Find her own "grassy knoll"

Digit flinched and dove behind a tree. She had thought being noticed by that snapdragon before was bad, but being looked at by people made her feel really uncomfortable!

What should she do? She had wanted to find people, yes, but she didn't want to get involved in another fight. Picking which side to support, strategising, risking her life... it was such a drain. She should just go, while she still had the chance...

She pulled away from the tree and flapped sneakily away from the clearing for about a metre, before hesitating, stopping to listen to all of the retreating footsteps behind her. They weren't her responsibility... but she needed to be prepared, in case she ended up in their shoes down the line. This might be a good opportunity to find out if she could repeat that...

She looked up, scanning the treetops. Figuring that she should be relatively safe on a high branch, she flew up and perched upon a sufficiently thick one to support her weight.

She turned a full 360 degrees, glancing at her surroundings to ensure there were no penis-spiders or anything else hiding in the leaves waiting to ambush her. Once she was satisfied her area was clear, she turned her attention back down to the forest chase going on below her, taking a good look at it for the first time.

The slime and dragonborn were still looking at her. Digit winced, doing her best to look them over without meeting their gaze. She didn't know which party had the moral high-ground here, but picking on the ragtag group of humanoids seemed unwise. Not only because they had eyes on her, but weren't slimes immune to bodily harm? Or was that a myth? Not to mention the foolishness of taking on a dragon, even a humanoid one. She'd lose the advantage of flight, just for starters.

That said, they did seem to be having some trouble with the chicken-looking plant monsters. If she left things to their own devices, they'd probably be beaten, and she could slip away while the snapdragons were distracted with their catch. However, if she saved them from the beasts, she'd then have no recourse if these people then decided to attack her...

She sighed. At the end of the day, they were people. She might be able to talk to them and get some clues about her situation, even if they did turn out to be hostile. Meanwhile the pack of animals had pretty much nothing to offer her. Nothing ventured, nothing gained...

She raised her right arm and pointed her index finger at the snapdragon leading the chase. She supported her aim by cupping her left hand under her right, and closed her left eye in order to squint down her "sights." Aiming seemed fairly straightforward... now she just needed to figure out how to fire.

She tried to think back to that overwhelming moment when her fingertip had exploded with darkness. What word had she incanted? There had been so much noise, but that one word had definitely cut through. It had barely even been a word, it was more of a wet noise, like a bubbling cauldron. How had she done that? Was it a trick with saliva?

Just then, time seemed to grind to a halt. The runners froze mid-chase, feet off the ground. Before she'd really fully processed this, Digit tried to use this opportunity to adjust her aim, only to find that her arm was locked stiff! She couldn't open her eye, couldn't move the eye that was open... even her lungs refused to budge an inch to take a breath! She felt incredibly claustrophobic in her own body... when she felt something crawling on her back.

She started hyperventilating in spirit, unable to do so in body. Had she been ambushed? She'd looked around so carefully...

All she could do was wait, fearfully paralysed, as the tickling presence made its way up from her back and onto her shoulder. Though she couldn't turn her eye to look at it, she mentally shuddered as something small, round and turquoise appeared in her peripheral vision.

From her shoulder, she then felt it crawl in two directions. There's more than one of them? she thought in terror as one of the crawling presences made its way up her neck, towards her face!

The other piece scuttled down her arm, and she finally got a good look at it; it appeared to be a stylized drawing of an eye, or at least half of one, split vertically. It was moving along her skin like a living tattoo, and her mind flashed back once more to that moment in the woods. So she hadn't been imagining that mark on her hand!

The half-eye on her neck reached her chin. She tried to close her slightly-open mouth, but as with the rest of her body, her jaw was stubbornly unmoving without the presence of time. The eye slipped past her lips and settled uncomfortably heavily upon her tongue.

The other half of the eye then reached the back of her hand... and split again? A quarter of the eye now travelled down her index finger, distorting as it wrapped around the curve of her skin. The other quarter slipped itself around her middle finger, and as soon as it settled itself in, both fingers began to ache in a familiarly agonising way.

Time started to leak back into the world, slowly. She watched as her middle finger uncurled itself, feeling her bones creak under the external pressure forcing them to move. Her tongue was pulled in directions that didn't seem to sit within the three dimensions she was familiar with; rather than pressing the tip against her teeth or the roof of her mouth to make different sounds, it was pulled somewhere... else. It came back feeling slimy and left a foul taste in her mouth resembling a concoction of coal tar, rotten eggs, sugar, salt and metal.

Her fingers glowed, charging up their black energy as turquoise electricity arced across her knuckles once again... and then she fired.

Dark energy erupted from her fingertips, blasting her with enough recoil to almost knock her from the branch. The twin beams slammed into the ground at the snapdragon's feet, causing an eruption of dirt which gently rained back down upon the nearby combatants.

Digit flapped her wings and regained her stability, then looked down upon her handiwork. Maybe aiming wasn't as straightforward as she'd imagined...

(Action: Fly up to a high branch.)

(Action: Scan the area for hidden enemies. Perception: Nat 20+4 = 24.)

(Action: Eldritch Blast. Fire both beams at the frontrunning snapdragon.

Ranged Combat: 6+0 = 6 Vs Evasion: 20+1 = 21. Miss.

Ranged Combat: 1+0 = 1 Vs Evasion: 18+1 = 19. Miss.)