Absent-mindedly, Kera scritched the side of her shaggy fur as she glanced over the upset dirt in Polaris, where she'd buried the shiny things to pass back to the elder. She had feathers, a shiny rock, a regular rock, bones, and black goop.

The wolf crinkled her muzzle, briefly. What else could she find? She could find more rocks, perhaps-- colourful ones, like she'd found for the Kings. Maybe some nice yellow ones, or orange ones.

She was the Lightbringer after all, she needed to keep a little bit to the theme.

Kera went stepping out into Polaris, her nose to the ground, sniffing quietly. Finding stones hadn't been so hard, before-- in fact, there was something nearby, glinting in the dirt near the crystal river. She started shifting towards it, ears pricked, then reached out to grab it in her jaw.

Whatever it was, it sure as fuck was not a gem.

It was a crab-like creature, a lesser with a shiny, yellow shell. One of it's pitch-dark claws reached up and promptly grasped Kera's nose, pressing down and down until the wolf gave a pained yelp and dropped it. Frustrated, the lesser went scuttling away into the crystal river, never to be seen again.

"What the fuck was that?" Kera said to no one in particular, placing her paws over her dripping nose.

It took her a few moments to recover-- as might anyone need, if they just got attacked by (what was in Kera's eyes, at least) a sentient gemstone. She lay by the river, rubbing her paws soothingly against her pained muzzle.

But, Kera had a job to do. A duty, that included doing what the elders wanted her to do. For science, and research, or something along those lines. Mostly curiosity, really, about what would actually come out of this one.

Kera shook her fur out, and then stood up. She had a sneaking suspicion that sniffing out these things wasn't going to help, but regardless the wolf pinned her nose to the ground and went padding along Polaris, searching the cave floor for more.

She suspected it would take a while, at least-- Polaris was a big place, but it did have many little glowing crystals and the like.

But not that long, apparently-- Kera was beginning to skirt the Spire when she found something else glinting in the corner of her eye. The hulking wolf moved towards it, a little more cautiously this time, reaching out tenatively to prod what she'd seen first.

It was like the crab-- shiny and yellow, like light. This one, however, didn't move when she poked and swiped at it with her claws. Soon, Kera was taking this gemstone and cramming it into her mouth as well.

She returned to the bank, buried it, and looked around.


One more, she decided.

Instead of looking around the Spire, this time Kera decided to take a look around the generator, where the shores were shallower. The generator, Kera assumed, was something of a luck-machine.

It fuelled the lights, anyway.

And she put them back on.

It made sense to her, at least. The wolf went plodding through the waters, her nose near the surface of the lake as she scraped along at the mud laying at the bottom of the cave, searching.

It seemed a little hopeless, at first-- all she could really see was mud and grey stones and water. She shook herself a little bit, beginning to turn to leave.

When she had just gotten out of the water she saw another stone glinting nearby. Her ears lifted and she went bounding towards it-- again, poking and prodding at it for several moments until she was sure it wasn't moving, and then she picked it up in her jaw and went hobbling back to her mounds.

To which, she paused. Did she really need anything more?

Kera took a long moment to think-- with an orange gemstone between her jaws. She didn't, really, and surely there'd be other gembound coming and going with an array of different things, too. Kera stretched, and then began running straight out of Polaris and into Fornax.

Back and forth.

Several times.

exit