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Rags nervously allowed Aya to check her hair for ears and skin for fur. Nope. No ears in sight, and her skin was smooth. When Aya went behind her, Rags was about to ask her what she was doing when she felt her pants being pulled back. She yipped, stood up rigid straight and her face was now a crimson mask of mortification and embarrassment. 

[color=cfb105]"Rags not dog!"[/color] She exclaimed, eyes tearing up adorably, though she was in no danger of crying. She calmed herself down by the time Aya answered her questions about the adults, and returned to sitting on her haunches, listening attentively. Despite Aya's misgivings about talking simpler, Rags understood what she was saying. You didn't have to be fully learned in grammar and language rules to get the gist of things.

That said, the explanation didn't quite make sense to her. Anyone can gain experience and knowledge. Anybody can be given good tools. Why was it determined that only at a certain age are you allowed these things? Who determined that? Maybe that's why everybody was so surprised when they heard about a child living alone in the wild. It wasn't that rags was alone. It was that she was a child. That's not how things work here. Children don't go out into danger alone here. A clearer picture was forming itself to Rags. And she didn't think it was fair. With knowledge and experience and tools, Rags could do what the adults could do.

Maybe that's what the apprenticeships and first level delving as supposed to be, but it wasn't testing. You don't learn to hunt in a forest by being allowed to explore a very small section of it and then being given food anyway. You learn faster by chasing and tracking for hours, across miles and miles of land. And you learn to delve by delving. By using the best tools, by going down deeper, with no safety nets. That's how Rags learned to live until now.

Rags was asked another question along with a nose bop by Aya, about the best thing she'd ever found by smell. She was about to answer, when an older child, not from the orphanage, approached the two, and asked about the missing kids. Rags responded by nodding, then looking to Aya, she could explain better than Rags.

[@liferusher][@FlitterFaux]