ORIGIN

Wyrm was SINGING.

Not very well, mind you, but today was a lovely day, and it was the sort to inspire creativity. She was prancing, too; she'd left splashes of mud and clawed footprints all over down by the river. It was a mess, really. Now she was frolicking through a multicolored patch of flowers, and she'd shifted her song from half-thought-out lyrics about water and shining light to pretty flower stuff. Also, a snake-alligator actually frolicking looked silly, too, but... she made it work.

"And THEN! With the WIND and the PETALS and the..." She paused, webbed foot midair. What rhymes with wind? ...Rinned? That's not a word, uhh... Binned? She didn't really know alphabets, so she could hardly go in order letter-by-letter to find something that worked. "...FINNED! Creatures of the meadoooow!"

Again, the song was most definitely not good.

She made up for it (but not really) in enthusiasm though, doing a spin in the grass. She wasn't ever going to be a princess in some cartoon, but she sure was trying.

It definitely left her visible. And very audible. And questionably smelly, too; she hadn't cleaned the mud off, yet.

Theatrically, Wyrm plucked a daisy and lifted it to her snout, snorting loudly as if to imply she were gently sniffing. Then she sneezed, and flung it dramatically away. "And then the queen was BETRAYED... by the bloom, planted there... for DOOOOM!"

Wyrm flopped onto her back, looking up at the low, fluffy clouds and the cave ceiling high above.

It really was a nice day.

Wyrm faltered and paused as she finally registered an imitation of her song. At first she assumed it was one of the cave birds, until a voice piped up quite close.

Wyrm SQUEAKED, surprised. It definitely wasn't a shriek, or a scream, no, if only because it wasn't loud enough. She rolled to her feet, looking around, and it took her a long moment to spot this new company in the grass. Because... oh, compared to her, Sweetpea was TINY. And--Adorable, she thought, immediately. Just a very, very tiny child! -Was she a child?

"Hi!" Wyrm blurted, blinking, getting over her brief surprise at this stranger's arrival. And she thought briefly before formulating an actual answer, because, uh, the song hadn't been about anything but she couldn't really admit that, could she? It'd been stream-of-consciousness nonsense. Stream-of-nonsenseness. As she considered, she noted the tiny paw-wringing and her heart melted just a little more. CUTE. It also made her wonder: was this a creature half-formed from a Lesser, as others sometimes were? One of the Carollers, maybe?

"It was about, um, beauty! And nature! Also, mud! Did you hear that bit?" she added, hopefully. She'd been particularly proud of it, but it'd been a few minutes back, probably before present company had actually entered earshot. "I have all sorts of songs I could sing!" Wyrm puffed up a bit with pride, but the reality was that she didn't 'have' any songs: anything she sang was quickly forgotten aside from vague thematic elements, and those tended toward 'whatever Wyrm was looking at right then.'

But her attention was on the stranger, now. "What are you?" and it wasn't a demand; her tone was bright, friendly curiosity. "-Sorry, my name's Wyrm! Who are you?"--because that seemed like a more polite thing to ask. And then, as an afterthought and in a tone of deep admiration (because those greens were cool as hell): "I like your feathers!"

Wyrm was an adult, now. The thing was, nobody had told her that. Maybe it wasn't the sort of thing someone should need to be told, but she still sort of thought of herself as quite young. So when Sweetpea perfectly parroted her greeting back, instead of developing some sort of maternal affection, she immediately thought to herself, new friend! A child like Sweetpea could've probably used guidance, and a more mature or at least more thoughtful Gembound might have realized that.

Wyrm was not those things, and so she noodled her way through the grass, bright-eyed (and she did have a LOT of eyes) and excited by this new potential best buddy.

She chirruped wordless encouragement when Sweetpea began to sing, sitting up on her haunches more like a rabbit than any of the ancestral parts of her sum serpentine total. There was no snake or gator in the way she perched, listening attentively, nor in the way she awkwardly turned her wrists to clap her 'hands' at the end of the short tune. It was an instinctive and very poorly done applause, and then they were down to introductions.

"Sweetpea?" Wyrm echoed, snout briefly scrunching a bit in fascinated thought. The only thing she knew that was called "pea" was actually "pee" and she was PRETTY sure-... At least, she hoped that this stranger was not called "sweet pee" because that raised a lot of really weird questions. It's gotta be something else, she decided, pushing that thought aside for now. Feathers had now become more important, and she sat upright again, looking down at herself.

"Oh! Thank you! -But these aren't feathers. They're skin! Feathers are softer," she explained. "Birds have them! Are you part bird? -I know you're just Sweetpea!" she hastened to reassure. She was listening! -She promised! It was just... Sweetpea looked kind of like a bird. And kind of not, too. "You have a beak, too! Like a bird. But ears. I don't think birds have ears?" After a moment, she shrugged and gave up. Wyrm was, after all, a snake-alligator-Oilbeast with gemstone horns and, as mentioned, a few too many eyes. Classification was way outside her area of expertise. "Well, you look cool, anyway! -Can you fly?" Her eyes sprang back open, hopeful. But what if she can't?! she realized, suddenly horrified by her own rudeness. She hastened to add, with dramatic intensity as if it were by FAR the cooler option: "-Or jump really high?!"

Okay, so, note: Wyrm was not an expert in most things.

In anything.

Definitely not in flying. She was descended from "wriggles along the ground" sorts of creatures, for the most part. Sure, there was a flyer in her relatively recent ancestry but she'd never met Nox, and if she had, she'd probably have categorized the oily beast's movement more as "wriggle through the air" instead.

So when Sweetpea started leaping into the sky, Wyrm honestly, genuinely, was baffled. That's not flying, was her first thought, but it was very confused and lacked any conviction whatsoever. Because... if it wasn't flying, what the hell was it? This thought was quickly followed by ...Is it? and then, because honestly she couldn't think of any alternatives, no, it must be flying. Just... not any sort she knew.

"That's amazing!" she said, at least, and she meant it, even if her face was still slightly scrunched up as she tried to puzzle out how these mega-high-jumps actually worked. Unless-? "...Is it magic?" she asked, at length, eyes all springing wide. Maybe that was it?! Maybe Sweetpea could sort-of-fly, with magic! Eager now, Wyrm tried to summon up some magic of her own, to show. Not to show off, or steal the attention, but to share the excitement!

A dim light flared along her extremities, flickering like flame, and she pointed this out to Sweetpea at once, sidling closer (as soon as the potentially OSHA-relevant bouncing had stopped and it wasn't a possible danger zone) to show the glow at her limbs and eyes, even opening her mouth to show it off there. The forked tongue that flicked out was almost white-hot, and she did her best not to show that it was kinda... burning... just a little. Her eyes watered and she dropped the spell, changing the subject quickly.

"Where do you see feathers on me?" she asked, twisting like a ferret to try and look herself over. Maybe there was some explanation to be had!

"I think it might've been!" Wyrm replied, cheerful. Her tone was one of encouragement; magic, after all, was cool!

"This is, yeah! My magic's fire, and sometimes it burns a bit." (This was a wild understatement.) "But this one isn't so bad, and I can use it to make light when someplace is really dark!"

The topic then switched back to her head, and 'feathers.' She reached up, baffled, ducking her head and neck way down in a tight loop and patting claws at her skull. "OH!" she cried, and began to laugh. "No, nah, these are horns! Look," she invited, and stuck her head down into Sweetpea's reach. Technically, a couple of the spines were her gemstone. But mostly, yeah, horn. "Careful, though--they're sharp," she warned.