Sleepless in Eterna City

They had made a catch. Niobe was sure of it. She could smell it. An animal in a trap always had a very peculiar smell. It was something about the sweat. It smelled distinct and pungent. Normally, you could smell if something had been sweating and it was a softer, muskier smell. The kind that gets worked up when you run a good distance or break a sweat climbing a hill. But not fear. Fear smelled different. Fear was intense. Sometimes, when she smelled it, she couldn't help but also see wide, bulging eyes and struggling feet. They flashed up on her mental screen unasked for.

She certainly didn't enjoy the experience. Still, it was practical.

If only she could remember where they had set the damn traps. The Mightyena scratched behind her ear and growled with a tinge of annoyance. This forest was so big and gloomy sometimes that she could hardly tell here she was sometimes. It must have been at least 4 or 5 PM, but inside the forest wit it's tall trees and bushy branches, it was as though there was only dawn and dusk. The tall woman's tail curled tightly around her leg as her brow furrowed behind a pair of round, pink tinted shades. She shoved her hands into the front pocket of a beaten and worn grey hoodie and fiddled with her fingers in an attempt to jog her memory. Was it by the old oak tree? No, maybe it at the river bed. No, not there. But she could have sworn she remembered water.

"Gah!" She shouted. She looked over her shoulder and sighed.

"Where the hell did we put the trap, squirt? I can literally smell dinner."

Artemis stood alone by a few trees, the thick foliage barely masking the old, worn down fencing on either side of the greenery, and more importantly, the path that ran down deeper into the old forest. To the untrained mind, the location may have simply looked like a deeper, thicker part of the woods, with a few strange pieces of wooden fencing mixed in with trees. To the untrained eye, one might have recalled an old chateau that supposedly stood in the forest a long time ago, but it had long since been abandoned, and nobody inhabited it out of practicality and superstition.

But to somebody with some kick-ass vision who had done some research on the topic?

It had taken the Luxray gijinka some time to look into the secrets of what exactly rested in the deeper portions of Eterna Forest. Chris hadn't been of any help to her, simply insisting that Artemis keep her nose out of it and look into something else. Strange, considering the Ninetales gijinka typically at least gave her a reason as to why she shouldn't check something else, but this time she just left it at a warning not to get involved. The old fox's warning only served to fuel her own interest, however, and so the Luxray simply had to resort to different means of research. She couldn't use Chris' library for research, considering the Ninetales would probably have her eye on the younger woman and her books, but the school she went to had a nice selection as well.

The books she found in her school's library hadn't offered her much help at first. They talked about the Old Chateau in Eterna Forest, but only mentioned the history of the building, and that it was haunted. Yeah. A haunted house wasn't what Chris wouldn't have wanted her to find for sure, so she'd kept searching. Sure enough, she had eventually found a book that gave her more to go on than some spooky human spirits supposedly wandering the halls of the place. Supposedly, one of the prior occupants, and possible current occupants, had been a Rotom...

Artemis' eyes flashed a golden hue for a moment as she stood before what was supposed to be the entrance to the Old Chateau, her vision intensifying as she found herself looking through the foliage, able to see past it and set her sights upon the path hidden behind, leading down to the entrance of an old, creepy looking house.

"Jackpot." Giving a small smirk, she brought her first up by her face and gave a little celebratory pump, approaching the overgrown pathway in her more humanoid form. Lowering to a crouch, she grabbed her chin with her right hand and looked around the area. Considering how thickly the trees had grown in, she probably wasn't squeezing by. Without a lot of low branches, climbing the trees seemed to be out of the question, which left cutting the trees down. And there were probably some rules about cutting down random trees in the middle of a forest.

Of course, there was the fence too. Standing back up, the Luxray gijinka stuck her hands in her jacket pockets and started to pace down over to the fence, glancing at it and giving it a once-over. It was old, sure, but it seemed sturdy enough to climb. Clasping her hands together, Artemis brought her arms up over her head and cracked her knuckles, before bringing them back down. With a deep breath, she took a few steps back before taking a running start, jumping and managing to grab onto the top of the wooden fence. The old wood creaked under her, but she managed to hoist herself up and over the fence. If anything else in the forest hadn't noticed her by her scent or by seeing her when she came wandering in, it was probably obvious someone was here given the racket she'd kicked up climbing the fence.