ORIGIN

Pride peered as the opossum sailed, somehow seeming to do so in slow motion in his mind, nailing a perfect landing on his back. "You mastered that quickly," he praised, his tone warm. "Now be careful; it will wear off any time."

He turned, and began a slow, careful pace back toward the throne; he'd only speed up to a normal walk once he was certain the little creature wouldn't simply fall away.

"Do you have a name, do you know?" Pride asked politely, one ear flattened back toward his passenger. Rider? Whichever it might be; his guest. "I am Pride." He'd said this already, he was pretty sure, but he'd found that with children, repetition was key--and an example, in case the kid didn't know what a "name" was.

"We're going to a little garden. There are plants there, and fruits, but if you eat... other things, like meat, we can catch something if you like?" He turned his head slightly to peer backward (it wasn't awkward looking, at least, given his wide angle of view). The child-... rather looks like a rat, he realized. Unlikely, then, that it'd want to hunt rats, unless it wasn't actually one-? It did look like an Echoing Gray, though, to some extent.

Just-... a very tiny one.

Pride suppressed a gentle snort. "No, I am not stupid," he answered; "It is a pleasure to meet you, Opie." He continued moving sedately along through Orion, but spoke with faint, humorous reproach as he did so: "It is a little rude to ask someone if they are stupid; wouldn't it make you angry if I asked you that-?" Pride was fairly certain the answer was 'yes.' In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if just about anything would make him angry, he reflected. "It is good to treat others the way you'd want to be treated. I would want help finding food if I were hungry, so I am doing that for you," he explained, slow and gentle.

Preachy, perhaps--but kids without these lessons could grow from amusing little monsters to horrifying adult ones.

He made his way to the edges of Mercy's garden--the place where the crumbled stones of the old ruins began to meet with overflowing moss and grass. There were often mice and rats here, he knew, ones that slipped into the garden to snatch some food and while he didn't mind that at all, it meant it would be a good place to hunt.

He summoned up a little wisp of light as he walked, sending it into the crevices and beneath the overhangs, his magic taut--he was ready to snap out a different magic to snare a creature, should they find one.

"Quiet, now," he warned in a near-whisper, "I will try and hunt some meat for you."

There was a soft skittering from up ahead, just below--and the wisp illuminated the glint of eyes beneath a stone. Pride froze, ready to strike.

Opie's acidic nature did little to dampen Pride's patience. "I can find food for us both," he reassured Opie. His attention, too, was focused (as it must be) on prey. Hunting was not new to him--he'd been thinking, only minutes ago, of the broken-legged dog for whom he'd had to hunt and this was simply an unpleasant revisiting of that, a necessity, as it so often was. Some of his children had been carnivorous, as well, for that matter.

The trick, he'd found, was to make it painless, quick, as much as possible. It would also be good to use our shared magic, Pride thought, though he mistakenly attributed a number of types of magic to the same element--"magic of the mind," as he thought of it. So while this lesson might have some useful generalities, it wasn't actually the sort Opie could learn quite as easily. The wisp continued to bob, suddenly directionless, as Pride released it and snagged out with his other magic.

A big rat--some two feet long, plus the tail, and deep gray in tone--was yanked out swiftly from beneath the rocks; Pride lifted it without a touch or even movement, tense with focus. He then dashed it on the rocks, a sharp, quick strike that left it briefly twitching, and then dead.

"...That should do," he murmured, tone a bit subdued. He then glanced back, to see how Opie would react. "These are Lessers; they cannot speak and think, like you and I. They tend to serve as food for those who can. We don't eat one another," he clarified--an important lesson, and one he assumed most adults taught most children as soon as they could.

But would Opie take this in stride--or prove traumatized? Or something in between, or something else entirely? Pride didn't know the child well enough to predict, so he waited, carefully still, to see.

Any deep, solemn concern Pride had that he'd traumatized the child was washed away with relief as Opie hustled (well, first fell, then hustled) toward the meal with nothing but eagerness. Or--was that greed?

Apparently, he was going to eat it all. Pride gave a brief, good-natured laugh. "Good luck," he offered. "I do not eat meat; you can have as much of it as you like."

Pride lowered himself to the ground, folding long limbs beneath him and settling on his chest and stomach. He chewed his cud idly as he first watched Opie start in on the meat--and then he turned his gaze away, keeping half-absent watch for any form of danger.

It did occur to him that maybe the greedy, aggressive child at once fixing on meat and blood were maybe not good signs, but he dismissed that as mild paranoia; after all, carnivores were just... carnivores. It was in their nature, nothing sinister.

He glanced around, ears sweeping this way and that, and let out a relatively contented exhale; never mind that the background noise was the young opossum chewing on a carcass.

"So, do you like it?" he asked, at length, turning to watch Opie sidelong. It was a question given with faint amusement; the child had already, after all, declared it his "new favorite thing." "Just be careful when hunting alone; they hunt, too, and they hunt in groups." This warning was lightly, gently given. There might've been carefree Gembound in the cave who'd have given Opie nothing but encouragement and enthusiasm; Pride always fretted that he was a bit of a wet blanket in comparison, but really, he couldn't help but offer these perfectly valid warnings.

He'd just hate to imagine what would happen should a child run into a rat pack not knowing. But--maybe he could make it interesting-? If the magic cooperates, he thought drily; this element never seemed to do so.

It did, though, to his delight, and so rather than a wet blanket, he settled in excitedly to teach a fun little lesson, instead. "This is magic--I will show you some of the dangerous things," he offered. "They aren't real, don't worry." Dinner, with a show!

He formed images, in the air--life-sized, and far enough from Opie that they hopefully wouldn't frighten him, but lifelike and bright. A pack of coal-eyed black pitch rats lurking behind nearby boulders changed into huge, jagged-fanged Dragonbats flitting overhead. Part of the stone itself seemed to detach to become one of the fat, camouflaged, predatory Lurker snakes, slithering across the floor. "Some of the creatures are very dangerous," he said, "like these. But some-" and now the magic became glittering schools of violet Orion's Scale fish, shoaling through the air "-are harmless, and make for good food, or just something pretty to look at." He kept the magic up a moment longer--the magic imagery became flitting Fairyfly butterflies, a dashing short-tailed Kooru, a reptilian Kite sailing up above.

Then he let the magic fade, glancing back to Opie.

Pride gave a short, good-natured laugh. "Yes," he agreed. "And that is your magic. Alternatively, you can pick something up and throw it at them," he added, once again conflating "mind magic" elements, as he often did.

He turned, and a short distance away, a rock--not a pebble, not a boulder, but something a little larger than a brick--lifted into the air. It hovered over toward Pride, and he nodded to it. "Like this," he explained, and then gave the slightest gesture of his nose. The stone went flying, clattering off another nearby boulder, crashing off and to the ground with a bit of dust and spark. It wasn't anything very dramatic, but it was clear that it could cause some damage to even a large Pitch Rat.

"And you don't need to be big to have powerful magic," he told Opie, glancing at the opossum child. Granted, he had no idea how big the kid might get, but it still seemed important to teach. "With some practice you can learn to hunt, and protect yourself easily, within a cycle or two."