimes it's sunken into the ground a bit, sometimes it's built up like a small hill--but the eyes are always the same. Blinking, occasionally. Tracking you. Moving, if they need to--with surprising ease.

Kick them, disturb the mud, or try to bury them, and they'll simply roll or swivel back into place to continue watching. Even if you try to leave, they'll move until they run out of mud--and then watch until you disappear from sight. If you linger long enough, the eyes will eventually grow heavy and slowly close before sinking beneath the mud.


Strange phenomena loved cropping up all over Destiny City, it was known.

It was one of the reasons why, in spite of herself, Andesine still sometimes wished that things had worked out for her to stay in Brooklyn. At least the weird nonsense in Brooklyn was mostly limited to the realm of “this late-night shift cashier at the bodega near my old apartment who was a total freak and semi-regularly tried to get me to sell my blood” and “so, this one time when one of my fellow chorus members got really ******** up on like five different substances at once.”

More boring than what Destiny City could offer, sure, but it also required a different kind of vigilance, one that usually felt like less of a burden.

You didn’t need to escort youma around town on a leash back in Brooklyn. As yet, Andesine hadn’t found much trouble with that. Amylthia was conveniently sized for getting into a dog collar (something that she had welcomed, all starry-eyed and eager, as a signifier of friendship). She had also proven shockingly amenable to going around town on a leash. The way she’d explained things—after their second time out like that, when Andesine had asked why Amylthia didn’t seem to mind much, when it seemed to her that other youma might have done so—the little youma saw all of this as a game, something that they were doing together and that Amylthia intended to win.

Which made sense enough, Andesine supposed. Between her uniform being one of the Negaverse stylings that she could more easily pass off as “normal but with a unique sense of panache” and Amylthia being so conventional pet-sized, they didn’t have to pretend they were cosplaying some hipster-a** anime or gacha game that you probably never heard of, the way that senshi might have done. And it was easy to slip into seeing things in the same delightfully odd way that Amylthia did: everyone who passed by without doing a double-take at all of Amylthia’s obviously non-canine traits—from her tail, to her eyes, to the unicorn-looking horn in the middle of her little forehead—counted as a victory. Maybe not an earth-shattering one, but a victory nevertheless.

Amylthia seemed to take the same approach to traipsing around in the mud tonight. Tugging on the leash, but not so hard as to be annoying, she’d led Andesine away from one of the paths in this park that they knew better. As they moved further and further away from pavement and into mud, Amylthia stomped her little paws as though she thought she was trampling her enemies underfoot.

“I don’t know what you think we’re going to find out this way,” Andesine pointed out, only able to muster so much impatience when she couldn’t deny: she found her youma companion’s odd behaviors endlessly charming. “The people with the drainable energy are back that way.”

There weren’t even any faint-ish aura signatures that might have been one of Amylthia’s fellow youma.