Back!

The portal was dark on the other side. It didn't much matter to him, he could smell his way around anything. Well, not quite anything. This place... It was rocky, kind of like the Den's bottom end. He got a strangely good sensation here, it wasn't oppressive the way that some rooms might be: it was ... a place to hunt.

He shifted down to four feet, comfortable most with that shape after all. Galloping around the dark corridors and narrow half-collapsed walls - were they walls? were they caverns? He couldn't tell and didn't care. Kedok splashed through the toxic lake - reminded himself not to do so again, he might even scar on the splashed damage to his carapace! While he was sitting and trying to scrape the acidic muck from his leg, he realized that there was no telling where he'd come from, which direction was up or down didn't seem to matter to these dark dank walls.

He let off an oddly familiar chirp noise. If any other Sanger had been there they'd have known it in an instant. He was lost, and he needed to be found.

Thankfully.... possibly ... he was. Very shortly, a skittering long-tailed rat-shaped form came around one of the ceiling rocks. The thing was, Kedok realized, that it was so familar to him. He had a scent about him, not friendly but ...

"Well ... greetings there," Kedok said quietly. He noted that the creature had two head-nubs that glowed, illuminating its way or just being luminescent.

Mine, the creature told Kedok, Hungry, find food for me. Not lost. Find food.

Suddenly Kedok's mind was filled with the scent-presence of ... this little burstling? If he really had never felt joy before, this was it. Or probably as close to it as he with his odd background might. "Of course... Food. Well, not there at the lake," he muttered. Standing, shifting into a two-footed shape, he figured his carapace would heal, and now he had another mouth to feed!

Unfortunately he hadn't seen anything worth even munching on himself, so he'd have to find his way back to the Portal, and --

Saw him first, mine! Thought the stripe-backed burstling. Mussadin's!

Hush little thing, I will not want you to bust a brain, thought a different, more sweet smelling mind. Joining hers was a weird giggling sound, from a second female nearby. Kedok spied their glow - they would be almost impossible to hide somewhere completely dark, but anywhere that had glowing lichen or technology... Oh how that would be grand!

Mussadin hissed with both heads, but then deferred to the slightly bigger female's wishes. He backed up, not quite hiding behind Kedok's armored legs. The one headed female remained behind the two header, but they both approached eagerly.

Get us out of here, even the little male is right - we're hungry.

Hungry, Nijosys and Tonnanir are hungry. You're too big to eat, and too thick to chew.

"Well.... I hope so, I'm sort of -- ah, there's the portal," he said, anything to get them to stop 'staring' at him like he was lunch. He climbed along the wall, they joined him easily. Eventually he recognized the one larger corridor, the smell of gunmetal and probably gunbattles. The portal back to the Healing Den was there.

But first he laid down some laws: "Unless I give it to you, it's not to be eaten. Not until later when you know the place and its people. Got it?"

He felt their grumbling, grudging attention to his words, they weren't hard to command, but they were definitely going to be a handfull... He let them latch on to his tail, he didn't want them to be lost in the Portal. When he passed through its fainly swirling bubble, he felt the pressure and temperature change - there was more light which drowned out the little glows from the burstlings heads. That was slightly a shame.

"I think I want to find a new place to stay that's a bit darker for you to shine in..." Kedok chuckled. "Now, stay here. Food is on the way very soon."

Kedok brought them flitters. There were probably a hundred flits for every other living thing in the Den - some of them made their way freely Outside and were lost to the static (or brought to the Mistress' place, but no one was sure they'd ever seen Misota and her dragon out there); some were traded away to other people. But... A lot of them frankly were food for bigger lurkers. Even Baeris knew they were food - as long as the pets and the more useful ones weren't harmed, she really didn't seem to care about what happened to the nests.

Thus, Kedok captured a reasonable number of small, fledged flitters, and brought them chittering and nipping into his den. His place could be closed up, which he did, and the flitters became not just lunch, but exercise for the young xeno-mutts.

Oddly enough, after a few days time, it was the low-ranked drone, Nijosys, who showed the most interest in Kedok's books and learning from them. She would be more curious than the others, if only to learn better how to approach bigger prey like Humans.

Mussadin continued to be the more close guard to Kedok, rarely straying too far from his 'Queen'. While he was only a drone, he did stand up to the stronger influence of the warrior female Tonnanir when she suggested (while Kedok was out) that they just eat him or make him into her own pet.

An uneasy truce, but a family now none the less. Kedok would keep his hands full like this for a while - especially since as they grew - they grew large. Nowhere near as big as some of the beasts that followed his own sire, but... bigger than the small pair he had, and certainly a more elegant breed if he did say so himself.

Kedok was free with his praise, especially when they'd had good hunting or a particularly fun afternoon scaring the crap out of the local dragons.

The lightning that Mussadin could make was one thing, the illusions which the females cast were even more fun in combination. They could appear as an army - with just the four of them, showing up lining the walls by the dozen! Of course, the illusions faded and the lightning fritzed out the plasma-screen tv, which made Baeris a bit angry.

"Let's not hit the technology," Kedok urged them. "Oooh," he would have blinked with a coy look had he ever developed eyelids, "we can go to the vats... they're unveiling some clone or other today - and all the vats glow just like your domes."