Azure focused on her magic as she talked, trying again to charge a stone with electricity. Not that rocks were the most conductive thing, but hey.

"Armor? Maybe... I never thought about that. And yeah there's all sorts of magic. I don't know it all. I-..." she trailed off, briefly, half because she was focusing on her work, and half because she was thinking of her "family." They'd known some magic, though most were brutes--but they knew magic specifically to horrify others, to torment them. Caves, she'd hated that shit--and where'd it left her?! Stop, she told herself severely, interrupting that train of thought before it took over her mind.

Azure turned her attention back to the stone. "I think it's just really shitty as to whether it works or not. Like, random. ...Okay, right. Try to touch this--it's gonna zap you but it won't hurt too bad. Tell me if you can think of any uses for this?" she asked, pulling away from the stone in question.

It wouldn't be a bad shock, if Siren did touch it--Azure'd only imbued it with maybe a little more than a static charge. "I can make it stronger--but not by much."

@Siren

Serendipity nodded along quietly, for a moment scanning Azure up and down. Laurel had a nice faceplate that she'd found for her, but she was unsure if one would fit the hybrid in the same way. She'd have to account for the antlers.

A breastplate, maybe? Something that fastened underneath the wings so that she could still use them. Something to protect her neck, or her forelimbs or hindlegs.

She was half-interrupted from her train of thought when Azure trailed off. She couldn't quite read bird-face expressions but she seemed... not sad, but distantly thoughtful, perhaps? Not in a good way, at least. "That's okay," she reassured, just in case. "I don't know them all either."

She turned her head to concentrate quietly on her own work, as Azure did so with hers. She felt the familiar pulse of magic in her palm, spiralling outwards, conjuring into the ground. It was exhausting, she could feel the energy being sapped out of her by the second as a clear, pale blue moonstone gathered around underneath her palm, forming a thick ring-shape.

She paused, lifted this up, and then looked to Azure's thing.

"Yeah, uhh-- there must be a way to like. Make it not random? I don't know if practice will do it because if it's random then it might still like, not work if you've done it a hundred times," she replied, reaching out to touch the stone.

There was a muffled crackle of electricity, too brief to be noticed by the unobservant, and Siren squawked and retracted her hand. Not in pain-- Azure was right, it didn't really hurt --but in surprise. "That's really cool!" She blurted out, wide-eyed. "You, uhh, you could use it to protect your stuff, yeah. You could use it on a weapon to make it zappier but you'd have to design a sort of weapon where you like, hold it where it's safe and make a certain bit of it zappy or something?"

She tapped her chin, and then presented the moonstone ring. "This is for you. It's, uh, like a gem but there's no one in it or anything? It's just a stone," Siren said. "You can make it glow if you wanna, and I can put it on your horns? Antlers? If you want it."

@Azure

"Antlers, I think," Azure said absently, but her eyes were on the moonstone. It was beautiful--and for a moment, she just... didn't know what to say, or do. Everyone she'd met so far, in her entire life, had been selfish--some cruel, some indifferent. Wyvern had been the closest thing she'd had to a truly friendly encounter and that one had been a little... eccentric. She certainly hadn't offered any gifts. Azure didn't know how to react, at first, and hesitated before reaching out a clawed forelimb to slowly pull the moonstone in. "Thank you," she murmured, the feathered ear-tufts flattening back.

After a moment of staring at it--turning it a little and eyeing its ethereal shimmer--she looked back to Siren. She appeared to wake from her thoughts, blinking. "Oh. Dip--thank you. But that's such cool magic. You can just--make gemstones..? How do you do that?" she asked. "I've just been... scrounging them up. Finding rocks. But if I could make gemstones--and maybe with practice they wouldn't be random?" she added, thoughtfully.

Claws scrabbled at the moonstone, drawing it carefully against her chest, and Azure thought, for a moment. "Hey, can you think of any way to attach rocks to stuff? That'd actually be pretty neat... maybe some way to... decorate yourself with glowing rocks or something. Maybe you could hang something zappy outside your um. Cloth? Too, and protect yourself from those who might like. Attack you."

...Not that Azure had any experience with aggressors, or anything.

She then blinked up again. "Hey, do you want me to try to make the end of that knife-thing zappy?"

@Siren

Antlers? She was unsure, truly, what the real different was aside from a slightly different shape, but whatever made Azure happy, she supposed. That seemed like a bit of a priority to her right now-- especially since Azure seemed like the kind of cool kid she wanted to be happy.

Which she must have been doing a bad job of, because suddenly the hybrid looked a little sad, though she was saying thank you.

She flicked her ears back until they stuck to either side of her skull, but Serendipity didn't say anything about it in fear of making it worse. "I don't know," she admitted, looking down at her hand. "It's, uhh, random, like you said. I just think about doing it and sometimes it happens but usually not? And it's really tiring to try to do it."

"But!" She went on, a little abruptly. "I can kind of think of what it'll be shaped like if it works? So, uh, that's like a ring so that you can put it on your-- antlers, and stuff, but I think I could make other stuff out of gemstones, too."

Azure's next question was actually Siren knew a little something about, at least-- Glory had mentioned adhering sand and small stones to larger stones to make a whetstone before, but if Azure wanted to hang something on herself, like rocks, then she'd have to use something else.

"There's, uhh-- some of this stuff--" she pat some scraps of armour "--has sort of soft little.. strappy things on them? So that they stay on your legs and stuff. You could stick stones and stuff onto the armour but you might not be able to get them off-- uhh, you could use a hammer or you could use fire to stick them on there?"

She considered for a few moments longer before speaking again, gesturing to the rope tied around her waist. "Or you could use one of these to try to tie it onto something? Like an antler? You could maybe try to tie it around the rock or make a little... encasing or something for it, and thread some rope through it so that it stays."

Serendipity took a long moment to think this out further, and then indicated to her left hand, fingers half-curled around her gemstone. "There's, um," she murmured, trailing off to think of the right words. "A thing, that's shaped like a hand. It's covered in a soft kind of cloth-thing with metal bits plated around the arm and the back of the hand. Maybe you'd be fine if you made the metal bits zappy, but not the soft bit?"

Reasonably, you could punch someone.

With thunder.

Siren liked that idea.

Enthusiastically, Siren nodded as she pulled the dimly-glowing knife from the makeshift "belt" around her waist, carefully offering the bladed part to Azure. "Go for it! The, uh-- this part's called a hilt, it's sort of encased around a really thin strip of metal so it stays on, so it shouldn't-- get entirely zappy?"

@Azure

Azure did her best to keep up with everything that Dip was saying. First, the ring--it made sense, now that she looked at the shape, but it hadn't occurred to her before. Reason being: she had no hands. Her forelimbs sure as hell couldn't reach her antler tines... maybe if she balanced it on the ground and tried to just... scoop it up?

She mentally shrugged.

Next topic.

"Those, uhh--those strips, those cords, where'd you get those?" she asked, curiously. If they were rubble, half-lost in Tunnel J, then it was likely that there'd only be a finite supply of them. But... someone had made them before, right? So if they could just figure out how, maybe they could make more, themselves. Somehow, Azure liked the idea of shiny things dangling off in cords and ropes.

She leaned forward in an attempt, anyway, to "zapify" the knife-blade. She wasn't sure what good it'd do, but then again, it was always handy to have stuff around that one didn't think they'd need. Or at least, that's what she imagined.

She'd never really had "stuff," before.

Her beak touched the metal, and there was a brief flicker of static--and a charge. This one was stronger than the last, deliberately so, but she did her best to confine it to the metal itself.

"That should do it," she said, rocking back again. "Just don't, uh. Don't touch that one. That one'll hurt. But it should be useful if you gotta stab something. It won't kill anything, though--it won't even REALLY hurt if you touch it, but it hurts, um. Enough."

A pause.

"...Don't ask me how I know that."

@Siren

"Uhhh," Siren drawled on for a moment, and then pointed towards tunnel J. "I found one in there and there's some others there too, I think? But I'm trying to figure out how to make them myself so that I don't have to try to find them whenever I need one, and I can make them however long or wide I wanna."

She tugged absently at the chord. "I think it has something to do with grass, or maybe vines? I've seen patches of grass and stuff around but it's never really been enough, and most things are, uh, dead here." Serendipity gestured around Monoceros.

Serendipity leaned over to get a good look at Azure infusing the blade of the knife with electricity. She stared, and then slowly, hesitantly, touched the hilt.

She wasn't dead, at least.

Picking it up carefully, the child held it out at arms' length and turned it over to get a good look at it. "It looks like a normal knife," she said with Light Concern. "I haven't really had to, uh, stab anything yet, either, but I'll-- keep it for.. whenever I gotta. Thank you."

Maybe she should consider making a new knife for Other Stuff. She could find some scrap metal in tunnel J and smelt it down?

"Uh, I won't," she promised, looking back over to Azure as she carefully set the knife back down, overly cautious not to touch the metal. She leaned back, undid the rope around her waist, and offered it out. "You can have this one if you wanna? I can help you tie it up and put it on."

@Azure

"Might be grass," Azure conceded, eyeing it over. It seemed the right sort of color and consistency for dead plant matter, at least. "But don't dead plants get all... dried out and uhh. Sharp and dry and hard and stuff, after awhile? You'd think it'd just tear apart."

When Dip mentioned using her own rope, Azure blinked.

Well, that was a kind offer.

"...Uhh, I don't wanna take the whole thing? Maybe you can just... I don't know, pull a thin bit off? How's it work?" she added, leaning in to inspect the rope more closely. "It looks like little strings, all woven together. Maybe like. Split it..? If you can get it to hang loose 'round my neck, that'd be cool. I definitely can't reach that on my own," she added, amused. "But only if you're sure."

Then, abruptly--impulsively--she added, "It's... good to meet you, by the way. You're nice; I like you. Lots of people are assholes."

She had a brief thought of what might have happened to Dip if literally any other of Azure's family had found her first, and she shuddered.

@Siren

Serendipity considered this, gently squishing the rope. It didn't feel like it could tear fairly easily-- not if she started stripping at individual strands one-by-one. It did, however, feel dry like Azure had said. "Maybe the dry and hardness is what helps it keep it together or something? I dunno. Uh. Some bits are coming off it but it doesn't feel like it's gonna break or anything."

She squinted at the rope for a moment, but she shook her head. "No, uh, I don't wanna-- accidentally break it or anything? Not until I've figured out how to make another one. Uh. Just in case. Take it? I can find other ropes for now and I'm not really using it for anything," Siren said, threading the spool of rope between her hands and then extending one out, palm-upwards, for the stone.

"It's good to meet you too!" She replied cheerfully. She had no idea what an asshole was but she couldn't imagine it was anything particularly nice. "I'm sorry people are, uh, assholes. You're very nice, too!"

@Azure

Azure would have smirked, if she could. Nice? Nobody's ever accused me of that before. She liked Dip; she wasn't about to go blurting her tragic backstory all over the kid, but she trusted her more than anyone else she'd met so far.

She nudged the stone over, giving a dip of her head.

"Thanks. Stupid as it sounds to say, that means a lot to me. Say, you're a kid, right? You're young? Were you hatched here or what?"

Azure then nodded to the moonstone. "And what got you into that kinda stuff? Did someone teach you, or'd you figure it out on your own?"

...There. Friendly conversation, right? Azure was strangely nervous that she was doing it wrong, but yet... hopeful that she was doing it right. Friendship as a thing--hell, even normal social interaction--was still new to her. Weird, really, that chatting with a friendly Gembound was more frightening, to her, than diving facefirst into someone else's war had been.

@Siren

Serendipity perked up a bit. Somehow-- and she didn't really know how it happened --Azure did seem a little happier, now. Which was good! She took the moonstone ring and carefully threaded it through the chord, sticking her tongue out as she started tying the rope at the ends to keep it secure.

"Yeah, uh," she replied as she worked, eyes flicking between what her hands were doing and Azure as she spoke. "I came outta the chrysalis a couple of sleeps ago? I haven't really been counting or anything but it's been maybe ten or so days."

She did not notice, incidentally, if Azure was doing Friendship wrong. Everything was still a little new to her, too. "A bit of a mix of both, actually!" She went on cheerfully, holding up the rope. The ring wasn't kept in one place, it always dropped down to the bottom of the rope no matter where it was turned, but as long as the rope was tied together, it was fairly secure. "I wanted to fix all the stuff in the tunnel, or find out how to recreate them, if that makes sense? I just think they're neat and I wanna do them myself."

"I figure a lot of it out on myself but I have a teacher who's been doing the same thing, like, a bunch of cycles before I came out of any rock. Uhh, he taught me how to kinda like-- get started? So, you could like, melt bits of scrap metal down and turn them into shinier, new pieces that aren't dirty or anything," Siren pushed up now, as she spoke, and went to carefully set the rope around Azure's neck, wary of having to fit it past her antlers without choking her. Luckily, at least, the rope was very loose. "There's another guy I gotta go find called the Blacksmith, who can teach me more, I think? But I have to find out where he is."

She settled herself back down with this, folding her legs up in front of her. "What about you?" She asked. "How'd you get into making shiny stuff? And making them glow? I, uhhh, know it's your magic and stuff but you seem to really like it?"

@Azure