Whoever is up there must be bloody good at hiding..
Joe looking on the ground for a moment then picked up a pebble. Tossing it up and down in his hand, he looked over to the junction of the tree that the pair of eyes were.

"You know, it's not very kosher to be spying on folks"

Got-any-coffee-Jemima had turned her back to the tree as Julien reached for it, shuddering at the thought of what it might feel like. The bloody thing looked like a hangover personified and she didn't need more of that. Noticing the shattered signposts she pulled a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from her jacket pocket and placed them on her nose...
took them off again with a grimace...
polished the grease of last night's dinner off them with the untucked corner of her blouse...
put them back on.
"Hmmm?"
This in half-curious response to Joe's seemingly random comment (she hadn't seen the eyes). She bent over to take a closer look at the fragments.
"Someone didn't want us to know where we are. Or where we should go."

"Sounds about right! Could be somebody or something else, or it could be our little shy friend up there hiding in the tree."

Joe kept bouncing the pebble in his hand "You've been rumbled, might as well come out and say hello."

Lilith smiles at Julien when she feels his hand on her shoulder, then follow him to the tree. Her eyes follow both Joe and Jemima to the top of tree. She just missed seeing what they had saw.

" Who's rumbled? I don't see anything," she reaches out and touches the tree now that Joe isn't barring her way. she herself pulls the bark away looking at it. ^{I'll keep this it looks like an interesting thing to put in one of my sculptures}

she then moves toward Joe and scowls where he is looking. Lilith crosses her arms which makes her shoulders widen slightly and the muscles tighten.

Julien smiled back at Lilith, who also took a sheet of bark and tucked it away somewhere. For his part, he held the bark at arm's length, drew it forward to his nose, stretched it out again. He couldn't bring it into focus, no matter what he did.

"This... reminds me of a really bad trip I had once..." he murmured.

The piece of bark went into one of the deep pockets on the side of his pants and he sashayed over to see what everyone was looking at.

Apparently nothing...

But Joe seemed to think he'd seen... something.

"What's up there?" he wondered.

"Ok whomever you are, I saw your eyes peeking out in the branches. Might as well come out and introduce yourself."

Joe paused for a few moments then when nothing happened, lightly tossed the pebble into the tree near where the eyes had been.

Joe gave a small grunt as he felt an impact on the back of his head, lightly touching the impact site to make sure that it wasn't bleeding.

Hrmmm....second person? Something else? Blargh, who the fuck knows at this point.

Slowly turning around to face where the object possibly came from, Joe slowly started running his eyes across the other trees

"Well, looks like there's more than one thing watching us right at the moment."

Not paying much attention to the main group, Jemima tried to make words from the fragments of broken signs. "Qun hurt. Hut tree. Vllllllug. Shik fust. Nope," the last not being an attempt at a word so much as a resignation.
Rising from her crouch and brushing off her knees, she gave the fragments a little push with one foot in a half-bottomed attempt to see.. what? If they'd magically re-form? If there was something underneath? Maybe just out of pique.
With a soft haurmf she returned her attention to ... wait had he said... "More than one? One what?"
This message had punctuation tweaked by the player at 03:53, Tue 24 Mar 2020.

Julien put one hand on a hip and peered up into the tree where Joe seemed to think some...thing... some...one... was watching them. There didn't seem to be anyone there. Throwing a rock didn't work.

"What the hell?" he said after a moment. "Hold this for me, won't you?" He tossed his tophat to Joe and began to actually climb up the tree to find out if there was, in fact, anything up there.

Joe swiftly turned at the motion of the corner of his eye and tried his best to avoid damaging Julien's top hat while catching it.

"Just be careful dude, that tree doesn't look to be overly stable!"

As Julien got up past the main truck, Joe began offering direction "Yeah, just over that side about another metre up, that's where the eyes were staring out from"

Sliding her glasses half way down her nose so that she could see properly over the top of them, Jemima watched the flamboyantly-dressed chap climb. She wrapped her hands underneath her elbows, hugging herself, as she shook her head in negation.

"No. Nope. Not a good idea," though these were said more to herself than aimed directly at the madman climbing into the headache-causing abomination. She took a step backwards, but her eyes still followed Julien with morbid curiosity.

The branch where the eyes apparently were was only about 4 metres from the ground, the upper branches swayed a little as the human moved towards the spot being gestured to. Even from this height the area could be seen clearer, the level of death and dust around the immediate land was even more powerful when one could see the greener forests around them, one brighter green than the other. But there was green near them, the two large green eyes staring at the Englishman from just above Jemima's shoulder, a grin appearing under them that kept growing wider and wider.

Julien followed Joe's instructions, blowing blue hair out of green eyes and finally settling on the branch where the other man had said he'd seen another pair of eyes. Well, there was nothing here that he could see and he opened his mouth to say just that, but the words died in his throat and he snapped his teeth shut again with an audible click.

Indeed, as he'd looked around from his perch, gaze taking in the forests in the distance and the death not-so-distant, he caught sight of Joe's eyes. Well, not Joe's eyes, because those were where they belonged, in Joe's head, but the eyes Joe had presumably seen. Only they weren't in the tree any more. No, indeed.

His own green eyes met the greener still pair, hovering by Jemima's shoulder and he slowly cocked his head with great interest.

Whatever he'd taken was either really good or really bad, but in either case he'd fallen off the wagon in a big way. It was so weird, though. He could have sworn he hadn't taken anything - beyond his prescribed medications that was.

Maybe someone spiked his drink?

All these thoughts wandered with relative laziness through his mind as he continued to watch those floating eyes and finally he said; "Well, they're not up here, Mostly-Call-Me-Irish. But I found 'em, sure enough."

Lilith's eyes widen as she watches Julien climb the tree. She goes to try to stop him but is too late to catch hold of him. She then follows Julien gazer to the eyes perched over Jemima's shoulder.

"Jemima don't move!!" Lilith stalks the eyes very slowly.

"Who are you? What do you want? More Importantly where is your body?"

Lilith reaches out to where a body might be for this thing.

Saying 'don't move' is right up there with 'don't look behind you' when it comes to things-people-never-do-when-you-tell-them-to.

Jemima was, of course, no exception to this rule, and though she initially froze, as Lilith reached out she, of course, spun on the spot and tripped on her own feet. She landed on her butt with a thump and immediately looked up at the hovering, green eyes.

The disembodied green eyes look down at the prone woman, the smile tilting down and letting the gentle light shine across the surface of the bared teeth.

"No need for that" said a cool and steady voice "I did not scream when you appeared in front of me."

Hovering 5 feet off the ground the smile turned upside down, the eyes lagging a little before settling to their spot under the mouth.

"That's, um..." Julien rubbed his eyes and blinked owlishly. "Everyone else saw that, yeah?"

He didn't feel like coming down from the tree. Admittedly, the pair of eyes and smile could clearly float about, so something like being up a tree was unlikely to protect him. Nevertheless it gave him a false sense of some level of security. Not much, if he was honest, but some.

"Also, that floaty mouth is actually talking... Uh... Good morning... if it is morning... Sir... if you are a Sir..."

Jemima harumphed softly and muttered "I didn't scream..." as she got to her feet just to one side of the apparition and brushed herself off.

Squinting at the grin she postulated more audibly, for the good of the chap in the tree and the group at large, "It's not a Sir, it's a cat, though every cat I've met would consider itself royalty. I would have asked where we are but I'm guessing the more literary among us might already have guessed an answer to that, if you are who I think you are," this last directed directly to the floating eyes.

A purr echoed from the place where the eyes floated, they surveyed Jemima with interest,

"You probably would not believe the answer even if you did ask. Though I am grateful you didn't, I do so hate having to repeat myself"

Slowly the grey head of a cat, the wide grin stretching the face unnaturally. The now floating head backed up slightly, bobbing as though on water.

"and why... pray tell, can a Cat not be a Sir?"

Huh? Literary...cat...you gotta be kidding me, WTF is this Alice in Wonderland Bullshit?! Joe sttod there for a few moments while his brain processed what was happening and come to the conclusion that what was happening was seriously out of the realm of possibility...unless some asshole had put something in his food.....

"Oh...great...so apparently Im having a giant acid trip? Funny, I've always heard them described as colourful rather than bland and boring"

"It all depends," Julien muttered in response to Joe's words, finally swinging down from the tree with all the grace of a giraffe.

He was also making the connections the other man had made with Jemima's words. Alice in Wonderland? Well, it made sense. That did seem to be something like the infamous Cheshire Cat. But at the same time it made no sense at all, because that was a story and this wasn't.

"Maybe we're all having a bad acid trip," he mused, coming up alongside Joe. "Though I must admit, I've never had one quite like this..."

Lilith gasped audibly as she watched Jemima fall, her hands out in front of her waving uselessly. "Oh Sorry!"

She extends her hand to Jemima and helps her get to her feet.

"Of course I knew he was familiar! But how? i live alone and i'm damn sure nobody spiked my drink?!"

She extends she hand slightly to the head  to the cat. "You were my favorite character of the story. Would you mind if i check if you are actually here?"

Lilith extends her hand a bit further making a beckoning gesture to him.

The purring continued as the Cat looked at the humans, not looking them directly in the eye but more observing them as one would watch ducks on a pond.

“It's not the first time my existence has been reduced to the effect of a substance.” he said nonchalantly, rolling around as the full body of a grey cat appeared in the air. “I wonder if you your own existences are but the product of someone elses mind, I mean.... would you be able to tell?”

The cat rolled around in the air, tail growing and shrinking as it coiled and uncoiled around the body.

“But here is a relative term. Where is here? Or is it there? Are you here? Maybe you're not, perhaps I am not, yet you are. What is here will not always be here and yet while it is here we don't know if it is”

Joe mentally sighed and then pinched the bridge of his nose at the waffled nonsense the cat looking thing was sprouting.

"Alright then whatever you are...what's your game with this?"

The grinning Cat looked at Lilith with fascination, eyes growing wide like a cat about to accept a good head scratch. But at Joe's words the feline disappeared, a wave of cool air washed over the woman's outstretched hand as her fingers felt they were grasping at hairs made of silk, cool and delicate. The feeling went through her body as the light sound of moving air travelled away and up to the lowest branch of the blurry tree. Appearing again the mysterious creature arched his back and stretched out,

“In this world its not what you are but who you are, then again I did once meet a when you are. Fascinating man, though very hard to get truly acquainted with.”

He jumped down from the branch, though never reappeared as his body vanished between the seeing eye and the branch.

“Though I like games,” said a voice near Julien's shoulder, the weightless feet meeting his clothes “But I never really liked to play. I prefer to watch”