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randomwriteronline · 2 months

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"I, just to be clear - how long do you gestate?"

Matau looked at the nurse like xe'd just threatened to blow his kneecaps off, Vakama stumbled over his feet and nearly fell onto his face while he was pacing, and Nuju remained perfectly still as though that could have kept xem from seeing him.

Whenua sneakily reached out to the half scribbled notebook left on a nearby table: "What would be a normal period, in your opinion?" he asked out of genuine curiosity.

Nokama smacked his hand right off it hard enough to make him yelp while hissing under her breath at him to stop.

Alright, Netum reasoned as xe cringed a little at their bickering, maybe xe should have realized that their species did not reproduce like this normally considering their immediate reactions had been a little bit excessive even for someone experiencing their first time at this stressful rodeo.

Not wanting to be left out, from the other room Onewa shouted something that sounded like garbled static from a computer experiencing incomprehensible amounts of anguish.

His fellow Turaga winced.

Whenua reached for his notebook again, and this time got it slapped away by Matau.

(Nobody had any clue where he'd even found that, nor the pen stuffed into it. At some point, while his brother of Stone had been laid face up on the medical cot while gurgling in incredible pain, he'd just materialized right next to the obstetrician with it already in hand, looking intently alongside the nurses and doctors like he had any business being there between Onewa's legs, asking questions and scribbling down observations.)

(Vakama had eventually torn his eyes off of the pained Turaga long enough to notice what the former archivist was doing and had proceeded to give him the most furiously dumbfounded look he could muster, screaming above the racket: "A SMALL BEING IS TRYING TO CRAWL OUT OF ONEWA AND YOU'RE TAKING NOTES?!")

(To which is Earth brother had replied, "Of course I am! This is unprecedented, we might never get a chance of collecting this knowledge ever again! My academic colleagues surely understand the importance of my doing!")

(Such words had then been immediately followed by him being violently yanked away from his position and having his shoulders shaken so hard by Nuju's telekinesis that he thought his neck was going to dislocate, all while Nokama replied eloquently to his assumption with a simple yet very effective "ARE YOU INSANE".)

(All five were then promptly escorted out.)

"Let's try another question," Netum decided, "Do you have an idea when the conception might have taken place?"

"Oh, the last knowing mating?" Whenua piped up.

Nuju gave a horrendous shrieking squawk that lasted quite a few seconds, the meaning of which was universally understood to be Don't Fucking Call It That.

The nurse sighed, already regretting xer life choices: "Depends. Are you sexually active?"

"No," Vakama sputtered, "We are- we don't - our species does not- we, the Matoran come from assembly lines. We are built from machines. We don't - we're, we don't have anything. Or any... No, the short answer is no."

"Rahi are!"

"WHENUA."

"Sorry sister."

"But yes, no. I mean--"

Netum stopped him. Xer face was contorted by the grimace of someone watching their parents trying to climb up mirrors in an attempt at explaining in a sane and innocuous manner what the equipment in the case in the back of the closet is for: "I got it. So, either he-"

"Roughly one thousand years ago."

Xe turned to Matau.

"What?" xe asked.

He shuffled in his shawl, looking more than a little embarrassed: "Roughly one thousand years ago would be the, er, periodtime of beingmaking. There were... Everspecial conditions, that, uh, allowed us- him, to, er... Uhm... Uh..."

A suspicion struck xem.

Xer eyes carefully moved onto the other Turaga, observing their reactions to their Air brother's words: they seemed to suddenly find the walls, furniture, pavement and insides of their palms to be subjects of incredible interest, each drowning in their own vats of mortification at quickly increasing speeds while Matau kept on stammering in an attempt to explain the situation without having to admit even more that he'd unfortunately let on.

Huh.

Well.

There had been weirder paternity cases. Probably.

But one thousand years!

What was the longest xe'd ever heard of? A year and a half? Two years?

One whole thousand years.

Wow.

"Congrats to all of you," xe just said, because what else was there to even say.

They tried to disappear into themselves harder.

Vakama actually did, turning completely invisible before curling in shame on the floor, which Netum only discovered when he began rolling around knocking into chairs and the such like a ball inside of the world's slowest and most incredibly embarrassed pinball.

The door opened and slammed close so quickly that xe barely even registered the sound; when xe turned, a fellow nurse treated xem to a look with eyes the size of a pair of thornax.

She looked about to bust a capillary.

"Get in," she ordered, sounding a little hoarse.

Netum raised a thumb at her, faced the deeply mortified beings again, dryly left them with a: "Enjoy yourselves," and swiftly snuck back into the room in which Oewa still shouted bloody murder to all that existed before the Great Spirit Robot rusting miserably on the receding dunes of Spherus Magna.

The Turaga listened to five more of his anguished yells before Whenua began petting the air to find Vakama and hold him still so that he would stop bumping into everybody's legs.

"Should we speaktalk to the Hagah?" Matau proposed.

Nuju growled, shrieked, slashed at the sky and chittered furiously for about two entire minutes.

With her Rau dimmed after hearing only roughly a quarter of all that, Nokama let out the most tired sigh in her repertoire and sagged a little: "Depends on how much we value Kualus's survival."

They did not, in the end, have the time to contact the Toa Hagah, because before they could figure out a way to breach the subject to them and ask why exactly they had allowed them to get up to deeply unusual shenanigans while in their very unstable conditions as Hordika, their Stone brother's screaming finally quelled and they were allowed to see him again - under the conditions that they were to keep as calm as they could, since the patient had just undergone an incredibly stressful delivery, and that Whenua would not start asking questions pertaining anything that had happened in the five Turaga's absence for the entirety of his permanence lest he wanted to be promptly shoved back out.

He looked like he would have rather died, but he soldiered through it.

Especially because Onewa looked even worse.

A whole thousand years will teach you a few things about the people who destiny has assigned to be your siblings, for better or for worse, and usually against your will; and so they all had become intimately familiar with the tells of one another's moods, especially in specific situations such as, say, recovering from something, sickness or injury that it might be.

Onewa laid on the cot not limp, but stiff in a manner that had nothing to do with his usual posture. His eyes were shut, his breathing struggling to deepen, and his arms shivered weakly, as though he didn't even have the strength to tremble.

The five of them were on him in an instant, reaching out to touch him and try lending some comfort like that, ready to be shoved away if needed be. He welcomed them as best as he could, searching for them blindly, curling his fingers around their hands, testing the protodermis with his digits to tell them apart from the type of calluses plaguing the palms.

"F'respitt'r," he hissed at last - though his exhausted voice was laced with relief. "I'm fr'zin' - think y' could do som'thin' 'bout that?"

"Ah, I wish," Vakama replied, rubbing his hands around the tan forearm to warm it up a little, "But you know my powers aren't what they used to be."

"T'p'cal T'-T'raga, all sm'ke and no s'bst'nce..."

That made them chuckle while Nokama took the blanket Nuju had fetched with his telekinesis and laid it over their Stone brother, murmuring with the voice of a gentle brook: "There, that should be a bit better."

Onewa sighed: "Tha's why y'r my fav'rit', sist'r..."

"Oh? You desert your dirt brother like that?" she laughed.

"He ain' help'n' much, is he?"

"Excuse you-" Whenua mumbled; Nuju intercepted with a quiet chirping, clicking a few times for good measure, to ask how he felt.

It took a moment for the answer to be sighed back: "Bad. T'red."

"We're sorry, stonebrother. For, uh-"

A hand very gently smacked Matau on the mouth, not letting him continue: "Don't," the bedridden Turaga rasped in a monotone plea. He patted the other's mask a few more times to drive the point home. "Don't. I don' wanna think 'bout any of that righ' now. F'rev'r, p'ss'bly."

The silence between them unanimously agreed with his sentiment.

Netum found them cuddled up together and speaking hushedly in their strange whirring dialect when xe came back with Parca to deliver the news.

She coughed gently to divert their attention onto her.

Their brilliant eyes spooked the obstetrician slightly when they sat on her, but she pushed through her momentary discomfort with a wobbly smile: "Ehm! I, er, I'm glad to say that, well, from what we could parse - you know, different species and all - five of the sextuplets are perfectly fine and healthy."

The way they tilted their heads in unison was also a little eerie.

"The what?" Onewa croaked, honestly confused.

"The... The sextuplets. Your six little ones."

He seemed to process her words slowly: "As in, six indipendent beings?" he asked.

She nodded, now also confused.

If metal could have paled, the five surrounding the bed would probably have been see-through by now. The red one looked about to faint, too. Must have been the father.

(Although she had the sneaking suspicion, mentally comparing the colors of the six little creatures she'd just helped meet the light of day for the first time to those of the metal and flesh humanoids before her, that this had been a joint effort and he was just the most fragile link of whatever one could call the thing these six had going on with each other, because polycule didn't really seem to be the correct term in this case.)

The Stone Turaga gave a wheeze.

"No wonder that was so hard," he noted as he sank a little into the cot much more calmly than she would have expected considering he hadn't even been aware of the fact he'd been carrying in the first place, "Six whole beings... I thought it was just the pieces of one!"

Parca thought she was undergoing a stroke of sorts.

What.

What did that mean?

What the hell did that mean?

Netum had the kindness of pulling her aside and whispering helpfully in her ear: "Usually they're made in an assembly line."

"Oh," she whispered back.

Well. Sure, yes, that did explain it. Didn't make it any less insane, but at least the context showed there was some sort of logic to the madness now.

"Er, one of them is a little, ehm, a little different from their siblings," she continued, picking up from where her previous line of thought had stopped, "But we can't exactly tell if something is wrong, you know, medically, or if they're simply... Ahem... Built like that, and there is nothing to worry about. So, uh, would you..."

"What?"

"Would you like to see them?"

"Of course I do!" the Turaga waved, seeming annoyed, as though he had much to do and her needless talking was wasting precious minutes: "I went through the pains of Karzhani to get them out, I sure hope I can at least have a look at what all that pushing was for..."

"They're six?" the green one repeated faintly at that point - evidently having needed a little more time to process that bombshell of an information.

The black one piped up excitedly as though he hadn't been on the verge of keeling over himself seconds ago: "That's fairly common!" he said cheerfully, "Several species of Rahi tend to have litters in order to prevent exti-"

At least five hands piled over his mouth to shut him up, and Netum took that as xer cue to drag Parca away from that bucket of insanity for a minute or two.

They returned to a semblance of calm and a mostly disgruntled Whenua - the other Turaga weren't giving him looks of any sort, but from his demure behaviour one could assume they had chewed him out or at least managed to convince him to hold his excitement for another day. His pale eyes perked up still like those of his destiny-assigned siblings when the nurses approached to start carefully handing out the little ones.

They had expected... Well, it was hard to say. Had the six of them been Agori or Glatorian, Parca would have imagined a certain degree of awe, of starstruck wonder, gentle hands reaching out to catch their children in a careful embrace, or perhaps the strange apathetic curiosity that often struck alongside the beginnings of postpartum depression; Netum, having spent too much amidst the Skrall for xer liking due to xer Stone heritage, had learned to add to xer expectations a cold analysis, a check for any deformities that would make for anything less than a warrior - and in the case they were not found, then a thorough and thought through planning in preparation for marshal training.

The Turaga did none of that: they simply observed, captivated, dumbfounded, barely daring to lay a single finger on the little creatures slowly placed on Onewa's lap.

They were curled up on themselves like Mahi goats trying to keep warm on cold desert nights despite not showing any discomfort towards the current lukewarm temperature, with their heads swaying every now and then left or right, eyes shut, fists balled up tight just below their chests, not uttering a single peep or cry or babble. The muscles peeking from their tiny frames were a cold pinkish color, not yet the worn copper of a Toa or the much more common dull purplish tint their species knew, while their crystal-like brains had yet to paint themselves in any way. They wriggled their spines in a clumsy manner as though they were attempting to crawl on the thin armor of their backs - armor covered in faint hues reminiscent of watercolors, with plates much more flexible that those of a Turaga or Matoran. Above their little hands their chests rose and fell quickly against their pulsing lungs, and their heartlights flickered gently if a little fast, only ever becoming dim but never turning off completely; their identical faces lacked the deep dents in which masks were meant to slot, but the shallower lines digging into the protodermis of their skulls seemed to imply that the time for a Kanohi to be bestowed to them would simply come later, and for now they were in no danger of falling comatose.

Nuju reached out at last, as carefully as possible.

The light pressure of his digit against one of the little one's head made them squirm and stretch towards his hand in an attempt at nestling into it.

"Is that all?" Nokama asked, baffled.

"There's one more," Parca replied, "They'll be brought here in a moment."

"No, no, I meant..."

"I deepthink she was trying to asksay, are they whole?" Matau explained: "Are they... Complete? They're not losemissing any parts?"

The obstetrician blinked twice: "Er - yes? Yes, they're... Whole."

"But they are so small," Vakama muttered, gently poking a closed fist that quickly caught his finger. He sounded almost distraught.

"Babies tend to be," Netum chimed in. "Otherwise birth would be even harder than it already is."

Onewa said nothing, only looking at the five beings on the cot.

He hovered his hand above them without touching them, as though they'd been made of glass. He settled eventually on the leg of one of them with a feather-light touch, causing them to kick briefly at nothing before calming as they decided the feeling was not unpleasant after all.

How utterly strange.

The sound of creaking cries distracted the Turaga from their contemplation: Parca had reappeared - when had she even left? - with a little squirming thing struggling to escape her solid embrace.

"And here's the problem child," she announced quietly, handing them over directly to the Turaga of Stone as she did not trust the little one not to smack one of their siblings in the head in their agitated indignation at being carried around like some sort of dreadfully unfashionable purse.

It really wasn't hard to understand what she'd meant about this one being different. The infant being immediately came off as scrawnier, with thinner limbs and hands waving messily like little claws trying to play with yarn; the legs seemed a little arched and the neck very flexible, maybe too much. The face followed the shape of their siblings', that it did, but something in the way it moved felt off - as did the perfectly calm heartlight despite their erratic movement. They were chatty as well, squeaking and squealing angrily much like Nuju would under his breath, and their brain seemed much more opaque than it should have been; their armor as well seemed to resemble more matte hues than any brilliant ones, appearing to be a much darker grey than that of even their Earth sibling.

They thrashed and rolled in Onewa's arms for a little in a daring escape attempt that ended up going nowhere. With a frustrated huff they opened up their eyes: wide irises of an oily black stared up at the Turaga's blue ones, and the sight seemed to awe them so much that at last they settled down.

Then their eyes turned blue.

It was a murky imitation of the color, but it was so surprising that all present couldn't help but jolt a little upon seeing that. And they kept watching intently as an uncoordinated shiver struck the little thing and began blooming patches of tan and brown upon their body as it adjusted its proportions in tow, in a clumsy imperfect mirror of the Turaga's own colors and build.

Netum quickly glanced at the other five.

Upon determining that no, none of them seemed able to do that, xe muttered: "Huh. That's not normal."

Parca did not add onto that because she was busy running checks on herself to see if she was experiencing an ictus.

The only one who visibly lit up at the incomprehensible sight before them was, of course, Whenua: "Oh no, it is normal! That's a krahka," he reassured his stunned audience as he moved a little closer to tickle the little being, who turned and gave his digit a mellow bite as their teeth would grow out only in a few minutes: "It was heavily speculated that juvenile specimens would have a harder time shapeshifting at first, since they would have yet to establish proper control over their own abilities! Evidently they're a slightly parasitic species too, able to reproduce with other Rahi and adapt to the carrier's own appearance during gestation - clumsily of course, but still! It's not that surprising, thinking about it now, but it does showcase the extent of Roodaka's terrible power considering that she managed to make sure they're all but extinct even despite them not needing to mate with one another to ensure the survival of their species, which in theory should greatly reduce the problem..."

He shook his fingers, lightly bapping the little one's nose: they hung their little maws open to bite down again, but their slow reflexes were eluded by the quick movements.

The words floated giddily across the room for about half a minute.

They then fell into their heads like a ton of lead.

"Wait," Whenua realized softly, "That's a krahka."

Five pairs of eyes shifted onto the only Komau present: Onewa had already hidden it away behind his palm.

Deciding this was beyond what they were paid to do, Parca forcibly removed herself and Netum from whatever brand new paternity drama had been unlocked.

Nuju's voice, croaked from disuse and ages spent speaking only the language of birds, reached out in a dangerously indescribable tone: "Onewa--"

"SHUT."

Not a word followed.

The little beast squeaked loudly a few times, changing colors and shape as they took in the rest of their step-parents and sniffing their still perfectly peaceful half-siblings curiously.

At last, the Turaga of Stone lowered his palm to his mouth, treating the wall across him to a murderous glare.

"Is there something you'd like to share with the class?" Nokama carefully nudged him.

"I'm going to kill Pouks," he just growled.

The shrieks had already caused a few concerned members of medical personel and even patients to attempt entering the room in order to remove the raving bloodthirsty swan clearly carrying out a massacre from within it, but thankfully none succeeded in opening even just slightly the door, which remained blocked off thanks to Bomonga's body - turned as enormous as possible without collapsing the building in order to give Kualus somewhere high enough to climb to in order to escape from Nuju's undying rage. This meant that the Toa Hagah of Earth was left at the mercy of the squawking Turaga's ice pick, and considering his increasingly pained expression and the deepening dents on his armor he was probably going to succumb sooner than either he or his Ice brother would have liked.

That being said, he was having it easier than the rest of his siblings.

Gaaki shrunk in her shoulders, desperately trying to hide behind her Stone brother as she babbled: "We couldn't have know this would have happened-"

"The problem is not that you couldn't know, it's that you let it happen!" Vakama interrupted her rightfully angry: "We were vulnerable and unstable! You were the ones who decided to keep an eye on us so we wouldn't lose ourselves for that exact same reason! And then when we engaged in whatever tomfoolery the Hordika venom wanted you just watched us go at it!"

"We did NOT watch!" Iruini was quick to shriek as he peeked from behind his sister. He even raised a horrified finger to the sky as if to swear on the Great Beings. "We very much did not stick around to get a good look at your snuggle pile! The noise was disgusting enough!"

Matau reached out a hand to Whenua, who readily handed him his staff: "You still didn't stop us!!" he hollered, and threw the weapon directly at his Le-brother's forehead.

The impact produced a sonorous 'bonk' and a strangled yelp.

Before the Air Turaga could be supplied with more sticks to throw at their heads or, worse, turn to the medical tools in the room for ammunition, Norik raised his hands either in surrender or in an attempt at soothing the six beings like they were large lizards.

"I - please, listen," he begged them, a tinge of genuine fear in his voice: "Your unity was dwindling, it was getting harder and harder to convince you to stick together despite our best attempts - and, well, we knew from our years observing Rahi that such a, ah, unorthodox activity could significantly help easing stress and deepening the bonds within a community, so we sort of figured it would have been much more beneficial to let you ride it out on your own than to intervene to stop you..."

Nokama's shrill voice made him activate his Pehkui by reflex and shrink to the size of a cricket: "It didn't strike you for one second that perhaps Onewa might have minded being the bonding activity?!"

Speaking of him, the Turaga of Stone had been eerily quiet during the whole argument. He had sat virtually immoble on the cot while his little ones tentatively crawled a little closer to him to escape the annoying yelling, not even bothering to open their eyes or vocalize at all as he picked them up to place them under the worn blanket draped over both his middle and his long legs so that the fabric could muffle the voice; his blue eyes had been sternly fixed on the Po-Toa, who was starting to get massively creeped out by the unblinking stare never leaving him for a second.

When the others' yelling subsided - so, when Nuju interrupted his onslaught of avian injuries to catch his breath - all he did was merely lift a hand in front of himself.

Wrapped around it, the anomaly of the litter watched the Hagah curiously and chirped a croak at them while trying to shift into them.

The Toa briefly forgot their shame to stare at it.

"Is that a krahka," Bomonga finally spoke, too baffled to keep silent.

Ah, Pouks thought: He is going to kill me.

"This is your fault," Onewa grimly sentenced.

Yeah.

He was dead.

Kualus turned to his Po-brother with eyes the size of a knowledge tower: "What?" he yelped, though it came out more like a caw. "What?? Pouks?? What?!"

"Look--"

"What does that mean??"

"Brother, did you-"

"How does that even work, a Rahaga and--?"

"Alright, this is too weird-"

"How the--"

The thunderous clap of Pouks' hands hushed his slowly increasingly horrified siblings' chatter enough for him to recollect his thoughts.

He took a big, deep breath, trying not to let the Turaga's vitriolic gaze pierce through him and make him crumble to dust, and exhaled gently before starting to speak - in a very slow, almost stilted manner, as though convinced that if he could keep the intrigue of his explanation going he would not be immediately beheaded: "She is. A critically endangered species. And - since she was our ally... And! You seemed to get along. AND. You might have been. Compatible. Seeing as you were... Exhibiting specific behaviours. Towards your peers. As well as her. I thought. Well. It wouldn't be too bad - to try a... Uhm..."

He swallowed silently.

"Go on."

The sound of Onewa's voice made his entire body want to crumple into itself and implode, and it took a considerable amount of willpower not to do that and instead complete his sentence in a strangled voice: "A conservation effort."

"Mata fucking Nui, brother," Iruini sputtered out a little too loudly before he could stop himself.

"That's a fair reason, actually," Whenua mused.

An ice pick to the knee later and he was splayed as flat as a corpse on the floor while Nuju shrieked at him something that sounded a lot like No It Is NOT, You MAHI-BRAINED Mole Of An ARCHIVIST.

Onewa did not lose his poise.

"Little one," he called; the krahka in his hand turned to him with an air of great focus, and followed his finger as it pointed straight at Pouks: "Kill!"

Not even the time to react: the tiny beast promptly jumped off of his palm in a fluid motion, bounced on the floor like a rubber ball, scared Norik into scrambling right up Bomonga's arm and into the safety of Kualus's hands before he was run over by their clumsy charge, snapped open their little maws and clamped them down right on an exposed tendon of Pouks' leg.

Had hit slapstick cartoon 'Tom and Jerry' existed in this universe, the Toa's scream would have been indiscernible from the fictional cat's.

"TEETH," he wailed out in genuine anguish, keeling over and falling onto the floor to writhe in agony as the little bastard found his torment funnier than anything and resorted to biting him even harder, "OOOH SHARP LITTLE TEETH. OH MATA NUI PRESERVE ME IT HURTS. OH HOW IT HURTS."

The Turaga turned to the rest of the Hagah: "You're next."

"They've been alive for minutes and you've conditioned them to enact violence in your stead already?!" Gaaki shrieked.

"Yes. Little one, kill!"

Her scream turned wobbly as she hastily threw herself onto her Earth brother to scale him, Iruini following suit when the bloodthirsty dangerously ankle-height beast turned their attention to him since their designated prey had already escaped to higher grounds; eyes widening in terror as the creature began to now bounce in his direction, no doubt planning on mauling one of his own easily targetable enlarged muscles, Bomonga shrank back to his regular size and slid away from the pile of his siblings that crashed gracelessly only floor, sacrificing them in favor of the integrity of his flesh - a betrayal that ended up not even being worth the attempt as the krahka had already jumped far too high and far, thus managing to find the perfect trajectory to chomp at his wrist in mid-air.

With a strangled cry he fell right back into the heap of limbs that were the Toa Hagah. And at that point all Karzhani broke lose, because the little one, overwhelmed by the noise and adrenaline and fun and with no other instruction other than 'kill', grew a few more mouth in various disjointed parts of their body and began biting the shit out of anything they laid eyes on, which unfortunately happened to be the previously mentioned Toa.

The Turaga watched the bloodshed unfold halfway between enraptured and horrified, as though they were looking at a car crash in real time.

Some kind of garbled yell in Kualus's voice begged for mercy.

"In a moment," Matau replied while lazily scratching at the little Le-one trying to wriggle out of the blanket in response to the noise, not showing any intention of moving a muscle beyond that. "I deepthink Whenua would first like to downwrite some knowledgenotes on the everinteresting foodmanners of the krahka."

His Earth brother did not agree with his statement only because he was already scribbling away.

Norik squawked a horrid sound as he tried to hurriedly unshrink himself before he got chewed up into crumpled paper that sounded very much like PLEASE THIS HURTS WORSE THAN HORDIKA POISON, though there was room for debate.

Nuju chirped back something along the lines of Get Fucked.

More anguished yelling ensued.

It would have continued for a long while, frankly, or at least until one of the healers or nurses waltzed in and forcibly pried the little carnivorous pest off of the agonizing clump of metal and fllesh, had the Turaga not been startled by a very loud excited gasp coming out of absolutely nowhere.

Suddenly standing in the room as though having materialized in it was now a confusing being, a mismatched mess of Toa and Rahi and Agori parts clearly put together without having dedicated much thought into the whole assembly, clasping her hands to her chest and grinning an enormous almost ghastly smile as she beamed at the terrible tiny beast with nothing but pure unadultered pride.

"A natural hunter!" she cried out delighted.

Onewa pointed at her immediately: "LITTLE ONE!" he shrieked, "KILL! KILL! KILL!"

The krahka's head whipped to attention in the span of a second. With an impressive bounce considering its minuscule size they leaped onto their new victim - and much to the dismay of their father ended up right on her chest as she faked falling prey to their assault, maw opened to whine breathily about her coming end and make the little one grumble out a few hyena-like cackles as the two of them played Who-Will-Bite-Whose-Face-First.

With an angered tsk, the Stone Turaga sank back into his cot and crossed his arms.

Their new guest laughed at his annoyance.

"Oh, you shut it!" he growled back at her: "The least you could do is let them maul you properly! You have no idea what I've been through to get that menace out here."

A long slithering sound accompanied the now snake-like Rahi as she snuck onto the cot and behind the disgruntled Turaga, sustaining his neck and back with a sweetness that purposefully didn't mask a certain mocking quality to the caring motion: "I don't," Krahka agreed in a gloating tone as she nuzzled his mask, "And thanks to you I never will have to!"

She giggled louder as her face was shoved away, little one wrapped around her neck giggling with her: "Well, you could have warned me this could have happened!"

"I thought you knew."

"How was I supposed to know?! I didn't even know what I was doing!"

"That's not what you said that time."

"I'm fairly certain I was beyond speech in that moment."

The Rahi hushed for a few seconds, during which her spawn fell back onto the cot and trotted again to Onewa's lap: "Yeah, you weren't exactly capable of verbal communication," she recalled at last, "But your body--"

"Please keep that to yourself," Kualus croaked from the floor, promptly getting yelled at by Nuju to shut up.

Krahka treated him to a weird look: "I meant scents and posture," she explained: "Those are other ways for Rahi to communicate. Like this little one here, you can almost smell how much they like you."

Onewa shifted his gaze to find oily blueish eyes looking very attentively at his face, the tiny spawn of Karzhani wiggling where they sat with barely contained enthusiasm. A creaking chirp rattled up their throat as they kneaded at his leg with their clumsily shifting hands resembling now hooves, now paws, now proper palms; unable to fight back, the Turaga cradled them in his palm and watched them all but melt into it.

"Aren't you terrible, little one," he muttered, trying not to sound too fond and failing completely.

They'd have to find a name for them too, wouldn't they? Ah, so much trouble they were... And besides, the creature had already gotten used to being 'little one', so what was the point.

He muttered the words to himself: little one.

Lil' one.

Lil' wan.

Lil' wa.

Lilwa.

Lilua.

Liluah.

Hm.

Liluah wasn't so bad.

Krahka's satisfied purr of agreement was so potent that not only did it rattle his entire frame, but its vibrations managed to spread out to the cot as well, finally stirring her offspring's half-siblings from their torpor and causing them to somewhat angrily peek through the blanket they'd been swarmed beneath to complain wordlessly at her in the hopes she'd keep it down.

They would also need names, he mused to himself. Those would have to be decided by the six of them together - there was no way he could come up with five more on the spot, and Nokama would probably be at least a little upset if they didn't have some kind of specific meaning, or maybe she would have like to pick some from old legends. There was no way they were accepting anything from Matau, though. Sure, any suggestion from Nuju would have to be translated from bird, Vakama probably wasn't going to be of much help, and Whenua was bound to somehow fit in some tie or other to Rahi (which, in truth, would be fairly fitting), but all of that was preferrable to ending up with a clutter of little beings walking around named after music instruments or perhaps even worse, extremely volatile vehicles.

A good Po-Matoran doesn't believe too hard in the superstition that names shape a being into their true self much like molds, preferring to leave that up to the choices and actions one makes in their lifetime; but considering their brother's fancy for fast things usually very easy to crash into walls, it didn't hurt to be cautious.

He realized he'd neglected to mention their existence to Krahka only when he looked back to the Rahi to find her staring at the five beasties with an inexplicable expression, eyes wide enough to fall out of her head, stunned beyond words.

She leaned her snout closer to one of them, sniffing them intensely and nudging the plates of the spent red armor with her nose as though trying to tickle it off.

"Those are not yours!" Vakama shouted suddenly, as if overwhelmed by a burst of protectiveness, scaring her off of the tiny creature. "They aren't krahka, they're - they're..." he sunk a little in his shoulders, resolve wavering, but it was too late already; so he coughed embarrassedly once on behalf of the other Turaga as well, and concluded with a peep: "Ours."

Krahka blinked.

She gazed at the rest of the former Toa Metru.

What came out of her throat could have been called a whimper.

It didn't take long for her to shake off her melancholy, though: "Well!" she simply chirped, "Since I've infiltrated your litter and none of you have any experience or instinct to deal with small beings such as these, I shall make it my duty to help you raise them."

"... So that they're technically also yours?" Nokama translated.

The other grinned at her like a stone rat who got into the pantry and needed not say a word.

Oh, who cared - they were definitely going to need the help, and Mata Nui knew they had no clue whatsoever what to do with... with... With whatever these could be called.

(They had a discussion on what word to use for them later on, propositions ranging from cubs to pups to fletchlings to just plain Matoran - which felt incomprehensibly wrong - until Onewa had put his foot down on calling them 'kids'. Matau and Nuju had both objected on referring to these clearly anthropomorphic beings in the same way as juvenile goats, but he'd insisted: he was the one who'd gotten them out into the world, the word didn't immediately evoke some kind of Rahi, and even then he liked Mahi goats.)

(To say he was smug when the Agori confirmed 'kid' was another way they had to refer to babies would have been an understatement.)

Better not to look a gift Ussal crab in the mouth.

"How did they happen, anyhow?" Krahka inquired. "I thought Onewa was the exception among you."

Said supposed exception swatted at her nose.

Six pairs of eyes then turned to the heap of metal that was tentatively pulling its various limbs apart and back into the shape of a team of six Toa, who instantly froze in place under the still vengeful gazes of the Turaga.

Being used to reading body language meant that the Rahi instantly got the message - a very amusing one, truth be told, considering the immense fear emanating from the Hagah.

"Liluah!" she called.

Her offspring tore their attention away from their half-siblings and moved their focus towards her.

"Kill!"

The sound of several seven-foot-tall warriors scrambling desperately to escape a creature barely larger than half of their hands was music to her and her friends' ears. Less so for the healers that had to wrangle Liluah off of the screaming Toa before they managed to chew through the protodermis, but she supposed some sacrifices had to be made for the sake of her comedic enjoyment.