Awakened

Changing

Delight continued to thrum beneath his skin as he skipped towards the inviting, soul-sweet purple glow of the portal. The musher squeed in his grip, the others having been released to roam free in the still overwhelmingly pungent forest of teal.

Ink stumbled once he crossed the threshold, hit with a wave of everything. The sculk coiled in his mind, writhing in his veins as it reconnected. For a moment, everything was too loud and unnerving, like every chirp from every bird was hammered against his eardrums, bees buzzing seemingly inches away before it all smoothed out once more.

His suddenly rapid pulse began to ease again, and he turned to grin at Blue like nothing had happened. "You gonna check on Horror now?" He asked.
The skeleton hesitated, glancing out across the gap from the portal at the back of Cross's building.
"I will, but first, are you alright?" Cerulean eyelights fixated on him in concern.
"You seemed to.. flash for a moment there."

"Oh! That. Yeah, just readjusting. Takes a second going in and out of the Nether. It's kinda like I'm leaving a bit of me behind, y'know?" He shrugged carelessly, ignoring the increasingly concerned look the other was giving him.
"It doesn't hurt you, does it?"

"Nah, it's just weird." A tendril coiled as he hopped to the fence, hanging off the post with a salute before flinging himself over the gate and skipping along towards the village.

Blue was following at a more sedate pace, quickly falling behind as Ink was on a mission. He had to try the musher. He knew it was like crab but meatier, but he'd never even had crab before.
Still knew some recipes.
So many options flowing through his head, he could hardly pick any to start with.

Hopping down the basement stairs two at a time, Ink started mentally sifting through the ideas.
He was inexperienced in cooking, as much as he'd tried it in the past out of boredom, he knew he was too unfamiliar with the new thing to trust in his ability to cook anything overly complicated.
Not to mention a lack of most ingredients in general here.

Focusing on availability helped narrow things down quite nicely. So he followed that line of memories until he happened across a detail he found quite annoying.
Before he could do any sort of cooking, he had to deal with the fact that it was a Netherborn semi"aquatic" creature that needed a specific organ removed and blood drained in order for it to cook in the first place.
Drat.
He was so excited, too.

He ended up doing that, pressing the sacks into the sculky wall as a sort of disposal, delighted at the swell of energy it pulled from them. He briefly considered hunting more mushers before deciding against it. That would just make the sculk grow, it was never really just satiated like creatures would be. That would also probably endanger the population of mushers pretty quickly, and neither of them wanted that.

Though he was beginning to think about how he could include the sculk in the area. It felt weird to stay in one place and not be able to feel and hear everything around him.
Yet everyone in the village was unnerved by sculk a little in one way or another.
This presented a unique challenge.
He liked challenges.

Sculk had never really tried growing into the ground before. Then again, it usually found itself eating away at solid rock with absolutely no give to it. But dirt was different. It was full of pockets of air and water, could shift with the right touch and even form tunnels with very little effort.
The sculk didn't need to be visible to hear and feel things around it.
And obviously it didn't need light either.

Ink blinked, staring at nothing in particular as he considered the idea. He rather liked it. He just needed to get a bunch of sculk closer to the surface first. That was where the slight catch was.
He needed to make sure he didn't run into Blue for that. Whatever that.. implosion fit had been, Ink wasn't keen on triggering a repeat, and clearly the skeleton felt the same way.