She sighed and shrugged on her pack as she made her way to the twister room. Cayenne didn't realyl have a good memory of the last time she was here, with the first gembound she saw in the unrelenting room being cold and callous and completely and utterly uncaring - but that might've just been from her childish perspective at the time. She was older now, by all standards an adult, but she still felt young and uncertain as she entered the room.

She'd gotten to the point on her healing career that she needed to branch out from plants, and she was completely unsure and shaky as she tried to walk on unknown ground. When she was younger, it was new and exciting, every new discovery a bright new wonder to behold, but now, now, every new unknown thing had the capacity to wreck havoc and possibly kill, and she was still trying to absterge and swallow that fear.

So rather than to do it alone and make so many mistakes, she needed someone to tell her what she could do, and that someone was Louie. So she went to the howling room.

In the noise of the room, she yelled out the fox's name, hoping he would appear sooner or later, her hands cupped around her mouth, looking around for him. He'd said he had kids, and they surely must've hatched by now, so he might not even be here. It dimmed her search somewhat, but she would only give up when she knew he wasn't here.

She glanced up, then did a double take, seeing the young gem up so very very high, and all her fur bristled and stood on end. "H-Hey!" She called, hurrying over to them. "What are you doing up there?"

She dropped her pack full of medical supplies and prepared to climb up to them if they started to fall.

Cayenne was definitely panicking now, and when the young one disappeared she danced around on her feet and looked around and started clenching and unclenching her hands. She was supposed to be looking for Louie but now that this new gembound was putting himself in danger she had to go and save him. So she moved her feet before she put too much thought into it and started to climb.

Was I this reckless when I was a young hatchling?? She thought as she climbed. No, wait, yes I was, I was eating every plant I could get my hands on.

......Why?!? The word screamed in her head. Her gem finger did well to help her grip, digging into the stone with no remorse like a claw, and she climbed with no self-preservation to her hands or feet, her tail arching out to better balance herself.

She heard his muffled voice in the cracks as she got closer to him and farther away from the howling winds, and she barely caught what was said, but when she heard, she stopped for a second, her hand paused in reaching for the next jutting vein of stone.

"I'm coming, okay?" She said, her panic subsiding as pure determination set into her gut. She would keep him safe, if only for those words.

As soon as she reached the top of the ledge, his voice carried over to her and she paused again, listening intently over the wind. He was curious and she felt like his questions would only come more and more often once she collected him from the crevice, and she opened her mouth to reply - when all of a sudden he came running straight into her arms and she almost was pushed off the ledge, having not completely gotten herself up, but as pebbles crumbled, she kept her balance, just barely, and wrapped her arms around the tiny gem who seemed to fit absolutely perfectly in the curve of her torso. Like- like he was made to fit there.

This made her feel very very weird, and gladly, spiders ran from the crevice and she climbed all the way up fully to smash them, recognizing them to be vicious but not at all poisonous.

Once all of them had scurried away or been squished, she looked down at the little gem and tried very very hard to not let her heart melt. Half of her wanted to say he was just as deformed as she was, as something that should've been a normally formed cat, but after seeing so many like her, she rather thought his young small features were....cute.

So she hugged the little one just a tiny bit tighter and said, "You're okay, aren't you? You're not hurt anywhere? ....What were you trying to get?"

She wasn't quite up to safety yet and the tiny gem wriggled from her arms and wrapped his long tail around her middle to hang upside down and she started to really really panic because he was hanging over the ledge over empty air?? He passed the shards up to her that he had gotten (for her, she realized) and then very quickly pulled him up from his very dangerous precarious perch and set him to sit on the ledge, his little legs kicking over empty air. After him, she climbed up and sat down next to him and wrapped one arm around his tiny little shoulder with a soft sigh, telling herself to calm down, both with magic and her breathing, but panic set up in her lungs anyway.

All Mother, I swear I'll practice adevism if anything bad happens to him, so please, keep him safe, she thought with a desperation. This one was going to keep flinging himself into danger and it was going to age her a year with every day.

So, she set about answering his many questions, one by one, the best she could. "It's....not just us," She said, one hand over her heart, her eyes closed. "There are many, many, many more creatures out there. Big, small, hairy, soft, kind, mean, scary, sweet. All kinds. And...I'm not the creator," She laughed a little. "You were made by two someones, perhaps a while ago, perhaps a really really long time ago."

She had realized in her travels that many gembounds woke up either with parents that had recently made them, or had woken up alone. She was lucky her sister was there to introduce her to the world, but not everyone was so lucky.

"And, yes," She hugged him close. "Now I gotta take you with me. No leaving you on your own for the spiders to play with, hm? And thank you for the thoughtful gift, it's very very pretty." She picked one of them up, turning it in the light, seeing it play on the cracks, where the lichen didn't grow. How odd! Why were there so many shards? Why weren't they made into a new gem, waiting to be born?

Half of her just thought absently that perhaps the shards were made and simply not given life. The other half, the darker, realistic half, thought that a gem had been killed and his gem smashed and placed there a very long time ago, his forgotten grave coveted by only the earth and the spiders.

With that, she set the shard down, feeling her skin prickle.

"I came from a really really green place," She said, turning the thought aside in her head and told herself not to think about it, and she looked down at the kid with a soft smile, keeping her words simple and mystical to intrigue him. "With many plants and flowers and trees, very pretty and calm. And I was going to my home in the center of the world, where a huge, huge crystal tower is that crackles with magic. But first I stopped here to try and find a teacher to help me learn how to cast some spells."

She remembered when Orion was described to her, and she remembered the breathless need to go and find it, and the wonder of seeing everything new for the first time. She wanted him to have that, too.

(meant to roll Host, oh well)
Cayenne raised her eyebrows at the little one's outburst. "Sometimes you have to harm to help," She said softly.

She hugged him just a little more, and said, "Sometimes...life comes with pain. Sometimes even the good guys hurt others, for very good reasons. There's no line between good and bad, and a lot of the time it merges, like a blended color."

"Look." She showed him her palm, all crisscrossed with scars, white lines on her calloused grey skin like a spider web. Slowly, a tiny little plant emerged from her skin, the shoot unfurling, little leaves uncurling like awakening from a nap, and a tiny little white flower blossoming like a good morning kiss. "This flower is lovely, isn't it? Soft and innocent and pretty to look at, but look, this little one is hurting me, taking my strength but growing from me, but that doesn't make it bad. It's just trying to live."

She listened to his next question and curled her hand over the flower and tucked it away, and looked over the gorge absently, and down the ledge where both of their feet dangled, and her stomach did a small little flip flop for even daring the think about what might've happened to the little one had she not showed up. She hoped the neither of them would develop acrophobia or anything of the like after this.

"Those spiders...I probably shouldn't have squished them, I might've just brushed them off the ledge and let them climb their way down. I had a choice, and my choice was to get rid of them the best way I knew how at the time, to protect you. I squished a few to make the rest run away instead of them all trying to swarm us and bite us." She said thoughtfully. "I'm not entirely good either, you see."