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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:06:13 GMT -6
The first thing the miasma balgor noticed as she looked around the cage, mind feeling as though it was stuffed with fluff, was that it was not her cage. The only bit of decoration in the cage was the trough of water beside her and the greenish splatters that marked where she had tried spitting the stuff on her tongue out. There were no rocks, certainly no sign of even her favorite sunning rock that was in the center of her real cage, and not a single bit of dirt or plant to hide the shiny floor beneath her paws.
Shaking her head to dislodge the cotton that had taken up residence in her brain, the miasma balgor noticed the strange scents yet again. Some were more familiar to her than others, the common scent of stone and weeds fighting against the odd chemical smell that seemed to radiate from the ground itself. As she tried to puzzle out what the other somewhat familiar smells that tried to hide under the chemical smell, she looked beyond the bars of her cage, letting out a grunt as she saw another cage. It was her cage, she was sure of it, the ground covered with stones and weeds.
Shrugging off the lingering effects of the powder, the miasma balgor stumbled her way to the bars nearest the other cage, pressing her head in between the bars as she flared her nostrils. No, there was something odd about her cage. It lacked her own scent, something she was careful to reapply whenever it faded. And what were those two strange scents?
Large enough had Alma been outside of the city, but not too big in it.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:06:26 GMT -6
Her tusks rested against the bars as she stared at the other cage. Now that she was looking a little more carefully, she could see that this one looked larger than her own, the sunning rock she preferred to drape herself over completely absent. Pulling back her head, she looked at her current cage again. It was much smaller than her old one, lacking in any comfortable rocks or plants to lay on top of, and she was certain that it was not her original one. But the last thing she could recall was falling asleep in her cage, and that her cage had been the only one she could see.
Rumbling to herself, the miasma balgor paced beside the bars of her cage, looking for any that she might be able to fit herself between. The gaps between the bars were wider than those of the one she had lived her life in, but every attempt to force her head through proved the gaps to not be wide enough. At first, when her tusks would catch on the bars, she tried to turn her head and wiggle her head through, but no amount of wiggling could squeeze her head between the bars.
Growing annoyed, she returned to the water trough, lapping up some more of the metallic-tasting water.
In the other cage, Farida began to wake once more, yawning as she opened her eyes. A grumble behind her led her to push her paws against the stone, shoving her living backrest as Hektor complained of being woken.
And for Alma, the size did not make any sense.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:07:00 GMT -6
The miasma balgor froze in mid lap as she heard the noise, a low-pitched moan coupled with a loud exhalation of air. She lowly slid her tongue back into her mouth, her previously relaxed pose stiffening as she sought to not move, to not let whatever she had heard know she had heard it. The two familiar yet unknown scents tormented her as she tried to decide between an attack or to run down the short length the cage allowed her.
The thought was an instinctual one, body locked as she waited for another sound to know which action to take. She had never been around beasts other than the human besides the first few days, and she could barely remember more of that than the flashes of colors of each of her playmate’s hides. Her tail had been lowered for balance as she drank, and now she waited to twitch it upright to defend her back from the claws and teeth of whatever lurked behind her.
Then came the next sound, and she made her choice as the threatening rumbles reached her ears. The miasma spun in place, tail raised to ward off any attacks as she turned to launch her own assault, her mouth open in a silent snarl that showed off her teeth as her acidic saliva, and no small amount of water, dripped from them onto the floor.
There was no one there. Puzzled but unwilling to loosen her combat stance, the miasma balgor’s eyes darted around in their sockets, trying to find where the noises had come from.
The human was not sure where the space came from.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:07:13 GMT -6
There had been a few times that she had heard noises without any creature there to make them. The first few had been vicious roars, ones that shook her to her core so that her own roar in response felt weak as instinct forced it between her locked jaws. She had never seen the things that made those noises regardless of how hard she tried, and the human had always appeared soon after to close the opening from which side sounds came from. There had been smells as well on those few occasions, smells that brought to mind dry scales or the trumpeting small prey that sometimes came spilling out from the wall, and sometimes the human carried those smells as well as that of her own and the bloody meat she would bring.
But these had not been loud roars that could have come from any distance away from the unseen beasts that lived outside her doorway. These had been quieter yet easier to hear, sounding as though the beasts that made them were in the same cage as herself.
A quick look around the small cage showed no signs of the intruders though, and her legs were beginning to shake with the strain of her muscles. With the slowest speed she could manage, the miasma balgor loosened her muscles, lowering herself to her belly to present a smaller target to her unseen intruders. Perhaps they would not see her, the bars of her cage providing enough of a hiding spot that she would be left alone.
Alma’s kennel already seemed ridiculously big.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:07:44 GMT -6
Farida stopped tormenting her pack mate as she stood up, the nausea gone in all ways but memory. She reveled in the feeling, stretching out her front paws as her chest pressed against the ground, feeling the rocks beneath her shift as she pulled herself forwards. Her hind paws stayed firmly planted on the stone behind her as long as they could, her hind legs stretching with a small pop. A wiggle of her back completed the stretch as she moved her hind legs back underneath her, and Farida found herself feeling much better now than she had been upon her earlier waking.
But now she was bored. The temblor balgor looked to the still resting custom balgor, her pack mate’s eyes still tightly closed against the light. That would not do at all now that she felt better, and she was sure the other balgor was feeling better as well. The temblor balgor dropped her front half into a crouch, her rear held high in the air as she studied Hektor.
With her belly scraping against the ground, the miasma balgor crawled her way to the bars, pressing her side to them in hopes of staying out of the intruder’s sight. She had yet to spot them as she did so, the bars a small comfort as she hoped the challengers would not come from that angle at least. She almost did not catch the movement of the white thing, focused as she was on the space immediately outside of her cage for any sign of the source of the noise.
Alma was not one to complain about the free space though.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:08:02 GMT -6
But the white thing was waving through the air like a flag, and the movement drew her gaze upwards to stare at it. She could not see the entirety of the beast connected to the white, the majority of it’s form hidden behind a mossy rock that lay in front of it. The miasma balgor’s lips pulled away from her teeth as her ears pressed flat against her head, unsure what manner of creature she was looking at. Was it the human, and this was some sort of game? Games with the human had been increasingly rare, the now smaller creature rarely sticking around for long on the few occasions the meat was brought with it rather than coming out of the wall.
But the scent was not that of the human. Even when the human had come in splattered with the scents of unseen beasts, the miasma balgor had always been able to pick up the human’s scent underneath it all. Now she could not catch a hint of the human’s scent, the smells of the noise-causing creatures surely hiding it. She waited for the white thing to make its move, for the second smell to reveal itself alongside it.
Hektor had not taken the meat so well. The world had stopped its lurching, but she still felt fuzzy headed when her pack mate had taken to shoving her out of her sleep. A quick grumble had been enough to convince the temblor balgor to leave her to her sleep though.
Alma would not have a place to keep the pets otherwise.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:08:20 GMT -6
Hektor had happily fallen back asleep once the temblor balgor had stopped shoving her, and the sounds of fur and claws against the stones and grasses of their shared cage was not enough to rip her back to the waking world. She would have been glad to sleep for a few more hours had she been given the choice, floating through her dreamless sleep until it was time for a meal.
That choice was denied to her.
Farida had been preparing for her pounce for several minutes, scooting back half a step when she worried she might leap over the custom balgor by accident, shuffling to one side then the other as she tried to be sure she would land exactly on her desired spot. Normally, when it came to catching prey in her claws and teeth, there was no time for such preparations. She leapt where she thought the prey would scurry away from her packmate, Farida doing the same for her sister should it look like the prey would bolt towards the custom balgor instead. But now she had time, and she had no intention of using her tusks and claws to latch onto her prey should she miss.
Farida leapt for Hektor with a single motion, hind legs kicking out as her front paws reached for the sleeping bulk of her sister.
The miasma balgor stared as the white thing moved, raising into view just long enough for her to make out that there was more to it than the white billowing part she had seen behind the mossy stone.
Alma was already grateful enough that the place could feed her pets for her.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:08:55 GMT -6
There was no time to worry about the sound of rocks scratching away at one another as they were forced away from the direction she leapt, and no time for the custom to react to the noise had she been awake to hear it. The temblor smashed into the custom balgor with a rumbling in her chest that would have sent lesser creatures scurrying away in fear, paws gripping the side as her chest smashed against the custom, teeth clamping down tightly on the mass of thick brown fur that covered her throat.
The custom balgor woke the instant the paws of the temblor balgor slapped against her side. Though she was fairly used to sneak attacks from her sister, it was the rumbling that kept her claws in their sheaths and her head from wildly swinging her tusks. It was an invitation to play she knew all too well, one that she had learned in the days after they had started to shart a cage and the temblor balgor had decided boredom was far worse than any injury the custom balgor might inflict. On most days, she would gladly join in the play fighting, the last bone or toy in their cage having been cracked open or shredded.
Today, she wanted to sleep. So, even with the weight of the temblor balgor pressing her uncomfortably into the stones, even as her mane was gnawed at, the custom balgor slowly shut her eyes and rumbled softly.
The miasma balgor watched, her eyes widening as she saw that the stone was not a stone at all.
And not only feed her pets, but keep them exercised and well.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:09:10 GMT -6
The miasma balgor had seen herself before. The ground she had revealed in her digging had shown her a muddied version of it but she had been able to quickly figure out the mass of black and green was that of her own face, that the two little purple circles that widened were her eyes as she had batted at the metal. And the two beasts that she was watching looked like her.
Not the same colors, though one of them had green streaking through it’s brown fur like patchy moss on dirt and the other appeared to have stripes of black dripping down its hide. But, as the white one stood over the mossy one, teeth buried in its throat and rumbling as it yanked at the limp creature’s throat, she could recognize the similarities. The blade-like tusks that jutted out of the sides of her mouths were twins to the pair she had kept clinking against the bars of her cage, the thick patch of fur that the white one was so determinedly yanking on was like her own mane and that of its own.
But she did not know how to react to the two in front of her. Did she roar to scare them off, laying claim to the area as her own? Did she slink away as far as the cage would allow her and hope that the white one did not come for her once it had finished with the corpse it was chewing on?
Well, the ones that she had not not locked into a sleep at least.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:09:29 GMT -6
She was torn between fight or flight, and so she stayed where she was and watched. Another part of her, though it was buried far beneath her need to flee or challenge the interlopers, hoped that the white one would prove to be calmer after it finished with the mossy one. The human had been pleasant enough company, but the few times they were together were brief experiences of food delivery. She liked the human, and would likely try to eat one of the squealing things she was used to ripping into than the human should she have the choice, but the creatures before her were like her.
One was currently trying to kill the other, but she was fine with that. The other one was likely some manner of usurper, and better gotten rid of. And, should the white one decide to challenge her, she would easily outrun it after whatever injuries the mossy one had inflicted upon it. That she was in a cage and would not be able to run very far failed to cross her mind.
Hektor had gone limp after she had grabbed her, and a few gentle shakes of her head, gentle in that they were not meant to tear the other balgor’s head from her shoulders. She let go of the custom balgor’s mane with a frustrated growl. Now that she felt better, it was time to play. The temblor balgor batted at the face of Hektor, the custom flinching as the paw slapped her nose.
The kennel was a weird place.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:09:49 GMT -6
With a rumble that made no attempt to be as playful or inviting as that of the temblor balgor, the custom balgor opened her eyes to glare at her sister. One lip tugged upwards in a snarl as blue eyes met blue eyes, the custom balgor warning her sister to stop with the play attacks unless she wanted a real fight.
The temblor balgor huffed, turning to run a few meters away with her tail waving behind her. Unwilling to believe she would be left to her nap, the custom continued to glare at her sister, as she dropped her lip back down to cover her teeth. She was proven right a few seconds later, the temblor balgor slowing to a leisurely prance, glancing over her shoulder every few seconds back at the custom balgor. The custom balgor’s lip twitched up, then she let it lower once more.
The mossy balgor was alive.
She could hear both of them, the grumbling of the mossy one that had been a tad more threatening than that of the temblor, the chuffing of the white one as it pranced away. The mossy balgor seemed completely unharmed despite the viciousness of the attack, it not so much as wincing as it turned its head to follow the path of the jogging white balgor. But with both of them well and clearly not at each other’s throats, the odds of the miasma balgor escaping from them unnoticed diminished. With her ears pinned back to the sides of her head, she began to scoot backwards, unwilling to look away for even a moment.
Alma had plenty of time to think about it as she jogged back.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:10:12 GMT -6
She could not fight two. Whatever instinct that had made her tempted to linger, whether to fight for territory or possibly befriend one balgor, quickly evaporated under the need to escape before the pair noticed she was nearby. Scooting backwards was not the most graceful means of escape. She would press one of her front paws to the ground in front of her, resting her hind feet on her heels to avoid any kind of resistance as she slid her butt backwards. She would switch between paws as they reached their limit, pushing herself away from the two balgor one paw at a time as she strived to make sure they did not notice her.
She would have done so until both balgor had faded into the distance, only standing to run when their forms were small enough to hide behind the bars of the cage. But all too soon she felt her tail brush against something behind her, and her already frayed nerves snapped entirely. The miasma balgor sprang up with a roar born more of fear than challenge, whipping her head to the side to catch what she could only assume was a third balgor that had somehow snuck up on her. Her tusks smacked against metal bars, ones that looked the same as the ones she had been staring between seconds ago, the reverberations traveling painfully through her skull as her roar choked off into a pained wheeze. She looked over the bars as though she had never seen them before, pain and fear causing her to forget the other two balgor for an instant.
As Alma jogged, she resolved to keep some plugs and books closer to the balgor cages.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:10:27 GMT -6
Before the miasma balgor had made a single noise, back when she had just started to slowly scoot herself away from the two terrifying forms of the other balgor, Hektor had been watching Farida as the temblor balgor pranced around the cage. It was a common game, one where Farida would pretend she did not see the custom balgor, occasionally giving lie to the ruse when she would glance over her shoulder to see if Hektor had taken the bait. When the custom balgor was not in the mood to chase and fight with the temblor balgor, she would usually turn her head to focus on whatever else had grabbed her attention. Usually that was a bone that she had yet to crack open for its marrow, or a new toy she wanted to bat around before Farida tried to take it from her. Rarely would she try to sleep when such an invitation to play was being given, as much as because it was fun as it was to invite the temblor balgor to pounce on her instead if she tried to nap.
But there were no bones to gnaw on, the marrow scraped out of all the remaining pieces that she could see. It was odd, especially as she had thought there was one last meaty leg when she had dropped off to sleep. But it was not any great stretch to realize the temblor balgor had likely eaten it. Hektor snorted sadly, hoping that the next meal would be full of new bones to snap open and play with.
Alma did not want to need to run back every time.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:10:41 GMT -6
Neither of the two balgor had noticed the scent of the third quite yet, the scent both similar to their own but with enough of a chemical bite that they assumed it was just another smell native to the cages. Their human, for they thought of the female food-bringer rather fondly, always seemed to be covered in smells of beasts and chemicals. They had grown used to the variety, the human often bringing them food or toys, or playing games that had them play with a certain toy when she made a noise, and so they paid little heed to the scent in the room with them.
That was why Hektor’s attention was focused firmly on the temblor balgor as Farida yet again glanced over her shoulder at the stationary Hektor. This time, however, the ground beneath the temblor balgor’s paws shifted as she walked across, the stones loose from one of the prey beasts that had made a futile attempt at burrowing to freedom as a creature that could have been its twin was being split between the two balgor. It had done little more than displace a few stone before it was dragged out by a hind leg, the temblor balgor abandoning her attempt at claiming a larger share from the first carcass in favor of securing her own.
So, at the moment Farida glanced back to see if Hektor had finally decided to stop being boring, the rocks slid out from under her and she stumbled. It was a small trip.
Alma reached her main area after a while.
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Post by Alma on Jul 4, 2021 21:10:57 GMT -6
Hektor had been largely uninterested in Farida as the latter jogged around the perimeter of the cage, never straying too far from where Hektor lay while also never coming so close that the custom balgor could simply swat her. The custom balgor had only watched her to be certain that the temblor balgor would make no sudden attack while she looked away, knowing that there was a small chance the temblor balgor would grow bored and wander away to play with a tumbleweed. All she had to do was wait.
When the temblor balgor stumbled, she was not much closer than she had been averaging. The distance was meant to be enough that she would have time to react to the custom balgor launching her own play assault, but close enough that the custom balgor would think she might reach her before the temblor balgor could.
Hektor exploded into motion as the temblor balgor twisted her head away in an effort to keep from falling all the way to the ground. Stones, some as big as a football, were kicked away from her as she launched herself from a nearly prone position after Farida. The temblor balgor might have heard her sister begin to move, certainly must have heard the stones grinding across each other as they were sent tumbling in the custom balgor’s wake, but she took an extra moment to ensure she would not fall any further than she had.
The miasma balgor had watched this with the same wide-eyed fear.
Even for Alma, it was not the largest of places.
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