[ota]

[69problems]

WHO| Karkat, the Signless and YOU!
WHAT| Mutant camping, and food sharing if anyone's hungry
WHEN| All through week one
WHERE| Various less-shitty houses around the residential area
WARNINGS| Nothing as of yet; will be updated or marked in-thread

For the first week, Karkat and the Signless wander the rows of houses. Many of them are empty of anything useful, but occasionally they find a can or two to add to their small stock of rations. In a few of them they find bugs hiding somewhere dark like they found in the first one, and on those nights they have to worry at least a little less about running out of food. Once they even manage to trap and take down one of the dogs -- it isn't exactly appetizing, but cooking it as thoroughly as Signless insists on to make sure it's safe to eat masks at least some of the taste.

Mostly, they use the (less dilapidated) houses with fireplaces as overnight camps. The faint glow of their fire can be seen through the grimy windows, especially when it gets dark.

[As a note, the mods have said humans probably shouldn't eat bugs as they'll suffer pretty bad side-effects. If your non-troll character shows up and wants some of their food, it's probably best to have it happen on dog night.]

Comments

[sleeplessinalternia]

You mean, like Karkat's?

Hah. Hah hah. Hah.

"You'd have probably strifed a lot more. I dunno about Nepeta's, but my Crabdad always would strife with me to help me get tougher."

[whoseesbynight]

"Purrobably, yeah," Nepeta answers with a nod. "Pounce and I didn't always strife, but she showed me how to hunt purroperly, and that helped."

She did still have to spend some time figuring things out, because the last thing cats are ever inclined to offer are all the answers for thing, but she'd learned in leaps and bounds, and only managed to occasionally come back empty-handed. Certainly less than she had at first, anyway.

[69problems]

"Well. My mother did teach me how to hunt, so perhaps it wasn't as different from having a lusus as I imagined it might be. Though we never fought; I don't think I would have stood much chance against her even if I had been inclined toward violence."

A chainsaw very hard to fight against, after all, especially when all the weapons he might have used would have been smaller and more breakable.

[sleeplessinalternia]

"They're supposed to hold back a little," Karkat says, "at least when you're a wiggler." He prods the cooking bug with his knife. "I still wonder where mine came from. There can't have been a bloodline for him."

[whoseesbynight]

"I nefur actually thought about that," Nepeta answers at the comment about Karkat's lusus. "Although I suppawse maybe there was one? I know you and Signless have the same color, so there might have been a few lusii with it too?"

It's the best she's got, really, but it makes the beginnings of sense and that's a start. Even if she might be getting things terribly wrong.

[69problems]

"I imagine there must have been. If the mutation could occur in trolls there's no reason it couldn't exist in lusii as well."

It's strange that one never found him, but then again the circumstances of his hatching were stranger than most.

"Perhaps you were just lucky that a lusus with your mutation happened to be alive at the time of your hatching."

[sleeplessinalternia]

"Yeah," Karkat says. "Maybe. But isn't that a weird coincidence? And... when you guys scratched, wouldn't it have only swapped our ancestor-descendent pairs? I've never heard Kankri say anything about having a Crabdad of his own."

[whoseesbynight]

"I thought coincidence were always weird," Nepeta answers with a smile. Sure, sometimes they're the good kind of coincidence but that doesn't make them any less strange in the long run.

Karkat has a point though. Scratching would have swapped at least some of the things, even if she can't say anything about whether or not Kankri would have had a crabdad of his own. It's not the sort of thing she'd usually think of to ask, either.