Well...
This was shitty.
The brown man gave a not at all muffled shriek as his hooves nearly slipped out from underneath him on the spray-slick rock. His flank pressed harshly into the stone wall, ignoring the salt-encrusted texture as he tried desperately to maintain his balance on the narrow ledge. Some form of moss or lichen had begun to grow, and was soaked with the ocean spray, making it only all the more difficult to walk.
And then he made the mistake of looking down.
Oh gods oh gods oh gods oh gods-
He harshly slammed his eyes shut, throwing his head up and pressing it against the rock as he swallowed back the vertigo that threatened to overtake him. That would not be a good thing when the very site that induced the vertigo were the sharp, broken pieces of the cliff far below being endlessly battered by the waves.
It had only been a day, or two, or even three, he honestly wasn't sure, since the time he had had an unexpected encounter with a strange Caretaker. This was exactly why he hated setting hoof anywhere that wasn't at least a little bit familiar. When you were familiar with a place, you knew it well and knew every nook and cranny. When you knew all the things about a place, you knew who lived there too. And when you knew who lived there, you knew their habits and where they liked to be. And when you knew where they liked to be, you knew how to avoid them.
And you never had to worry about an astray encounter.
(Flower-girl didn't count, she was... weird like that.)
But going into a place you weren't so familiar with meant that you didn't know who could be there, and meant that you ran the risk of unwanted encounters.
(For further details, see the file 'Devour' stored in archive 33 subsection 2, clearance level C.)
Hence the Caretaker problem.
And apparently, at some point in the encounter, the young man had gotten turned around. He had forgotten which way the swamp was, and in the endless confusion of the plains he'd turned to trying to find his way back by using the stars as a map. Which he could not quite recall how to do, and so just set off in a direction that seemed promising.
(Really it was just a random direction, there was no sensibility to which way he went.)
And the end result of his poorly made decision was thus, and he found himself stranded in the midst of a vast, rolling, and broken cliffside.
Okay, perhaps his lack of direction wasn't the only fault here. Perhaps there had been some general poor decision making involved in getting him into his current situation.
Really now, he had never been close enough to see the ocean before. And when he saw what looked to be a stretch of coastline far below, he seemed to forget about the dizzying heights, and the worries of falling that pricked at his flesh. He forgot about just how truly treacherous the way down was and the fact that perhaps, just this once, his fears were not quite unfounded.
He had been so enamored with the thought of feeling the waves lapping at his hooves that he just had to go down there and check it out, forgetting in the meantime that he was far from an experienced climber.
But really, who could blame his child-like enthusiasm?
He could, quite a lot.
And as the young man shakily managed to inch his way along the ledge to a far-too distant widening of the rocky outcropping... Well, let's just say that if berating oneself was a sport, he was currently an Olympic gold medalist.
@Isorath
OOC: Edited to include whom it now pertains to C:
