Breaking from the Shell

Validus catches one more fish and swallows it before surfacing.

"Hello"
He responds

Validus cocks his head slightly
"Home?"

He hadn't really thought about it, but he doesn't have a home it seems


"No...I haven't chosen a nest or anything yet..."
He replies, looking back towards the others a little

A storm was coming. Varek stayed inside his cavern, thinking of ways he could avert death all while saving the home. The area was full of trees, so he would be safe from most of the wind, and he trusted his cavern was sturdy enough, being made of clay, rock, and supported by the roots of the large tree in the center of the island. The problem was flooding. The tree was in the center of the island, while the cave was on the side nearest the lake. Although the cave was above the water level in its entrances, parts of it dipped down, most notably a large area in the center. And the water level could always rise. Fortunately, it was mainly clay, with the exception of large boulders apparently lodged into the dirt walls and rock beneath it, vegetation above, meaning water couldn't easily seep in. The main problem would be water flooding in from the upper entrance via the river, spilling through the cave, and washing everything out through the lower entrance.

He couldn't make the upper entrance smaller, that would be inconvenient, and parts of the lower part of the cave were dirt. He needed to somehow safely channel water out of the cave without it flushing out everything currently in the cave. Varek sat and pondered how he knew this before realizing time was short. Tunneling in wet clay wasn't an easy job to do without something long. Varek ventured outside into the beloved forest and picked out a somewhat wide in diameter, long, and straight fallen branch before reentering the cave. He drilled a few holes in the lower side of the cave, continuing to twist the branch until he felt no more resistance on the other side, a symbol that he'd breaken through. Often times he'd hit a boulder or find the wall was too thick, or possibly a branch, and would have to start over. The second part of the plan was to dig channels all over the cave, to drain out water seeping through the walls and divert small amounts coming in from the higher enterance. He planned to do this with the branch, but turns out, it broke. He had to use his claws, wasting time.

After some channels were dug, mainly concentrated around the center and lower parts of the room, all leading into the holes he'd made. Now it was time to hold back the main flood should it happen, usually as a huge wave coming from the highest point of the river. Since both entrances of the cave were on the riverbanks, none of which faced directly towards the river's source, the water flooding in would be limited, but not insignificant. Varek figured he had no chance of holding it back, so he got to work piling clay up on both sides of the top entrance in two mini walls leading down to the bottom. This, would take time.

Once Nerea's inner instinct recognized a storm--a coming storm--as bad news for her nest and not good for her, she quickly gathered that it was no point trying to find a place to sleep outside when she already had the strange human's cave. She knew it was still early. She knew that she had time until the rain started to pour; and so she didn't consider putting some leaves on the cave's rock floor a priority.

Instead she opened her--now much wider--wings and flew off the ground in direction of nowhere in particular. She acknowledged that being airborne when the sky was full of charged electricity probably wasn't the best of choices. But she was willing to risk a couple of scales for a day of... joyflying?

It was probably an immediate stroke of luck that just an hour after Nerea decided to do nothing in particular that she got bored and dived down to get some fallen leaves for her nest in the cave. When she was in front of the entrance, she stopped dead in her tracks as she realized that there wasn't no entrance.

Annoyed, the purple dragon flew away without further examination, leaving the twigs there and then.

She knew she really had to find herself a nest now. She had some kind of personal obligation over herself. And then she concluded that she did not feel like doing it at all. For the first time in her life, Nerea felt the weight of responsibility crash down into her stomach. Lumping into her throat. It wasn't pleasant.

Varek had finished the 'walls'. He hesitated to call them that since they didn't reach the ceiling, and were more like clay mounds that were slightly more long than wide. Yes, not walls. The cavern's entrances were wide albeit long tunnels, so Varek figured his stash would be somewhat safe from the wind, and so would he. For safety reasons, however, he decided it was best to put all the small objects and sticks into a small but relatively deep hole in the cave floor he tried to dig up.

"Mmmmm..."
Validus hums. He would then crawl out of the water and look up at the sky, noting the storm. He makes his way into the forest in order to find somewhere to take shelter

(This is rather unsafe... I should find a way to shelter myself) Pacis thought to himself, as he began to burrow underground. After he found himself ten feet down, he began to burrow a small den taking him only ten minutes. He then dug deeper down from the entrance hole as to lead leaking water away from the den, he dug it fifteen more feet down and then made a small space around it twenty five feet in diameter, then crawled upwards to the den. (That should keep it from overflooding, although I'll have to learn to live with the dampness of the wet earth. If it does begin to flood I should think of making an escape route... Perhaps if I dug further along... But a pathway might collapse...)