You're sweating, shaking, body jolting with every step. You're down to.... two. Two vines. You've been rationing, eating half of one once a day, but your body doesn't understand the sudden drop in toxin in your blood stream and your brain... well, knowing that you only have four days left before you go into full-out detox mode doesn't make you feel any better. So you've been wandering around this cave, because it's cool and because you've been hoping you might find some place where your vines grow. You know it's a futile effort, of course, but you've got to do something. A few days ago you thought that it was better not to give yourself any hope, to just accept your fate. But now... You need something to hang onto, because without that hope you might just lay down. You might just give up. You can't ever remember the last time you went without your vines, without your locoweed.

A call from within the cave rouses your interest for a moment, the sound of a voice that you recognize, though not one of your brothers or sisters. The first thing you think of is Kak-tus, though you're not really sure why. Faintly, in the back of your head, you remember the image of a snake and some antlers, but that doesn't make much more sense than before. Whoever he is, he's calling for warriors not addicts. Lucky you're both. Regardless of who he is, you suppose you should figure out what all the commotion is about. You move through the caves towards him with purpose, trying to follow the echoing sound of his voice. But your drug-deprived brain is having a hard time making sense of everything. A wrong turn here, a dead end there.... but eventually, you find him. The Tribal man. And suddenly it comes back to you, the forest, the Sun God, hit me. It's just flashes of images, but if you weren't so busy fighting off the memory of the two of you sharing those sweet, juicy vines you might actually smile.

As if to spite you, from your shoulder bag, your wispy companion escapes, morphing into the spitting image of one of your vines before your face. And now your confusion, your memories, leave your brain for something new- rage. You bellow, a war cry echoing noisily in the cavern, as the your anger floods your companion's mind and causes her shape-shifted form to falter and then disappear into nothingness, a barely-visible wisp of blackness rushing back into your leather shoulder bag. She's afraid of you. Good. She should be. Now is no time for antics.

Finally, you look back to Gaucho, your body perhaps in worse shape than it was when he met you the first time, though your burns have faded to a few ugly scars. Detox is not pretty. “What.” As for the other present, you pay him little mind. Even the bountiful greenery here does not catch your eye. None of them are what you want... what you need.

we all look for ways to make the pain go away