She swears those fuckin' pink things are telepathic somehow. (Completely missing that it is, in fact, part of her new suite of powers and they're just so much hornier than everything else as to stand out in comparison.) Regardless, no way Jose.

Onwards she sleds, riding out what she increasingly suspects is a "feature" of her new isekai'd body and masturbating... Kind of a lot. Stopping every couple hours for it, and doing it at night too.

Maybe she should stay away until she's done? It'd be kind of mortifying to be in front of Luna again like this... Then again, Luna probably doesn't care. Like. At all. And it is hot, to be so worked up all the time. Just... Not hot enough to fuck a weird slimy pink tentacle monster thing. That's just asking to get parasites planted in her brain, like that town was worried about.

She scries the apothecary every time she stops just to make sure she can still find it even as she gets further away - should she try some of the flashy attention getting spots? Nah, might be a trap, best not - but continues none the less and finds her way back to her hut after high-speed sledding around mid-day on, apparently, Rainday.

As Wynn is approaching her hut, she suddenly notices an unexpected bit of danger, and stops before sledding into an unusually dangerous pile of leaves... which is, on closer inspection, a concealed pit trap, with sharp stakes at the bottom.

Luna's work... Plausibly?

She works out a quick formulation of Air magic to boost her and more importantly to make her voice carry, and shouts. "LUNAAAAAAA!"

There is no immediate response... other than a number of birds taking flight, and shifting shadows beyond the treeline which suggest that Wynn managed to attract some attention to herself.

Well, she can fight them if it becomes necessary.

Whatever.

For now she'll go see what state her little house is in. Maybe put the wards back up. Probably all her smoked meat's gone.

As Wynn gets nearer to her hut, she smells smoke. It's rising from a small wooden shack that Wynn definitely doesn't remember building, tucked neatly within her circle of warding stones.

Did Luna... Build a house? ...Score one for 'human convinced she's a cat somehow, she guesses'.

She pokes around the perimeter of the wards, disabling them long enough to inspect with that little twist that - probably she should crib some notes from the collars' security for her ward rocks, if she can disable them easily another spellcaster can disable them, they're only good against dumb brutes like this - adds more mana to a few of the lowest-powered ones, then checks on her outdoor food cellar, and then investigates her own house's state, and only after all that goes to investigate the new structure.

As predicted, the smoked meat is gone, as is anything else meat-like, including in the nearby cellar. Most of Luna's stuff is still scattered across the floor where she originally left it, though the axe, the harpoon, and the bag itself are gone. Wynn's bed looks slept in, but is not currently occupied.

The new structure is small and windowless, with a chimney-like hole in the ceiling (currently emitting a trail of smoke), but was put together with surprising craftsmanship. Inside is quite a bit of meat, butchered and hanging in crude racks from the ceiling, while a fire set in a stone-lined pit in the dirt floor fills the place with thick smoke. Some of the 'meat' is rather dubious, including large fleshy tentacles with clearly-phallic tips, but the place is already half-full, and clearly has room for more.

She lets out a breath, feeling oddly relieved that Luna isn't here.

-Okay, yeah, dedicated carnivore at work here. This is a lot more than her own little smoking box but it kind of annoys her. It's not bad but it could have been done better. A lot of this isn't going to preserve right, as is, as if it's a well-intentioned but half-hearted attempt at a smokehouse. Also, yuck, more sex monsters. Though they might actually be edible?

She's suddenly glad she doesn't have to use the bathroom anymore.

...Anyway, the smokehouse is not her problem.

She tidies up her house, keeping Luna's stuff separate from hers, and eats a little more of the preserves and hardtack and a bit of Luna's meat, feeling pretty sure she's going to come back at some point. She's still horny, but by this point it's become an annoyance like an old ache, ignored in favor of preoccupation and worrying.

-She should try and look at the stolen collars some more, but it kind of hurts to think about right now.

How about she pours as much mana as she can into the protective runes on her clothes until she feels woozy and a bit sick, then takes a nap in her better-than-trail-conditions bed.

Some time later, Wynn wakes up to a loud thump, just outside!

Where's her spear where- There it is!

Wait, her danger sense isn't going off. She pokes her head out.

Lying on the ground, just outside Wynn's door, is something like a star-faced mole, except it's the size of a bear, and its face-tentacles are as long as its entire body. It's filthy and bleeding and very much dead, and is accompanied by a still-nude Luna, who is none of those things. Did she just... toss the corpse over the ring of ward-stones to get it through?

"...Hi, Luna."

"Hi, Fox!"

Luna nonchalantly hops over the stone circle herself, before sitting next to her kill with a satisfied expression.

"Luna was hunting!"

Avoid looking at her. Or rather, don't, but try not to feel much about it? That doesn't really work, but. She licks her lips and takes a breath.

"I see. I'm Wynn, but... Fox works, I guess. I see you made a smokehouse."

Collar's still there. Maybe... Better not bring it up again until she can do something about it with confidence.

"There was no more meat! Luna got more. Then there was too much meat! Luna made a house for the meat. Now there is room for more meat!"

With Wynn looking away for a moment, Luna crawls over to the corpse and quickly slashes it open from neck to groin... apparently with her bare hand?

"Yyyyyyep. If you want it to last longer I can do more ice. Frozen things don't spoil. Or improve the smokehouse but... I have something I gotta study, ice is fast and building is not.

Sorry for hurting you, last time we met."

Luna looks up from her bloody work with a vacant smile.

"Do not worry. Luna is fine."

Wait, no... that's not it...

Luna hisses, and brings a hand up to touch her collar. It looks like it's burning her, but she holds on with grim determination.

Stop. Let go. No. Don't touch the collar. Luna can do what she wants.

"Hurt, but was helpful! Luna has been practicing!"

Suffer.

She flinches pretty bad, and drops her hand from the collar.

"Yeah."

"...The collar is really terrible. I'm working on a puzzle. If I do it right, I might be able to take it off without it hurting so much. But if you think I should not, I won't."

"Okay. Tell Luna when?"

Without further comment, Luna turns away from Wynn, and gets to disembowelling her tentacled mole.

Okay then.

She wishes she had music to rock out to. One of those 'flow state' playlists. They really do work, or so she thinks. But regardless, she takes another deep breath and pushes away all those disruptive emotions (and thinks vaguely about making a joke about the Adeptus Mechanicus but can't come up with a good quote and that's a distraction too, so) and goes back inside and spreads her notes, and the two stolen collars and the pokey tool, all across the table.

Come on, she knows how the simple locks work, and she's mapped out part of the complicated collar's lock.

After psyching herself up a bit, she uses the single-use version of the rune magic to build a single-use "key", a spell that does the same thing as a dedicated key would but is much faster to try. It's her first decent guess at what the valid key looks like here, and lets it fire off where she holds the collar closed around nothing, watching the results in those painstakingly tiny inscriptions as closely as she can.

There was a sudden flash of danger there... the collar seemed about to grab onto Wynn's wrist, for lack of other prey... but the 'key' wasn't quite right, and the body position wasn't quite ideal, and the 'master' and 'slave' were the same person, so a bunch of error flags got triggered and nothing happened. Unfortunately, the thing doesn't exactly keep a handy error log to let her reference the exact details, so it's hard to review the specifics... but she can already see a couple mistakes she made on her first try.

Also, it'd be helpful to have a test subject for this. Wynn's not quite sure whether or not it's possible to glitch the collar onto herself, but it'd probably be very bad if she succeeded. Also, it won't quite be clear whether or not she succeeded unless she can collar and uncollar someone.

OKAY THEN!

Note to self: Cast Protect Magic to keep the thing in place for next run!

She writes down what she was able to discern, compares it to what she expected, traces out a small part of the magical machinery - there, it got lost there, so if she tries it again in a slightly different way...