ORIGIN

There were very few thoughts in Rena's head as she skittered her way down the crystal-encrusted tunnel. She was trying to keep it that way, because if she let herself have a thought, it would be about how all these crystals were—oh no. She'd started thinking about it again.

Entirely against her will, Rena's myriad legs slowed to a halt. Then they turned her back around to where she'd been five seconds ago, where bones lay scattered willy-nilly all over the floor and were even sticking up at odd angles out of piles of crystals. A set of pincers lifted, grabbed one of the offending objects (some kind of rib or leg, she thought [she was not particularly familiar with non-insectoid skeleton anatomy]) and tugged hard, trying to rectify the way it was stuck half in the air and half within purple crystal. Infuriatingly, it did not move. Her pincers tightened and she began to not just think but contemplate. Would it be more or less messy if she simply tried to smash through it...?

Rena immediately tensed as someone entered the tunnel from Canis. Though they didn't seem immediately hostile, they were large, which put them in the 'possible threat' tier in Rena's mind. It was simply staring at her for now. What did it want? Perhaps for her to get out of the way?

One pair of golden eyes glanced down at the bone-crystal fusion currently still in her grasp. The other remained fixed on the stranger, watching them. Okay. She'd stop blocking the path.

Her grip tightened until several loud cracks echoed through the tunnel and the bone-crystal broke into several large pieces. Rena picked these up in several other sets of pincers and moved to the side in a mass of skittering legs. Waiting for the stranger to pass through, if that was what they'd wanted.

Distressingly, the stranger did not simply pass through. Instead it picked up a chunk of bone and also crushed it to pieces. This would not have been such a big problem, if he had not let the chunks go scattering every which way on the tunnel floor.

Rena twitched, then gave in. She scurried after them like some kind of freakish worm-dog, picking up each piece and rearranging them into a neat line near the tunnel wall. The bone-crystal chunks, she struggled with more. While one end of the worm stared balefully up at the stranger, the other end was focused on the bone-crystal pieces with increasing intensity as pincers struggled to either pull them out from one another or crush it to a dust so fine that their togetherness would not matter.

It was perhaps like watching someone struggle with a tragically-stuck-closed jar.

Another shattered bone went flying across the tunnel floor. Rena completely gave up on her efforts to extract bone from crystal, instead hastily shoving the chunks out of sight and out of mind before scrambling after the new offenders.

She picked these up too, with significantly less patience than the first time, and reared up, lifting the front half of the body off the ground to face the stranger. It still didn't bring her to eye level, but it indicated more serious business than if he had to talk to the floor. She hoped.

"You're supposed to clean up after yourself." Golden eyes stared reproachfully at the stranger's long, blank face. Neither of them had much in the way of facial expressions. A black wing swept out and gestured to the bones she'd had to clean up for him. "Keep things orderly."

Though they didn't say anything, the stranger's behavior did change, which Rena thought was promising. They collected one of the bones that Rena had already cleaned up—were they not satisfied with how she had arranged it? Bizarrely, though no one's opinion except Mother's should have mattered, this thought ate at Rena.

She watched, first in confusion and then in full-on bafflement, as the dinosaur attempted to stand the bone up on its end. That was an unstable form—too much potential for disorder when it fell. Which it did. And again. And again. And again. And—

Rena scuttled forward and interrupted the dinosaur's nth attempt by taking the bone into her own pincers. She brought it back to where the other bones were resting. She replaced it in its place in the pattern. She took several bones scattered haphazardly outside the small ordered pattern and arranged them carefully, adding to the lattice of now-ordered bones.

Then she waved one leg at the stranger, and pointed at what she'd made. Did they understand?