ORIGIN - Mountain Dew

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If she still had her old face (and that was a horrifying sentence, on its own), she could've grinned. She sort of wished she could, but her expression managed to convey her happiness nonetheless. Her feathered tail flicked, wagging in excitement, and she turned and leaned to the drawing that Dewberry had done of her. Black beak pressed to the rock wall, and there was a flare of magicka; the blue lines briefly glowed, then settled back to how they'd been. Azure pulled back, eyes bright, content.

"There! That one'll stay, at least. Your very first painting," and her voice was full of the same enthusiasm. She looked back to Dewberry, and then turned, flopping down. She worked her beak at a couple of the jars, popping corks off one by one.

"Yeah, that makes sense! Change it up, a new color every day? Sounds good. I don't mind teaching you everything I know. You'll probably get better than me pretty quick," and here, she gave a little laugh. "Here--I can mix any of these with water if you wanna give 'em a go? Uhh--orange, bone, blue? Or I can make a whole new color, if you want? I could show you how to do it from scratch?" She glanced up, blinking, and then widened her eyes.

"Oh, I have some of the starry paint, too. You're welcome to use that. It's my favorite," she added, and popped the cork off another. This one was a midnight black, with the faintest hints of indigo; throughout were suspended tiny, glowing particles of stone, not unlike the stars the caves had never seen. "This is that one like Orion's roof! I painted a whole dragon in this, once."

Azure squinted, remembering. "She looked awesome!"

@Dewberry

Azure's enthusiasm bubbled over into Dewberry's own emotions, and she wiggled her tail happily. Her sister liked her painting enough to make it permanent! "Oh! New colors are exciting! Could you teach me how to make them, starting from the beginning?"

Dewberry nodded toward the bottle of neon green, then the blue. "You said you made these by grinding up gemstone? How did you manage to do that? They're so hard! Is there a spell that does it for you, or do you need to just keep hitting it with those--" she gestured toward the mortal and pestle-- "until the pieces get small enough? How do you know when you can stop? How did you manage to crush enough to paint a whole dragon?" Her voice was awestruck, imagining the sheer size of such a being and the amount of dye it might take to cover the entire body.

@Azure

Oh, now she really wished she could grin.

"It took a LOT, but it kinda got thinned out on her, yeah. So like--it was black, but it came out sorta watery, uhh... thin? I needed more, really. But it was a lot!" There was enthusiasm in her. "So, yeah--it does need to be done with that," and she nodded toward the mortar and pestle, "but I can use my mind-magic to move it all. It takes a long time but I can use my claws too, and my beak--to move the stone, I mean. I'd made a mortar and pestle outta diamond once but I cracked it," she added, a little sadly--those were still back in the Monoceros forge. "The starlight dye is easy, though! Anything burnt can be used for it. So all you need to do is find some burned wood--and that can be really soft, and crumbly. Then mix that with water and some glow-dust! So-... Okay you wanna start from the beginning," she said.

Her beak tipped down to the ground, touching rock.

She had intended to form a stone, but instead the ground split with a quiet crack, a small fissure opening beneath her; her face plunged into it, with the gentle weight she'd been leaning, and for a moment Azure was left flailing (feathers flying, wings flapping, talons scrabbling at stone) half-fallen into it.

She scrambled back out, wide-eyed, blinking, and backed away.

"...Um. That wasn't--I didn't mean to do that," she said, hastily, with a glance at Dewberry. What would she think of her now-? That had been a failure, damn. She spoke a little more quietly, enthusiasm somewhat dampened by the sudden shock.

And the new hole in her house. Damn. She'd need to patch that up.

"Uhh-... So. I was trying to make a gemstone. Why don't you... pick one, or--pick a color, and I'll try again. So I can show you from the start?"

Whoops.

@Dewberry

"Ah!" Dewberry gasped as the ground suddenly cracked open, and Azure's beak slid into the fissure. Thankfully, there seemed to be no real harm done: her sister looked unhurt, if a little ruffled. "Oh... ha, yeah, magic does that sometimes." Dewberry's own had made her into an unwilling acrobat pretty recently. "But you're okay?" She slithered a little closer, flicking out her tongue. No visible wounds, at least.

She looked over the row of supplies again. "Uh... how about pink?" That was a color you didn't see very often, except on her other sister. But it was pretty, and if she wanted she could be pink for a while after they made this! Would looking at yourself and seeing another color be weird? How had the dragon felt, after being painted? "What color was the dragon originally, before the starlight paint?" she wondered out loud.

@Azure

"I'm fine, I'm fine," she hastened to reassure Dewberry. A blink, a shake of her head, and she squinted at the crack. "Well, I do have a pink gem, as it so happens! But I gotta repair this anyway and you said the whole process, right? So--lemme see. I'll try this again." She paused to fire a wry glance Dew's way, full of humor. "Hopefully without shattering the ground or something, this time."

She took a breath (she was well-used to these sorts of failures, and it didn't shake her too badly) and pushed her beak to touch the gap. She stood, crouched low, tail swishing side to side. After a moment, and a bloom of magicka, a rich, translucent pink gemstone rose to fill the gap: to repair the damage she had done. It looked like a pink streak across the floor, and to top it off a small chunk (with a very thin connection to the rest) sprouted at the top. It looked rather like a mushroom, thin-stalked with a lump above, and Azure turned and kicked it off the rest with a swift movement of her hoof.

That left them with a repaired (pink-streaked) floor, and a small chunk of pink stone to work with. It looked like a rich pink quartz, and Azure nudged it over to Dewberry contentedly.

"Okay, so that's, like--step one. You got any magic to grind it up or should I show you how?" and her tone was easy-going. "As for the dragon... shit, I don't remember," she laughed; "She was, like--teal? Bright greenish-blue wings. But the rest of her--what I painted--was like, uh. Greenish... gray?" She offered a little shrug. "I meant to paint her black, but like you said the paint was a little thin for a whole dragon so she was still kinda... gray, after. Maybe she'll come back for another coat."

@Dewberry

Dewberry nosed the newly-repaired crack curiously. The rock was smooth, apart from the place where Azure had broken off a piece, and vibrantly pink. "It's kind of pretty," she mused. "Nicer than plain rocks and bricks, I think. So at least something nice came out of that."

She lifted the pink gem into the mortar-rock, then switched her magic to the pestle. "I can do it, I think. Do I just--hit it over and over again?" Dewberry gave the gem an experimental tap, then began to strike it harder until it was crushed into a pale pink pigment, with the largest pieces about the size of one of her smaller scales. "Is that enough?"

@Azure if she'd have interrupted Dewberry while she was crushing it lmk, and I can edit it in!

"Yeah, like that!" she had time to exclaim, before it really settled in.

Dewberry had the same magic-! She could work all the same creative tasks that Azure did; she could make the same things, no questions asked. Somehow, Azure had feared that they'd run into barriers--something (like maybe the whole 'no limbs' point) that'd stop Dewberry from doing what she was interested in. That she'd want to pick something up, and just... wouldn't be able to.

But here she was, smashing the gem away with the mortar and pestle--and Azure watched, beaming.

By the time Dew was done, Azure had turned and--with talons and beak, quite mundane--pulled a small, capped ceramic jar from a corner. It took her a few moments to get the cork off of it. But once she had, she brought it over, and carefully maneuvered it to spill a little into the mortar. A little more splashed out over the rock, but she didn't mind that much--it was hard to move stuff with these limbs, and as long as she didn't shatter the jar she was quite content. "It's enough! Lemme just mix in some water, and we're good to go! Then you can paint with it. Oh--do you want any glow in this stuff?" she asked, glancing toward Dewberry. "I should've asked in the first place--then we coulda had glowing pink--but if I add some smashed-up glow-stone to this, it'll look like it has those speckles. But we can do just pink, too! It's all yours, anyway!"

Azure rocked back onto her hind legs, using her beak alone to re-cap the jar of water; then she looked to Dewberry, cheerfully expectant. Would she want sparkle, or nah? And what would she do with all this pink-?

@Dewberry

Oh! Glow! She'd forgotten about that! "Yeah, we should make it glow!" Dewberry exclaimed. She wasn't exactly sure what she would do with a whole jar of sparkling pink dye, but glowing automatically made things ten times cooler! Glowing paints didn't seem to produce any heat with their light, but they gave off light all the same, and one out of two was still better than nothing.

What would the Sentinel think of paints? she wondered, thinking back to the tall black hound. If he did end up visiting them in Orion, maybe she could show him some of the colors. Did the Masters believe in vacations...? Or she could visit him, but there was that slight problem of having no idea where Draco and the Chaos Forge were, and not wanting to be anywhere near it anyway.

But that was a thought for the future. Right now, she had Azure, and that was perfect.

@Azure

"Cool! Okay hold on--hold on--"

They were doing this from scratch, right-? She turned and rummaged around, pulling out a small stone from the rubble at the back of the ruins. A moment's focus gave her... nothing, and she sighed. "Okay, so my magic's being an ass at the moment. Usually I can make a rock glow, and I wanted to show you how i did that in case it helped you learn to, too! But it's not working so let's use one I've already got."

Azure used beak and talons to pick another, already-baubled rock--not a very large one, and certainly misshapen--from a pile. She carred it over, then, and dropped it into the mortar. "So just grind that one up, too--as much as you want, and however fine or uh, coarse, you want your sparkles! If you need help let me know--if your magic shits out on you, too," she added, happily and foul-mouthedly helpful.

@Dewberry

Making things glow--whether it was for dye or for some other purpose--sounded like a nice spell, and Dewberry resolved to find out how to do it later. With that spell, she could bring light to wherever she traveled, even if the orb-lights were dim or absent. Or, she thought, I could just paint myself glowing all the time. But then she wouldn't be able to do the spell herself, and she wanted to help her sister, too.

Dewberry gripped the pestle with magic, and beat the glowrock to a fine powder. (She still wasn't sure what exactly she was going to use it for, but a more uniform glow seemed like it might look nice in a wider variety of situations.) A little pink splashed out of the mortar at times, when she was a little too enthusiastic about hitting the rock, but she managed to keep most of it inside.

"It worked!" she cheered softly, nudging Azure's leg affectionately. "Let's test it out." Attaching a new feather to the figure-8 before wedging her nose in, she added a long, wavy line to the painting of Azure she'd made earlier, with two dots above the head and a small curve for the smile she couldn't make in real life. "It's us!"

@Azure do you want to fade to an exit here

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