Heron Lake Plateau Norupo.

Today, Towhee's thoughts drifted over to their neighbors. She wondered how Wildfire was doing and felt a stab of guilt for declining to send X to search for Kiwi. But she reminded herself that neither she nor her hawk was obligated to serve the Firebirds. And Kiwi had attacked her! Anyway, she had seen less and less of the hawk the past few weeks. Towhee didn't require his assistance much these days, so she liked to let him live his life.

She wrapped up a patrol and began to head back toward the den site when she saw a familiar shadow glide overhead. Her lips twitched into a smile as Towhee looked up, orange eyes widening when she saw that X wasn't alone. For a hot second, she thought he'd brought a mate along with him, yet the second hawk was visibly smaller. And when the two of them glided down to land in her path, Towhee's sharp eyes took in the littler hawk's youthful appearance; it was clearly a juvenile.

"Well, who's this?" the mercenary asked, a look of delighted surprise on her face. Her eyes grew wider and wider as the story unfolded a la their rudimentary language: as X explained that this was her son, because X had actually been female this entire time. Somehow, this threw Towhee much, much more than the fact that X had procreated, raised a chick and brought him to the plateau.

"You're a chick?" she blurted, to which the younger bird squawked in affirmation even though the question had been meant for X. Towhee blinked loudly and burst into laughter, which actually turned into paroxysms and resulted in the mercenary crumpling to the ground and rolling around in the dirt, tears rolling from her eyes.

When she recovered some time later, she sat up and wiped the moisture from her cheeks. "I see that X has been teaching you," she said to the young hawk. "We'll call you Z, is that okay?" It made her grin hugely when the half-grown chick bobbed his head. "Cool. This is so cool, X. I'm really glad you brought him here. Is this just a visit or...?"

And X completely stupefied Towhee a second time today by announcing that she had brought Z here in case @Fennec would like a seeing eye bird.