08-05-2020, 10:52 AM
Popinjay snorts wearily, though she does not put up much more of a fight than blocking her flank from the beaked girl. The normally nimble mare is careful not to step on the tipsy boy at her other side, one ear following the sound of his breath while her eyes trace the shape of the filly mangling her feathers, watches as a frustrated tug plucks one of the long, stiff flight feathers from its place. The violence brings no more than a blink, with the spring comes the molt and the old feathers are loose and ready fall away.
Manikin, however, growls and shakes her prize like a dog with a bone until her brother's breath catches her attention.
What was that?
She freezes, head askew atop a twisted neck, caught midshake, and the soft, young feathers pressing through the down along her crest stand up like porcupine quills. Golden eyes peer beneath her mother's belly where thin legs and knobby knees give away his place beneath the shade of Poppy's other wing. The movement of those legs holds her rapt for a moment, and then the girl creeps forward on fat paws whose muscles have not yet developed the strength to retract their claws so they catch and claw clumsily with each step. She stalks without skill, and, coming upon the exasperated boy, reaches out with one of those barbed paws to bat at his rear leg and the damp bit of tail that twitches above his hocks.
Avocet.
He is not as strong and sturdy as their dam, and the chimeric girl wonders rather innocently if she could eat him.
Not now.
He is looking at her now.
Later.
She grins up at her elder brother as best she can through the stiff horn of her beaked nose, then yawns, stretches, and finds his gaze again. Perhaps he is sleepy?
@[avocet]