[attn: kai, Samael, CourtCat, Umbralwind] seeking a Spiral cub

[errin]

It is a start, that look at the ground, pointed as an arrow to a space between the Ahroun Cub and the Theurges. Phoebe's brows lift, but the look is less surprised and more pleased. The corners of her mouth lift up into a slight smile. She closes the distance and drops into a crouch, wobbling only a little on the way down because let's face it, Phoebe is rather like a newborn giraffe, all long limbs and not as much coordination as one would expect of a woman of her age and rank. And she sets the pin - a hairpin, for that greasy hair of hers - on the ground and she explains, "I wasn't sure what you might like. If you have a favorite color, the white is good for painting over." Tipping her chin upward, that smile grows a little more. "I like crafts." She hesitates there, but only a moment. If it looks like Fern won't come closer to the hairpin if Phoebe's there, then the Theurge gets herself upright again, and she moves to rejoin her sisters.

[kai]

[Ugh. You guys, I am SO sorry I keep letting this thread drop off my radar! Someone should haved pinged me! LOL]



How are you, Fern?

Fern shoots Keisha a glance, her crossed arms squeezed tight. She does not quite know what to make of that question. She also cannot keep her eyes off of the Fostern for very long, edging back as Phoebe moves to set the hairpin down. Phoebe lingers a moment, but seems to grasp that Fern isn't going anywhere near them anytime soon and gets up, walking back to the other Oracles.

The girl's eyes lock onto them, watching them, not answering them, while she steps forward. Even when she crouches to pick up the hairpin she's staring at them, unblinking. There's a reptilian -- well one shouldn't call it grace, there's nothing soft or ethereal about the way she moves -- control of her body in the way she descends and arises again. Her fingers close like coils.

Those fingers that, clawed or otherwise, ripped out River of Clouds's heart. Tore apart human bodies. Strung entrails together like strings in a web. It's amazing she's not still washing the blood out from under her fingernails, rinsing it from the back of her throat.

Fern takes several steps back again, her grip tight on the hairpin. She glances down once she's A Safe Distance, whatever she thinks that is, looking at it in her palm. The clasp on the back that might hold it in her hair is examined, frowned at, and then

broken off with a snap. She doesn't toss it aside; she pockets that piece, still cradling the delicate white flower in her palm. If she is in wonder at its craftsmanship -- and she should be -- it doesn't show on her face. If she is touched by the gift, it doesn't occur to her to express this somehow, even by a thank you. That's not a decision on Fern's part; Fern is so far from her own humanity at this point that she doesn't quite remember it's there.

"I used to like green," she says, her voice quieter, less rough, dreamlike,

her pupils blowing out as that dream turns nightmarish. She shudders, arms tightening up again, hand closing around the flower til its petals dig into her skin, looking up at the Oracles again. "What do you want?"

[errin]

[no worries! it...may have actually dropped off my radar, too ¬_¬]

It's true, Phoebe steps slowly back to rejoin her pack, standing just a little ahead of them, protective of them. Her hands fold before her waist and she watches quietly as Fern examines the gift. Brows lift again when that piece is snapped off, not in offense at her creation being summarily broken right before her eyes - the gift is Fern's to do with as she wishes, whatever pleases her, and if it would please her to grind it into dust, then that would be her prerogative. And a message would be received. But, no, she watches Fern pocket that piece, so small and delicate and relatively harmless, and shoots a glance to the Cub's watcher if they're still there. If not, she merely makes note to mention it when they've finished.

She and her sisters did not come here to cause trouble, though the questions that they have may do that for them.

Fern used to like green, and that makes Phoebe's smile return, but she says nothing.

"We have some questions for you, Fern. You don't have to answer if you don't want to," she adds gently, "but we would be very grateful for any information you can give us. Why did you arrange those humans and the Garou you met the way that you did? Who taught you to do that?"

[kai]

Fern was questioned once already, and for a long time, though her answers were not spread outside of older packs, older garou, many of whom just don't think to tell the cliaths and fosterns anything. She sulks a bit in Phoebe's view, shrinking in on herself. The look on her face, furrowing her brow and screwing up her mouth, is wincing and pained.

"I didn't meet them," she says, zeroing in on that one word, that one tiny piece of what Phoebe said. "I hunted them. I had to get good ones, ones that matched. Cuz you have to look at the pieces like they're a mirror of you and you think about --"

She hesitates, her words coming faster for a moment before that beat of renewed wariness. "While you eat up the heart," she adds quietly. "You think about how you're just dead meat and a body moving around because of the fire and how he's inside you making the fire but you're just... you're just pieces, but he'll hold you together."

Fern is so small, making her tall and willowy frame so little, that she almost seems to physically grow shorter. "You know? Because he's the strongest thing. You know?"

Repeated, her voice tinny,

but how could they possibly know something like that?

[errin]

Fern shrinks herself down, becoming so small and so little, and there is a part of Phoebe that wants to reach out to her, to go to her, to wrap her in her arms and pet that greasy hair.

It shows on her face a little, in a look that is suddenly pained. But the Alpha of Desert Oracle holds her place, her figure tall and still as stone. She could have tried to find someone else, someone who had already questioned her, but why risk getting the runaround? She came to the source and this is the result.

"Who is?" she asks, mind working over Fern's words, and hoping she doesn't say the name she thinks she will.

[kai]

Fern's eyes are wide, and Fern's voice is a whisper.

"The dragon."

[Samael]

Keisha has been quiet after that first question, because her Alpha has taken the lead. She stood at Phoebe's right, letting the Fostern Fury ask the questions that, perhaps unsurprisingly, are the same that she probably would have asked. There were, one might say, similarities between the two before they were packed together and since that time the Child of Gaia has grown under her Alpha's example; they may well be more similar than they were before. And she is much like Sophia in some ways too, particularly the way they espouse peace. And then there is Winona, with whom she shared the bond of multicultural wisdom.

This pack, they are each parts of each other and their own distinct wholes; that's why they work so well as a group.

It is true that the three Oracles did not come here to cause trouble; they came for answers. But that of course is a trouble all its own; answers are dangerous, because they solidify the nebulous into the certain. As Phoebe asks questions of Fern, the cub answers, and Keisha's bones chill just a little more with each answer.

Hunted.

Strongest.

Dragon.

The latter is the cold snap that takes what was chilling and flash freezes it to ice. Keisha, for her part, pales. Perhaps she knew it was coming; the clues were there. Green, destruction, vengeance. And then it's out there.

She could cringe or cower there. Some might expect it from the ahimsa, thinking her weak. But she doesn't. Instead, she shows off another of those distinctly human traits...her adaptability, as she goes back to pick up on something that Fern let drop.

"Fern, honey." She smiles a bit, as much as she can, and while she is distressed by causing the cub distress (not to mention what her sisters may be feeling at Fern's state and this new revelation), she does her best not to let it show. They have an answer, but they still need to know about the ritual. That's Keisha's focus. "You said that the hearts were specific, and they matched. What do they match and how are they mirrored in you, and what do you think about while choosing which ones to hunt?"

[Umbralwind]

"It stinks down there!" Sophia says with her back turned upon Fern, as she digs her fingers around in the dirt, as if she was looking for something. Until this point she had been happy to sit in the background humming to herself, seemingly oblivious to the world. So when she speaks up it might seem surprising, especially when she adds her words with such enthusiasm. "He's scared, so scared... What is he afraid of? Does he know? Would he understand it if he knew?"

She allows a pause for the others to ponder her world before she draws out a small beetle from just under the dirt who had been trying to escape from her. She gives a sound of enjoyment as she catches it, "hah! Gotcha!" She says as she begins to gently push the dust off the beetle's back. There was a look of smug satisfaction upon her face, though it was unlikely any of the others even saw it.

"They hate him! They hate him so much! They hate him, and they fear him. They fear him because somewhere they understand deep down inside what he is, deep down inside they understand what he can do, deep down they understand that they can't win." At this point she holds up the beetle so the others can see, her fingers holding the abdomen as the creature struggles to get free of her grasp. "She knows she is lost, she knows she is caught, somewhere inside her she must understand that this is the end, somewhere she must know that her struggle means nothing! Yet she struggles, why does she struggle? She wants free... So she fights."

"She isn't the strongest... If she was the strongest she wouldn't be so frightened, if she was the strongest she would smash her way free of her prison and she would destroy me for threatening her. She is, simply, what she is, and right now she is helpless and vulnerable... Trapped like a fly in my web."

She pauses there for several more moments, allowing the others time to let her words sink in, before she gently settles she beetle back down on the floor and smiles brightly as she begins scurrying off into the distance, she had been given a second chance at life and she wasn't going to let it be wasted! It might BE wasted, ultimately in the end, but if it was it wouldn't be because of the beetle's actions. "The day is hers, and perhaps... To her, that is all she needs? Just one... more... day." She says as a smile slowly lifts and her eyes slowly close as her voice is lowered nearly to a whisper.

"They made you stronger?" She asks as she peeks over her shoulder in Fern's direction, her first direct notice of her. "Did he make you stronger?" She wasn't trying to interrupt, she wasn't attempting to pull away from her sister's questions, she would allow ample time for an answer, but she had questions of her own that were already scratching at her mind. "Did he make you better?" She finally adds as she turns herself around and she lays in the dirt with her hands moving to rest under her chin so she can watch Fern with those curious eyes of hers. It was the first time she took any active part in the conversation, though she had been present the whole time he interest had seemed to be elsewhere until now.

[errin]

Phoebe falls silent in the wake of those two words. Not because she is too stunned, or too shaken, or she has nothing to say. Her sisters ask the questions she has before she can speak them.

Despite the rush of fondness she feels for them, or disturbance at the thought of wolves as marionettes controlled by the dragon's fire, she, like Keisha, keeps what she can from showing on her face or in her carriage.

Her eyes flick down to Sophia briefly when her fostern sister lays herself down in the dirt, then return to the cub.

"Is that what he did for the alpha of the Beloved Horror? The fire moves him and gives him his unnatural strength?"

[kai]

It's a lot of questions at once. Fern doesn't get around to answering most of them. She scowls at Keisha calling her honey, but the question confuses her, the scowl just becoming a frown of bewilderment. She's not a theurge. She doesn't think like a theurge. All she can do is repeat what she hears. Which may be why her reaction to Sophia digging a beetle from the dirt and saying a whole lot of things that Fern doesn't understand before aiming three questions at her is to just look at her in something that rides the boundary between confusion and disdain. Another question from Phoebe, then.

Fern's hand closes tightly around the flower, her face screwing up. There's a reason cubs are kept in the bawn, behind the boundaries where they can be watched over and -- to put it bluntly -- controlled. Fern is not only a full moon, but a full moon who has killed her own kind, was recruited and nearly a part of a pack of Spirals, who is now getting peppered with questions by a set of garou she has no context for understanding. For an ahroun -- especially a young, damaged, frightened ahroun -- there are few paths that do not end in rage. Including paths that begin with shrinking, with terror, with retreat.

"I don't know," she says defensively. "If it all made sense I would still be there with them, wouldn't I? I did what they told me and I killed a lot of people and cut them apart and tied their intestines together and ate their hearts because they said it would make sense once I did it, okay? I impaled that one guy," she says, strain in her voice, because these days she's surrounded by people who don't know what that's like, what that sounds like, how hard you have to push, the way the body smells -- "And I did it because they said it was what I was supposed to do, it's what I was, it's why I was born like this."

She tosses the flower on the ground between them again, not a throw but a lob, a heavy drop, frowning at the lot of them. She's shaking, and it's hard to tell if it's from trying to control herself or from remembered terror or simple nausea at these memories. "I don't wear flowers in my hair and I'm not your 'honey' and I don't wanna think like that anymore. It's crazy," she says forcefully, defiantly, her eyes shooting with accusation at Sophia when she says that.

Her gaze snaps back to Phoebe. "I had to find people who looked like the ones in the Horror. It's like eating your own heart when you do it, or the hearts of your packmates. And the wolf at the center is like... like a present for each of them, so they have to be the same moon. So I got one for...him, for Th'nak'vis, and I was gonna get that one, that biker guy, for the next one, then you all took me away. I don't know how it works, or if it's all just crazy bullshit," she says, and it's hard not to growl now, not to show teeth, and

it's hard to keep the hair on her forearms from growing thicker and coarser, her ear-tips from elongating, her teeth from sharpening, her eyes from gleaming slightly gold. "I don't know," Fern snarls, her feet scooting back in the dirt. "Okay? I don't know. I'm not like them anymore, I don't know why they do it all. I don't know."

She has coiled down on herself, crouching in glabro now, claws to dirt, very near taking a four-legged shape, bolting-shape, retreat shape. She keeps inching backwards.