ORIGIN

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Kerberos did the first truly sensible thing in his life and plopped down on his belly, legs splayed out, and finally tried to fix the mess he had made. His forepaws frantically tried to get the gunk off of his face while his ungunked face frantically licked at his tail. The air was still wigging out a little and that made him uncomfortable. He knew he had done it but he didn't know how to make it stop.

Aside from frantic pawing and licking himself, however, he more or less held still as he was told and avoided looking at Giggle. She was very mad at him and he felt quite quite bad about it. Maybe she would just disappear and he would be able to slink away (after kidnapping a bone, perhaps) and forget this had ever happened.

Something told him, however, that he was not in charge-- he had lost the "play"-- and he was in deep, deep dog shit.

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The pup and all three of his heads stopped when Giggle said his name, though each set of eyes only met hers for a moment before looking down at the scattered bones. Each head nodded when she spoke of cleaning off, shaking up and down at just slightly different rates. The heads put the words to memory, please, thank you, don't attack, and carefully the pup got up, hoping that maybe she would forget that he had maybe tried to fight her. When he was bigger maybe he could win the bones, but not until he was older. He knew when he was beat.

"Okay," he woofed, a paw rubbing at his mucky face still. "Please?" Another head offered, only to be corrected by the head Giggle seemed to think was the smartest-- which might have been true-- "Thank youuuu." With the formalities aside, the one and a half faces that could see lead his great, lumbering baby body back to the puddles and ferns.

He paused before he got too far away though, his floppy head glancing back at Giggle with the hesitant of a thought. "Giggle come too?" His paws kept going after he asked, though he continued to stare back. It was only kind of a problem, with literally only one ungunked eye watching where he was going, but it wasn't long before he stumbled back to the lair of the hyena, and promptly flopped in the water.

His paws scrubbed at the sticky mucus, his tail flicking through the cool water, getting all of the gross stuff off as best as he could.

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The pup blinked, soaking wet noses tilting up towards her as she instructed him not to move. Was she going to do something bad to him, for trying to eat her? Maybe she was hungry now, and wanted to eat him. He snorted, grumbling and mumbling to himself. "What she want?" "I'unno." "Is fine." "Yeah'huh." The heads went on to groom each other, licking the wet off, the gunk mostly gone, and then stopped abruptly when he felt something peculiar happen on his behind.

"Fix tail?" Asked the head most concerned about the state of his tail, glancing back at the tingly, strange feeling on his rump. He blinked, the other two sets of eyes watching as Giggle came around to lick up some water. She hadn't tried to eat him, not like Baratheon had. Perhaps only white beasts belonged at the top of the food chain, though she had beat him... So where did that leave things?

Things simply didn't make sense to the pup. "Giggle," he whined, tilting his scarlet nosed head nearly ninety degrees inwards, getting a ear full of tongue from the middle head. "Bones didn't show anything." The other heads considered this statement. "Bones tasty though." This was something that all of him agreed with, each head nodding in acknowledgement, the weird feeling on his butt forgotten almost immediately. It didn't hurt, just felt odd.

"You eat bones, but not Kerberos? You could eat Kerberos. Would eat you back. Yeah... But you could. Won the play, stronger than... No! Stronger. Maybe..." The heads exchanged a glance, and in a low growl, insisted, "Don't attack."

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Kerberos didn't understand what talking had to do with how eatable something was. He figured as long as he could put it in his mouths he could eat it, but he remembered the sweet bone that he had to destroy before it tempted him to eat it. His tail flicked, slapping against the edge of the water. Rats and lizards-- he had eaten a rat before, and he had almost caught his own lizard, but he didn't know what a deer was... It must have been bigger than a rat or a lizard, though not by much, if it belonged to these bones.

Finally, the pup's eyes went wide as he listened to the reason why he couldn't eat the talking ones. They had friends. Family, she called it. They would eat him if they had more teeth than him. He nodded, finally sinking in. If he wanted to eat someone, he had to make sure they didn't have more teeth hiding somewhere. At least, that was how he rationalized it. It was hard to get more teeth if you couldn't talk. All three mouthes grinned when she suggested a cave rat might eat him, knowing that he would shred any rodent that came across him.

... The last thing she had to say, however, made the grins fade. There was something strange about her words, something that didn't make any sense to him. Words too big for him, ideas to grand for him. He didn't know what to make of her fortune, no, maybe one day he would understand. The way she said it made it sound like he wasn't supposed to get it yet. "Long way to go... Which way?" He asked, shaking out his soaking ears. The other heads had some sort of answer, which probably made less sense than Giggle did. "Some day soon..." "Can't go there now, have to get it first." "It?" "The bones, maybe." "Bones and... And eating things." "Too little." This seemed to click for orange flopster. "Not strong enough yet! I'll get strong like Giggle first."

The middle head shared a grin with the others. "Yeah!"

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Kerberos came back to the idea of teeth, as he listened to Giggle. Talking was important. Valuable. It was how one gained more teeth, made it easier to hunt and eat. As a pup, he had been fed by all those who he had met so far that could talk, and while he considered that once he was bigger he would simply eat them-- Baratheon, Usui, Giggle--... Well, the words perhaps had a similiar effect as the spores did. Subtle. Potentially long lasting.

"Nothing," echoed the one head, though the others stayed silent. The pup rose to his paws, shook out the water from his thick fur. He looked around, sniffing at the air, pondering. He had to meet a lot of gembounds-- and somehow not eat them-- for this to work. He had a feeling he was about to go very hungry for a while... Unless he kept getting food from everyone he talked to. Something about that hit his pride oddly and made red nose snort.

On one hand, perhaps Kerberos had learned something. On the other, perhaps he was just taking her words a bit too literally. Go and speak and listen and learn... "Thank you." He said slowly, with each head, all at once. His tail wagged gently, and he picked his way over to one of the bones that he had cleaned before, picking it up-- it wasn't a thigh bone, but that was alright. It was a rib of some sort, maybe. Strong. Sturdy. He cast a glance her way, and as if he had figured something out from all of this, he abruptly bolted off.

He would certainly return when he got hungry again... Or, maybe, when he was older and wiser. If such a thing was possible.