It is extremely important, if you want your body to stay limber and functional, to stay active and do your stretches every day. This is why Jim was currently doing so. After waking up, he first went through a long, satisfying routine of physical stretches. Then he started thinking about breakfast, and his magical stretches, which he always liked to combine together in a show of efficiency.

His Jim Senses extended, returning flickers of Gembound signatures that were relatively weak and hard to read. That was all right, and even to be expected; he was just warming up after a good night's sleep, after all. From the positions of the Gembound entities he sensed, he could make educated guesses at which ones were probably his preferred prey hiding or foraging in the gorges, and which ones were not relevant to his breakfast for one reason or another. He noted the locations of which prey-like entities were closest, so that he could finish hunting them down when he was ready.

First, though, he could attend to the gemstone shards he'd collected from Leo the other day. Jim sniffed at the shards, then selected one of the clear ones at random and put his diamond-ringed paw on it. He tried to summon some kind of magic up, to push it into the stone to reawaken it, but it very quickly became apparent that it was not going to work. Not because he'd done anything wrong himself, but because there was simply nothing in the stone to take it.

Jim stared at it with big golden eyes in a look of flat disappointment. He checked the others: nope, same situation. Oh, well. Jim couldn't say that he felt any irresistible desire toward parenthood—only the knowledge that, if he were to try it, he'd definitely be better at raising a big happy family than Mother or Master or whoever else was out there raising their kids to be terrible little beasties that needed to be house-trained. That didn't mean he needed to prove it. Why prove something everyone knew to be true anyway?

Jim shrugged, and padded off in search of his breakfast. The most important meal of the day. He hoped he could find some sort of rabbit; the wind hoppers always tasted nice.

exit