Kera liked Eridanus but it sure could be boring, sometimes. She took to carefully patrolling since hearing about Blackberry and her-- as Pride put it --precious little murder-dumplings had attacked the place, she took to patrolling a little more carefully.

She sniffed up every tree trunk searching for the scent of goose, or moose, or both, but not yet to any avail. Any scent she picked up was long stale, none of them had been by here in a small while, at least.

The wolf shook herself out, reassuring herself quietly. She'd been about to leave, to turn and wander out the room, when she heard something. A very familiar, something.

Crack.

Kera's ears lifted, and then tilted back as she turned. Someone new? Someone breaking out of hibernation? Someone injured? The questions ran through her head quickly, before she actually started moving in the direction the sound came from.

Another crack. The fur along Kera's spine bristled, and she half-expected to be attacked by a group of re-awakening Bloodberries, but when she turned the corner she saw...

... newborns.


Oh, thank the caves, she thought, before approaching. They both smelled of fresh-hatchlings, of how chrysalises did right after they'd been broken. The wolf shook herself out a final time before setting herself down in the ferns.

Non-threateningly. As non-threatening as a giant, broad, mushroom-stinking wolf can.

"Uh, hello," she eyed the snake first. She knew snakes-- Winter had been a snake. Right? "Welcome to the caves. Or-- welcome back. I mean I think you're both new."

Pale eyes offered a vague squint at the second; the pangolin. Kera, of course, had no idea what the hell a pangolin actually was. Was it a baby? An adult? She had no idea.

"You two'll be hungry, right?" The wolf continued anyway, stubbornly refusing to be undeterred. "I can help you hunt if you want to eat bird or mouse or whatever."

Kera's attention was, firstly, gripped by the snake who called himself Sanji. He wanted mice.

... mice?

Kera had hunted rats, but not mice. There used to be an abundance of them between tunnel N and tunnel O, the former where she'd made her den, but she didn't get to go there much anymore. It was unsafe.

The wolf had to shake herself out before she thought too hard about Blackberry and her murder-dumplings, ears rotating briefly. She could certainly smell prey, but the scampering of tiny feet was difficult to pinpoint while there were hatchlings talking at her.

One of them was asking who she was.

Boy, did they make a mistake.

"I'm Kera," she announced. "I'm a guardian, and a protector. A long time ago-- before you were born --the lights in the caves turned off--" she pointed her nose to a hanging orb of light, powered by the generator in Polaris. "--So I went and turned them back on. I'm the Lightbringer, now. Because I bring light, I guess."

She did quite like Black's logic.

Kera had no idea what a pangolin was (except, apparently, it's what Vivi was) but she shrugged this off fairly quickly. "You could try digging at soft spots in the cave," she suggested. "Eridanus is pretty much all soft spots, but if it feels hard under your paws then you'll probably hurt your claws trying to dig into it."

To set an example, Kera drew one massive paw along the moss underfoot and raked it back until the rich soil was exposed underneath. With it, insects. An abundance of them. A beetle flew out and into the distance and a worm thrived and attempted to bury itself deeper into the earth, it's pink body quickly becoming flooded with brown soil.

"Enjoy," Kera offered, as she halted another beetle from flight and tossed the twitching carcass towards Vivi. Turning her head back towards Sanji, her ears flicked. "Let's find you a mouse, huh?"