Quoted By:
A word from the Underground gets you a sitting space on a wagon bench going towards another Rhean town. No one on the wagon asks you questions or looks at you much; when they offer you food and drink, you take it.
Two days' ride on, the wagoneer snaps his fingers for the other passengers to wake you. No words: he gives a curt nod, points left, you jump off left. A little into the woods from there a pair of Rhea Scouts collect you.
They're puzzled that only one dood came, and quite empty-handed apart from a fry-press pasty. They were expecting fireworks.
You tell them to just give you a map and let you worry about boombooms. They don't completely doubt you, seeing how serious you are about camo.
You don't know what they're talking about; it's just your Light Kludge Armor and a longy scarf made of picnic tablecloth. What they call camo is your pattyface getting smudged off. But the positive attention and default respect are new sensations, so you don't ask too much.
There's a series of short tunnels going from behind the Dorf Towers, to blindspots between the hillocks, then coverholes leading to more tunnels.
The Scouts take peeksies before exiting; heat makes the Bugs think and move slower, so they stay in cover when it's bright. Before emerging, the Scouts rig up a timed device that would spray a colored cloud out of several chimney holes. Then you all take a snakk n napp in the tunnels till next sun-up, once the Bugs have tired themselves looking. Thinking and moving costs calories; make the enemy hungry and dead-tired, and no one needs to die. So goes the Rhean martial philosophy.
YOUre not convinced; when gobbs get too hungry and there's enemies needing killing, they might make a meal of their own dead or injured. Everyone turns to bugshit in the end; it's Weak to be squeaking about the meat of your own kind. In a way it's kindy YOUr meat, if yez fink about it: your belly needs less work to turn one of you into YOU. Stands to reason.
But you don't argue the point, because there isn't any. You probe them for information.
Rheas have this bantzy way of chatting, allus joking n jibing each other, but without the social-survival and demonstrative-hierarchy aspect of Gobby bantz. It's weird; it takes so much brain juice bouncing jokes off songs off jokes off real talk like they do, and no one wins anything off anyone.
For their part, they obviously think <span class="mu-g">YOU</span> weird, because you don't bantz and can't bother following. They've been told you've got the Turns, so they let it slide; there's plenty of stories about everyday Rheas who get Turns because bad things happen. For someone with a reputation like Cutthroat Oats the Rhea information network are daisychained clusters centering a local regulatory Authorities, called Our Aunt Molly or Mom, who crosschecks and sorts them based on priority and reliability. News of YOU travelled fast, since you panto-killed Our Shawn, they almost expect it.
