ORIGIN

The Piano was back at The Organization's old haunt, freshly caught and sedated mystfox in tow. The little creature fit in its box quite well for the time being, but it would need to find a way to contain it while it was away doing other things and before it found a new home.

Magic flowed to the golden alien script on its side, which began to reflect light with an eerie shine. Cassiopeia's dimness became less forbidding to its vision, the shapes and outlines of everything it could see sharper. The Piano rifled through the overgrown vegetation as it wheeled itself along, searching for branches or vines that could be useful for its purpose and stowing any that it found inside its box.

When it felt it had collected enough, The Piano returned to its chosen spot and began building the enclosure. It had to admit, architecture and structural engineering were not its usual areas of expertise. The cobbled-together fox enclosure definitely looked the part, awkward vine-ties and branches that didn't fit quite right everywhere one looked. The 'door' was more like a flap with multiple knots you had to untie. The visibility was... not great. But The Piano confirmed with some tugging of its strings that it was stable, and probably escape-proof. It reassured itself with the fact that this was only a temporary enclosure to hold it until it could make a better one.

As The Piano rolled back to view its creation, several more thoughts occurred to it. Would other people want to spend time interacting with the mystfox before they committed to taking it home? What opportunities could it give the mystfox to show off its cleverness and playfulness, so that it would not get bored and lose its sparkle? To its chagrin, it could not think of many ideas. As someone who spent most of its free time in the library playing music, it had very little idea of what Gembound without keys, strings, and hammers did for fun.

In the end, it just kind of dragged a few big branches and rocks into the enclosure without any sort of coherent design scheme. The mystfox had liked chasing its friend around those things, right? The Piano regretted that it had not been able to bring its friend along too, but... the fox would just have to make do.

Carefully, it placed the mystfox's sleeping little body inside the enclosure and shut the door. What else did an animal need? Food and water? It would start with water.

While there were plenty of water sources within Cassiopeia, the question of how to transport and hold water into the mystfox's enclosure was one The Piano would have to spend some time figuring out. After breaking into several homes with doors it could fit through with varying difficulty (it wasn't breaking and entering if the residents were already long gone), its strings dug out a dusty metal bowl from someone's millennia-old residence and waved in the air with triumph. It rinsed this off in a small stream and filled it with the same stream's water before taking this back to the mystfox enclosure, careful not to spill too much on the way.

Now the only thing left for it to find was food. This would be an easy task, The Piano thought. It would hunt the same as it always did, only instead of tearing its prey apart and flooding its digestive cavity with juices it would just give the prey to the mystfox instead. Oh, and it should catch something small. So it wouldn't all rot and go to waste before the mystfox could finish it.

An attempt to send a pulse of magic from its gem resulted nothing but silence in The Piano's ears. That wasn't right, it knew there were rats and other Lessers skulking about all the time. So the only explanation was that its spell had failed. What a drag.

It wasn't as if a five-second delay would cause anyone to starve, though, so The Piano simply shrugged it off and tried again. This time the faint heartbeats of the surrounding fauna pulsed to life in its senses successfully, and it wheeled itself toward a small one digging around in some overgrown bushes--probably a rat of some kind.

When it had gotten close enough, with no apparent reaction from the heartbeat--how useful for it that despite its size Lessers generally completely failed to see it as any sort of predator--it lashed out, strings grabbing for its target. It was thwarted, though, by the plant growth the rat was foraging under; it could not see its prey from behind the cover and the heartbeat scampered away unharmed.

With a sigh, it turned to the next closest small heartbeat. Again it approached, again it lashed out. A Pitch Rat came into view as it drew its strings back in, struggling and biting furiously at the metallic tendrils to little effect. The Piano simply squeezed, tighter and tighter, until its movements weakened and then stilled. It waited still more to make sure the creature was not playing dead, then slowly relaxed its grip. It was well and truly dead. It wheeled itself back to the mystfox enclosure and deposited this rat next to the water bowl, a delicious snack for when the poor Lesser inside woke up.

Did mystfoxes subsist solely on meat, or did they also like berries and plant matter? The Piano had not observed them enough to know, but it thought it should gather some alternative foods just in case. It wandered along, looking for anything promising--ooh, the berries in those bushes looked promising! It reached out a string to grab some, only to flinch back at a sudden sting--it had apparently provoked a bumblebug happily feeding on the flowers on that same bush. The sting had worked its way perfectly in between the protective scales on its string, and burned in a way the pitch rat's bites had not.

"[piano sounds]," The Piano hissed, in what was probably a curse word for it. It flailed its stung string around wildly, trying to distract itself from the pain.

It would not let a puny bug stop it. Pride was coded into The Piano's genome. That's what the P in its name stood for: Pride, and also Power. Also Persistence.

None of these things were helping it right now, though. Despite its Pride and Power and Persistence its search turned up nothing apart from that one bush it didn't really want to see again. GRR.