Moonspear When I see her face

After checking up on Terance (which she did daily) and doing some hunting for herself, Wraen headed towards the place, where the puppies had relocated. Now that family matters were settled and she knew some people in the pack more or less, she thought that it was time to get to know Charon's youngest generation of offspring better. After all their father had suggested that they would enjoy a good story or two and, where story-telling and weaving was concerned, you did not have to ask Wraen twice.
 
It was not hard to find, when you knew, what smells and sounds to look for. She arrived at the designated spot, however, it was pretty early and there was none around yet. She had brought a toy for the kids - a beaver skull she had dug up by the river-bank and now settled it on the ground. She stretched and lied down, thinking that someone had to appear sooner or later.

There was a lot to see and do around the new rendezvous site and Galaxy wanted to explore, yet she found herself feeling strangely listless just now. She just didn't have her usual energy. And though her stomach growled, begging for sustenance, the thought of food didn't appeal to her one bit. As a matter of fact, all she could think about when she considered eating anyway was Vela muttering about her fat head.

The slim white pup sprawled beneath the shade of a tree and rested, though she perked up and lifted her head when a stranger approached the fringes of the clearing. Her fur was mottled gray, with a paler underside and lovely green eyes. Galaxy's tail began thumping against the grass and she pushed into a sit, then stood and began padding toward the unfamiliar she-wolf.

"Hi! Who're you?"

"Hey!" Wraen pushed herself to a sitting position, when a white puppy emerged and was coming in her direction. It was a puppy with mismatched eyes, which stood out against her white coat. She quickly counted and reminded herself all of the names of Charon's offspring and according to the art of deduction this had to be Galaxy. The pup that had been lost for a while.

"I am Wraen and you must be Galaxy, right?" she asked with a wagging tail.

"Ran?!" she exclaimed in surprise. "I have a sister named Ran," Galaxy added in the next breath, "but she's gone. I don't know where she went." It was strange to meet someone with the same name as her missing sister, though beyond sharing this information with her new acquaintance, the pup didn't dwell on it.

She had come to a stop about three feet from Wraen. After eyeballing her a moment, the pup's mismatched eyes wandered to the skull beside her. "Cool!" she declared before suddenly remembering she hadn't properly answered the adult's question. "Yeah, I'm Galaxy. What is that?" She pointed a white toe at the beaver skull.

The pup confirmed, what Wraen had already suspected. However, the mention of sister Ran confused her, because she did not recall Charon mentioning her, when they had first met, and she had a pretty good memory. Perhaps he had forgotten or it was quite possible that this was an imaginary friend of Galaxy. Wraen had had plenty herself as a kid. 

"This guy," she tapped the skull with her forepaw, "is Sir Alfred Boneskull."

The pup snorted, immediately finding the name humorous. "Sir Alfred?" she repeated merrily. "Isn't it a bone? Isn't it dead?" she pressed. Galaxy was young and averagely intelligent, though she was pretty sure she was looking at the remains of some sort of small creature. "Did you eat its brain?"

Brains were quite succulent and tasty, in the youngster's experience. Normally the mere thought of such tender meat would make her mouth water. It did water now, though that was due to the nausea which suddenly clutched her belly. Galaxy didn't puke, though it took a good twenty seconds for the sensation to pass.

"Sir Alfred is neither dead, nor alive. He is an..." here Wraen stopped, looking for the perfect name for a being that was neither. Living dead or dying lived? Dyliv? "... I forgot the name. Anyway - if you put your ear next to his skull, you will hear his thoughts." As she said this, she leaned down, pressed her ear against the top of the bone and pretended to listen. Apart from the usual "swooshing" sound there was nothing particular.

"Sir Alfred says that he is a flower today," she got up. "I say that he is a bit mad."

The youngster didn't hear much of what Wraen said next, due to suppressing the urge to throw up the lunch she hadn't eaten. She swallowed several times, waiting for the sour taste in her mouth to go away. She needed a drink and even cast her mismatched eyes about for a puddle or stream. But then an errant thought crossed her mind.

Thinking out loud, the Omicron asked, "Does water make you fat, like food does?" Especially after her conversation with Hydra, she'd made the connection between eating and weight. But where did drinking factor into it?

"Hmm..." Galaxy's next question caught Wraen off guard and left her thinking. She had not seen a fat wolf in her life and according to Osprey - if you died fat then you had been one lucky beast. Achieving that kind of physical state in a life-time... well, that seemed almost like saint-hood. A long and difficult task. 

"Not that I know of," she shrugged and looked down to Sir Alfred. He seemed to happy as a fool in his flower-hood today so it did not seem likely that he would know the answer to the question. "Why do you worry about that?"

Wraen's noncommittal answer didn't really satisfy the youngster. Her lips pursed against the thirst aching in her mouth and throat. She couldn't imagine denying herself a drink. Her hunger had faded, yet this thirst was strong. Galaxy decided she would just have to find out for herself by partaking in water and seeing how it affected her fatness, even if the idea made her cringe a bit.

"Why do you worry about that?" It was hard for her to articulate an answer, so for a moment, Galaxy's (dry) tongue stuck to the (dry) roof of her mouth. Eventually, she slowly shrugged a snowy shoulder and said, "I don't want to be a fathead anymore."

Before Wraen could possibly reply to that, the puppy suddenly wondered, "How did you find Sir Alfred?"

"Believe me, if you are ever lucky to die fat - consider that you have had a life well-lived," Wraen replied before bouncing back to an easier subject - Sir Alfred the skull-head.

"By the river-bank. And judging by those kick-ass teeth," she beckoned to the two pairs of massive, orangey-brown incisors. "I think this guy once might have been a beaver. Have you ever seen one?"

Naturally, Galaxy didn't see things that way, though soon thoughts about fatness and the like dropped out of her head as they focused on Sir Alfred's origins. The skull apparently belonged to a beaver. She had never heard of such a thing and shook her head, silken white ears bouncing slightly.

"No, what is it?"

"Oh, that is one very cool animal," Wraen told thinking abou the leathery tailed, yellow-teethed beast, which could eat through trees. In her earliest silly day, inspired by the deeds of this sturdy creature, she too had set her mind on becoming a beaver, when she grew up. But it quickly became clear that her set of pointy teeth were not meant to take trees down. 

"It is this big," she lifted one of her feet up to show the approximate size, "it has got a brownish-gray coat, a set of four, sturdy, orangey teeth." As she said this, she tapped the skull with her paw. "A-a-a-and big, fat and flat tail - watch out from that - he can hit you with it," she pointed out, though it had never happened to her. "They chew down trees, create big dams - imagine, blocking a massive river. And they live in piles of those trees. And the entrance is underwater. And..." she furrowed her brow, thinking. "And if that does not prove that this is one cool beast, then I have no idea, what else would."

Galaxy listened raptly, her mental picture a rough approximation of a beaver. It did sound really cool, though the youngster was abruptly distracted by a word she perceived as a swear. Her mismatched eyes flew wide and she clapped a paw to her mouth as if she'd said it, then giggled.

"You said a bad word," she pointed out to Wraen, forgetting to make any comment on all the other neat stuff she'd shared.

Would you care to wrap this up soon? I'm trying to finish up her threads. :)

"I did?" Wraen asked innocently, going through most of what she had told and explained seconds earlier and simply could not sense the foulness of the bad word. "Which one was it?" perhaps people here had different customs and, what might have not been understood as a swearword elsewhere, was understood like one here.

ooc: post another one and I will wrap up after that.

Galaxy giggled again. "I can't say it!" she insisted with merry eyes. She then looked around surreptitiously before leaning in closer, pushing her muzzle close to Wraen's ear. She lifted a paw to shield her mouth as she whispered, "Damn."

With yet another chortle, the youngster retreated into a sit. She hadn't felt this jolly in a while. Wraen and her friend, the honorable Sir Alfred Boneskull, had really put her disordered thinking totally out of her head for a while. It was a welcome reprieve, if totally unconscious and even more tragically brief.

"Come on, now you are pulling my leg," Wraen said, not recalling for one moment that she would have inserted the "d" word anywhere. Generally her speech was clean, unless she was so excited by the moment that the usual words for describing something big and amazing just would not do. 

"Ooooh! Wait - dams! Dams are not the same as damns. They are... well, stuff beavers build accross the rivers and block them. If I find something like that one day, I promise I will show you, what it looks like." And she kept her word and one day she did.