Around midnight
Alesha felt restless. She'd been awake all day, hiked all around the island, and quite a lot of mentally draining events had occurred today, so why couldn't she sleep?
As quietly as she could manage, she got up from the simple bed of leaves that lacked even a canopy (there hadn't been enough time for anyone to build a proper shelter yet), and tiptoed into the forest.
A fair distance from their camp and hopefully out of earshot, Alesha picked up her pace. She ran, pumping her legs and feeling the night air rush past her. She breathed in the scents of the forest. Wet leaves, dirt, moss, and mold. Crisp wood. Damp air. Her feet pounded rhythmically into the ground and she felt a sense of euphoria fill her. Guided by sound and smell almost as much as sight, she traversed the Island terrain.
It wasn't long before she left the shade of the woods behind her, coming out onto the debris-strewn beach. She leaped over a huge log of driftwood, dodged the long-dried skeleton of a swordfish, and nimbly navigated various smaller pieces of kelp, wood and bone left haphazardly along the coast.
Her euphoric run continued. Eyes drawn upward towards the sky, the nearly-full moon filled her mind and, before she realized what she was doing, she was howling at the moon as a humanoid wolf. Her heart pounded like a drum in her ears, blood thumping through her to its beat. Bliss like she had rarely known filled her whole being.
[+2 Chaos Energy]
Rather than distract her from her howling, the Chaos Energy that flooded into her redoubled her enthusiasm. What joy! What fulfillment! How satisfying, how thrilling!
She continued howling for a good 5 minutes or so, until she was so out of breath that she simply couldn't anymore. Wait, since when did she have such good lungs? Last she could recall, she was terribly out of shape.
This was when rationality returned.
Alesha looked down at herself, finding lots of sand, leaves, twigs and even small bits of broken seashells stuck in -- fur. Her fur. Her mind had a little bit of a short-circuit moment where it couldn't process this fact, but it wasn't long before she realized what had happened.
Once it hit her, she instinctively attempted to say, "Ah, crap! What in the third hell?! This seriously just happened, didn't it?! Zorhellian meant it literally when he said he'd give us 'modifications' to help us play our roles!! Damn it!!"
What actually came out was a series of garbled woofs and whines, entirely unrecognizable as any form of speech.
Of course, Alesha was a little too caught up in processing the fact that she was literally a Werewolf at the moment to process the ineffectiveness of her speech, so she just kept "speaking" as if nothing had changed -- and the System was so thoroughly amused that it let her do so uninterrupted.
----
Olphen didn't want to admit it. He didn't want to face the fact that he was a Vampire now, not in the slightest. He especially wanted to ignore the little footnote at the end of his 'Special Penalty,' too.
Unfortunately for him, his body wasn't letting him do so.
He could hear everything. The buzzing of the insects, the calls of distant nocturnal mammals, Veronica's snoring, Tristen's shuddering breaths, even Westley's heartbeat, who was the one sleeping closest to him.
It was deafening.
How could anyone sleep in such a loud environment? And how could he sleep when he was so… so…
He didn't want to articulate it, even in his mind.
He wouldn't admit to his hunger, his thirst. Apparently, even though he was a new Vampire just transformed today, the nutrition he'd had before getting stuck in this Game didn't carry over. His stomach was so painfully empty that it felt as if he hadn't eaten since yesterday; when, in fact, he'd eaten multiple times today.
Did regular food not do it for him anymore? He'd managed to eat a fish caught by another participant, but it had done nothing to sate his hunger.
If only…
If only…
Right, there had been one person. One person who knew what he was now and had offered without hesitation to let him bite.
Red began to creep in on the edges of his vision. This was bad. He was too hungry. With his rationality beginning to fade, he calculated that he had very little time before he went berserk.
Now he had to choose. What chance would he take: would he find Jasper among the sleeping participants and risk drinking from her while she slept? Or would he flee into the woods, on the off-chance that animal blood could slake his thirst? There wasn't much time to choose anymore. He had to act.
Taking what he deemed would be the safer way out, he got up quickly and dashed into the forest, gambling on being able to drink his fill from the animal natives of the Island.
The next day, he'd end up cursing his choice -- for in his haste, he unknowingly tripped over the one person he absolutely could not afford to notify of his nighttime excursion:
Shelby, the self-proclaimed Vampire Hunter.