If it was up to Cinder, personal needs would all be banished. As far as she was concerned, every single one of them was simply a waste of time. Sleep? For the weak. Food? Waste of energy and resources - it would just be burned up by the body and used in a matter of hours. Relieving oneself? Bothersome at best. Every single one of these needs took up precious time in her day, which she would much rather use learning or exploring of healing Vykeli. Anything was better than wasting time.Today, the source of Cinder's ire was food. She'd found herself with a rumbling stomach again, somehow, and been compelled to start foraging about for her next meal. Absolutely preposterous! She had been in the middle of traveling - she thought she might make it to the Ruins of Erli today - when she'd been sidetracked by these hunger pangs and had to stop by a small patch of grass that looked like it might contain edible plants.
The doe sighed audibly as she rooted about in the patch of green, sniffing instinctively for plants that she could ingest. "What is this, Flare?" she said, rather dramatically, shoving her nose angrily this way and that. "This is just a ridiculous, inexcusable waste of time! Look at us. Now we'll have to spend the night camped out here instead of sheltering in the Ruins. That's a whole day we'll have wasted, if you think about it."
Now that she had snapped out of travel mode, Flare hopped down from her shoulder to rest on the ground. He winced a bit, landing on his injured foot. cinder briefly paused in her tirade. She shut her eyes, drew on her energy, and cast a gentle Soothe on the cockatrice, easing the pain he felt in his healing wound.
"You'd better be careful there, or I'll spend the rest of my life healing you," she warned.
The cockatrice cooed and folded his wings neatly to his side. "Thank you, Cinder," he said happily, wounded leg half-cocked as he sat and watched her return to angrily foraging about in the patch of grass. "For you, eating maybe isn't the worst thing. You need to be forced to take a break every now and then. You can't just keep going forever without rest."
"Why not?" Cinder demanded, curious. "If I didn't have basic needs like eating and sleeping, why would I need rest?" She kept searching.
"Well..." Flare sounded thoughtful as he mused on her question. "You may not need to sleep, but for your own mental stability, I would think you would still want rest. You don't want to push yourself over the edge any more than you already have." He chuckled.
"That's unfair!" Cinder protested. "Being driven doesn't have to be a bad thing."
"It's not," Flare agreed readily. "But sometimes you're almost... manic about how obssessed you get with your goals. Might not be the worst thing for you to remember that your ambitions don't have to be everything."
Cinder glared at him. What a bad influence. She decided to drop this particular line of questioning, suspecting that she wouldn't win. Flare wasn't wrong, but he was pragmatic in a way that she simply did not want to hear. Never in her life had anyone had the audacity to tell her she needed to slow down, and hearing it now out of the cockatrice was simultaneously new and upsetting. She couldn't slow down. Life was happening rapidly before her very eyes. She couldn't afford to fall behind.
The doe went back to shuffling through the grass. Here and there, she snatched up bits that smelled the most appetizing until she had had her fill - or rather, what she suspected would mollify the cockatrice. "There," she said, huffing. "Are you happy?"
Flare blinked his beady eyes at her, and then chuckled. "You even eat like someone's out to get you," he said. But he opened up his wings and flapped up to his usual perch on top of her shoulders. "If you think you're full, I won't stop you. Just as well, it's about time we found some shelter anyway."
Cinder nodded grudgingly. It wasn't easy to admit that their day of traveling was done, but there was no point in pressing on into the night. Predators would begin to emerge, and there was no use trying to fight anyone off on her own. Scrappy as she could be, she was hardly a skilled fighter.
The doe turned from the patch of grass, scenting the air. "That way, maybe," she said, heading toward a smell that was unmistakeably noulicorn. They'd likely be friendly, but it was early enough to move on if that turned out to not be the case. As they went, she said, "Flare. Do you think you'll be a good influence on me?"
The cockatrice chuckled again. "Cinder," he said gently. "I'm pretty sure I already am."
