GLITCH

Shortly after your encounter (frankly, a little too soon), a brightly colored aberration crashes into the clearing. He's yelling all sorts of nonsense about the smell of rot and asking if you saw "it".

You sigh with a shaky exhaustion and reply that, yes, you did see something out of the ordinary and might have smelled something odd. You are not particularly inclined at the current moment to relive it, either.

He begins combing the ground around the clearing for something, but you have a feeling you know what he's after, and point out the dead flower petal on the ground. You were very much just about to leave this place far, far behind you, but he seems to know about whatever you saw. He pulls a small jar out of his satchel and carefully slides the petal into it with a stick. You're almost more concerned about the fact he didn't touch it than the fact he collected it, when you notice a couple of his bright pink claws are blotched at the tips with a dark black. Now you're definitely concerned. Any curiosity you might have had has been vanquished and you grab your things to leave.

He stops you, begging you to tell him your story. You give him the most abbreviated version possible to get away from him, leaving out the part where you couldn't move and the flowers wilted and you thought you were surely a goner. But when he asks you, "Did the flowers wilt where it stood?", you begin to feel a little woozy. You follow up with a few extra details, and then he begins:

"There is a creature in this part of the garden that terrorizes lone travelers. I believe, from my studies and personal encounters, that this anomaly may be a ghost. But! It is no ordinary ghost. The illusions it casts on its victims are very much real, at least for the moments they occur. It always leaves dead plants or wilted flowers afterwards, to further terrify its victims with the knowledge that it is Very. Much. Real."

He holds out his hands to you, and you can see the black spots on his claws are only on his left paw, and only on his pointer talon and thumb. The black spots start at the very tips of claws and look as if they've spread upwards, leaving small, black cracks moving up the nail.

"This is where, after my first encounter with the anomaly, I picked up the evidence it left behind. It left me a rotted a piece of vine. At first, the black spots were just at the very tips, I didn't even notice them until I got home. Over the past two years since my encounter, the blotches have gotten larger and begun moving up my claws towards my hand. I've tried cutting off the parts that seem to be infected with this eternal death, but it returns. I hope eventually to find a cure before it consumes me."

You wonder why he continues to travel alone, or how many encounters he's had with the thing, but it's clear that he wants to see it again. He seems determined to find answers, or die trying.

You, on the other hand, are determined to get as far away from here as possible.