//------------------------------//
// The Story of Splinter: Saved (Revised) 
// Story: A Timberwolf For Forrester 
// by Schattendrache 
//------------------------------//


-The Story of Splinter-



Saved


This morning was one that Forrester had been waiting for since he first arrived in Fetlock. Today was going to be the day that he would go out into the Foggy Forest and see for himself just what truth there was in the claims of the all-alpha hunting packs. It had been about five months since he first moved to Fetlock and had yet to see this fabled occurrence. After the fourth month of not seeing the event happen Forrester had planned an excursion into the woods himself.

The Foggy Forest was one of the more obscure areas of Equestria. Like every great woodland of Equestria, the forest possessed magical properties. Unlike the Everfree and its unnatural degree of independence or the Whispering Woods and its perpetual breeze, the Foggy Forest was constantly covered in fog. No matter how much the pegasi tried to blow the fog away, the forest would not permit the flow of air to exceed a calm breeze.

While the university generally frowned on him studying timberwolves on his own, he had been able to convince them to let him do the preliminary studies by himself. He would have preferred it if he had been permitted to do all studies by himself, but even he had to admit that the only way to have his papers be publishable was to have multiple ponies involved. When he had first had to deal with other ponies accompanying him he had wished he was born a griffon so he would have been able to bite their heads off. They had hurt his research the first few months he had to deal with them, but after giving them some training—and no small amount of verbal berating—they had become tolerable assistants.

Forrester slid out of bed and headed to his bathroom to take a shower. He quickly opened the door to the shower and stepped into it before closing the door and turning on the water. While Forrester preferred to let the water run for a bit to warm up, he was too excited about today, so he resigned himself to the freezing water of today’s shower. When he felt he was thoroughly soaked, he grabbed his bottle of scentless griffin shampoo, squirted some out onto his left hoof, and started to wash himself.

Forrester hated that he needed to special order his shampoo from the Griffin Kingdom. Because he spent most of his time studying timberwolves as an ethologist, he always needed to make sure he reduced the impact his presence could have on their behavior. To accomplish this, he always did his best to either spend several weeks in the field without bathing to try to attain a more natural scent, or remove his scent entirely. After several complaints from his colleagues, he tended to utilize the latter. This, unfortunately, meant he needed to order the same supplies griffin hunters used if he wanted to take away his scent. He honestly couldn’t understand why everypony else needed to have scented shampoo in the first place, especially when half of them were strong enough to be smelled from halfway across a forest.

When he was sure he had cleaned every part of his fur, he moved on to his mane and tail. Usually, he wouldn’t bother doing what other ponies would consider an adequate job, just using enough shampoo to get the dirt and knots out, but he needed to make sure there was nothing that would still have his scent. Doing this always reminded him of when his mother had found out he would never actually wash his mane and tail and would just soak it and comb out anything that found its way into them. His mother had decided to wash them for him using a “special” shampoo to make sure his mane and tail wouldn’t be so dry and brittle. He still couldn’t bring himself to use mayo or apple cider vinegar in any of his foods.

When he finished that he rinsed himself off and prepared for the worst part of taking these kinds of showers. Because all ponies sweat and that sweat would carry their unique scent, he had to make sure that didn’t happen while he was out in the field. To accomplish this, he had a friend in the chemistry department at the university concoct a lotion he could apply that would capture his scent. His friend had refused to make one that would stop him from sweating, citing dangers to his health. The problem was that the lotion smelled like a timberwolf’s marking until he fully rubbed it in.

Shutting off the shower he opened the door to his shower and grabbed a towel to dry himself off. It took him some time to dry off, especially around his wings, tail, and mane, but he felt he was ready to use the lotion. He reached for it on his sink before he remembered he still needed to preen his wings and there was no way in Tartarus he was going to preen them after he had applied the lotion. Putting his hoof down and sitting on his haunches he spread out his wings and started his preening.

While most pegasi preferred to have help with preening and to use artificial preen oils, Forrester never felt very comfortable with either. His mother had stopped helping him preen himself when he was ten after he insisted he was old enough to take care of himself. While it was common for pegasi to preen themselves, they never just did it themselves. His mother had allowed him to do as he wanted and relented, believing he would allow her to help when he realized most pegasi couldn’t do all their feathers themselves. Since then he rarely had another pony help preen him, and that was only after he had had his feathers preened by somepony else for the first time in years. That day had been one of the most awkward experiences in his life.

He had been fourteen at the time and was in his high school health class. It was the fifth week of class and they were covering the special needs of each race. While unicorns needed to file their horns regularly to make sure their magic would be properly channeled and earth ponies needed to keep their hooves filed due to their increased growth, pegasi needed their wings preened. Since ponies were a social species, none of this was a shock to anyone, and when the teacher said that everyone would be partnering up with a member of each race to help them no one batted an eye. And due to the week coinciding with the biannual molting of pegasi, it seemed to be the best time to teach the subject.

On the first day, most ponies paired up with members of their own race since they already had experience with what to do either from their parent or themselves, the exceptions being the more curious ponies or those that came from mixed families. While he himself came from a mixed family—his father was an earth pony and his mother was a pegasus—he felt more comfortable having his first partner be a pegasus. His best friend Golden Sunset was happy to pair up with him when he asked.

Golden had suggested he help preen Forrester first and Forrester had agreed, not really caring who went first. The teacher had fortunately provided the needed supplies for each group with everypony getting a mat to lay down on, preen oils and a cloth for the pegasi, and the appropriate files for the unicorns and earth ponies. When he laid down and unfurled his wings, he didn’t expect the response he got from his friend.

“Hey, Forrester, when did you start to molt, man? Your wings kind of look like crap. I know the teacher asked us to stop doing our regular maintenance this week but man, you look bad.”

Forrester looked to his left and over his shoulder to look at his friend and his wing. To him his wing didn’t look too bad. Several of his feathers weren’t in the proper position, but he was used to that since he had started to preen himself. “I just started to molt about three days ago. I don’t think they look that bad.”

“Dude, your wings look like you started to molt like, last week, and haven’t been preened since,” Golden said, lifting Forrester’s wing and examining all the feathers. “Seriously dude. You must have the worst molts of any pegasus I know. I would hate to be your parents.”

Golden gently grabbed onto Forrester’s feathers with his teeth and began to gently pull on them to either straighten them or take out the one that had fallen out. Forrester felt uncomfortable but had attributed that to the fact it had been about four years since the last time another pony had helped to preen him. 

“Why do you say that?” Forester’s voice had a hint of discomfort but it was a little too subtle for most ponies to have picked up on, “I don’t lose my feathers that fast, and when they do come out, I make sure to clean them up.”

“I’m referring to when your parents help you.” Golden dropped the three feathers he had been able to remove from his first pass through Forrester’s wing at Forrester’s side. “I sometimes help my mom and her wings never get this bad.”

“My parents don’t really help me with that. I actually just preen myself.”

“What?”

Forrester turned around to look at his friend’s shocked face. While he was slightly grateful the preening had stopped, he couldn’t help but feel that the way his friend was looking at him was worse.

“I preen myself. I thought everypony did that.”

“Well yeah,” Golden said before taking another pass through Forrester’s wing, inciting Forrester to tense up again, “but nopony just does it themselves. Every pegasus I know gets help with preening. It’s the only way to get the entire wing.” Golden dropped another two feathers on the three from the first pass. “Well, at least this explains why your wings never look quite right and your flying is suffering.”

Forrester had never considered that his flight had been suffering due to how he had been preening himself. He had assumed that he wasn’t that good of a flyer because he just didn’t fly all that often. But now that Golden brought it up he did remember reading that proper feather alignment was important for pegasi when they flew in the most recent homework. 

The preening continued with Golden doing his best to help fix the problems that Forrester had made for himself and Forrester stiffening up whenever Golden would make a pass. It wasn’t until Golden reached near the base of the wing that things started to get really awkward. Because Forrester could never quite reach some of those feathers his usual method for preening there was to take a back brush and do his best to brush the feathers out. While that didn’t cause much of a problem, the fact he hadn’t been preened regularly in that area in some time meant the nerves there were not desensitized to the stimulation.

When his friend started to preen there every nerve in that area lit up from the stimulation. Forrester didn’t know what to think as all the feathers in that area were properly repositioned for the first time in years. He didn’t know what to think, if the stimulation was pleasurable or not, but it was decisively different from how the rest of the wing had felt. When he tried to think as to why it would be feeling this the first thing that came to his mind was the clop material he had seen.

Like most adolescent colts his age he had grown to start appreciating the forms of fillies, and as such had discovered clop. Golden and he had been rummaging through Golden’s older brother’s room after he had left for college to see if they could find anything interesting. Under his bed, they had found several clop magazines in a small cardboard box. The two of them separated them into two piles, one for each of them, and agreed to switch piles in a week.

Forrester had been most interested in the pegasi sections of the magazines, especially the ones that dealt with how to best stimulate one. Most of them showed or described the best way to preen a pegasus to get them in the mood, how hard to bite, how fast you should go, everything. Being that Forrester only preened himself and had recently come to learn that preening could be made sexual, anyone could tell how the next time someone helping him preen would go.

Intellectually, Forrester knew this wasn’t sexual, it was just his friend helping him, and it was something everypony that knew a pegasus either did or was willing to do. This was something completely normal, he wasn’t even getting aroused by it. But because of how his life had panned out up to this point, and the fact he was currently flooded with hormones, this situation was far worse than it should have been.

When Golden finished his left wing Forrester let out a sigh of relief, he could finally relax now that the preening was over. It was only when he was about to refold his wings that he noticed that Golden was moving to his other side that he remembered that he still had his other wing to go. His heart dropped.

The right wing went as well as the left wing, Forrester stiffening every time his friend touched his wing, only getting worse when he reached the base of the wing. In the end, Golden was able to remove twelve feathers from his left wing and fifteen from his right. When Golden had reached for the bottle of preen oil Forrester was about to stop him, but remembering what his mom had told him he kept his mouth shut. Golden carefully poured a small amount of oil onto the cloth and picked it up with his hooves and began rubbing it onto the feathers on both sides of his wings.

When Golden had covered each of Forrester’s wings with the oils, he dropped the cloth onto the oil bottle and proceeded to the teacher's desk to get a towel to wipe off the oil on his hooves. While Forrester’s wings felt a hundred times better than they had been at the start of today and about ten times better than when he preened them himself, it still wasn’t enough to convince him to make this a regular occurrence. 

“Alright, looks like you’re done. My turn,” Golden said when he returned.

Forrester felt his stomach fall at this realization. With how uncomfortable he had been with getting his wings preened he hardly wanted to consider how it would be preening another. So with shaky hooves, he folded his wings and stood up to let Golden lay down on the mat.

When Golden laid down and unfurled his wings Forrester had more or less become petrified in fear. Every possible way this scenario could play out wrong came to mind. He hadn’t ever preened somepony else in his life. While most pegasi learned how to preen another pegasus from at least one of their parents when they turned ten, Forrester was what his parents liked to call a “lone spirit”. His mother had tried to teach him several times since he turned ten but he had never accepted, always saying he was too busy. And usually, by busy, he meant he was planning his next outing into the forest.

Now that he found himself in the current situation it seemed that his desire to find timberwolves rather than learning how to actually act like a normal pony was coming back to bite him. While he was thinking this, Forrester noticed that Golden had turned his head to face him, giving him a look of “you can start any time”. So, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, Forrester mentally psyched himself up so he could do it.

Since he already preened himself he figured that it would probably be best if he just did what he did to himself when he preened. So taking his teeth he bit down as hard as he usually did and started to make his usual kind of pass.

“OW! What the Tartarus, man?” Golden instantly folded his wings back, almost having an un-molted feather torn out since Forrester still had it in his teeth at the time. He looked back at his friend with absolute fury. “What did I do to piss you off, seriously? If you’re mad about what I said about you preening yourself just tell me. You don’t have to try to tear my wings off.”

Forrester looked at his friend in shock, folding his ears back. Was he really that bad? Did he bite too hard or pull too fast? That was exactly how he did it himself. Tears started to form up in Forrester’s eyes. Today was just perfect. Not only had he learned that he was the only pegasus that not only couldn’t groom himself right but had also never learned to preen another pegasus. To make it worse, he had hurt his best and possibly only true friend with his incompetence. He was going to be the biggest joke in the entire school; “look, there goes Forrester, the only pegasus that can’t preen”.

Golden, seeing how upset his friend was at hearing this, went from anger to compassion in an instant. “Oh, crap, dude, I’m sorry. I forgot you said you just preened yourself. Tell you what, I’ll walk you through how to do it. Just follow what I say and you should do just fine.”

Forrester had just nodded while trying not to meet his friend’s eyes, still too embarrassed about everything that had happened.

Golden, seeing how Forrester was acting, did his best to try not to make the situation any more embarrassing or uncomfortable for his friend. He extended his wings back out and faced forward before starting the same explanation his mom and dad had done for him when they had taught him how to preen them.

“Ok. On the bright side, you know how to preen, you just need to work on how you do it. Start again, except this time bite down like you would with a quill.”

Forrester approached his friend fairly timidly, looking almost like he expected to be bucked by his friend. When he reached his friend's right wing, he followed the instructions and bit down along where the feathers met the flesh of the wing, eliciting a reserved tensing up from his friend.

“Good. Just loosen your grip a little.” Forrester loosened slightly, causing his friend to sigh in relief. “Ahh, much better. Now drag your teeth down the feathers and make sure you keep hold of any that come out.”

Forrester did his best to keep the same grip he had and ever so slowly went down the wing, doing his best to not go as fast as he had gone the first time.

“Hey, you can go faster if that’s more comfortable for you. You were just way too fast and hard when you did it the first time.”

Forrester picked up the pace a small bit, doing his best to try to finish preening his friend as fast as possible. After he had finished the right wing Forrester didn’t feel so bad. While it was still weird for him to be preening another pony, it was nowhere near as bad as it had been when he was having his wings preened.

When Forrester had finished preening both the wings he looked down and was somewhat surprised to see that Golden had barely shed any feathers. While he had lost over two dozen Golden had barely lost half that. Maybe his friend had a point when he said he had bad molts. The only thing left was applying the oils, and with them, the problems came back.

“Golden.” His friend turned to face him. “How much oil should I use?”

“See how much oil I used for you?” Forrester looked at the clear bottle and saw that less than a quarter of it had been used. “I used the same amount on you I do for myself. So just use about half that per wing. I don’t think I need I need to tell you, but it’s never fun when your wings feel like you tried to bathe it the stuff,” he replied with a small chuckle.

“I can imagine,” Forrester replied, holding the cloth onto the top of the open bottle with one hoof before inverting the two to get some oil onto the cloth.

“Imagine? You mean you’ve never done that to yourself?”

“No.”

“Dude, you’re so lucky. When I first used the oils, I just drenched my wings. I couldn’t fly all day since they were so soaked. It wasn’t until I took a shower and washed them out that they felt right again. Let me tell you, there isn’t a worse feeling than having oily wings, especially when you have them folded.” Golden had a full body cringe remembering what that had been like.

“Have you ever gotten any of the oils in your mouth?” Forrester had finished oiling the alula and was moving on to the primary coverts. He always had a pattern when he oiled his wings and even now he couldn’t help but follow it with his friend. Alula, primary coverts, primaries, marginal coverts, secondary coverts, and finally secondary.

“No. My mom taught me how to use a cloth and keep the oils away from my mouth.”

“Let me tell you, I would rather try to eat meat before I would want to taste those again.”

“Really, that bad?”

“Probably worse.”

He remembered back when he first started to preen himself his mother got him a bottle of preen oil for foals. She had explained to him how to properly apply it using his muzzle or a cloth if he didn’t want to wash his muzzle afterward. He had tried using it but to him, it just smelled too bad. He tried using the cloth method to get around the smell but his first time he got some oil in his mouth and was treated to one of the worst tastes ever. He read the bottle and found out they made it smell and taste this bad to prevent foals from trying to consume it. He was about to give up when he remembered that this was an artificial oil, meaning there was a natural substitute.

He looked it up and discovered that pegasi had uropygial glands beneath each wing that would secrete natural preen oil. It made sense to him since when he thought back to how his mom would help him she would always start by rubbing her muzzle beneath his wing after removing and straightening his feathers if she didn’t use the bottled oils. When he opened his wings, he was able to find the small growths of the glands after feeling for it with his muzzle for a short time. When he used this method, it was so much better than the oils his mom had given him. It didn’t stink to Tartarus and if it got in his mouth it still tasted terrible but nowhere near as bad as the artificial stuff.

While Forrester’s aversion to others helping him preen set him apart from almost every other pegasus, the fact that he refused to use artificial preen oils and instead preferred to use his own wasn’t too strange. Still, the fact he used his own oils exclusively was something most ponies, and even griffins, saw as abnormal.

When his mom first walked in on him finishing one of his preenings in his room, she saw him using his own oils and was shocked. When he saw how red her face had been and how fast she apologized for interrupting him before closing his door he had been absolutely confused. It wasn’t until a few weeks later after a rainstorm that he found out just why she had responded that way.

When he had had been exploring the Gloomy Woods—without his parents’ knowledge—a sudden storm had rolled in. It wasn’t really sudden, but the fact that the woods suppressed the light that came in made it difficult to tell if it was going to rain unless you actively looked up. Needless to say, by the time he got home he was completely soaked. His parents were cross with him for going out into the woods again. They would have yelled at him, but this was at least the dozenth time he had done this to their knowledge, so they had grown somewhat accustomed to it.

After they gave him the same lecture they always did about the dangers of the woods they gave him a towel to dry off. He didn’t go into the woods out of some rebellious spirit; he always tried to follow his parents’ orders, nor did he do it to spite them; he loved his family and didn’t want to hurt them. The reason he never listened was that the forest just seemed to call to him. No matter what his parents or other adults told him regarding the dangers he was putting himself in, the lessons just didn’t seem to sink in for him.

After he was positive he had dried off, he started to reapply preening oil to his wings to replace what he had likely rubbed off when he was drying himself. Before he had even really started his mom had walked back into the living room to see what he was doing.

“Forrester! What do you think you’re doing!”

Forrester jumped in surprise and landed on his flank. He hadn’t heard his mom yell at him like that in a long time. He folded his ears back before he responded. “I was just trying to reapply the oils I probably lost when I was drying off. You and dad do it all the time when your wings get wet.”

Forrester’s mom’s face went from anger to one of both sorrow and sympathy. She walked over to his left side and draped her wing over him. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Forrester. I should have told you this when you started to preen yourself. You see, while everypony is fine with helping to preen a pegasus, applying preening oil is something different.”

“But I see every pegasus using oils all the time, or somepony helping them. What makes what I did so wrong?”

“Well, you see honey, while everypony is fine with pegasi using the artificial oils in public, using our natural oils is… more complicated.”

“But why? They do the same thing. What makes using them so bad?”

“No no no, I didn’t mean it that way. I just mean… remember when you were a foal and Dazzle and the other colts wanted to see who had the biggest colt parts?”

“Yeah, all the parents got really mad. You told me that even though we might not wear clothes, that gentlestallions aren’t supposed to do that.”

“That’s right. Well, you see, using your own oils when you aren’t alone is kind of like that.”

Forrester’s face went pale. If he would have done that at school he would never have been able to live it down. His parents would have been called and told what he did. He would have been the laughingstock of the school. Forrester couldn’t help but start to cry, and he buried his face into his mother’s barrel as the tears started to come out.

“I’m sorry mommy. I won’t do it again. I just hate that stupid bottled stuff. It smells so bad and it never comes off my muzzle and whenever it gets in my mouth I want to throw up and I hate it.”

Forrester’s mother closed her wing tighter around her crying son and placed her muzzle in his mane. “There there. I never said you had to use the bottled oils. If you don’t like them, I won’t get them for you. You just have to know that if you want to use your own oils, you have to do it privately.”

Since then he had mostly preened himself in his room with the door locked, and usually only after he was sure his parents had gone to sleep. When he came back to the real world Forrester realized he had finished with applying the oils to his friend's wings.

“That wasn’t too bad now, was it? At least we both learned something new about you.” Golden stood back up and folded his wings before turning to give his friend a comforting look to show him the experience hadn’t been a nightmare for him.

Forrester looked down slightly, still unable to meet his friend’s gaze. “Yeah. We both learned I’m terrible at being a pegasus.”

Golden just trotted over and sat next to his friend and used his right wing to give his friend a sideways hug. “I was actually referring to preening not being your special talent, seeing as you’re still a blank flank,” Golden said with a smirk.

“Really, if today wasn’t bad enough, you just had to bring that up too. Why don’t you just get Celestia to tell the whole nation while you’re at it? Some friend you are.”

Forrester still had yet to earn his cutie mark and at the age of fourteen he had mostly given up hope that he would ever find his calling. While it had been Tartarus when he was still a foal, the things the other foals said being the main reason he had insisted on preening himself, the snide remarks had mostly gone away when he started high school. But it was still a sore topic for him.

“Well, if you had earned your mark today, I might not have had a good enough excuse to invite you to my house this weekend.”

“Wait, what? Aren’t your parents leaving to go see an art exhibit in Canterlot over the weekend?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t your parents tell you never to invite anyone over when they’re not there?”

“Yeah.”

“And don’t you always follow their instructions to a T?”

“That’s right.”

Forrester didn’t know what in Celestia’s name was going on. Golden never disobeyed his parents. Something was up.

“Then why are you inviting me over?”

“Well as I see it, I got my cutie mark when I was nine following my passion in art.” Golden pointed back to his mark of a paintbrush in front of a setting sun. “While you on the other hoof haven’t been able to follow your passion for exploring the forest for over a decade. That just didn’t sound all too fair to me. So I figured, why not use the opportunity of both my parents being away to help my friend do what he loves?”

“I’m doing this because I know how much it bothers you,” Golden said, taking on the caring tone he had used earlier. “You’re like my little brother. I hate to see you get upset. I was going to tell you on Thursday, but after today I think you could use some good news.”

Forrester scowled slightly. While he didn’t hate that Golden called him his little brother, he also didn’t like it. Golden was only about seven months older than he was and about half a hoof taller, but he sometimes had a habit of trying to look after him like he was a little brother. It wasn’t that it was a bad thing, it was just that Forrester had been trying to become more independent for years now and Golden’s older brother attitude kind of ruined that.

“But… you know how dangerous the woods can be. We could get hurt. I don’t want you to pay for the mistakes that I make.”

“Forrester, we both know there isn’t a single adult in this town that hasn’t heard about your ventures into the woods. If either of us were to ask one of them to watch out for us your parents would know about it in two seconds. And besides, I trust you to bring us back in at most three pieces.”

Forrester smiled. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

The exploration over the weekend had gone over well. They had been able to convince Forrester’s parents that Golden had gotten permission to invite Forrester to sleep over at his house over the weekend while they were away. The two of them had been able to spend most of the time looking through the woods, giving Forrester ample time to look for whatever interested him without the fear of his parents finding out.

Forrester had noticed how on edge Golden had been while they were in the wood and had done his best to keep away from the parts of the woods he knew were far more dangerous. While those areas were his favorite as there was just something about them that pulled at something deep inside him, he knew that asking his friend to go there on his first trip was not exactly something a friend would do.

Golden had later offered to help him with becoming more comfortable with preening. Every time the molting season came around the two of them would get together and help each other out. While Golden wanted to get Forrester to agree to do it more often Forrester could never get over how uncomfortable having another help preen him was. In the end, Golden was happy with the progress he had made in helping his best friend overcome his perceived deficiencies.

Forrester eventually even agreed to help his mother with her preening whenever she wanted. While he was always hesitant to let her help him, he would occasionally relent. He was always grateful that she remembered his preference to use his own oils and would never pressure him to let her apply oils to his wings, and she never even mentioned the topic with him. When he looked back at how happy she had been that he was finally acting like a normal pegasus he figured that the main reason he had started to preen with his mom was to make up for all the times he had gone into the forest.

Forrester was finishing applying his oils to his wings when the memories of his past were finished. For all the problems of back then, he had to admit he missed those days. Even though he still saw Golden Sunset every now and again, he missed the time they used to spend together as brothers. After Golden left for art college and he went to Saddle Pines, the two only saw each other during the breaks when they would go back home. After they graduated, they were only ever able to hang out when he wasn’t off doing his research. Needless to say, their months of hanging out nonstop had now been reduced to a few hours or days every month or so.

Forrester reached out with his hoof and grabbed the lotion bottle. He slowly undid the cap and was assaulted by the foul scent of the chemical his friend had devised. Even though he had used the lotion almost three dozen times by now, it never failed to make him crinkle his nose in disgust every time he had to smell it. He quickly poured some onto his right hoof and began to apply it to his fur.

While this was probably the worst part of preparing for going out to research timberwolves, it was fortunately over quite quickly. When the lotion was fully incorporated into his skin and fur, the smell went away. It was just the Celestia-awful scent of the lotion when it hadn’t been fully applied that made this the worst part. When he could no longer smell the stench of the lotion on himself he recapped the bottle of lotion and proceeded downstairs to eat some breakfast and do one last check on the supplies he was going to bring.

He grabbed the loaf of bread off the top of the refrigerator and popped two pieces into the toaster to cook while he double checked his supplies. He went over to his saddlebags he prepared the night before and made sure he had packed everything he needed. He found several pens, an enchanted all-weather notebook, three bottles of water, some snacks to keep his stomach in check, and his own personal notebook for notes and drawings he made that weren’t intended to go into his papers. 

When his toast popped up, he closed up his saddlebag, slipped it on, and went to grab his food. On the way over he quickly opened the fridge and grabbed out a container of margarine to help the toast have some flavor. He quickly scraped the margarine into both of the pieces and folded them together. Forrester ate the toast like a sandwich and fast enough one would think he was starving. When the final bit of toast was devoured and Forrester made sure that no pieces had decided to cling to his face he set off for his front door.

The icy morning air sent a chill down Forrester’s spine when he opened the door. It was a good chill, he tended to prefer the cold to the heat anyway. The morning sun was only just peaking above the horizon, still half an hour away from fully rising. Forrester looked to his left at the forest before him. His house was only about ten meters from the edge of the forest and had been sold at well below its actual price after the old owner had gotten sick of having to watch timberwolves wander into town on a regular basis.

He started to make his way into the forest for the first time since he had moved here. The fog that clung to the ground was aggressively trying to work its way into his fur and cling to his skin. He could already feel his legs getting moist. Looking around, he was amazed by just how different this forest was from the other forests he had visited. While the air wasn’t as stagnant as what he had experienced in the Windless Woods, the breeze he could feel was much more subdued than that of the Whispering Woods. It was the perfect speed to move the air but not disturb the fog.

He walked for around ten minutes before he found a position that looked to be ideal for his research. He could see through the fog that the ground was more disturbed in this area than it was elsewhere. This was either a regular resting area for a pack or it was somewhere they frequently walked through. As Forrester extended his wings and prepared to fly up to a good position where he could watch over the area he heard a sudden cry of help from a timberwolf not too far from where he was.

Forrester began galloping in the direction he had heard the sound. He knew as a professional he shouldn’t involve himself in the subjects he was supposed to study but every cell in his body was calling out for him to help the timberwolf he had heard. As he got closer to where he thought he heard the sound from he heard what had most likely had been a timberwolf sprint away. Forrester slowed his pace. The timberwolf had still been able to move, but he had more than likely scared it off from the noise he had made. When he made it to where the timberwolf had likely been he was shocked by what he saw. 

In front of him was a bear trap, sprung, with several split sticks in its jaws. He could see several other pieces of wood around the trap and realized what had happened. The timberwolf had stepped on the trap and called for help. When it heard him running, it had separated its leg to avoid further danger since he had not tried to call to it. Forrester mentally kicked himself for his stupidity. If he would have just walked over, he might have been able to prevent the timberwolf from separating its leg and running off.

Running off!

He had really bucked up. His desire to help the timberwolf had made its situation one-hundred times worse. While losing a leg would mean nothing to a tinderwolf, if this was any other species, one lost leg could be a death sentence. Forrester quickly grabbed what wood he could that had most likely been the timberwolf's leg and shoved them into his saddlebag before taking off after it.

While running after the timberwolf Forrester noticed how bad losing its leg had been. He noticed several indentations in the fog covered dirt, proving that not only was this not a tinderwolf, but that trying to navigate without one of its legs was almost impossible for it. He would need to catch up to the timberwolf quickly before it hurt itself more.

Eventually, Forrester came across what had to be the seventh indentation in the dirt from the timberwolf falling, only to lose the trail. He looked around the area and couldn’t see any signs of where the timberwolf had run. He looked all around in the dirt but couldn’t see any tracks. He was about to continue in the same direction he had been heading when he noticed that one of the bushes was looking at him, with dark green glowing eyes.