Open Vulpinsula & Surroundings The Changes Upon Us

[Cricket]

The pat-down was not detested, though the small puffs of fur certainly were. Cricket spluttered and gagged, caught between trying to clean her eyes of the fibres and her long tongue picking up more of the dratted things. Perhaps making a wintertime nest out of fluff would have been a bad idea, after all. Yeah. She wasn’t totally mad it was all gone.

Squinching her face up as she teased the last bits from her vision, the little gecko stared with horror, rapidly transmuting into confusion, when their saviour started…crying? About numbers and cakes? Cricket was not a creature accustomed to mathematics, unless those mathematics involved subtracting from others and adding to her own pockets. Once you got above fifteen or so numbers ceased to matter to her: Eskilia could be twenty-three or fifty-four and she would still have received the same moniker from Cricket, so she did not understand why she was so upset. “Of course you’re grown!?” she added unhelpfully. “Lookit the size of you! You could fit like three of me in your fur so you gots to be old!”

The logic was sound by her standards. She looked to Finn, paws spread as though pleading to a referee, only to realise the conversation had moved on to cake. Her confusion only seemed to deepen. “Cake? Namedays ‘ave cakes, now?”

 

[Eskila]

Eskila, sniffling and hiccuping and still dabbing her eyes with whatever dry fur was left on her arms, nodded along.

"I had two cakes... one time, when I was... small..." She hurtled into another back-wracking howl of anguish and distress, but quickly sorted herself. "...and an...an...another time, hic, the fire house company, got me a cake, bu... b-but then... everyone quit, and... snnhhrrk, nobeast's been in the fire house long enough to know when it is since then, and... and I forgot... I've been so busy every day... I don't know what year it is, or what day it is, or... or what month it is... all I do is w...wake up and go to work and try to stop everybeast from d-dy...hic...dying... and sometimes I don't even wake up because I never slept, and... my shield's gone, I need to get my shield..."

The sniffling had mostly gone, leaving her just breathing heavily and hiccuping, with wet lines down her fuzzy cheeks where the dust and grime of the Slups had been washed away in the deluge. Her tail gave a sad little waggle.

"Hi," she said eventually, gazing at Finn, then Cricket. "I'm Eskila. Are you two feeling safe now?"

"...my cabbages..."

The cabbage-seller pattered past them down the hill, lost in a deep haze of his own kind of grief.

"He's okay," she said. "Cabbages grow on trees so he'll get more."

 

[FinnianBrightfur]

Finn stared at Cricket, as if she'd just grown a third nostril. "Course they come with cakes!" he said matter of factly. But then he hesitated. Cricket was, like him, an orphan. Though he had suffered hard times, it had never occurred to him that Cricket had never enjoyed a nameday cake. The thought was so foreign to him that he needed a moment to process it.

As he imagined further, his eyes studied the gecko intensely. Gates... ...how could no one have ever bought her a nameday cake? His eyebrows pinched together with sorrow, and he let out a sudden huff. "Alright, that's it!" he announed, as if he were fed up with the situation. Seizing Cricket's paw, he began to march down the street. "We're going to Mr. Larsen's bakery, and getting a cake!" he said resolutely.

> "He's okay," she said. "Cabbages grow on trees so he'll get more."

"Yeah, and geckos hatch from eggs!" Finn scoffed incredulously.

 

[Cricket]

Cricket did not know the term existential crisis. If a beast had uttered the phrase to her face, she would have presumed them either speaking in tongues or of some bygone diplomatic calamity of the Imperium no longer of any concern due to the passage of time (that being anything more than her own lifespan). She did not know and neither would she have liked the word, but she could see it happening before her eyes as this poor sable seemed to be processing the mess that was her life.

It was deeply uncomfortable to witness.

Stunned into silence by both Eskila’s emotions and Finnian’s own processing, the gecko merely stared blank-eyed until the sable asked after her. “Uh…yeah. Yeah, safe,” she murmured. That was rather relative: she was safe from the threat of drowning in fur or the harbour’s rancid water; was she truly safe from these outbursts of emotion or the potential for, ugh, feelings?! It all seemed rather precarious.

She was not to escape. Finn had made up his mind and for once she allowed herself to be pulled along, glancing over her shoulder as Eskila moved to collect her shield and halberd. Oh, right, for all the crying the sable was still pretty cool. She wanted a shield now. “Okay, yeah, all of us go,” Cricket said, gesturing to Eskila. “Might be an adult with us helps Larsen forget about that cupcake stuff. Besides,” she looked to the mustelid as they began to head down the street, expression turning pleading. “You’re a girl: you can maybe try a’ explain eggs to Finn on the way there.”

 

[Eskila]

Her face gently ached from the outpouring of tears, but in a way... it was catharsis Eskila rarely got to feel. Crying was good, sometimes? And just once, she managed to stay awake to really feel it. It was... nice.

The trek to her shield and back up the street to find her halberd allowed her some time to calm, while the two younglings made their plans.

"What cupcake stuff?" she drawled, squinting a little in suspicion. It awfully sounded like these little kits had been getting up to no good... Much like she had once done, on the days she could get out of bed. Emptying out the jar of sweets, drinking her father's liquor and throwing up under the kitchen table, before sneaking back under the covers to pretend she'd never had the strength to leave it all day, before they'd come home from the fields...

Along the way to the bakery, Eskila did her best to explain eggs as she escorted them from the rear.

"Lizards," she informed them, "are like birds... except they're more like fish... they have no fur and no ears... just little ear-holes... never stick your finger in somebeast's ear-hole... But like Missertross gulls, you're not supposed to eat lizard eggs for breakfast, because they came out of somebeast's bottom. Or a Missertross gull's bottom. But eggs from a Missertross gull don't turn into lizards. Unless they're delivering... that used to be storks... also you can eat a stork egg, so they stopped doing deliveries with storks, because no one knows how a stork egg looks different from a lizard egg... eggs are what makes cake fluffy... But you have to use them before the little yellow part inside turns into a bird, or a lizard. It won't turn into a fish because fish eggs are like gooey bubbles... but I bet fish egg cakes would be really delicious, too..."

Oblivious to their questions and outcries of concern, Eskila kept going on and on as they padded down the fluff-strewn streets of Bully Harbour. She didn't get to talk much these days, and she had a lot of thoughts about eggs, even if most of them were wrong.

Though the sable's fur hadn't changed much at all, perhaps she was the most changed of anybeast that curious day. Her soul felt a little brighter, her ears perked a little higher. Maybe her body was old, but her kit's heart had found two little friends to share time with, and in her mind, she was still just the young sable who spent her days in bed, waiting by the window for them to show up, that they all might frolic the daylight away.