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 Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 1:35 pm
 The morning was wearing on as the sun got higher, but Coryth took no notice of it. Her eyes were exactly where they always were; fixed on the ground beneath her feet. She scraped at the dirt to dislodge any small rocks, then examined them carefully. So far this region had proved devoid of anything really interesting, except for the shiny stone she had uncovered yesterday. She had admired it for hours, before her urge to dig had drove her back to her work.
Noticing an oddly shaped stone, she eagerly pawed at the dirt around it, her rough, seasoned pads scraping away the dust like sandpaper. She circled it carefully as she worked to get a feel for its shape and size, and soon became very excited. Maybe this was something after all! She put her strength into the work and began digging for real now, dirt shooting up behind her like a geyser.
Too quickly the stone came loose, and disappointment thudded in her chest. It was only a normal gray rock, nothing special, and way too small to be worth studying. Ah well, the cycle starts again. She paced away from the hole, scanning the ground for anything interesting.
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 1:48 pm
Wingu found himself a good deal away from his home today, though now that he was a bit older that didn't matter as much. He still knew where home was a would return once he was done doing his daily inspection of the sky. Eyes glued to the sky and clouds above Wingu padded forward, chasing after a slow moving cloud - slow being a relative term.
Normally running about like this was quite dangerous for him, always tripping over rocks, or branches or anything else that was strewn about the ground. But as it was, Wingu has slowly caught on that if he glanced down towards the ground every now and then he wouldn't trip - as often at least. His eyes took a momentary dip to the ground and caught sight of a strangely patterned lioness, who appeared to be looking for something on the ground.
Perhaps there was something interesting there. So he padded forward, eyes for once staying off the sky for a few moments are he approached her. "What are you looking for?" He asked once he was close enough.
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 2:11 pm
It took Coryth a moment to realize that she'd heard a voice, so busy was she with her efforts. She glanced up, and jerked in surprise at the proximity of the other lion. This always happened to her! Get distracted for a few moments by a find, and some big predator just waltzes up, usually to chase her out of their land. "I'm just passing through!" she shouted out of habit, before she noticed that the younger fellow didn't seem upset to see her.
His question finally caught up with her brain. "Oh, I'm just... uhm..." she turned to look at the long string of holes she'd left in her wake, and puzzled over how to explain this. She tended to get the oddest looks when she tried to tell people about the rocks that looked like bones, and other unusual things she'd found, and why she was digging around in the first place.
Still, she wasn't one to pass up the opportunity to talk about her passion. "I'm excavating large rocks and stones, to see if any of them are unusual. Sometimes I find ones that look like strange things. Who are you?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 2:36 pm
Wingu tilted his head and raised a brow as the lioness made the passing through comment. How very odd. But he shrugged it off as nothing more than a random comment. His eyes moved as she glanced at all those holes. How did those get there? It wasn't very often one came across so many holes in one spot.
Excavating rocks? That seemed - well he wasn't quite sure. But he bent his head down to look closer at the hole. "Why dig up rocks? What's so unusual about them?" He asked before lifting his head again to look at her. "I'm Wingu. What's your name?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 2:46 pm
"Pleased to meet you, I'm Coryth." She was pleased, it had been a while since she'd had a civil conversation instead of being chased off for putting holes in other people's land. And the other lion was actually showing a mild interest in her work! "Sometimes the rocks don't look like rocks at all. Sometimes they look like animals or plants. And sometimes..."
She peered around them, but there was no one to eavesdrop. Still, she leaned in and spoke in a low voice. "This one time, I was walking along a cliffside. And as I turned the corner, there it was. Stuck into the side of the cliff was the bones of a huge beast, bigger than an elephant. Only they weren't bones, they were black rocks shaped like bones. And nobody knows how they got there."
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 3:07 pm
Wingu considered her words carefully, rocks that don't look like rocks. That made little to no sense to him. But then he made a bit of a connection after a few minutes of thought. "Oh! Like how clouds don't always look like clouds." He exclaimed as he glanced up at the sky. Sometimes clouds looked like rhinos, or trees or all sorts of different things.
His attention turned back to Coryth as she spoke quietly. "Bones that weren't bones, but were rocks?" Head tilted in thought over that. "Well were they rocks or bones?" Now he was starting to get confused but at the same time was quite interested in finding out more about these rocks that weren't rocks.
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 3:26 pm
"Clouds look like what?" Confused, Coryth followed his gaze to the sky. She squinted carefully at the sky overhead, but try as she might, she couldn't see any rhinos or trees. Just clouds. "Not sure what you mean. Then again, I'm not very experienced on the subject." It was a rare day she bothered to look upward at all... usually, her head was pointed down.
"Well, you know how bones are white? And how if you bite them really hard, you can crack them open and they splinter? Well, these huge bones were black like rocks, and they were so hard you could chip a tooth trying to bite them. And if you did manage to break them, they fell apart into dust."
Her curiosity dragged her eyes skyward again. She still didn't see any rhinos. "Would you explain this cloud thing again? How do the rhinos get up there?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 4:36 pm
Wingu's brow furrowed in thought as she explained the bone that wasn't a bone but was a rock. Well that was..kinda interesting in a still slightly confusing sort of way. "So a bone that's like a rock but shaped like a bone that's so hard you would break your teeth on it if you tried to bite it?" He asked, trying to make sure he had understood what she was trying to say.
Then as she turned her eyes skyward he couldn't help but let out a laugh. But since she had shown a bit of an interest in the clouds he wasn't about to turn down an opportunity to explain things to her. So he turned his head skyward, searching for the best example of a cloud that wasn't a cloud. Ah, there was a perfect example right there. "You see that." He said while pointing with his paw towards a very long thin cloud that at one end split into several thin tendrils. "Well that one looks like a giraffe. So see it's a cloud, but not a cloud at all."
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 4:50 pm
Coryth grinned eagerly. "Yes, you've got it! I call them bone-stones. And sometimes I find ones that look like plants or bugs, too. I saw one once, that looked like a fern had leaned against a rock so long that it became a part of it. I don't know how it happens. I'd like to ask a god, but I haven't run into any yet. So I just look for rocks to learn more about them."
She took a long look at the giraffe-cloud, turning her head this way and that trying to see it. Wingu's words about the bone-stones tumbled through her head, and suddenly she got it. They were clouds that looked like things! She gasped in excitement at the new discovery. "There are giraffes and rhinos in the sky! How do they look like that... hey, where did it go?" The wind had picked up, and the shape of the cloud was slowly distorting. "It's not a giraffe anymore. What is it now?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 5:03 pm
A smile crossed Wingu's maw when Coryth agreed that he understood what she was talking about. Thank goodness for that, cause he wasn't really sure how else to explain it. Of course that opened up several other questions he wished to ask. But his attention was turned to the sky once more.
"See that's the great thing about clouds," He began to explain as he watched the once giraffe cloud shift into something else. "Now it looks like a -" Wingu tipped his head to the left. "Well it kinda looks like a Zebra." Tearing his eyes away from the clouds, a rare thing for him to do he looked at Coryth. And while he could see that she thought the clouds were quite amazing, he also knew that her passion for these rocks that weren't rocks matched his love of the sky and cloud. "Tell me more about these bone-rocks. How do you know where to look?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 5:26 pm
Coryth stared at the zebra-formerly-giraffe for a long while, watching it constantly change shape. "There are so many mysteries in this world," she murmured. "I wonder how many there are that I don't even know of yet." But the clouds seemed far beyond her grasp, metaphorically and literally. Rocks she could touch and smell, but the far away clouds were beyond her understanding. The more she tried to think about them, the quicker the thoughts slipped from her mind.
Shaking her head, she waved a paw in the general direction of the holes she had dug. "It helps if the area is dry, and if the rocks and soil are loose. I tend to find more of them that way. I grew up in that kind of place, a dry rocky place where the ground underfoot was nothing but rocks that would shift as you walked on them. Tough for hunting, but terrific for finding bone-stones." She laughed. "My mother used to say the only reason I like rocks is because they're easier to catch than prey."
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 6:05 pm
His eyes roamed over the line of holes as she pointed towards them. It looked like she had been working on finding these bone-rocks for quite some time based on how many holes there were. Nodding as she spoke Wingu tried to imagine why exactly one would want to dig up rocks. Though he did chuckle slightly. "I don't imagine they try to run away too often when you are digging them up."
Wouldn't that be a sight to see, a rock - er bone-rock, running across the savannah with a lioness chasing after it. The thought made him laugh even harder. As he forced his laughter to an end he looked upon the lioness again. "But how do you know that digging a hole will reveal one of these bone-rocks? It seems like a lot of work." Wingu couldn't see himself spending all day digging for something that may not be there. Of course it was somewhat similar to how other lions couldn't understand why he could lay watching the clouds all day long.
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 6:22 pm
She chuckled. "Actually, one time a rock did run away from me. I was trying to pull it out of the top of a hill, and it started rolling off, and I had to chase after it. Tell you what, by the end it was faster than any antelope. And it broke apart when it reached the bottom. A real shame." She sighed wistfully. It was always a tragedy to her when a good rock was destroyed. She'd even cried over it once, which had very much confused her sisters.
"And sometimes I wonder if the bone-rocks did used to run. I mean, they're bones. And bones come from animals. Maybe the bone rocks once came from huge rock beasts." She shrugged. Such questions were pointless without further evidence. She glanced at the holes. "Oh, I usually only start digging deep when a stone looks like it might be interesting. I've been digging alot lately because I found some small ones on the surface near here, that looked like they might be shells or something."
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 6:28 pm
The image that formed in his mind of the lioness chasing a rock down a hill made him chuckle once more. "That would have been funny to." Wingu was impressed with how interesting this conversation was becoming. The more she talked about these rock-bones the more he wished to know. Perhaps that was a good thing, after all he was so often distracted by the sky that he was obviously missing out on other things in life.
"If there are rock beasts I think I would avoid them." He told her with a serious look on his face. Wingu had no intention of running into a large rock beast that had rocks as its bones. That would be a frightening experience. "Can I see one of those shell rocks?" He asked, not curious about seeing a rock-shell, which he supposed was not much different than a rock-bone in a way. "You know up until I met you I never thought of rocks as anything other than something I often tripped over while looking at the sky and clouds."
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Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 6:39 pm
She nearly jumped with glee when he asked about the shell rocks, and dashed back across the land until she reached the third hole behind her. She plucked a stone off the ground from where she had set it up on a little patch of cleared dirt. Then she padded happily back to her new companion, and gently, carefully placed it at his feet.
"This is the reason I've been so busy with holes today. See?" She tapped it carefully with a claw and traced the spiral pattern that could clearly be seen. "It looks like a snail. A very big snail. I see a lot of these around. But if you look closely, and pick it up, you'll see it's not hollow like a snail shell at all. It's really a heavy stone." She preened happily, happy to have someone to ramble at. "I've never seen any rock beasts either, but I can't come up with any other ideas of where the bone-stones come from."
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