ORIGIN - one always tells the truth, the other always lies

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Kerberos was doing his best not to worry. Things were much more complicated than he could handle; there was the Hole (which was bad), the Sentinels (which were demanding), the Hydra (which swallowed entire lives, and was very terrible), the formation of dragons that he barely knew about but still set him at unease, the Gate that opened and promised change (which was... good?) and the constant current of Master's running their hands through the tapestry of the cave, changing strings and effecting lives in ways that the dog couldn't begin understand.

It was a lot easier to do what he knew and understood. He sat at the entrance to Tunnel K. He still slept here, from time to time, though Canis was his home. He guarded the door, a three-headed hellhound protecting the outside world from... Hydra? The Hole? And protecting his family from the outside world, too. It felt like he could not protect them from everything, though.

He had been trying to focus on small, simple tasks. Sit at the door and watch, and wait. Catch food for mom, and for himself, and the rest of Bonebound. Keep an eye out for Damask (who he saw flying about in Orion a lot, though like most of the Bonebound, he didn't talk to much these days.) Look out for Fungus. Keep himself clean. Remember to stay hydrated.

Right now he had simplified it down to sitting at the door and playing with magic. He had yet to really master the Wisps; he had received some secret knowledge from the gift in Pisces, but he had yet to manifest enough Wisps to do anything with it. He liked the Wisps, though... They were pretty; he could summon one for each head on a good day, and each of his brains could take turns controlling them!

Presently, he had managed to summon a pink orb, the wisp dancing about his heads as his tail thumped happily behind him. If he focused a bit more, he could get another... But he wasn't very good at juggling them, especially if he kept getting distracted by the worries of a world that had gotten so much bigger than the big cerberos himself.

i'm ready to start
the conquest of spaces

@fable

Fable fancied herself a hunter.

Huntress.

Whatever. She fancied herself it.

Had she caught anything? No, but that was all according to her plan, if you were to ask her. And what a plan it seemed to be. She had spent the whole day in this new room until the lights began to crackle, working on a skill she decided was Very Important: prowling.

She had tried-- and failed, several times --to sneak up on russet-coloured mice, though they seemed to see the cub coming from a mile away. Or maybe they smelled her. Or maybe they heard her? Fable did not care for the specifics.

Fable did not realise not caring about the specifics was exactly where she was going wrong, but no one had told her this much yet. No one had told her much of anything, in fact, not yet.

The cub crept through the dark, golden eyes larger and rounder than saucers, her fingers clicking quietly against the cave floor as she went. Her stance was off, unbalanced, and if it weren't for her dark coat and sticking to the shadowy sections of Orion, she could have been spotted a mile away.

When she moved along, she caught sight of something New. Something pink, and shiny, and glittery, and that was going to be hers now. Never mind the three-headed, over-sized mouse (?) watching it, too-- Fable was going to grab it!

... however.

"AAAHHHHHHHH!" Screamed the Sphinx as she lunged out of the dark, her small body flinging itself at the fire. She went through the orb, however-- and she went through quickly enough that she only briefly felt the heat of the fire --and then dropped back onto her paws haphazardly, only half-balanced.

She spun around, looking between the fiery orb and the cerberus. "What'd you do to it?!" She demanded in a spat, hairs raising ridiculously along her spine. "That's mine!"

@Kerberos

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Out of the blue, a little cat came hurdling through Kerberos's wisp. The three-headed hound blinked, heads rearing back with alarm as the feline yowled, and spun back on him, hissing and spitting.

Judging from her oversize paws and clumsy stance, tail held up like a bristling little pine tree, he quickly recognized that she was only a child. Sat far back on his haunches, paw half-raised in alarm, he slowly eased forward and began to lower his noses to the ground. He squished his shoulders down too, eventually squirming his whole body into an awkward pile of fur, legs haphazardly splayed. He didn't want his big size to intimidate the kitten; though she already seemed...

... Her face was weird, for a cat, wasn't it? It was... Flat. He pushed away that thought for a moment, instead opening one of his mouths to reply in a quiet rumble. "I made it, it's mine," he tried to explain, with utmost patience. "You can't take other's things. That's mean. But," he offered with a waggy twitch of his tail, the scales slapping against the stone behind him. "I can make you one."

As the middle head woofed softly, it took only a moment for another wisp to materialize on his soft pink nose; the same pink shade as the first wisp, but it drifted down with a huff of his snout and settled down in front of the child, pulsing with a warm light. This one wouldn't be too hot for the child to play with, and he managed to somehow anchor it to her, so it idly moved about her like a moon in orbit.

"It's nice to meet you," he whined, tilting his head and rolling on to his side so he could stretch a paw out lazily into the air. "Little one. He had met many little kittens in his life; and though his mother detested them, he found himself drawn to them like a mother hen. Not that it had ever gone particularly well... He... Ah, had any of them ever survived?

... It was fine. It wasn't like he personally killed them; things got lost in the caves all the time. Gembound went missing... All the time. He didn't need to be thinking about that right now.

"... do you have a name?"

i'm ready to start
the conquest of spaces

@Fable

Fable watched, but for the longest moment, her hackles did not flatten. She didn't have any real concept of how silly she looked-- still childishly spitting and stubbornly standing her ground, no matter how small that ground actually was.

"Why not?" the sphinx demanded, and despite her tone it was a genuine question. What did she care if something was mean or not? "If I want something I should just take it!"

Her line of reasoning wasn't exactly one of malice, either; it was ignorance. For all Fable knew, everyone was like the mice-- dumb, thoughtless, something to be eaten. She had yet to come to the realisation that things were like her, and would get angry and upset if their things were stolen.

The jagged fur lining her spine began to smooth out, however, when another pink wisp of light was formed. 'Thank you' wasn't in her vocabulary-- not yet, at least --but there was gratitude in her movements regardless. Her tail flicked and then lashed back and forth as she twisted, wriggling to chase the orb flying around her.

At least this one didn't hurt. It was hers, too, apparently-- she felt no need to try to snatch Kerberos's either. Her massive paw-hands batted for it, trying to pin it down to the ground, but it slipped out of her clawed fingers every time.

"Ah!" she yowled, rolling along the cave floor to try to snatch it-- but she paused midway as she heard Kerberos continue talking. Her lanky body was stretched out and she didn't bother to move much further as the light went swinging circles around her head.

For a moment, she considered. "Fable," the sphinx said, and in that moment it might have been entirely unclear if this was a given name or if she had just come up with it on the spot. "Do you have names? Or do you have three names?"

No questions were potentially insensitive when you were only days old.

@Kerberos