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Eufriesea would have his hide tanned three shades darker when he returned home, he was sure. He could see his fates face waiting for him with weapon in hand -- the way her delicately feathered fan concealed a bladed handle - such a fitting trinket for a woman who’s soft as silk outsides belied a steel core. Especially when that woman was so intrinsically tied to him as to be considered one of his inner circles council.

It was for that exact reason he’d left her in charge. Trusted her to manage for a passage of time his *everything*. Court dealings done in one, his trio of fledgling fates, even his newly acquired beau.

He thought it’d help to explain upon return, that this one time? His shirking of duties had a purpose.

Even if that purpose was entirely personal in nature.

He wasn’t one who could hear of Senshi leading *hunts* and pretend he hadn’t. Whispers that’d rolled in across vast celestial causeways; Jovian gossip about days, turned nights, turned expansive trecks over foreign landscapes purely for the thrill of it.

*So he came.*

Without entourage, without army, just a few men and a cage that thrummed with enough zap to have turned him into a past tense rather quickly. Left his charrak hounds and favorite leggy mount at home. He missed that ebony boned beast more than he missed his seeing Ananke on the horizon....

But wasn’t Praxidike alone enough? The Man, the Moon, the Senshi. Likely not. But with a chitinous beast worth killing levied as a gift? Maybe then.

It was those hopes that set him up a hill, guided by a nod of heads toward a towering tree, the party he wished to impress fletching arrows beneath it. “You know, I can think of so many who prefer the axe. The spear. I personally like the lash, but it’s terrible for hunting.” sand-worn bass, a smile that suggested heat. Praxidike gave them an ancillary nod; took in the weapon first of all - and then? The person holding it. The approval sat at the edges of his eyes, being met so plainly. They could be dressed down together, just people for a time, instead of symbols wearing power over-burdened by crowns.

If he was a bit envious of how light the pleated flowers looked? Praxidike kept it to himself.

Because it was going to be such a good hunt.

There was a sharp thrill for imagining Cybele with a spear in hand, *with a bow*, the weight of curious gazes did little to dim his attention for the Senshi’s smile. The kind that told him, yes, they’d used one before - while asking coyly if he’d ever managed the same without running himself clean through?

"I'm trying to imagine a jackalope --" and maybe he'd see one worthy enough to hunt; taste it's meat fresh off a spit the way most things were meant to be - fragrantly spiced and set over open fires, "--and failing. Maybe if I eat it first?” and he found himself humorous, at least, while motioning at the trailing procession to set the lightly sparking cage down. The being within it jostled enough to buzz; cicadalike in the summer. The large insectoid hissing with the force of a pissy swarm, glowing warning while it’s foreclaws clipped along an ionic solid painted to mimic steel.

"But later! I’m Praxidike, and of course I came to see you! Heard stories - rumors, really, on endless hunts and forests that swallowed men, spat out beasts? Of hunters named ‘Cybele’. I even brought a gift! Something worthy of the hunters in those tales…if their true?” his hope for their truth was bleedingly obvious across his face, even if his movements spoke of time spent getting an earful over not acting with the sort of pageantry that fit a currently reigning Senshi — All youthful rough edges, hungry and restless.

Not that he cared if tongues wagged one way or another. He never took advice from anyone save his favored Fates…

He didn’t worry for that here. With Cybele. With clear sky’s and cool shade from a tree that’d see more lives than his own selves had lived.

If anything, Praxidike breathed easier for it.

Maybe it was the surrounding green; how it roiled and tangled up into the mystery of a forest so unlike the sand scraped and sun baked dunes he was used to, or the way a certain *lack* of technology bred a heartier stock of society, rough and rugged, the sorry that could survive with lesser comforts and greater love — what the Mauvians had brought? Magic. Wizardry. Worshiped, and yet? Ill understood, insomuch as it was swallowed like a nectar soaked pill and called the ultimate cure to ailments —- *Being a Senshi* — and what did any of that mean without a little living thrown in!? Life deserved wildness! With endless lives to run endlessly, to cut beautifully short in the doing of it.

"You can't say mines superior till you've tried it," how did he say in their language that their presence alone was a gift; the simplicity having people to be a person around. Much in the same way his impromptu trip to her planet was equally a gift; even if Cybele had refused to entertain him, and he'd ended up doing little more than wandering through rough woods and lounging under shapely rock archways.

There was something about getting out and away --- the way this place had drawn him with a kind of resonance.

Eufriesea was incautious with tasting the thing, brazenly tearing into the piece of dried hide. Face an expressive multiple choice quiz of emotions. The meat was gamey, but not in any way he was familiar with, as if the creatures here fed on heartier grasses that gave their meat a lighter taste; a sweetness. Anything unpleasant was well hidden by the drying process --- He wondered which trees they felled in order to achieve it? If there was something special about that, for how deeply the woods eclipsed all beyond what he could see. All the ways it was that extra bit of 'more' than the typical sun dried and heavily salted fare he was accustomed to back home. Where everything was kissed by salt and sky, or buried beneath the earth in heavy jars; saturated in wax coatings like a shell, or soaked in honeyed layers instead of tender leaves and wood-smoke.

He didn't hate it though -- that was clear on his face as he chewed through the bit of dried meat. Like it was rare delicacy instead of simple fare, following Farosh's trailing feet with eyes of red, licking his fingers clean of the game-taste.

"Sadly though, the Chichux is bad for eating once it's grown this large. Once the females get their wings?" a soft tsk, butterflied locs done up into a roughly beaded nest clicked with how he shook his head softly for the loss of a meal done as the Haliartians would, "It's typically their larvae dens we hunt them for, when they start to nest -- the masses of their brood can feed our mounts for months on end; if properly preserved."

An errant wave of a hand answered by an attendants errant fiddling with some sort of device, and the humm of wattage ever so slowly died down. Eufrieseas circled the cage, respectful of it's hands high, pony sized, occupant. Knowing that even if the beast did not twitch to follow him -- it's fractal eyes didn't miss a step. His grin seemed to grow in counterpart to the buzzing, with the way the creature stilled as if waiting for the next move.

He'd have to remember to thank his sisters, the darling gifts some of their Mau could be talked into giving him for little more than scritches and a good bit of asteroid to sunbathe on.

"That's not to say there isn't use in felling an adult. The shells are especially bright on the inside, like polished sea-glass, and the hardness of their chitin is good as any armor. For an age -- their sharp tarsus tipped our spears alongside their mandibles..." and he looked to her people he approached the cage, laying a finger along bars warm to the touch, "I'd say you could make an entire tribes worth of necklaces from the thing, but?"

Cybele was prettier unadorned, or better yet? Adorned only by the things she killed. Praxidike thought he would've liked to see that, a true hunt, the entirety of her forest, and maybe also a Jackalope, just for the sake of placing a body with the meat of the creature -- to see if the taste fit what he was now imagining to be an herbivore with very sharp teeth, big as a man, legs like an arachnids....

That had to be what made up the 'lope' of the beast. Long, long, legs.

"What do you say...is this an acceptable hunt?"

Needed? No, but he'd certainly been led to believe Cybele wasn't the type to be easily swayed by something useless as it was pretty. The little he knew of those who lived on Cybele; about their Senshi? Rumors, one and all, none of which spoke of gaudiness or grandeur. How it was supposedly a place unspoiled by overcrowding, or the technologies so common to Mercurians and other same-song spatial bodies.

The idea that they were plain, however? Turned out to be a lie. Though they were wreathed in flowers, braided in duskweed, and clothed casually light -- they werent unadorned -- it hardly hurt to skim his gaze over the bits of glint that touched their long, calloused fingers; nor the carefully chosen brightness that colored the whole of the encampment. Their people were perhaps far more in tune with nature than others, that was the difference.

"Well if you like them," quietly flustered as he was over his own folly for assuming anything, he tucked it under a peaflies vibrance of pride. Took the gentle teasing chide easily, "then you'll have them." Praxidike only hoped his would be the more memorable of trophies Cybele would acquire. A prize that could adorn a mantle, throat, wrist -- something with a story worth telling behind it, instead of some paltry gift offered up for peace keeping or praise of power.

"I'll even help carve you one myself."

Praxidike admired the flair of silver, and easy flow into Cybele as he wished to know them. A Senshi ready to hunt -- hungry -- in charge --

He caught fidgeting in his periphery and rolled his eyes heaven-words as his youngest attendants near the cage flinched; as if to move in answer Cybeles order. They may have even followed through, if not for the oldest of them shooting passively halting glances their way. Cybele gave an Order, but they were for Praxidike to Command; a passive raise of fist and accompanying nod followed by sparse words.

"Herd it to just beyond the tree line...." his attention for them brief, the screech of latches coming undone and heft of metal being raised --- the Chichux backed free of it's confines at the end of long, barbed, prods. Until the chittering of clicking mandibles, and faint scrape of carapace plates became a distant thing.

They'd get it done -- All his remaining attention belonged to Cybele, speaking even as he kept his back turned to the direction their prey was pushed in.

"Her wings were notched, just in case," he'd been instructed, with much severity, that things were to be done with 'safety' in mind. Eufriesea smiled like a shrug even as he thought it, having been unable to budge Mezen on the idea of leaving his prize to fly free. The gnarled old quartermaster was more piss-brine and whip-hand than person, and yet? Even Praxidike knew well enough to heed him, on some things. Sneaking a dangerous insect across space *quietly*, required some heavy heeding and the promise that if anyone got ate, it'd be him. No pretty bug hunt was worth an accidental war, "but just because she can't fly higher than a mans head? Doesn't mean she cant still burrow, or climb...or bite..."

If the beast could scale a cliff-face n make hollows of sandy dunes? Then Praxidike was sure a tree wouldn't be overmuch a problem. If anything, he hoped the strange new environment would make for an even better hunt, and place the Chichux in such a state of fight or flight that the tracking and killing became well worth their time!

"Now, show me what you have to hunt with."

A quarter hour was more than enough time to get a good look in.