Round Stone Crest You tiny boat with oars

Although Draven was small, the world was big, and he had a mind to explore it. Each day his chubby paws were able to carry him further away from their little hideaway, so he let them. Little by little their territory was becoming familiar to him, as every rock, or puddle warranted an investigation. He always found something new to see, or taste, or smell. Soaking up the information was a constant sensory overload, but unlike the first time he had gazed upon the world, this time he was ready. 

Bits of bark, mixed with saliva flaked onto the ground as the last of Draven's stick fell apart. It had soothed his itchy, growing teeth, and now he was wont for another. Picking his chubby belly up off of the ground, the dark cub noticed a creature in the distance. It was staring him down, with the beadiest eyes that he had ever seen. There was something else off about the tiny beast, something about the way it sat hunched over with it's hind end on the ground, and it's paws turned to hold it's face. He had never seen anything like it. Bewildered, the Lagina stood there for a while, deadlocked in the staring match. What he did not know, was that the mouse was probably just as afraid as he was. He considered calling for Minka, or @Gent . Surely they would save him. Unfortunately, he had the mind of a child, and like most children, he thought that the best defense was complete, and utter stillness. Maybe if he did not move, the creature would continue on it's way.

He hardly made it through the thought, when he got his wish. The mouse took off, it's little body zipping across the terrain. Instinct took over then, as Draven's stubby legs darted after it. He chased, and chased, but to no avail. He was not nimble, or quick. All over-sized paws, and too-short legs, he wobbled this way, and that. It proved to be all for naught, as the creature slipped inside of the ground, leaving the defeated cub huffing at the entrance.

Everyday, Gent grew more and more relaxed in his role as king of Round Stone Crest. The nerves brought on by that question of is it all too were ebbing away quickly, for despite a few rocky moments he felt all the more sure with each sunset past that this was indeed exactly where he was meant to be, exactly at this time in his life. The entirety of the pack was not like family to him, not yet at least. But those that were had solidified themselves completely within his heart.

His life, as always, consisted of constantly being on the move. The only rests he took were to visit with pack mates, and sometimes he didn't even get to a particular wolf for days at a time. Yet every day he ensured himself a visit with @Minka , @Kova and the children, as well as @Raela and @Lugh . The more and more that was crammed into his schedule, the more comfortable he felt. There was no time to sit and think of what might go wrong, of what he should have done differently, if he should have waited; no time to worry about the now inconsequential what-ifs. The busier his was, the more his mind was forced to focus on progress, the happier he was. Gent hadn't just been groomed to lead; he had truly been born to shoulder such immense responsibility.

The day was just starting, but he knew that the children would already be up. While he liked to save his time with them for the end of the day, always the perfect icing to top the metaphorical cake, it was difficult to put off seeing them for so long. Intermittently, if he could make the right excuse to, he would pass by them one, twice, possibly even three times within any given day. Today, their proximity was far too much for him to resist. Already smiling just at the thought of seeing what he had decidedly come to see as his little ones, Gent quickly cut through the small distance that lay between him and the tiny Lagina trio.

As he approached, he could sense Draven out and about. The darkest of the three, he was the one that looked least like Tokino and most like himself, a thing Gent assumed he was alone and noticing and would never muse about alone. At times, it did bother him that he was so attached to children who were not his blood. At times, he realized that they would one day be competing against his own offspring for opposing blood rights. But these thoughts were utterly disturbing, and Gent did all he could to push them far from his mind. They were so little, and such a thing was so far off. Whatever false paradise he'd forged for himself here with this adoptive family, he wanted to keep for as long as he could.

When he finally broke through the divider of thick clustered trees, his ice eyes just barely caught a glimpse of the mouse's worm-like tail as it dove for survival into the ground. His ears picked up and pressed forward, intrigued. Had Draven been attempting a little hunt?

"Hey, watcha up to big guy?" he asked him as he trotted closer.

Surprisingly enough, the soft thud of paws upon the ground was not enough to stray Draven's typically short attention span from the entrance. The little beast had to come out sometime, and when it did, he would be waiting. Gods, how could he have let the tiny menace slip past him with such ease? Still fuming at the great disappointment that was losing to the smallest of fauna, it took Gent's voice to finally pull the cub away from the injustice of it all.

Of course, the mouse was nearly forgotten in the excitement of seeing Round Stone Crest's leader. He towered over Draven, but the cub was unperturbed. Gent was his father figure, and Minka's male counterpart, after all. The pup had no idea that Gent was not his biological father, though he was still too young to understand what that meant anyway. His constant presence, and never-ending patience spoke better than words ever could. So Gent wasn't technically their father, but he encompassed it in every sense of the word. 

"Gen'!" He called, as his little tail waggled with such vigor that it forced his whole rear end to sway. Had Draven known the meaning behind the word dad, it's what he would have used, but no one had ever spoken of a 'father' around him. It was always Gent, and Mumma, but Mumma also answered to Minka. It hadn't struck him as odd before, but now.. did the dark man have two names as well? 

Baby blue eyes squinted up as he neared the man, finally able to make out the features quite nicely. His sight was a little more clear with each passing day, which was a vast improvement from the blurs he's had to deal with upon first seeing the world. The only problem now was that he really had to crane his neck upwards to see Gent.

An easy grin spread itself across his lips as the little boy chirped his name. Or at least, most of his name, though the man no longer noticed the slip ups in their words. He was used to deciphering even the most garbled of sentences, and was simply thrilled to have them talking and able to communicate their thoughts with him. It made him especially happy when the children spoke their names, and secretly, when no one else was around to hear and judge, the greatest sound of all was @Marianna referring to him as 'da'.

It seemed his presence had completely distracted the child from the mouse he had so diligently been waiting to reemerged, and the man couldn't help but chuckle as he watching Draven practically squirm with mirth. Attempting to redirect his attention to its prior target, Gent pointed his snout toward the mousehole and asked again, "What did you chase into there, Draven?"

Did he even know? Or was it simply the movement that had enraptured his attention? He waited patiently for the child to answer him and illuminate the situation for him. Perhaps the boy was a little young for a hunting lesson, but the king was willing to pour as much knowledge into the child's head as it could hold. All he wanted was for them to grow, and to grow strong, both in body in mind. Odd, that he had started here with the goal of disabling all of Tokino's children, stealing their legacy from them, and now he wanted to enable them all.

(This post was last modified: Aug 19, 2015, 02:51 AM by Gent.)

A lynx has left behind the remains of a deer. +5 Health

Looking up finally proved too hard for the little black puff of fur to keep doing comfortably, so he plopped down on his rump to give his head more room to crane all the way back. That made it much, much, much easier to look up at the towering giant before him, and his neck didn't hurt as much as he did now. “I saw a small thing an' chased it,” the youngest Crest prince reported. “'Cept it ran away afore I could geddit.” He turned his wide blue eyes back to the hole where the mouse had vanished. “It's not comin' out now,” the pup added grumpily. Something dawned on the young pup then. Gent was here, and Gent was an adult who knew pretty much everything about all of the things Draven had discovered and wondered about so far. Maybe if he could tell Gent kind of what it looked like, the dark-furred King would be able to figure out what kind of thing Draven had seen. Maybe he could even help Draven get the thing! “Gen'?” he asked tentatively. Just in case Gent had stopped paying attention (sometimes adults did that even when they were looking at him, although Draven didn't know really why), the pup reached out and batted at one of the bigger wolf's tree trunk legs. “It was a little brown floof,” he explained. He frowned, trying to remember what he thought he had seen, then brightened again and wiggled happily as he added, “With whiskers an' tiny feets an' a long nekkid tail. What kinda thing was it?”

As he listened to the boy recap what had just occurred to him, Gent opted to recline, lowering his hindquarters to the ground as his pale eyes remained fixed upon Draven. A small smile remained ever present on his lips, encouraging the child. While his words were twisted with the accent of a puppy, Gent couldn't help the pride that circulated through his veins as he reflected on how well the children were talking now.

When Draven swung his paw out at him, as though wanting to further focus his attention, Gent gently and playfully pawed back at him, catching the child's tiny mitt with his own a few times. He described just exactly what had disappeared into the earth, and the man couldn't help but chuckle at the choice of features to be imparted.

"That," he began, monopolizing on the obvious fact that Draven thought him to be a walking encyclopedia of the world, "sounds like it was a mouse."

He reached forward then, pulling at the mouse hole's entrance with his claws. It caved, and he removed the dirt before repeating the process, hoping that maybe he could unearth the little creature and present it to Draven for a learning experience and ultimately, a toy. If they were lucky, their prey would have built its home more shallow than deep.

"Want to help me dig it up?" he asked, thinking that shoveling dirt would at least keep the boy entertained in the time it might take Gent to reach the hidden vermin.

“Mmmmmmmmowse.” What a funny name for the tiny brown floof thing! Then again, it was a funny looking floof thing, too, so Draven guessed that made a funny name like mowse a pretty much perfect name for it. “Mowse. Mowse.” The little dark puppy grinned, his stubby little puppy tail wiggling behind him on the ground. Draven's attention swung from his thoughts about the mouse right back to Gent again as the giant shadow of a wolf reached out and scraped away at the little hole where the mouse had run off to. Oooooohhh... Draven hadn't thought he was allowed to dig up the mouse. Wasn't that against the rules or something? Why else would the mouse run down there if it wasn't because wolves couldn't dig it up? Maybe the mouse was really, really dumb. The pup grinned again, stumbling back onto unsteady little legs as his tail went wagging away again. He toddled over to the hole and watched Gent dig away a couple pawfuls of dirt before plunging in too, dabbing at the dirt with one tiny paw before scooping away as much as he could. Hmm. This was taking a long time... the little prince switched to using both front paws, scooping bigger loads away and getting dirt all over himself in the process. “Heeeeeeeeere mowse...” The pup stopped scooping for a little bit to lean closer to the rapidly crumbling hole in the ground, trying to spot the tiny brown floof before it had the chance to run away again.

A grin worked its way across Gent's muzzle as the child repeated and memorized the name that had been given. There were rare moments where he missed the children pre-speech, how small and dependent they had been, yet he wouldn't take even a day of it back. The man absolutely loved hearing his adopted pups speaking, teaching them new words and watching them grow in understand of the world around them. These moments were certainly the most precious he would have them. One day, Draven wouldn't need Gent to tell him what some floofy creature was called. One day, Draven would be hunting all on his own.

Continuing with his work, Gent's pale gaze looked down upon the child as he assisted the king. Draven was spraying himself with the rich soil, tiny brown clumps clinging to his raven black fur. The boy would certainly need a bath after all of this was said and done, but that was alright. The child was clearly having fun, and this was a valuable lesson to be learned by him.

Something gave under his paw, his dull claws scooping at air for a second before structure began to collapse. Facing no other options, the mouse squirmed through the loosened dirt, suddenly popping out of the ground. The second its tiny paws made contact with the earth again it attempted to run, but Gent had reacted instantly. His mammoth paw came thundering down, crushing the life out of the tiny beastie with abrupt finality. The king held his victim there for a moment, feeling for movement, and when there was none he pulled the small carcass over to Draven for the child to inspect.

"And now it's food."

Draven was so busy digging away big armfuls of dirt (big for him, anyway, except most of the time his armfuls were only as big as one of Gent's big paws) that he missed it when the dirt gave way under Gent's paw. He didn't miss it when the dirt started moving all by itself, though, and stopped digging to watch as the little floof - the mowse, he reminded himself - poked up out of the dirt and started to try and get away. It didn't get very far before Gent stomped on it. Draven jumped, then leaned forward as the big paw lifted away again, leaving the mowse looking a little bit flatter than it had been before it went into the hole. The Crest prince sat back again as Gent pulled the squished mowse over to him and tilted his head down at it. One tiny black paw reached out experimentally and poked at the mowse; when it didn't move, Draven grinned and bent down to sniff at it. It smelled a lot like warm squish stuff - not really a gross smell, but not a smell he knew yet, either. Gent said it was food, now. Draven guessed this was the kinda stuff adults ate instead of milk, but how did they manage that with so much fur in the way? Wouldn't that be really gross, especially since this mowse was covered in dirt? Wouldn't the fur get stuck in their teeth? And what about the hard crunchy parts he could feel when he dabbed at it again with his paw? Did they eat those, too, or just eat around them? What even were the hard crunchy parts? “Gen'?” the boy asked, looking up at the behemoth and tilting his head the other way. “How's it gonna be food with all this fuzzy stuff on it?”