Plot Picture Challenge 38

[Greenie]

A picture is worth a thousand words, as is often quoted.
How does the picture below speak to you? Perhaps as a poem? Perhaps a roleplay idea? Maybe a story?
Whatever comes to your mind, write those words down! All is well and welcome, whether a couple of sentences or more!

 

[Take Without Touching]

On the first day I saw nothing. Just the trees and the plants and the growth, reaching out of the soil and towering higher with each step.

On the second day I saw nothing. The trees were taller now, older, wiser. Thickets and ferns obscured the trail, but it did not stop me.

On the third day I saw nothing. But- was there a wood this ancient elsewhere on the hemisphere? In the world?

On the fourth day I saw something. A flicker of fur and flesh, the glint of clever eyes, a laugh that could have been running water. Has it been here the entire time?

On the fifth day I saw Her. Like the Cheshire Cat she hung from a tree, her bent legs hooked over a stray limb. Was that curiosity or humor that she watched me with?

On the sixth day, I saw nothing, heard everything. The wind was not wind, but whispers, songs, ballads. The river I drank from babbled secrets to me. The birds cried warnings.

On the seventh day, I met her in the heart of the forest. I do not remember what she taught me, and I'm not supposed to. But she did allow me to leave with something far more precious that knowledge, and that is an idea.

 

[PoetLore]

She stood in the midst of the forest, light somehow shining about her though it was the middle of the night. I was hidden high in the trees for the night, attempting to escape becoming the prey of some nocturnal hunter. Leaning over the branch a bit to see her better, I nearly fell from my perch. The rustling of the trees leaves alerted her to my presence.

The luminescent butterflies that surrounded her flew up to me and lit the place where I hid. Her eyes followed and fixed on me and then she fluttered her wings and rose to face me. She hovered there before me in silence, inspecting me looking into me and making me feel naked though i was fully clothed.

And then as quickly as she came, she was gone again and i was left in the blackness of a moonless night to ponder what I had seen.

 

[Doctor Jax]

A gush of air left me as I stared at her. Horns had sprouted from her head, a tail squirming out over the top of her jeans in a thick vulpine fluff. Her skin was mottled green and gray and brown and orange, all the colors of a forest floor, and I could only sit and stare at her here.

I had sat next to her in math class. I had helped her with trig. I had loaned her my good mechanical pencil.

Which I still wanted back, by the way.

"Oh! Grant! What are you--?" she squealed, and I fired back, "You never gave me back my pencil."

She stared at me, wide-eyed as a doe, before she slowly dug her hand into her pocket and pulled out one of my good Pilot brand pencils. She handed it to me, and I took it, my eyes following her suspiciously.

"I-I'm... I'm sorry, I forgot, and.... can we forget that this happened?" she asked, spreading out hands that oddly had pads on each finger, like a fox or a cat. The claws clacked as she put her hands together in a prayer position, my brain trying to process what I was seeing.

"What.... are you?"

"That's a good question," she said with false cheer, sweeping a finger into an underhanded arc, before continuing, "it'd take too long to explain."

"Okay, better question - what are you doing in a high school," I posited, and she seemed to take that one in greater stride.

"There's... someone I'm looking for."

"Uh...huh."

"It's complicated."

"I gathered."

She looked over my shoulder and mentioned, "Hey, your lunch period is almost over. You're a sophomore, right?"

My eyes widened as I glanced over my shoulder, wondering if I had lost track of time, but everybody was still out in the yard for recess. I turned back around, and she had disappeared into the forest.

Well, if that wasn't a bummer.