ORIGIN - Myths and Legends

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She stuck one hind foot into her mouth.

It was itchy. Fangs nibbled at paw-pads, at claws; but she couldn't quite get at it.

The old hyena was sat beside her bone pit; the ledge overhead was empty save a few sprouting mushrooms and a single Hallowed Caller staring down. Gah; she couldn't reach this itch! She twisted again, contorting herself into a rather bizarre and unflattering pose, black muzzle wrinkling up a little in a grimace as she flea-bit her own foot.

It was not a particularly graceful sight.

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr

@Fable

When Fable came careening through the circuit, turning a hard corner, she fell with a heavy thump.

Not her most graceful moment, but none of her moments had been... graceful. Fable's life consisted, currently, of trying and mostly failing to catch mice strewn around the caves. She was too big for her paws, and the mice were often too small and too quick and scurried into little warrens that Fable couldn't get her fingers into.

She was tired, and she was frustrated, and she was hungry.

For a time the cub lay there with her cheek against the ground before slowly, wearily, she stretched herself out and started to push herself back up to her paws and started padding heavily along the path again.

It wasn't long until she found another creature in the distance-- and what a creature it was. Instead of assuming that it was just twisted and itching, she assumed that Giggle was Just Like That. It wasn't her place to judge, after all-- though one detail did stick out to her.

She crept, quietly, shifting along to come up along the edges of Giggle's peripheral vision with her stomach barely touching the cave floor, nails clicking delicately against stone. If she were meant to be in position to pounce, she was doing a terrible job of it-- her stance was wildly unbalanced and her lower half tipped almost comically upwards.

Fable did not, however, pounce.

Instead-- "You only have one head," she said, because Giggle did, in fact, only have one head. "Why are you biting yourself?"

@Giggle

Foot came down, and head looked around, eyes blinking, as Giggle sought out the source of the voice.

Oh-

It was a cat... -thing? Giggle sat further upright, squinting as she tried to puzzle it out. It looked catlike, but off in some ways; any surprise, really, in a cave full of hybrids-?

You only have one head-? Giggle grunted, amusement creeping into her tone as she responded to the stranger--whose size and proportions, at least, suggested that she were young. "I only need one head. You only have one head," she pointed out, with the wisdom of many cycles. "I take it you've met my other son. Kerberos?" she asked. She didn't know all that many multi-headed creatures around the place. There'd been that snake, once--but she'd never seen that one again.

"My name's Giggle. I'm biting my foot 'cause it's itchy. There something I can do for you?" she added, quizzically, head tilting to one side. It wasn't an unwelcoming question; if anything, it was fairly open. She just... wasn't quite sure what to make of this one, yet.

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr

@Fable

The cub watched with confusion clouding her eyes as Giggle straightened herself up. It looked a bit more like Kerberos, now-- though, again, with only one head, and spots, and sort of reddish fur.

Fable started to push up to sit straight, too, with a long slide of leathery paw-pads on stone as she rose. Her tail went curling comfortably in front of"I only have one HEAD?" She barked alarmedly, twisting violently around to try to get a look at her own neck-- though it was... difficult to tell.

There could have been multiple necks underneath the mass of a mane, though Fable had never checked. She'd only seen Kerberos and assumed that she had three heads, too-- she'd just never seen them before.

It was a good thirty seconds before she actually stopped, half-twisted and craning her head (singular) back to look at Giggle with enormous eyes. "Yeah," she said, slowly, almost cautiously. "He has three heads. What do you mean other son?"

The sphinx started to straighten out again, with a sluggish ruffle of her shoulders. The news of her head (still singular) was an alarming one-- but likely not one she could actually change. To her knowledge. Did Giggle have that kind of knowledge?

She studied the hyena for a few beats. "I'm Fable," she said with the assumption from Kerberos that when someone gives you their name, you have to give it back. "How do I grow more heads?"

Because this was a very important question.

@Giggle

Giggle stared. "Most of us only have one head," she offered, and then, watching Fable, tried over those thirty seconds to convince and/or reassure her.

"I promise, you only have one," she tried.

"You'd know if you had more than one." -Wouldn't she? Wouldn't she... see out of it, and stuff?

"It's fine! One head's perfectly healthy."

And, at last:

"Turning all over yourself isn't gonna make you suddenly have new heads."

At last, though, the kid seemed to calm down, turning to Giggle and confirming her guess: that she'd met Kerberos. "Mm, he was nice I hope? You two got along?" Always best to check, though the big white teddy bear (three heads notwithstanding) had been nothing but gentle, really, in his adulthood. (As far as Giggle knew, anyway.) Oh--and an introduction, too-! "Nice to meet you, Fable--that's a pretty name," she decided. For a cat, or at least a cat-thing, this creature wasn't (yet) overly snobby or hung up on appearances, at least. (Giggle made this judgement while eyeing Fable's nearly upside-down head.) Fable asked about Giggle's phrasing, and thinking it over she had to admit it'd been an odd choice of words; one she really hadn't thought about. "I have a lot of kids," she explained simply, with a shrug. Adopted, and otherwise. And now Fable had another question, too.

A... A question Giggle had definitely not been asked before.

"You can't grow more heads," she answered bluntly--and then found herself worrying: Or can you..?

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr

@Fable

Giggle's reassurance didn't seem to reassure Fable at all-- the sphinx seemed to grow more and more restless as one oversized paw lifted to her face to touch it, and then lose itself into the thicket of hair draping her neck and shoulders.

Would she know if she only had one head? Kerberos seemed to know he had three but surely someone told him he had three. No one had told her, up until now, that Fable only had one, and there was something immensely upsetting about this information to her.

Trying to sit with this new fact of life proved a little troubling. Fable's elongated ears flicked back and forth for a moment as if trying to hear something far-off, unheard, and then she focused back in on Giggle. "He can make fire," she responded, because this is a reasonable way to answer 'was he nice?'.

She pushed up onto all fours in a fluid but largely uncoordinated and swaying movement, and for whatever reason, held her breath.

And for a time, did not stop holding her breath.

It was largely unclear to the outside perspective what she was doing, in fact-- but it was clear when she decided to give up some seconds later, restlessly pushing back up and pawing at the ground and perhaps pretending she'd never tried to cast anything in the first place. "It was pink," she added, because it was.

And then, eventually, she sat herself back down again and coiled her tail in front of her feet. "Why?" Fable went on to ask. "What are kids for?"

It should be noted that Fable-- who was essentially born out of a wall in the middle of the caves --had no real concept that she, too, was A Kid. She could assume from Kerberos's mere existence that kids were for guarding things, like Canis, or maybe just for making pink fireballs and having three heads.

But what did she know.

"Why not?" She asked again. Kerberos, surely, at some point, had grown two extra heads? "How did Kerberos do it? He did it twice," she added, in case Giggle was unaware that Kerberos had not just two, but three heads.

And then a new theory was spawned. "Was it by accident?"

@Giggle

It was at this exact moment that Giggle remembered--or was reminded, at least--that for all Kerberos's kindness, and even wisdom, his actual reasoning wasn't as bright as some. It wasn't that he was stupid--he wasn't!--he just... He wasn't a thinker. And this child, Fable--she'd probably only ever met Kerberos in her life. And he likely hadn't taught her shit.

The hyena sighed internally and buckled down to the task of Parenting.

"Oh, that's nice," she answered to the 'he can make fire' with amusement and some measure of blankness. A typical, half-nonsensical kid's reply. "Why-? Wh--kids aren't for anything. They're family. You make kids--or adopt kids!--and then you've got family. They're just... you know, close. Like friends, but closer. He didn't--no, he didn't grow more heads. He-..."

Inspiration struck, because the only thing that might make Parenting easier was just repeating a story from the last time you Parented and hoping the kid picked up on the same lesson. Entertainment AND education. "Kerberos was born with more heads. With three heads," she corrected herself, having half-picked-up-on and accidentally repeated Fable's take on the whole thing. "Do you want to hear the short story of what he was like when he was your age?" (The age being, as Giggle eyed Fable, mostly a guess.)

Please say yes, she thought, because she was kind of at a loss with this one.

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr

@Fable

Fable had to really think about this one.

Family were like friends, but closer. Fable did not know, entirely, what this meant. Well-- she knew what it meant but she had no experience in either matter-- she had no family and she had no friends. Unless Kerberos counted. Did Kerberos count? Did Giggle count?

She went a little shifty-eyed. "How do you get a family?" Fable eventually went on. This question could also extend to how do you get friends, but that part was, for now at least, left unsaid. "Do you have to grow that, too?"

The information that was born with three heads led Fable to a second theory-- Kerberos had been born three times. Fable had go to be born a second time for a new head. Fable did not know how she'd achieve this, yet.

Her mouth opened and then shut-- and then her eyes snapped to Giggle, focusing. She knew of stories, too-- but like families, and friends, she had no experience in them. Her eyes went huge again, too big for her face, and she leaned over to study Giggle very closely for a moment.

"Okay," she agreed after some beats. "What was he like?"

@Giggle

Giggle's mouth opened, then shut. "You grow kids. You put life into a stone and it becomes a baby. Or you find kids and adopt 'em." In any other world, the birds and bees talk might've been... a little young, here, but it was rocks, in this case, and anyway Giggle doubted that Fable would understand or even remember all of this.

-Oh, good, she could tell the story.

A sigh of relief escaped the bone-reader, and she rocked back a little on her haunches. "This is my bone pit. I've lived here all my life. I read the future in the bones, see?" (and instantly, Giggle regretted saying this, hoping Fable wouldn't ask for an explanation.) "When Kerberos first found me here he was very young, but still very big. White, and fluffy, and his three heads weren't all that big, yet!" She'd nearly said 'weren't fully-grown, yet,' but realized that might beg a dozen questions about how heads grew. "He had very big, cute paws and he didn't have any of those scars. But because he was so young, he didn't know many things yet; and he didn't know to ask politely. To say 'please' when you want things, and 'thank you' when you get them." Giggle paused--lessons within the story were the important part, after all, and she hoped Fable might absorb them. "He only wanted to play! And wanted to fight! And I had to teach him. Teach him: to listen, to learn, and to speak, instead of only biting. He's very nice, now," she added.

Story-time over, apparently.

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr

@Fable

Fable stared at Giggle but it was clear that the Birds and the Bees went through one ear and out the other, and the information was promptly lost to her, never to be seen again. Kids-- making them and adopting them --did not interest her, she suddenly decided.

She was interested in Giggle's story, however-- but unfortunately for Giggle, Fable was not at all the type of person who would just sit and listen to a story in complete silence. "How?" She asked a little loudly, perhaps interested or perhaps just thirsty to Know Things. "Do the bones talk?"

The sphinx was pushing up again, pacing back and forth and getting a look at the bones littered around Canis. It would be.. spooky, if they could just talk-- but more importantly, Fable wanted them to talk to her, and she wanted to hear what bones would say.

She wasn't intentionally being rude, however. In fact her head was turning back to Giggle to listen with flicking ears, eyes large and round and pupils thin, focused slits. "Why?" Was her next question. "What's the point? Why not just say, 'I want that,' or 'give me that,' or 'that's mine now'?"

These questions didn't come from a place of rudeness or demanding either. They were the ignorant badgerings of someone who was too young and too unsocialized to actually know any better-- but her focus and attention could likely lead to the conclusion that she was willing to learn.

"I want to play and fight, too," Fable said after a moment. "His scars are cool."

It took her another moment to actually absorb what Giggle was saying to her-- and it clicked some seconds later. Maybe (and she had to think about this) she wouldn't like it if someone bit her but-- "what about rats?" She asked. "You have to bite rats and mice and stuff to eat and live. Is that bad?"

If it was, then what was Fable supposed to eat? And if it wasn't, then where was the line drawn between what you can and can't bite?

@Giggle

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