Beauties and Beasts

Chapter 101: brought to you by Dalmatians

We interrupt your usual program of bills, lame jobs, and lamer people to give you: "Cute Babies and Muscley Men!" Men have it all wrong. Women don't like cars and money. Women like muscles and cute snake babies--I mean, cute babies! It's not our fault that the males of this world are lazy, refuse to grow up, and are afraid of commitment. Oh, and addicted to porn. Fantasies of adultry and whores while comparing you to photoshop boobs does the opposite of help, and no, I don't believe you when you say you think I'm beautiful. -.- But screw that, here's "Cute Babies and Muscley Men!!!"

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With both her hands in working order and her pains and exhaustion gone, Shay found more than enough to make an enjoyable time.

She played music and sang for her babies. She made food, wove baskets and flower crowns, gave an attempt at making a drum, marked out an area for a large garden as well as a field for grain, got involved making Curtis's den beneath the floor of the master bedroom, and throughout it all squealed and skipped. Somehow, the emerald hadn't just healed her body, it had done something to help her mind which frequently spiralled into depressions or bouts of anxiety.

Naturally, she still had her fear of getting pregnant again, of rabbits, and all of that good stuff. The emerald had done nothing to her memory, nor had it restored her weight. She was still frightfully skinny (at least to her mates), and she still had food shoved at her at every opportunity.

Still, Shay felt her good days had come.

Cheered by her turn of good mood, Curtis allowed the snake boys to stay longer, though he made them work for their keep. They helped drag logs, dive for strange flat pink clams that Curtis planned on using to tile the house, dig holes, till the space for the garden and fields, and other grunt work that could be done with an adept tail and blunt head. By the end of the third day the boys were sneaking off on their own back to the wilds to get a break.

"Keep that in mind," Curtis said to the four that remained after the first left. "If you come back home, you're not getting easy times either. If you grow up easy, you grow up weak. If you're weak, you die. The end."

Soon, only Licorice and Dice remained. Licorice because he seemed oddly attached to his father. Dice because he had found an odd interest in all the various things he could do with his body besides swim, run, and hunt. As Shay watched Dice attempt to cut at the wood with his scales like his father did, she could almost hear his deep want for hands.

"I think you have a craftsman on your hands," she said one evening as she lounged within Curtis's coils. She went on to explain what she had observed about Dice.

Curtis seemed to find this both intriguing as well as confusing.

"He doesn't have hands."

For some reason, that sounded like a punchline to a bad joke, but Shay took it in stride.

"That doesn't mean he's not interested in creating things. An interest is the seed to talent. Maybe you should foster that by telling him the story of how you had to let a rabbit into your territory since he could build a roof better and faster than you."

Curtis's frown got ugly. "That's because you wanted to live in beast city next to your friend. I can build a wonderful den."

"Not all females want to live in a hole in the ground. Besides, it wasn't just a roof you lacked. You couldn't make medicine either. Didn't you originally have an idea of teaching your sons to be well rounded so they don't have to share their females?"

He hadn't forgotten that. She could see in his eyes.

"But you don't have to," she quickly added. "I know it's stretching your comfort zone just having them around."