As a travelling artist, Tama had spent many a night sleeping under the stars. He was no stranger to nodding off under the cover of a sturdy oak tree, or waking up misted with silvery morning dew. The only time Tama was thrown for a loop by nature was when he was caught in a downpour with no source of respite.
Tonight was to be one of those nights, it seemed.
In his first day in Scribel, he had met several new faces, both as passerby in the streets and as workers with the guild. He passed the day familiarizing himself with the town and its denizens, sketching and painting them whenever he could, as a spot of practice. By the time the golden hour had passed and Tama had finished his last masterpiece of the day, the sun had set, the bars had closed, and any hope of finding an open room in a nearby tavern had slipped away just as the sun had slipped beneath the horizon. That meant he would be roughing it.
Tama made his way to the town's outskirts, in the hopes of finding a nice view to sketch as he settled down for the night. Finding his way into a nearby prairie, he dropped his rucksack and settled down to jot down the stars in the sky with his charcoal. After a couple of hours, he had finished his work and nodded off under the clear, starry sky. He didn't wake up until just before sunrise, when the sky was still dark but held the faint, dim glow of oncoming morning.
*Splip...Splip...Splip-Splip-Splip-SplipSplipSplipSplip*
The shock of cold water on his face jolted Tama awake just in time for the clouds to rip open like a sack of grain and spill forth a merciless deluge of rain.
"ShitShitShitShitShit" He chanted under his breath, diving for his non-waterproof rucksack of fragile art supplies and slinging it onto his shoulder. He scanned his surroundings, peering intently into the dim light in the hopes of finding somewhere to take shelter before he was soaked fully to the bone. Just barely, he could make out a silhouette of a lone oak tree, about fifty yards away. Tama broke into a mad dash for the tree.
He was about halfway there when his rucksack let out a heavy jerk against his back, and the seams split with a hearty *RRRRIP* noise that shocked past the thunderous downpour of rain. He whirled around at the discarded rucksack, and gaped in horror as it seemed to squirm and wriggle madly, before finally splitting apart and expelling its inky black contents out onto the wet grass.
"My sketches... my portraits!" Tama wailed, realizing the inks and paints had run in the rain and smeared into a bunch of messy unrecognizable blurs. His voice caught in his throat, however, as the first smeared paint blob hurled itself off the page and onto the grass, taking on a short form with stubby legs and a shifting set of inky black eyes. It hissed at Tama, then leaped toward his leg, gooey "fangs" bared. Tama, in a panic, kicked it away, where it splattered against the ground, then re-formed and skittered away. By the time he'd turned back to the rest of his works, they had also escaped their pages and formed into a variety of other smeary forms. Tama took a step back, but none came closer. Instead, they all skittered away, hidden in the grass. One of them, a large black humanoid blob that was once an ink greyscale of a local blacksmith, turned and made eye contact with Tama, its black eyes glittering with intelligence. It turned and melted into a pile of goo, wriggling away into the grass.
Shaken, Tama gathered his brushes and what little art supplies he could salvage; Two sealed bottles of ink, and a few small jars of colored paint in red, blue, yellow, green, white, and black. The charcoal were squished and crushed beyond ruin, and the parchments were soggy, but would dry. Turning back toward town, He started toward the guild; Someone would have to be notified about this.
"Oh boy. I hope I don't get in trouble for this one."