ORIGIN - overthinking it

Paws were strange, Abel had quickly determined immediately after emerging. One had to move them all in a very specific way to get places, and he wasn’t finding that the easiest.

They were too big as well, Abel noticed as he stared down at them, as he tried to carefully figure out which paw to move when. Maybe he was just terrible at walking, he thought to himself as he once again stumbled forwards a little bit.

Having only managed to move a short distance, the cub plopped down in place, giving up on walking for now. It just required so much thought. How was he supposed to keep track of all his paws all at once and make them all move in different ways?

@Kera

After breaking out of the hellish landscape that was hibernation, Polaris seemed much nicer then Kera remembered. The air was cool and the thrumming of the Spire seemed to ignite her exhausted limbs with more energy. If she'd taken a nap here, she likely would have been back to feeling like herself in no time at all.

She was not, however, remotely ready for a sleep. She was suddenly buzzing with too much restless energy, and instead, the wolf found herself patrolling the room with heavy paw-steps.

The generator was first, of course-- the generator that kept the lights on all over the caves. In ankle-high water she listened to it bubble and whir beneath the river, eyes squinting into the mirk. The noises sounded good, and although she couldn't quite see inside, she was fairly certain there wasn't anything lodged in it.

This, Kera decided, was also good, at least in the grand scheme of things. For Kera, it was boring. There was very little to do other than patrol and keep an eye on things, when Kera wanted very much to be living up to her title and impressing people like she used to do.

Pink tongue ran along her jowls as she turned and waded back out of the river to go scrambling back to land. There, she heard the hollow thump of a body hitting the floor and swiveled with alarm.

It was not, luckily, a murdering goose, or a dragon, or someone coming to jam the generator. It was only someone who still smelled like the inside of a new chrysalis, someone small and striped and orange.

Nails clicked on the cave floor as she approached from behind, neck extending to observe the cub critically. "Hey, kid, you good?" she asked once in earshot, sniffing absent-mindedly. "Not hurt or anything, are you?"

@Abel

The sudden voice from behind him resulted in Abel anxiously trying to spin around to face the speaker, but he tripped in the process, nerves causing him to be even more clumsy than before. Still, at least he managed to get facing in the right direction. Wide, yellow eyes regarded the bigger gembound.

At the second question, the cub shook his head to indicate that he wasn’t hurt. Still, the young tiger’s gaze kept jumping around before moving back to the wolf, a clear skittishness to him. It hadn’t occurred to him to keep an eye on his surroundings, and then he’d been snuck up on.

What if something else was sneaking around? Something less friendly?

Abel moved to sit up as he realized he was still sprawled out in the ground in front of this other gembound, if in a different direction than he’d been sprawled out before.

@Kera