ORIGIN

The stranger did not understand. The stranger... the stranger...

Rena was stunned. Not from fear or awe at 'being shown not to mess with him'. From... complete and utter bafflement? And also a bit of pity? That looked like it really hurt.

It didn't even occur to her that he'd tried to attack her. That didn't look like an attack. It looked like... well, she didn't know. Slowly, she extended a wing to brush toward the very head that had just slammed into the floor. Sometimes Gembounds got hot and feverish and did things that didn't make sense. Was this one... okay?

The touch of wing to dinosaurian forehead revealed nothing. They just flinched away in a very delayed reaction and then touched their own snout. Rena... supposed that she didn't have any real reason to care, but she still asked.

"Why did you do that?"

From the beginning, this stranger had been one inexplicable action after another. She could not understand it at all. She wondered if it was trying to do anything, if it had an actual goal in mind to the... the bone smashing, the bone standing, and the head slamming. It might be relevant to the Hive, or it might not at all. But Rena was... curious.

In the latest turn of events, the stranger seemed more annoyed by the fact that she'd asked it a question than by the fact they'd just smashed their head right into solid rock. Also they thought that everything mentioned above was fun.

"... Okay." Keep having fun, then. Rena was going to do something productive.

She turned back to the bones littering the Canis Entrance again. The main pincers at one end grabbed hold of a particularly large chunk of bone embedded in a geode formation and yanked aggressively. The structure of the millenia-old bone had less integrity than Rena expected. It crumbled almost immediately in her grip and she was thrown backward by the force of her own tug, landing hard on her back. Infinite legs flailed in the air for a second or two until she managed to right herself.

Rena breathed hard and considered the lingering soreness of the impact on her chitin and flesh-and-bone wings. Don't get what's so fun about it.

Embarrassingly, it was the stranger again that showed up to 'avenge' Rena. He stomped and crushed the geodes around her with alarming ease. Before she could make space to process any other reaction, Rena went skittering after the pieces again to collect and arrange each of them.

Belatedly, it occurred to her that maybe this wasn't the most efficient way to do things. If they worked together on smashing up the bone and crystal for now, she could rearrange them all in a more orderly manner on her own once they were freed from their stony fetters. Provided that she could tolerate the temporary mess.

Change of strategy, then. "Thank you," she told the dinosaur. "Let's smash them together." She wound up and whipped one pincer-laden end at a particularly bone-infested piece of crystal. The impact reverberated through her chitinous exoskeleton as it shattered upon impact, freeing each category of solid from their entropic fusion with one another. Beautiful.

The dinosaur's enthusiasm for violence would have been almost scary, if Rena wasn't a fearless machine of order designed to enact violence herself. Or at least, she aspired to be. Twin pairs of eyes quickly locked on their first target, a skull awkwardly engulfed in a mess of violet crystal. That wouldn't do. Rena drew back a limb and stabbed right at it. Glassy knives cut into the crystal, chipping away at the material trapping the foreign object, but it did not break completely. Undeterred, Rena wound up for a second attempt—unless Brother got there first.