Em tripi, said the brown-furred Goufa, and Ephraim's ears began a slow drift toward his shoulders as he realized she was going to keep on saying things he couldn't understand. Isolation wasn't in his vocabulary and it would be some time before he understood what Kiwi was doing without intent, but he felt the sting of it all the same. He didn't know what she was saying, but took it with some smugness that made him feel nervous. Only when she spoke in his language did he perk up, and then immediately felt deflated again.

You talk funny. Hey, that wasn't nice! His tail beat shyly at his hocks as she approached to sniff at him and, in an effort to connect on some level, he declared, "you talk funny too." Then, as if he could somehow demonstrate, he attempted to repeat the strange phrase she'd used earlier while sniffing the air between them: "um traypee." Yeah, Ephraim was way off and had no idea what it meant, but he tried, damnit. His eyes flicked up to Thuringwethil as if for approval.

Kiwi corrected him and a hot stab of indignation poked him right in the chest. What? That was exactly what he said! "Um traypee," he repeated, frowning as his ears flicked forward and then back. There was an accent there he wasn't quite able to emulate yet, his tongue thick and clumsy in his mouth on the foreign sounds, so to him, they sounded alike. Maybe someday he would learn something of the pack's language and be able to speak a little of it, but it would take more effort than the cubs who were raised with it. He wasn't sure about putting effort into much of anything, so who could say if he would ever pick it up.

"S'wha' I said!" he insisted, as if somehow the fact he was wrong was the most offensive thing in the entire world. But he was too timid and unsure of himself here in Drageda to go further with the argument. Had this been Grimnismal, and Kiwi Raleska, whom she reminded him of, then it would have turned into a shouting match or a fight. He wasn't quite prepared to take on the fiery brown Goufa, though, especially not in front of Heda. Anyway, she asked another question that turned the burners off in him, and he tilted his head so that his ears flopped sideways.

"Moms?" he repeated, glancing between Kiwi and Thuringwethil as he slowly sank back into a sit. "I haves a mom. Keyfurs," he thought was her name, but who knows. "An' one pa, Krrkgrr," okay, so like, what the fuck, their names were really hard. "They're gone," he finished dolefully, then politely asked, "yer moms an' pas?"

Time would distance him from his parents enough that he might one day forget their faces—already the memories were hazier than they had been when he first got lost—but their names, he would always remember. And he would always remember having a mom and a dad, even though he would be raised in a pack whose prime litter had two mothers and no identifiable father figure. Ephraim was young enough still that this didn't strike him as odd in any way, especially once Thuringwethil explained it, but he still wondered how one got two mothers instead of a mom and a dad.

He would have liked to have two moms instead of his pa, who was a frightening wolf that Ephraim had always stayed away from. They'd spent no time together and so he never came to understand his father. He'd been too attached to Caiaphas to crave Kierkegaard's attention, and the ghoulish male terrified him anyway.

"A pa is like..." He had to stop and collect together his thoughts, but he didn't have the right words for what he wanted to describe. Instead, he puffed up all the hairs on his body and growled as lowly as he could in a horrible imitation of Kierkegaard's usual gruff take-no-shit warnings for his cubs; there had been nothing fun about the man, only discipline. "Pa is scary," he admitted.