Chapter 139: brought to you by the talk

Background color
Font
Font size
Line height

There's a reason why it's hard for us to get to cleaning the bathrooms, and it's two feet tall, two years old, screeches at hypersonic, spine-melting pitches, and looks so adorable we're surprised neither of us are dying or at least foaming at the mouth. And yes, both my co-writer and I have two-year-old sons. I have two sons and she has two sons. Funny how things work out that way. We often swap mom-stories. You're welcome to join if you're actually a mother. Pets do not count. Now...TO THE FICTIONAL BABIES!!!

______________________________________________

A day or so after the scorpion family left, Lazy Boi slithered alongside his father as he took a check along the boundary, in case he or his brothers hadn't caught any dangerous scents. Licorice followed behind quite happily, mirroring anything Curtis did. Dice brought up the rear, hardly there at all. They were passing through his territory, so Dice was probably following for a lack of anything better to do. Lazy Boi could still tell he watched their father carefully, hoping to learn any tricks.

It was damp and chilly out. The humidity felt good on his scales, though he disliked how his body became heavier the colder it got. He found himself missing the warmth of the fire back at home, where his mother sang from atop her cushion of cats, plucking her harp. He hadn't seen much of the world, Lazy Boi could admit that. But he had come upon nothing like Mother, not in sound or smell. At least his sisters looked a little like her.

"Are there any females who can sing like mother?" Lazy Boi asked.

His father, in his full beast form, had stopped to scent the air. He didn't bother turning his head towards Lazy Boi as he answered.

"The merfolk sound similar. I think I heard a male peacock sound similar once. No females, though."

Lazy Boi wilted.

"Do...do females not sing?"

His father snorted. "Haven't you heard your sisters?"

Lazy Boi winced. Sky could warble a tune when she had mother singing with her, but what the twins did couldn't be called singing. It was more like swoopy, tuneless yelling.

"Why all these questions about females?" asked his father. "You shouldn't have any interest in them at your age." He dropped his head and pushed on, somehow ever silent despite his size. In contrast, Lazy Boi could hear everything Licorice and Dice did behind him.

"I want a home one day that's all my own. A den with a warm female, like mom."

"There are no females like your mother," said his father, a tad sharply. "You better snip that hope in the bud."

Lazy Boi inwardly frowned. "How come?"

"Because your mother isn't from this world. I thought you would have picked up on that already."

Lazy Boi thought it a little unfair that his father was making him sound like he had been ignorant. It wasn't like he got to be around all the time, and the conversations between his mother and her mates weren't always open to all.

What he had inferred, however, was that his mother was different. And that where she was from she couldn't return to.

"There are other worlds? Where?"

"Beats me," said Curtis. "Though your mother has told me that every star in the sky is a sun like ours, and each sun has worlds of all kinds, with and without life."

Lazy Boi couldn't help his shiver of delight. "Mother is from the stars? How did she get here? Didn't it hurt falling from so high? Or did a bird fly her here?"

"Don't be ridiculous. You go far enough away from the ground and the air runs out. There is no bird that can reach a star. No. Not even your mother knows how she came here. She told me she was simply walking and then she stepped through a door and her surroundings changed beyond reason." He paused. "Well, there is her friend that came with her from the same world, though she isn't like your mother. I don't advise trying to court her. She hates snakes. And she's a fussy one."

Lazy Boi scraped his memories for the female besides his mother, but all his fuzzy, young memories gave him was a blurred face with frizzy ash-brown hair.

"She is more beautiful than most," said his father. "But not as beautiful as your mother, though she'd probably say she's just a different kind of beauty."

"You also love mom," said Lazy Boi. "Mother told us that love makes people beautiful to your eyes."

"What brought on that conversation?"

"We were talking about how ugly the scorpion female was!" Chirped up Licorice, whizzing up to Curtis's other side. "Ugly ugly! Uglier than sisters!"

"Our sisters aren't ugly," said Lazy Boi, one eye to his father for his reaction. He knew very well how dangerous it was to make jabs at a sister.

But his father didn't seem upset at all. Rather, most of his attention was to the scraped bark on the side of a juvenile tree.

"You might as well think them ugly," he said, a bit distantly. "They can be no mate of yours."

"How come?" asked Lazy Boi, suddenly interested. It wasn't the first time he'd heard he can't mate with his sisters, but he had wondered why more than once, especially since his father told him females didn't sing.

"Because your children will come out deformed, if they survive at all," he said. "Ask your mother for the details. It's just not safe."

"Mating with a sister would be like mating a brother anyway," said Dice, as though he had thought the very same thing. Precocious brat.

Lazy Boi didn't disagree in the least, but it did make him more curious. Why would the babies turn out deformed?

"What makes babies anyway?" he asked. Maybe there would be a clue in there. Surely pee didn't make babies. And what went on inside a female anyway?

HIs father flinched. Above them, the brief sight of so much red suddenly shifting sent a crane bursting from a tree with a loud caw. It brought his father to a stop to once more observe the surroundings more closely, therefore bringing the younger snakes to a stop too.

"You'll know when you inherit the Legacy," said his father rather tersely.

Ah, yes. The Legacy. The mounds of memories from ancestors that they'd find in their head after their first transformation, and also his father's favorite excuse to not answer their questions or cut off a hunting lesson short.

"Dawn says it's through a special hug," said Licorice. "And when the female feels the hug she feels loved, so she makes a baby."


You are reading the story above: TeenFic.Net