There was a sharp malcontent this night.

The moon hung gravid in the western sky, its light illuminating the wood. It flashed reds and greens through the bouncing water, like a sputtering neon sign, the moment a foot struck its surface. The forest was dark and imperceptible, everything cast together by the swipe of a watercolor brush. It was the dark kind of night where things went right for the criminals, and very bad for those who hunted them. Smoke drifted along the breeze, spiced by tobacco, as a detective walked a dirty path. Her paws dug into the dark rock beneath her, orange eyes locked onto the distant flag of a tail. Her tongue hung free from between her little ivory teeth, her sides moving like a bellows. The scum in front of her had led her all this way, and she couldn’t afford to lose them. Rozabela, ignited at her edges by the moon behind her, snarled a note and dove into the dark brush. Once they were behind bars, she would hit the bar, go home, and pretend putting another in the slammer made her feel something. Her paws churned through the dense packed dirt, swerving through the neon night.

She was close. She could taste the dirt a criminal carried, resting on the back of her tongue. This one had done her wrong through a friend, and through thousands of friends across her home, her city. They were a politician of the worst of kinds, and she came to collect the debt he owed her in skin and sinew. Her eyes squinted through the dead black, catching sight of a flagging white tail.

How much can I pay you to leave me be! Roza ground her teeth together.

You couldn't give me the world to quit.

Her path led her stumbling over a stone, then another, until she was scrambling up the steps to a.. ruin? There wasn’t ruins anywhere near town, but she couldn’t let this one get away. She ran through the shadowed ruins with single minded focus, not noticing at all as the world changed around her, until she stumbled into light. She threw a paw up to try and block the sun, feeling the cold pierce her like a knife. And when she lowered her paw, she was alone.

No criminal. And definitely not where she had started.

---

Kasey

this wasn't where kasey had started either.
her day began as they always did; with the sun creeping up over the prairie until the sky is nothing but an endless cerulean sea. she'd dug out a bone from her cache for breakfast, washed up in the creek, and moved on with her day. she was meant to catch a buck today.
as she got closer to the woods, the sky above began to shift. no longer was it blue but green, a sickly kind of green, like something that would come out of a nostril. the trees felt like they were moving. was she dying? it wasn't panic that grabbed kasey but frustration, frustration over the fact that she could no longer move and her vision grew black spots.
until it all went black.
as she stirs, it feels as if she's been asleep for thousands of years. her eyes feel crusty and her nose is dry, as is her mouth. she probably smells like shit. her muscles ache. rising to her elbows, she blinks away the sleep and takes in her surroundings for the first time.
where the fuck is she?

Rozabela believed in things that were real. The guttering of failing neon lights. Her paws against the hot concrete. Shady bars, worse men. Those were things that were real. Those were things that made sense.

This? This didn’t at all. When she looked around her, it was ruins. All of it. Ruins she didn’t recognize, and a swamp she had never stepped foot in before. She would know, she hated the smell that wafted off those that did. She felt her lip twitch as the smell reached her. Dead fish, decaying plant matter, and the faintest wiff of the desolation of stone around her from the water’s ceaseless war. She was atop a dias, like a priestess addressing a crowd. Roza, who’d never been particularly religious, recognized the blasphemy and quickly scrambled down the steps.

Of course, that’s when she noticed the figure. Red and brown, brawny, laid among the stones, groaning. She slowed.

Pardon! Her snappy voice rose, the itch to find the bastard she’d been chasing near overwhelming.

You haven’t happened to see another wolf nearby? Perhaps running? She refused to believe this was happening. Perhaps a hallucinogenic gas. Or she’d been knocked out, and this was a dream. That would make more sense than transmogrification.

is she dreaming? she has to be dreaming. not only has she fallen asleep and woken up somewhere else, but there are two things very distinctly wrong with this new environment:
1. the rocks are too tall.
2. there's a woman here.
instinct kicks kasey into overdrive. her massive body practically launches into the air, back arched and hackles furiously raised in surprise. she pauses, watching, staring, processing, face contorting into an unreadable smorgasbord of confusion and frustration and god if her head would just stop fucking pounding. whuh! who the fuck are you?!
she raises a paw to her temple before collapsing back down into a sit. sorry. no, i haven't seen anybody. if you can't tell, i just fuckin' woke up. a sigh escapes her tense jaws. seriously, who are you? can you tell me where i am so i can get gone?

The figure was a brawny woman, with doughy eyes and the face of someone who’d seen hard work. Roza had met many a hard worker who’d fallen to her door, begging her help, begging her retribution, begging against her reputation to help. She’d done so, of course. She’d sunk her teeth into all kinds of greedy bosses, into their pockets, their smug faces, their hearts.

Each one had led her down a deeper, darker web, woven on the backs of the city’s poorest. The wolf she chased was yet another thread, another connection she had needed. Another file in her cabinet, another awful creature who deserved no quarter removed from the world.

Rozabela Tondra. Which is why her voice falls from her lips like a smoker’s cough. Unpleasant, a little wet with something. It’s an awful metaphor, but she was a detective, not a poet. The hard orange of her eyes glittered with each back and forth whip of her head, and she let loose a tch of irritation.

If I had an answer to that question, I wouldn’t be asking you where the bastard I was chasing was. Observation put them in a swamp ruin, of course, but even the air tasted different. Electrified. It singed Roza’s already frayed nerves, ticked a nerve against her forehead.

I came out over there. You didn’t see anyone? She stressed the last word, letting it hiss between her teeth. That vermin couldn’t have scuttled to a hidey hole that quickly. They were around here somewhere, they had to be. Nothing else made any sort of sense.