Broken Boulder Microtransactions Can't Stop Sea Lions On Twitter

Someone from the new crew? @Olive @Seabreeze @Séamus @Eleuthera @Okeanos @Ibis

brilliance hasn’t made very many attempts to get to know her new pack mates. they were a little too close for comfort. sleeping on top of them. literally! she grunts, shimming out from beneath a nondescript body of someone else. when she is free, she glances over, stepping over her sister and brother and then over her father until she is out in the open and breathing fresh air. she inhales a deep breath, looking up at bright morning light, and looking once to her left and then to her right.
 
what is she going to do today?
 
when she releases the breath, she doesn’t move forward—or any direction, except down—and plops her rear right on the ground and stares off into the distance at nothing in particular, losing her train of thought to a blank cycle of varying degrees of silence.

okeanos and his siblings are perhaps more used to suddenly finding themselves in close quarters with other babes, to their advantage -- he has not been fussed by the transition, aside from missing his papa a little bit sometimes. (this he keeps to himself, not wanting to upset ibby or mama seebee -- he's gotta be a good, strong boy, he knows.)

there is one small problem though, which is, he can't find his gelman anywhere! somehow in the jostle of the move and the long walk from the mountain he must have dropped it -- at first the sprite is convinced he's just hidden it well in the den, and distracted by all the new faces does not think much on it, but now, oh, it is a big problem!!!

from the sleeping mass of puppy-pile okeanos wriggles free, an urgent whine on his lips as he hits sunlight, spying one of the new puppies staring into the distance. he still feels hesitant to go far without permission but he's already done it a couple of times since arriving in the sanctuary and so  he decides it's worth it, marches up to her, and begs, "excus me! um, have you seen, um, my gelman? it's a wing?"

however longer later that the annoyance starts, brilliance can’t tell. she’d zoned out but reels back in when she hears bumbling footsteps in her direction. fur bristles around her nape and she turns sleepily in his direction, blinking out of her stupor. the sky is still bright and the sun doesn’t seem to have moved too much. okay, good. now what does this fool want?
 
brilliance shakes her head, realizing she’d missed what the boy was talking about. “what?” she blurts, eyes narrowing in his direction. he’s a bit taller than she is but she straightens out her legs and tries to stand a bit taller. “your what?”

she is  not as immediately hostile as her brother (he assumes) had been but she is not exactly nice either -- the bigger boy shrinks back a little, looking shyly at the ground instead of her. "it's my gelman... auntie wraen gave it to me..." oh but maybe the issue is that she doesn't have any gelman, and thus lacks context for what it is -- well he'd said it was a wing but he doesn't mind clarifying again. "issa wing an' it still has feathers on it kinda, though it's chewed up a li'l," okeanos tries to explain, hoping that she will understand and not get more annoyed with him.

the other child dares to explain himself, despite her obvious disinterest. she snorts and lifts her nose, shaking her head a beat later as he explain. “haven’t seen nothin’ like that ‘round here,” she tells him, sorta ha ha. she’d lost her mom, her space, they deserved to lose something too. maybe she had seen it and doesn’t want to tell him. hmph. she wouldn’t tell him even if she had. “you’ll halfta find new toys to chew on. you can’t have mine.”

oh. oh. his ears lay flat against his head, mouth pinching into a tiny dot. he doesn't understand why the puppies here are so mean, so untrusting of him. he wants to like it here because his mamas brought him here and he trusts their judgement explicitly, but... but! 

tears well up in his eyes and he sniffles, rubbing his nose with one paw and looking down more. "i," okeanos whimpers, "i wouldn't wanna take yours, tha's -- that's mean!"

a sob catches the last word and then he explodes into a wet, sobby mess, the demise of his beloved gelman the final straw for the poor thing, try as he might. "suh, sor, reee," he weeps, "just, jus' miss, papa, an', an' i dunno why, why y'don't like mee," he cries, oh poor little soul!

ugh. look at this fuckin’ softie. brilliance rolls her eyes and looks away from the blubbering puppy. that about sums up the lot of them, if it were up to her. he’s a bit bigger and older but clearly something is wrong with him.
 
as he continues on, ears twitch as he goes on. “where’s your papa?” she asks, this time softer but her expression remains hardened, skeptical all the same. “yer bein’ a baby. you don’ see me cryin’ and my mama is gone.” yep. just fine. no concern here. it was enough, she realizes, when he tucks tail and disappears.