ORIGIN

Giggle's life-based magic senses nothing in the void. The faint reply of Omen's cawing, however broken and distorted, came crackling through to her; but words could not be picked from this. The Hallowed Caller indeed could see Giggle within the void, that much was true.

The stone did not move again, and Vahi's body shifted unstably. Where? Where was it? She could not see it. She could not sense it anymore. It had definitely been here. It had moved, called to her. Where?

Senka regarded the dog for a moment, aware now that he did not know she had taken the others. Was he even aware of what was happening, that this was all her doing? That this was her home? But she was void-cat and her lips twitched into an uncertain smirk; at the mention of her sister as storm-cat, her eyes shifted to the unfortunate body Vahi had been doomed to—and, ah! That's why they had even come back here.

"This is... my den," Senka explained, the yammering of the tiny dog echoing in the back of her mind. Boy, that small creature was loud. And that the hyena would dare suggest she was afraid... Senka had seen fear in the hyena. She did not think herself afraid. "We came back here to search for Vahi's stone—it is a piece of cymophane. I had it here, somewhere." A few more eyes popped open, as if expressing the idea of searching. She did not expect it to be in front of her, behind the dog. She assumed one of the others had already stolen it.

Are you safe, he had also asked.

She felt her tail lash behind her. She was safe. What would he think, however, if he discovered she toyed with the safety of his fellow Gembounds? Shrugging her shoulders to feel the chunk of diamond between them, she felt herself gritting her black teeth. Were they not the same?

Senka quietly quested toward him with her shadows.

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They rolled toward him like dense cloudy tentacles, dipping in and out of the ground and dispersing at his paws like mist; but she was not like him anymore. Somewhere within his body beat his gem with magicka pure. Her ear flicked, then she made a show to move the eyes to different places, searching for Vahi's cymophane.

The moment the words "is this it" left his tongue, all of her summoned eyes swept around the room to gather in a focal area, honing in on the object he stepped aside to reveal. A simple 'ah' left her, quiet and delicate, and her body shifted to move around him as if he might not have been there.

"Sister," she said gently, the storm-body sparking where it stood. Her paw gently nudged the saberfang-shaped stone, moving it away from the body of the dog—had he watched over it, protected it from the others? "Here you are."

Lightning arced erratically from the summoned body of unstable energy, as if awakened by the location of its stone, again; as before, when something else had moved it briefly. But this time it has transfixed on the stone, lightning reaching across the ground and through the air to find it, crawling across the surface of the cymophane.

For a moment, the body of the storm-cat dissipated in a pop of sparks and blinding light. The stone remained crawling with crackling lightning; and then she struck back into the den, a bolt from the air, forming her storm-like feline body once again. She hadn't reformed via chrysalis, and her stone refused to create one.

Senka stared blankly with her eyes for a moment, unsure of what to do. Could they not give her a flesh host somehow? She hissed under her breath. She'd wonder how this was possible, but then, it started with Him anyway.

"I'm sorry," she muttered. Vahi at least looked more stable with the stone in her presence. They would need to find a way to keep the magic source near her. Senka could carry it, maybe.

A rumble of thunder rolled in the den, "We.. tried.."


In her darkness, the dog was speaking, but the knowledge that her sister would never be whole again had pulled her away from everything that had been happening. She just wanted these creatures out of their home.

"There is darkness, and there is void," Senka commented dryly. The hidden bodies of the lion and the filly were gently untucked from backside of the wall, rolled out on dense shadow-like arms and placed on the ground to rouse once they could move.

She considered keeping the loud and tiny fluffy dog, but instead uncurled his body near herself, dangling him high before her body with an eye formed in the middle of her forehead. "Boo," she growled. "Spunky brat." The shadow-like tentacle that held him pulled him back into the wall, then exposed him again near the backside, where the filly and lion had been revealed. Kavish was... less gently plopped beside them.

And Giggle... Senka's single eye shifted from the three she had released to Black, waiting. That's where the others had gone. A shrill reminder called from above her—The Hallowed shitbird circled overhead and her ears flattened. Was the sound made to feel literally harmful to her, just as the bird could see into her realm? Several of the remaining eyes that lingered around the den glared up toward it; and Giggle, an endless onslaught against her peering eyes voidside.

Fine.

Like something she had eaten that tasted rotten, her shadows spat Giggle's body from the inky wall, pushing her out along the ground.

"Get out of our home," Senka demanded, the void pulling toward the ceiling like black water. The eye on her forehead was steady on Black. He had helped her and Vahi again. "Take the others with you and get out of our home." The dog was the only thing that stood between her and the other Gembounds; she had done this deliberately, a show of good faith.

It wasn't his job to stop any of them from coming at her, or to stop her from choosing to defend herself again; but she hoped he took her demand seriously. She had no more lurking shadows, no more tricks. She simply wanted the time with her sister now.

She could terrorize them more later.