Nidhogg considered for all of two seconds as he plodded along beside his children. "Dead things," he answered, wisely.

That was all he offered, because he was sort of stupid and didn't know any more than that. As an aside, he added "Your other sister lives here. Or brother. I don't know!" He hadn't actually met that one. He just knew it was here.

Somewhere.

Nidhogg scurried up onto a rock, a higher point, to peer down and around. He didn't see any Hive-stuff: no big white bugs, no mold to speak of. His tongue flicked out as he peered around. "Don't see anything." It was rare he was focused. Not screaming. But for once, he was aware that this was 'work'... of a sort. If wandering around, looking for fungus, was work.

Nidhogg recoiled visibly, taken aback by Eleven's shout. "THEN WHY DID YOU ASK?!" he cried a moment later. See, unlike V-Agate-One's snark, Nidhogg was just kind of dumb. His answer had been genuine. He'd thought he was being helpful, and now he wondered why the hell Chaos-Eleven had first asked, and then gotten angry, if she already knew!?

He flinched, too, from Chaos-Eleven's demands regarding having babies. He was being ganged up on by his children and it SUCKED! His voice was more subdued, his body language a little wilting, as he replied. "I had to. I was ordered to!" (He'd forgotten one had actually been an accident. It'd probably come up later.) "-Not that I mind? But. Three? I think. -That's all, I promise!" he added, flinching preemptively, hoping to forestall any further anger on the topic.

As for Order. Uhh.

"Order's a bunch of monsters that are white instead of black." Relatively accurate summary given, he then thought it over and chose to flesh that out. "They're assholes, though. And we beat them up! But they put stinky mold on everything so we burn it."

Nidhogg was a great provider of information, if that information could be summarized as "now you know that Nidhogg is a terrible choice for explaining just about anything."

"We have to make sure it doesn't come back for awhile. But I don't care, except that we get free stuff for doing it, or something. And Aethril's scary!" His eyes all turned round as he remembered: "Once in one of those meetings she turned someone inside-out! -And didn't even let me eat them! So if she says we gotta come here, we gotta come here." Those, at least, were probably wise words.

Nidhogg eyed the tail-flick warily from where he'd slinked away from his intimidating (own) children. "Don't fight," he warned them, but it was in an apprehensive tone. "We get in trouble if we hurt each other! Unless it's a spar! It's against the RULES," and he said that last word with derision. He hated the Rules.

"And I don't know! Ask Vargas." Somewhere beyond, the sound of Archon snorting was audible, if faint. The angelic monster had gone from grateful to have been asked along to, probably, wondering what the fuck he was now party to. Nidhogg glanced his way, didn't get it, and looked forward again. "Did the kid look cool-? I don't know, it--OH. THE TURNING INSIDE-OUT? Yes Aethril did that with magic!" he went on, replying now to both children at once. "It was an owl! A bird! With white feathers! Aethril did SOMETHING and then it was all... meat. And organs. And blood. And there were bones. In a pile," he explained. "Like the feathers and the skin all got sucked into the inside! Just GONE!" He made a sound, half sucking meat and half comic POW.

This was more than Nidhogg usually spoke, and he said it all cheerfully, his words tumbling all over themselves in his eagerness to describe the Horrors.

"I don't know how the dead stuff got here. -You're BOTH assholes stop being assholes." Parenting level increased. But Chaos-Eleven's other question was... good, and he had to think about it. Nidhogg's answer would've gotten him in trouble, but it was the truth: "They're stronger than us," he answered bluntly. "If they come into other caves we can beat them! We have! But they live in a snow cave where they have all these secret tunnels and giant bugs and they eat us if we try." He'd been there for both the assault on Ursa (a failure) and the one on Leo (a success, if barely). So he did sort of know the answer. "They use mold to try and take places over! Maybe to keep us busy or maybe because they can just leave it around but it turns other guys into THEIR guys."