The carmine babe is very bored. She travels alone, volcanic orbs dancing along the black surface of the tar pits, an erotic expression gripping her features. So many animals have fallen victim to these pits, and as she passes the fools within the pits she can't help but laugh. What idiots! How could they have been foolish enough to fall victim to the pits? Surly everyone knows the danger that lurks beneath the bubbling surface. The babe stops in her tracks, the screeching of a live mammal catching her attention. Her eyes shift toward her right, and she beholds a rabbit whom is waist deep in the tar, its skull thrashing from left to right as it tries deperatly to free itself. The babe reclines onto her haunches, a devious smirk playing across her lips as she reaches a single paw toward the rabbit. Dauntingly she runs the tip of its right ear between her toes, showing the animal she has the power to free it although she has no intentions of doing so. "If only you were strong enough to pull yourself free... What a shame." She taunts, lips curling to reveal her deadly fangs.

"Why aren't you helping it?" came a still-youthful voice from behind Fia as she stared at the struggling rabbit. His orange eyes moved slowly from lapine creature to the familiar bright red pelt of the young woman. They'd met briefly when they were pups, and he could remember a name - Fiamette, but could remember little else about her. He rarely wandered from home, and yet twice now out of that handful of times he'd run into her. Strange. He'd not, in fact, even had a reason to leave pack lands today, only that odd restlessness that seemed to infect many yearling wolves though he was in general he simply ignored it. He'd seen the bright red of her coat against the blackness of the tar almost immediately upon entering these lands, and had gravitated toward that one bright spot of color. He was nearly oblivious to the nuances of her body language, seeing only her, staring at the rabbit as it thrashed squealing, and not much moved to hasty action he stayed where he was, a few feet away, as he watched. ""

A familiar voice breaches the woman's audits, and immediately her skull sharply turns toward her left, a single orb glancing in his direction to behold the face the voice belonged to. Familiar golden hues drape the flourishing bodice of the impending man, the one she had met in the gully when she was a pup. Their meeting had been brief, the only thing she can remember about him is his name. "Ahh, Hephaestus. How nice of you to intrude." She says, her lips falling to her usual emotionless expression. Her head turns toward the rabbit, her eyes falling upon the flailing form with unwavering interest. "Come site with me, and perhaps you will receive an answer." She beckons to him, her ebony dipped tail flicking as she curls it around her body. She reaches her paw out again, this time pressing it forcefully against the base of the hares skull so that it would sink another inch into the tar's abyss. "Speech"

Her greeting was less than enthusiastic, possibly even less than polite, but Hephaestus wasn't phased by it. He continued to stand stoically there, though the shrieking of the rabbit brought a knot of concern to his brow. It seemed to upset. It might even be hurting - that stuff looked disconcertingly hot. It was just a food animal but... She said he might receive an answer to his question if he came to sit with her, and he did want to know, so slowly he moved to oblige her, settling on his haunches at her side to stare at the creature. His confusion simply grew, however, when she simply pushed the rabbit further in. "What are you doing?" he asked, his voice filled simply with confusion and uncertainty rather than accusation. He simply couldn't fathom someone actually wanting to harm another creature, so surely she had some reason for what she was doing. ""

A few seconds of silence would pass before the shuffling of paw steps would fill the air. A smile would grip her features as he moved to sit beside her, but it would dissapear by the time he reaches her side. The rabbit screams in agony as it sinks farther into the abyss, and she recoils her paw to press it against her chest. "I'm playing reaper. Would you care to join me?" A single orb glances in his direction, the corners of her lips creasing into a demonic smirk. Her fangs are exposed, her tongue rolling along her incisors in a very suggestive manner. Her gaze turns back on the rabbit, who is sinking deeper and deeper by the minute. By now it has sunk almost to it's shoulders. "Speech"

Steady as he was, Hephaestus shifted uncomfortably as the rabbit continued to struggle. Sitting next to Fiamette had done nothing to truly explain things, and it's agonized screams were simply getting more desperate. It was actually... really horrible. Fiamette's explanation made no sense to him. He had no concept of the reaper as a personification of death - he was far too literal for metaphor. He grasped only the definition of the word, a harvester, but he did not see what she did as a harvest. "I don't understand," he admitted in a rumble. "Why not just kill it cleanly? It's suffering." ""

The boy admits that he does not understand what she means, and asks why she does not kill the rabbit cleanly instead of torturing it. She does not answer him with words, but instead glances toward him again to ensure he is watching. She sees him staring at the rabbit, and she takes action. Her paw reaches out again, this time coming down upon the rabbits skull with an admirable amount of force, enough to drown the mammal within the pit. Its ears are the last to sink beneath the black abyss, the woman's magma hued eyes never leaving the boy as she sealed its death. She wanted to see his reaction, she wants to know how the boy fairs while in the face of death. "The gods do not ask us to cleanly offer them sacrifices. They will enjoy this as much as they would enjoy an instant death." She says to him, her tone of voice dauntingly cool although she had just tortured a small animal in front of another wolf.

It eats at him, this confusing, this not understanding, and he worries at the situation as a dog chewing a bone, turning it, flipping it, examining it, but still it makes no sense. His concept of right is very simplistic, shades of black and white with no gray. Yet he has never seen evil before, can't truly wrap his mind around the idea that someone would do bad things on purpose, and so in his child-like innocence everything that is not Good is simply... Other. And this was definitely Other, but people could be... Fia couldn't possibly be... not-good. So while his ears pinned back at the sight of her smashing the rabbit down to drown in the broiling black tar, he simply sat and processed without condemnation. "If you say so," he offered simply, uncertainly. How was he to know what gods wanted for sacrifices? He was supposed to be one but no one had ever sacrificed to him before so he didn't really know how that really worked. It didn't seem right but every time he saw her she was just so confident in all her answers, while he felt like he knew nothing and just had to guess. He hated guessing, it was just so... hasty. "How do you know all this anyway? Does someone tell you or do you just know?" No one ever really told him anything. His voice was a little crestfallen as he continued. "Are we supposed to already know how all this all works?"

Hephaestus pins his ears at the sight of the rabbit going under, three small bubbles coming to the surface as the last of its air escapes its lungs. The bubbles bring an amused sneer to the woman's face, curling the corners of her velveteen lips in a demonic way. It was obvious she felt no remorse for her actions, no sympathy for the rabbit or its death. She barley notices him speak, it wasn't until he asks how she knows all this that he fully grasps her attention again. Her demonic sneer fades, a numb expression overtaking her striking features. Pulling her paw back to her body she cocks her head toward him, her eyes aiming to align with his own. ?I just know. I can feel it in my bones, I can feel the impulse rushing through my veins. I can feel their wants, I can sense their needs, their desires.? She says as she glances up at the sky, as if a god himself would descend to applaud her. ?You don't feel it, Hepheastus? You don't feel the power coursing through your veins? You don't feel the pulsing of their blood within you?? Her head turns toward him again, her right brow cocked. Was this boy really a god then? How could he be if these desires, these sudden impulses to do wrong, did not exist within him? ?Speech?

She just sounded so sure of herself. Talking of just knowing, of feeling it in her blood and power and all that. He just didn't have that. The confidence, the sure knowledge, the feeling of power... most of the time he really didn't feel anything, or at least not the way everyone else described it. He didn't really grasp the concept of intuition, equating her words instead with emotional feelings rather than senses. To him there was no inner senses, no hunches, no notions. He thought everything out so thoroughly that just "knowing" something would never occur to him as possible. Everyone else seemed to feel things so strongly, so passionately, and they were always in such a rush to do things because of it. Him, he just... couldn't. It was really hard to get emotional about anything. "I don't know if I really feel anything at all," he spoke quietly, with a great deal of thought. "I don't know what that means about me, but..." He shrugged awkwardly. His mind crept further along the same track, recalling how his mother always believed that they were stronger and smarter and better than other wolves because they were gods, yet... Yet he didn't know how to be a god and his mother... "Fiamette, have you ever wondered... if we're gods, why is it we can still get hurt? Are we really gods after all?" His voice dropped in timbre after his last few words, embarrassment creeping in that he would question both his family's assertion that the Olympians were gods, and Fia's assertion that her family were gods.