ORIGIN - feeding the nintendog

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Kera's muzzle twisted with thought. Smoke... check. Fire... check. Dragon... not sure. Something had to have made the fire, though. "I couldn't tell you," she was eventually responding. "It felt like a long time. It smells like everything's normal out there, though, so it couldn't have been that bad."

The wolf shook her head absently-- no wounds. She'd spent enough time in her chrysalis to take a good mend from any wounds that she might have initially sustained, and aside from feeling a little cramped, it was nothing a good stretch wouldn't take care of.

Kera, after all, had some boasting to do. "Unless those lights have gone anywhere while I've been out," she said, nose pointing distantly, "I'm the reason they're on at all."

"The caves were pitch-black when I was born, so I turned the lights on. Made a weird amount of enemies about it, actually-- some of the others liked it for hunting and killing people, I guess, but it was pretty shit to do, uh, anything in the dark. Everybody seemed... just miserable about it."

"I try to make sure nobody fucks with it anymore. It's a bad state for everybody to be in, but, uh-- I haven't really been able to." Because she was stuck.

With a little scrape, she shuffled on the spot. "It was a really long time ago now, though. Things've probably changed." She'd have to find that Overseer she had the faintest memory of meeting, and find out if Blackberry had died at her trial.

Her muzzle crinkled again. "Who're the bigwigs?"

@Thalia

Thalia's face reappeared in the gap, nose scrunched up but eyes wide. If what the white wolf said was true--that she'd turned on the lights--then she was far, far older than Thalia'd realized.

"You turned the lights on?" she asked, clearly both surprised and impressed. And as she started 'walking' another block of stone backwards, rocking it away side-by-side, she hopefully asked for more information. "Could you tell me about that, uhh--if you don't mind, I mean?"

It sounded like a damn good story, and Thalia lived for damn good stories. For hearing them--and for retelling them, especially in song.

"The lights have been on my whole life," she went on--and then dropped down into a crouch, peering into the gap she'd made. "I didn't know they'd ever been out. Think you can squeeze through this-?" She gestured to the narrow hole.

"As for the bigwigs--I don't really know, but they opened up--do you know about it?--the palace in Cepheus? They live there, I guess." Her own family'd half-moved to Cepheus after the tunnel had opened up, and the palace played some pretty kickass music, sometimes. Thalia liked it there, but... sparingly. It got a little claustrophobic, sometimes, especially when there wasn't much to drink.

@Kera

"Well," said Kera, eyes shifting to watch Thalia through the gap. "Somebody had tossed someone's stone into the generator-- it's this.. big sort of metal hole in Polaris, in the river. There's little things in it that move with the flow of the water, but when the stone got into it, the whole thing jammed. When we got it out the lights came back on, but-- I don't know. It seems like a delicate thing, you know? Anyone can just-- toss something down there and make everybody miserable again."

She paused, for a moment, as her forepaws went to the hole and she began scrambling and digging, easing her burly body out of the crevice bit-by-bit. "There was someone I met, when I was a kid-- when it was dark. I showed her how to make mushrooms that could glow and she was so... happy." A long scchhh of her haunches against stone, followed by the thump of her legs hitting the ground. Kera immediately bowed into a stretch, paws well out in front of her and spine scythe-shaped.

"I don't know how long they must have been out for," she said, rising again and shaking a good amount of dust off her coat. "--fuck me, thanks. But, uh, I don't know. I just never forgot how she reacted to seeing some light, you know?"

To Thalia's next question, however, Kera was shaking her head-- "I don't know what a palace is. Or a Cepheus." There were only really a handful of rooms, last Kera checked-- even Hydra she had only heard briefly in passing, and never saw even the tunnel in Canis.

@Thalia

Thalia listened with fascination.

And as Kera dug, she helped, stepping aside and pulling bits of stone and debris away from the wolf's compressed path--nothing large or actually useful, really. As Kera was squeezing out Thalia stood aside, smiling a little, briefly awkward now that there was nothing left to do (where was she supposed to put her hands?). Some instinctive, reflexive part of her moved to pet Kera instead--to run a hand briefly over fur as if in greeting--and she pulled back right after the attempt, a little horrified. That isn't helping?! she thought, wondering what the hell had just come over her.

"Sorry!" -and hastened to change the topic. Going back to what Kera had been saying, then: "I wonder if anyone in my family knows about that." About this time when everything'd been dark. It sounded way before any of them had been alive.

But--Kera didn't know about the palace..? Thalia struggled to think of another point in time she could use as a sort of benchmark, one of the pieces of cave history. "Uhh, were you around for the Deathmatch?" she asked, glancing back toward the forum; being so close, and having been so large, it was the first thing that came to mind.

Cepheus, at least, was a relatively new opening--that much she knew--so if Kera didn't know about that, she might be older still. That, or... she just hadn't been out that way?

She glanced around then, and up, and stepped back to make room. It was occuring to her now that if Kera had chrysalized during the big dragon attack, then she wouldn't have seen Orion since. The ruins had been badly charred all over--reduced, in places, to rubble. Well--more than they had been, anyway. She didn't know how important the place had been to the wolf, whether Kera had lived here and called this place home or had maybe just been passing through.

"Did you, ah, live here?" she asked, concern lighting her eyes. "If so, I'm--sorry."

@Kera

Kera found herself more confused than offended by the touch; at first, she had written it off as the unusual feeling of getting used to fresh air on her fur until Thalia apologized. She was quick, however, to dismiss it-- especially since some completely ludicrous shit was coming out of the faun's mouth.

"Deathmatch?" The wolf snorted with surprise. "That sounds fucked up, who's idea was that?" She could hazard a guess -- there was no shortage of bloodthirsty gembound around the caves, but Kera still found herself dreading the answer.

She licked her muzzle quietly for a moment, looking around. "I hatched here. That was my den," she nodded to the rubble. "At least-- I think it was. It's sort of hard to... tell." Orion didn't look much like she remembered it, really-- but Kera had never really taken in the view very often. She only knew her den by its fungi on its walls, and they were long gone. "I had two kids here, but one never hatched."

It was probably also taken by the fire, she realised with a grimace, picking herself up and having a little sniff around the hollow buildings next door.

It was a slightly unnerving pause she offered in that time, Kera realised. "Uhh, I'm sure it's fine, though. Do you live here?"

@Thalia

That last bit of news had her blinking, taken aback by how damn grim it sounded. Didn't hatch-? Can that happen..? "Damn, I'm sorry," she blurted, heartfelt, and then straightened--brushing rock dust from her black-furred thighs--and looked around. "Live here-? No," and it wasn't really a judgment on Orion. She just hadn't considered it. "I mean, I've got family here-! So I visit a lot, but mostly I live in Eridanus, or I visit Cepheus-... I wander," she finished, with a brief and lopsided grin.

"The Deathmatch shit, uh... it was kind of fucked up," Thalia admitted. She hadn't really thought too much about it, in retrospect. Some of it had been quite horrible, really, but some sort of... almost beautiful, even with the 'death.'

Maybe especially with it.

There was something in little things fighting for their lives against all odds that was inspiring. And they had made the choice to fight. But some of it had been downright gruesome, too. "Some did die in it, like--got eaten, burned, that sort of thing," she told Kera, with a grimace. "I'm not sure whose idea it was, but it was... run, I guess? By that little fairy thing. Uh, Nemean. And the big purple guy with too many eyes, and a huge shaggy thing--like, bigger than anything I've ever seen in these caves. She was brown, with red--horns?" It was hard to remember, now. Plus, Thalia'd been a little tipsy at the time. "And spiky wings. But if you don't know about that--you must've been asleep for a real long time," she added, frowning.

Thalia tried to count back, but she couldn't really remember how long it had been. Ten cycles, maybe fifteen-? For sure, though, that meant Kera had been asleep since about the time the dragon had fucked Orion up, which was more of a pointer toward that being the timeline. Or maybe even sooner.

Anyway, that brought them to the here and now, and Thalia found herself eyeing Kera over for a moment. A little flash of magic and she was holding out one hand, a small banana in her palm; she pulled back a peel, offering out the magic fruit.

"So... you've been asleep awhile. You hungry? Or if you need some place to stay, we have, like... a little--village?" she offered, uncertain. She didn't know if the wolf would want to wander straight off on her own--if she had business to attend to, probably stuff long left undone. Thalia didn't mind, either way, but she'd have felt sort of bad not offering her hospitality when she was so... out of place. Out of time, even. "It's in Eridanus, we have food, water, a safe place to rest if you need. If you want," she amended, with a little shrug and a look of polite concern.

@Kera

Kera had a little sniff at the offered banana. Fruit wasn't usually her thing, but this was sweet and familiar. She lifted it carefully from Thalia's palm without showing too much teeth and craned her head away to go snapping at it hungrily. It was only after the inital bite that she did realise how hungry she was, and thirsty, too.

She was snuffling the remains of the peel when her fur began to twinkle like sunlight breaking through clouds.

"Nemean is a familiar name," she muttered. "The purple guy-- the Overseer?" He was the only purple guy who had an unreasonable amount of eyes that she could think of-- but Kera was suddenly unsure if this was... offensive, somehow. The third, however, she could not even visualize-- the only black shaggy thing that came to her mind would have been something akin to Blackberry's spawn, and to her knowledge, none with red horns.

Kera took a taste of the peel and spat it back out, finding it simultaneously too chewy and too tough for comfortable consumption. "I don't need shelter, I'm tough," she grinned over, good-naturedly. "I'm fucking starving, though-- do you want to share food?" She would have preferred to catch something, thinking of it-- the exercise and fresh blood in her mouth would feel great.

She finally left the banana peel and sat back on her haunches. She should see Rift in Eridanus, if they go there, and-- "Are the Seven still around here?" She asked, mentally formulating a list of people to catch up with: Rift, Pride and Blackberry seemed like the immediate priority for getting up to date with what's happened in the caves.

@Thalia

Overseer? Thalia offered a shrug that was far less than graceful. "I don't know if it's an Overseer?" Honestly, there'd been so many introductions and so many of them had been ridiculously over the top. ...In retrospect, though, all those titles, the food, the music and lights, the cheering--it had been sort of exhilarating. But remembering a single name out of all of that?

Nah.

When Kera grinned, Thalia grinned back, easily--to some, the flash of fangs from a wolf Kera's size might've been intimidating, but Thalia liked her company and found it reassuring more than anything. "We can do that. And the Seven-?" She grinned again; she knew this one! "Yeah. Pride--he's one of my dads--he's one of them, he still lives up by the throne-thing. With Mercy, if you know either of them?" She shrugged a little, and added, "They have a whole family here."

"Anyway, we can go get food--what do you eat? Do you want something from Eridanus, from--our home, or-?" She looked Kera briefly up and down, and guessed that she ate meat--maybe a rat or something, then. She wasn't sure, though, so she left it for the wolf to say.

@Kera

"One of your dads?" Kera parroted, albeit not without amusement. She hadn't expected Pride of all people to be the kind to have and care for children, especially after throwing around distasteful insults about Blackberry's children-- (murder-dumplings came to mind). A second or two to rethink and suddenly Kera could see it: he had done a hefty amount of babysitting before, after all.

Pink tongue swiped along her jowls. "Me and your dad used to be friends," she said, conversationally-- as she was turning to lazily stretch her legs and walk. "Actually, now that I think about it-- he found me in this room the last time I woke up out of hibernation. Did he never tell you about me?" Kera would have been wounded, if she were not still reeling with amusement with this news. "And Mercy-- Mercurius, right? He's kept me fed on more than one occasion, but I never saw much of the guy. Always too busy."

She paused, then, nails scraping against the cave floor. Thalia looked like Pride in most ways, except for her... upper half. Pride, as far as she knew, was a herbivore-- had this creature inherited that, too, or...? Would she take offense if Kera tried to eat a cave deer? "Uh... what do you eat, by the way?"

You know: the safest way to ask if someone's down for sort-of-cannibalism.

@Thalia

So far as Thalia knew, Pride had a whole-ass family. She couldn't say she'd met them all, but she'd seen enough of them in passing--the adopted and the 'blood,' the big and the surprisingly small. So the smile she gave Kera was quizzical: a little confused as to why this was funny. "Yeah-?" she asked, brow a little furrowed, though that smile remained and it was genuine.

She shook her head--dismissing the internal question, offering a negative to Kera's and, all at the same time, confessing self-deprecating humor. "I gotta admit, I don't... really stay up on current events," she answered wryly. "Pride's got a lot of kids, a lot of friends--Mercy too, yeah--but I don't know half their names. Rude, maybe, but they're not usually gathered up together, y'know?" She paused, turning away, gesturing to the cave at large. "I eat whatever. Not really good at hunting if my spear's not on me so don't worry about me, I'll find something," she added, as easygoing as before.

She carried on walking, but she spoke now, thoughtful. "You know, now that you mention it--when I asked you about the lights, it's because I tell stories. Well--I make them into music, and I sing 'em. I'm not real good at it," she admitted, with casual humor, brushing some dust off her arms from the rocks she'd pried off Kera. "But I really should ask Pride more about his stories. He might have something good--I think he's old as hell, and he's seen a lot, I just never really asked about it before. ...So how'd you get to know him?" was her curious follow-up, with another quizzical smile Kera's way.

"Please tell me it was one of those adorable 'baby best friends' things." Thalia grinned.

@Kera

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