Katlynn laid awake in her little hammock, strung across an unused corner of her cabin listening to the early morning birdsong. "Guess last night's storm didn't want to stay for breakfast..." it had been a hell of a thing too, forming suddenly just a few dozen miles a way and growing in intensity as the evening progressed, she'd barely had enough time to secure all of her random assorted things that clustered her homestead before it started raining.
Rolling out of the hammock, Rush landed with catlike grace, her feet barely registering an impact on the ground. Grabbing up two thin cut logs from the woodpile next to her hammock and tossed them toward the glowing coals of her fireplace. Oddly enough, they fell incredibly slowly- landing with a barely audible crunch as they settled. Once those started to catch she'd toss some more on, get the cooking pot warm again. "Let's see, last night was supposed to be the full moon, so my meal rice should be ready for dehusking.." she said to no one in particular, "The rain will have stirred the mud in the rice patties, so that frees up some time, just need to make sure the flow streams aren't blocked."
She continued to talk her way through her mental checklist of what she needed to do today as she went about her morning routine. It was something she'd just started doing to alleviate the loneliness of living and training out in the Thunderbacks, waiting for the day her papa would return to help her further her training. She went about preparing herself a light breakfast of a few eggs and some rice porridge, she'd need to go hunting soon- her supply of smoked meat was far too low to use any for breakfast.
The sun had maybe been in the sky for less than an hour by time the young fox girl left the cabin in the mountains, taking in some of that fresh early morning air- feeling all the more raw from the storm the night before, she loved it, the cooling morning air contrasted in wonderful and weird way with the warming rays of the rising sun on her bare skin. Who needs clothes when you haven't seen another person in more than five year- made for one less chore to do. "Let's see, since I don't have to agitate the rice patties, I can squeeze in a few more hours of control training, or I can go back over those arcane textbooks papa left." She slowly turned back to face the house, thinking about the stack of textbooks in her unused bedroom- then turned back towards her rocky flat that she used for training, a break in the trees a little ways away from her homestead and rice patties.
The training flats wasn't much to look at, about three hundred meters across from one treeline to the other, with a sheer cliff face bordering one side and a sheer drop off the other, forming a sort of natural shelf. When she was younger, Rush had called this area the giant's stairwell, on account of another cliff shelf about a hundred meters above and below the one she trained on. There were mounds of stones located at various points all around the flat, ranging in sized from a pile of pea pebbles to a massive stack of boulders. The training she did here was all about finesse and control, flexing the mental prowess of her ability rather than the raw power of it.
Katlynn Rush, had an innate control over gravity, and was part of the reason her papa adopted her, and entirely the reason she lived out here as a hermit- far removed from the world and those who would abuse her power, to train and become more versed in controlling her own ability. Her papa had left to find out any information he could about her power, apparently he was a mage of some rapport, and had connections to magical archives, that had been five years ago. As she moved to a pile of rocks each roughly the size of her head, her hand flexed, a mandala of white power forming in the air in front of it as the stones in front of her began to lift into the air, a warm up before moving to the boulders.
Focusing on each other Rock in turn, she began shifting their individual gravity so the rocks started to orbit her, stepping towards the center of the field, the rocks moved from a singular orbit to a variety of unique orbits, some going the counter-direction as they each started to move independently of each other. seven stones in all, orbiting and never making contact with each other or the ground- Katlynn looked like the center of a fox tailed cosmos doing this. She'd gotten particularly good with this set, the boulders had enough weight to them to test her, but not so heavy that their own gravitational momentum made them impossible to control at higher speeds. The boulders? That was her current training set, the next challenge. Thankfully she'd only found five of useful size and roundness to use for this orbit training- she couldn't go nearly as fast with them- and they still occasionally struck each other.
After a few minutes without a single set of stones cracking together, she maneuvered them back to their pile, and looked over to the five massive boulders, sighing as she started to move forwards. She'd been unable to get all five to orbit her independently for nearly seven months now, she felt like she was just banging her head against a wall at this point. Because of their size, she had to push the orbits further out- which made them harder to control. Even at crawling speeds, these boulders still struck against each other or shifted to strike the ground.
As she moved closer, both her hands flexed- the rings of energy forming in front of them as she laid down an area of negated gravity over the boulders, slowly they started to rise up into the air- slowly she started to pull them away, taking a hold of each and pulling them out of the weightless area. That's when she saw it. The naked body- beaten bruised and all cut up body. Her mind jolted as she took in the sight. She went to let out a scream, but as she did- she realized that the boulders, and the body, were dropping. Her hand snapped out, applying several lashings to the boulder which then launched away from the body it was about to crush, her other hand snaked out, mentally grabbing the body's gravity and pulling it away from the falling boulders, keeping it off the ground. She was perhaps not as gentle as she could have been- but the groan of pain as the body careened through the air told her that whoever this stranger was, they were alive.
She reached out to slow him- very clearly a him to Katlynn's embarrassment -constantly shifting the way his gravity flowed to keep him above the ground. It was incredibly difficult- so much more so than keeping boulders aloft. His unconscious weight kept shifting, changing the way his body wanted to fall. It was incredibly awkward, but she quickly started to get a feel for it, shakily but gently setting him on the group. "Gods be damned man, just what the hell were you doing there?" she asked the unconscious man, as if he'd just suddenly wake up and answer her.
She kinda just, plopped onto the ground, still looking at the very severely unconscious man. "What the fuck even happened to you, you look like you tried to fight a bear.. Why are you naked?!" it was only then that she realized that, for one, she was starting to get a little hysterical, she needed to calm down and assess the situation, and perhaps his condition. Who even knew if she could do anything for him? For two, she herself was in fact, naked. "Oh gods damnit, if I'm going to be taking care of you mister 'crawls under some boulders to die' I guess I have to start wearing clothes again. There goes some of my free time to laundry.."
She couldn't just leave him out here to die, especially not after she'd just saved him from being crushed by a boulder. But she could already tell that she was substantially in over her head here. Her knowledge of treating and mending a person was remedial at best- mostly tending to her own bruises and scrapes, the rare broken bone.. Maybe one of her papa's books in his collection detailed how to heal someone? She had to try, so stood back up and gave the unknown man a once over- strictly to examine his injuries. Clearly several broken ribs, that leg was basically mangled- had he come all the way out here on it? She was days of hiking from the nearest town. He was covered in lacerations, some of which had started bleeding again when she'd mentally pulled him awkwardly through the air.
"I'm going to do my best to save your life stranger, in return, when you recover, tell me stories to break the monotony of this place. How you ended up here. Who you are." When the body didn't respond, she flexed her hands, both of them moving to enact her power on him, as gently as possible, he lifted from the ground and she slowly moved her back to her cabin- thankfully, there was one unused room available while her papa was away.
Papa's collection had included such a book! A very thick, leather bound thing without any sort of inscription or title, but the front of it was branded with the likeness of an Ouroboros with a triskelion at it's center. It was the third book she opened to see what it was, come to find out it was a very dense tome that read like it had been stolen from a university that specialized in mundane healing. Complete with sketches and diagrams. She'd taken the first hour after finding it skimming for information on how to treat her surprise guest, taken the next hour to follow it's instructions and pray they worked, and had spent the hours since sitting at papa's small desk reading over the book- starting with the first page. She decided to call this tome the Ouroborucus, because it sounded cool and there wasn't anything to indicate a name besides- that she'd found anyway.
Papa's books had been... off limits to her, papa had said that she could read them once he returned. But... this had been an emergency! And papa had been gone for five years at this point! And she'd already read all the other books papa had left for her studies many many times over. At least, that's how she'd justify it to her papa if he walked through the door right now. She looked away from the book to the bookshelf of her papa's books, all manner of strange things from all over the world. It was a small collection, and now that she'd started with Ouroborucus, she knew there was no helping it- she'd read the rest of the books there before the year was out.
Looking from the bookshelf to her guest- his leg in a splint, salve patches on most of his larger cuts- she hoped she wouldn't have to stitch him, and a different salve just plastered over his chest, he looked at least like he was resting easier than he had been. She made sure to stoke the fireplace in the main room, so it was warming up in here to a comfortable degree. "I hope you wake up soon, I can only do so much for you like this. Sorry but I'm not kiss feeding you, I have some food ready for you for when you wake up though.."
Looking out the window, the sun was climbing higher into the sky, probably nearing noontime now. "I still need to dehusk the rice.. I'm going to move my stuff to the porch and dehusk out there. Call out for me if you wake up stranger!" She turned to leave, stopping to give him a lingering, worried look, wondering if she'd done enough to save him, before leaving the room and leaving the front door open.
