Gossamer followed Ásta to the border of the Alabastrine Shrine where it met the tallgrass plains. The fox was going to show her another way to make a spear but in order to do that they needed to find some sticks and the tallgrass plains were rather short on trees. A wind storm had blow through the night before so they hoped to find some branches down close enough to Armada territory. Of course, as far as Gossamer knew, he Armada and Ashen were allies so they could probably announce themselves but to the girl it was kind of a challenge to see if she could find anything blown across onto their side. She scoured the ground then spied a fairly straight branch. Maybe that one would work! She bounded across the border grabbed the stick and then started dragging it back toward the Armada side.

Malachai was on the lookout for something new to chew on, his siblings weren't too fond of him chewing on their tails or ears and he'd basically worn out the lizard he'd found... so now he needed something else to keep his fangs occupied. He was after all mostly still kept from roughhousing with his siblings, and he was a bored puppy. Ashen probably should have been grateful he'd turned to chewing to deal with his boredom because he was already quickly growing, and would soon be quite a handful and hard to control if his mind turned to mischief. So when he caught a slightly familiar scent, one that had belonged to one of the pups at the training he immediately latched onto it, veering his idle paws towards the puppy he could smell and would quickly come up upon her, dragging a stick backward towards the border of the armada. Something clicked in for Malachai there, some kind of instinct, whether to protect resources or simply to play tug of war was unknown but he beat shadowy paws, and immediately picked up the free end of the stick and dug in to try pulling it back. "Panic" | "Malachai" | "Belladona" | "Lurch"

ooc: sorry for the wait!

Gossamer's retrieval of the stick was cut short as a boy her own age bounded out of nowhere and grabbed the other end of the stick. Her eyes narrowed and she would have yelled at him but she didn't dare let go of the stick. A low puppy growl emerged from her throat as she tried to pull the stick back over to her side. However, it was quickly becoming clear that she was fighting a losing battle as the boy was bigger and heavier than her even though she dug her paws in as much as she could.

At that moment Ásta returned with a couple sticks. The giant fox saw the pups and sighed for a moment before setting the sticks down. "Let him have it Gossamer. I have some sticks here that will work for our spears. Now come here and start chewing off the excess branches so we have a clean surface."

Gossamer's brow furrowed and she pulled back hard before letting go. "Fine." She looked at the boy. "You can have that one then." With a toss of her head she trotted over to one of the sticks her companion brought her and she started pulling off the excess branches.

The fox looked over to the boy and nodded in greeting. "Hello." She looked to Gossamer then poked her charge. The girl sighed dramatically and sat up. "I'm Gossamer Fatalis, princess of the Armada. Who are you?"

There was something exhilarating about gaining ground against the smaller girl, his own puppy growl rising to meet her own. He started to shake his head, his tail beating against the air. Now this was play he could get into! Soon enough his fun would come to an end though as a fox bound towards the girl, telling her to let him have the stick and... with a flounce the girl let go, the end dropped to the ground and almost instantly his tail stopped, hanging in the air for a moment before it dropped. He dropped his end of the stick and looked down at it dejectedly, his brow furrowing. The girl introduced herself and the boy lifted his mismatched gaze... oh so she was related to Mr. mud fur himself! Great... Were all these dumb Fatalises this snooty? "I'm Malachai Klein." He said, narrowing his eyes at her, wasn't the Armada supposed to serve the empire? He was almost certain he'd heard that from his mother at some point. Wouldn't that make him more important than her since the empire belonged to his family? He was in some contexts a prince... even if his mother wasn't a queen. "What're you doin'?" He asked, stepping forward to peer at the sticks at her paws, there wasn't really any sign of curiosity in his voice, the truth was he wasn't really thinking about what she was doing... so much as wanting to know what it was that was oh so important as to abandon the game he felt they had been playing. "Panic" | "Malachai" | "Belladona" | "Lurch"

Gossamer cocked her head at the name. Another Klein? There sure seemed to be a lot of them around. Probably a really big family or something. "I'm making a spear. I haven't quite decided what I'll do after I'm done." She stared at the stick for a moment as a wicked grin passed over her face. "Maybe I'll poke my brother with it." In reality this was just practice and when she made a really good one then she could ask her dad to show her how to use it.

"You can make one with your stick if you want. You'll need to chew off the extra branches and leaves to make something fairly straight. Then you can sharpen the point by scraping it on a rock." The fox looked to Gossamer and nodded. Gossy picked up her stick, positioning her jaws near the tip of the stick then scraping it on the edge of a nearby rock. She worked back and forth at it until she had a dull point.

For all his dislike of what he was quickly starting to see as the Fatalis' self-importance, he couldn't help but smirk as she suggested using her spear to poke at her brother. He hoped she meant Kotori, she didn't know how many Fatalises there were... or if all Fatalises were siblings... after all, there were a lot of Kleins and only three of them were his siblings. But that didn't stop him from hoping his half friend, half sparring partner would be her victim. The fox spoke to him and Malachai nodded absently for a moment, then moved back over to the stick he'd grabbed earlier, dragging it over and lowering onto his stomach, he balanced the stick between his forepaw. The girl was scraping away at it with a rock... but that seemed dumb to Malachai so instead he set about stripping the stick using his teeth. By the time he was done he'd had more than his fill of bark and his stick looked distinctly worse than the girl's. He glared at his own stick for a moment. "Is this even actually gonna be useful?" He could see how it might be fun to use to poke at things from a distance but it seemed unwieldy and hard to balance with. "Panic" | "Malachai" | "Belladona" | "Lurch"