Heron Lake Plateau (futuristic space music)

Sure thing—unless you for whatever reason really WANT to respond to Owen's inchoate nonsense here, ahahaha. Dumb kid.  :P
That is of course assuming all this belated hasty confused rambling can be made sense of, eheheh  <.<;;  Rawrgh! May try to get this edited for clarity agan later, we'll see, though most of it's just Owen once again misdirecting himself inside his own head anyway, in practice.

Owen ratcheted his spine up to sit up straight, bit by bit, as his father launched into what actually ended up being a bit of a rant—Owen was a bit startled that obviously all this drama had touched a nerve in the male alpha. The kid's green eyes were distracted and a bit blank even as they obediently latched onto his father's matching pair, however: Owen was also put out and unconvinced that Qui was trying to offer up this dodgy-feeling explanation that this was just some sort of normal "in heat" thing (a phenomenon Owen hadn't really run into, and didn't really "get" on some fundamental level still...obviously...but which in any case seemed far too tame and humdrum to him to be able to explain away all the weirdness and excitement and furtiveness on everyone's part). It just didn't seem to fit; down in his bones Owen felt that there was no way he could possibly be getting the whole story here, or even the most exciting part of it. He had zero intention of getting into fights or spawning kids of his own...wtf, did Quixote think he was stupid or something?!...but at the same time Owen felt restlessly dissatisfied and his brain kept wandering off on tangents and returning to his earlier, far-preferable private suppositions. Giant pondmonster fights halfway to the death were exciting, after all, while "going into heat" was incomprehensible yet somehow still pretty ordinary and boring, at least if you asked Owen. So when his father finally asked if he had any questions, what unthinkingly and slightly plaintively popped out was, But what does that have to do with the pond monster?!

Owen was already glancing distractedly back over his shoulder towards Rye again when his mind caught up with the question it had insisted on voicing. ...Whoops. That had been a bit dumb of him to voice aloud. After all, he'd never yet even gotten Qui to admit the thing even existed! So he really didn't think he was going to suddenly get a confession here and now just because a whole bunch more confusing nonsense was all of a sudden happening. No, if Owen wanted to really get to the bottom of all this, obviously he was going to have to go behind his father's back and do some deeper investigating of his own. ...You know what? Never mind, he said, glancing back to Qui and trying to look intelligent and attentive and as if he had totally been paying attention this whole time and swallowing all this BS wholesale. They're, uh, in heat and all, stay away from them, right. Got it. The more he thought about it the more a bit of frustration with Rye was starting to build within the gangling teen. Dangit, why hadn't Rye butted in with a more satisfactory explanation of his own?! The whole impassioned babbling explanation by Qui seemed so frustratingly incomplete, while meantime Owen was so sure Rye would have some sort of totally contradictory and far-more-interesting story to tell.

Thankfully for Owen's increasingly restlessly dancing feet, Qui had some idea of what he was doing and didn't take too long to grab a few plants and start heading back in Rye's direction. Owen didn't quite surge ahead of his father after he haphazardly grabbed a few matching green stalks of his own, but obviously had some impulsive drive to do so that he was fighting down as his paws repeatedly almost did just that before reeling themselves back in check and letting his elder and superior patriarch precede him most of the way back to their packmate. Despite his thirsty impatience however, Owen wasn't quite sure how to begin, and only got as far as, Uh, so uh, we got you some of these plants...see... while gesturing vaguely in Qui's direction in a thoughtless - Yeah here have some super-duper great plant crap - manner that also managed to be slightly and clumsily sarcastic. Fortunately I don't think Rye likely caught on, and with even Qui's more-tenuous grasp of ptero it was likely that Owen's distracted rudeness went mostly-unmarked, particularly as Qui launched into a more-useful and coherent set of instructions of his own to Rye. ...Rye, though, Rye was almost as distracted as Owen himself had been. And as unhelpfully reticent as Owen had thought his father would be. Rye seemed not fully in possession of himself as he noped on outta there, but was too traumatized and preoccupied to offer up anything meatier than a hasty promise to stick around the pack and...also around Aunt Towhee?!...before he skedaddled. Owen made a frustrated noise of inarticulate complaint after Rye's vanishing tail— - But—! ARGH! - —but although he instinctively lifted an eager paw toward the trail Rye was hastily blazing, Owen glanced back at his father and immediately hunkered back, hunching a bit grupily down in on himself. A scarce moment later he picked up his big ivory paws again to move off away from Qui but with different intent. Um, right...guess that's that... he half-mumbled with no real thought to it before likewise escaping the scene entirely.

If Rye was going to go hang out with Aunt Towhee, after all, then Owen was obviously going to get in a big heap o' trouble if he followed right after the guy. The boy knew his own tracking abilities weren't really up to par, but felt he had no choice but to make a very deliberate and obvious completely different choice of direction to exit in as he too ditched Qui in order to wrestle with his own internal problems elsewhere. And fortunately for him his father was probably too distracted by whatever other issues had him fretting to up and chase his son down, at least so long as Owen wasn’t too obviously and immediately disobeying. Owen was still so deeply convinced that there was something more to all of this that Qui just wasn't telling him, though! It couldn't just be some heat thing, and obviously whatever secret story all the grownups and Poe were privy to that Owen wasn't was keeping Qui's mind at least as preoccupied as Owen's own. Maybe he should try to track down Poe, the teen mused as he scarpered off with only a brief last glance in his father's direction... once he was sure he wouldn't get absolutely reamed for doing so, anyhow. That might be the only way the boy was ever going to get a more satisfyingly complete picture of the story here, or so he was convinced.