“Camazots! That was incredibly sloppy! You wasted HOW much of your good fat on shedding that blast? Wasteful ungrateful child of mine! Live up to your name and THINK!”

Mother Grue fretted and yelled a lot. But it was for her children’s own good. These were gentle feedings. Well tread and known prey. Practically pre prepared and laid out for them to sup upon at their leisure.

But it was not always so easy. And they needed to conserve and take care lest the family be caught unawares by some strange beast or anger one of the terrors of the void.

“Mother grue! Mother Grue! I took out a stinger just like you told me too! Look look! I even did the pose just right and made the little food calls too!”

She turned her attention from tending the ‘come-hither’ song lure to look at the excited loops and spirals of delight and laughter one of her daughters was doing around the tall columns and nests of the food. Swinging delectable edibles around in snapping whipping flourishes to show all the prey she stuck with the trick.

“Very good Ursula! Now swallow your food! Don’t leave them hanging out like that! Someone might steal them! GRENDEL I see what your doing there with the plague spore! Put it away! We don’t want to waste that! Do you know how long I worked on it?!”

She whirled and sweeped her wings about to put her full ire and attention on the wayward son. But he petulantly flipped about and did not disarm the munitions.

“But when they puff up they taste so much better! We haven’t had plague-puffs for sooo long! I’m tired of spook poke! It’s so BORING”

Mother Grue spun in agitation and ran some arithmetic. If they had a good supper here at this prey nest, and then a decent breakfast, brunch, elevensies, luncheon, and dinner that should give her enough time to stock all of her children with backup munitions.

“Alright Grendel, at next Supper we will use a plague. But until then it’s spook poke and lancers! No disengage that armament now!”

Grendel, second to youngest of her children moped but he disengaged and stowed the plague muntion back into his belly where it belonged.

There that should keep the offspring placated and focused on slurping up their dinner so that she could keep watch for-

“What about cult-frou?! I want cult-frou! We haven’t had cult-frou for way longer than plague-puff!”

And now Bathory the youngest of all her children is crying and throwing her food around in a tantrum. Truely a mother’s duty is never done, yes she had sheltered and nurtured her twenty-six children. She set their course to sweep the long way for their meals and avoided the horrible fiery hate at the lip of one of the feeding shells.

Yet times like this she sometimes wondered why she did not just kick the ungrateful fry out on their own to experience what real life was like. But they were still so young! Only a thousand and forty meals at the oldest! She was ten times as wise a hunter when she had set out on her own with a brother and mate.

Still if bathory didn't eat and kept hurling the food around like that a lot of it would go to waste and her children were still much too lean for that. Much too lean.

“Bathory dear, I promise we will do a cult-frou as soon as we can, but it requires a lot more time and work and most of your brothers and sisters need a good store of fat to take a nap before we can do that. And it’s hardly worth it for just a quick dinner! I promise when we find a proper soft feast we will settle in for cult-frou but you need to be patient my little black fluke”

Kamazots bless his wings and gentle nature helped her in consoling bathory.

“I’d like to do a cult-frou too Bathory, I’ve even got some ideas to help you with your lures! We can talk about it on the way to breakfast!”

There now she was distracted and actually chewing her food again. Although a lot of it had been smeared all over the nest pylons uselessly. Wasted food made Mother Grue squirm inside. Her parent’s pack and her own and all the ones that anyone has told of had been lean. Scrimping and saving and living mostly on spook poke.

She remembered being young and rambunctious and feeling like her stores would last forever! Wanting to hurl every trick of fiery doom and rake wastefully across a nest during a meal. Cook the food to charred almost uselessly burnt dust or unleash terrible savory spices upon it with every feeding even if it took twenty or more meals to mix the spice properly!

Holding back and pulling a spook-poke for a meal was never as satisfying as when you had to unleash half your fat stores in munitions and never mind how bad she would feel for the meals afterwards as she built up to restore those spent weapons.

And it’s not like a few extra plagues for a few times in a row in the meals would actually be bad for the children right now (It took a lot for the food to notice a plague pattern and become immune). But Grue was a mother and she knew that they would need to learn proper discipline and meal care. One needed good habits to live a healthy life on the reef!

So she would chide them, she would hold back on giving into every desire for a plague munition, or wasting time on insidious cults, or just plain burning half a food nest to char because they were impatient.

They needed to know the fundamentals. And it was hard to get more fundamental in this part of the reef then the tried and true ‘spook’ of instigating the food’s own defensive response to do half your work for you. And then the low energy intensive ‘poke’ to eliminate said defenses to allow for leisurely feeding in the chaos.

Of course they cheated a bit, Mother Grue and her mother before her and her mother before that had lucked into a wonderful bit of magic! The lure song was a honed and precise little trick, legend told it was stolen for them by a far distant ancestral kin. A dear who traded her life and soul to the terrible fire mount on the outwelling so that she would have the chance to sneak this secret to her kin.

Mother grue did not want to think what horrors had befallen her distant ancestor and whatever poor children she had been forced to beget as the fire mount’s whore. Never to taste a proper meal again! Turned as an instrument and weapon against their own kin!

Or maybe it was just a story, there were a lot of those in the family. Big boasts of hunters who stole stars! Of strange lands where it was the family who crawled along the reef and the food which eat them and danced in the glorious sky!

Many stories that Mother Grue told dutifully to her own children but that she had to admit she was unsure which were true and which were not.

But the lure song worked on the majority of the most troublesome and wriggly of the food, gathered them up and drew them in. When combined with a few careful bursts of painstakingly learned calls and flashes of the food noises it tended to make meals much easier to prepare and save on wasted munitions.

Let Mother Grue’s family and pack keep the really exhausting stuff in reserve for emergencies.

Like right now.

“Ho! Carcharodon! Ho Balrog! Spot flashers! Foodnest is stinging from afar!”

She called her eldest sons named for the strength of their jaws and the fire in their barrages to attention. Then swept herself up high to join them in an array, calling and flipping their fins and wings about to each other in subtle little cues. Discussing and assembling the picture at a distance.

Soon she was calling the rest of her still feeding daughters and sons in close so they could weave a disk of eyes to better appreciate the signs.

“It’s a sweeping line of stings”

“Heavy given that load of fire and smoke”

“Tuned to biggest burn?”

“Could be could be, probably yes”

“Will flatten the nest here, kill all the food”

“Ruin the whole meal?!”

“Ruin it all in ashy dust!”

“No fair! We just finished cleaning out the stingers! I’ve barely started eating!”

“Fret not fret not!”

Mother Grue spun in laughter and called and sweeped to her children to belay their fears. It was a surprising but not unheard of thing to deal with a rotten spiteful meal. Some times neighboring food nests would try to deny her family and pack their feeding. She had seen it done before and knew what to do, her aunt and uncle had showed her.

“This right here my children is why we do spook and poke often enough to always have a reserve. Now do not worry, we will have our meal and it seems our next as well since they are so gallantly trying to draw our attention, now together children! Give them a single target and ready your arms and munitions! We will strike their stings from the sky before they even so much as warm our meal with their light! Together children HO!”

And they swam back up into the open sky, above and away from the tallest towers so their line of sight would be uninterrupted, and then did they see the lines and trajectories of the many missiles converging from food nests afar.

But she was undeterred, Mother Grue kept her arithmetic keen so she knew the yields and reserves of her family.

They had enough stores to take on four or five nests and their full ordained allotments of weaponry and even if those ran low her daughters and sons could do with a little bit of more precise maneuvers and simply slap the missiles out of the sky.

But she did not think it would come to that. Her family had hunted these parts of the reef for meals uncountable and the habits of the food that lived upon this sweeping star shell were well known to them.

So she was unconcerned and gave the howl to fire full barrage.

Her family and children laughed and spun as they were finally allowed to let loose interceptors and high coherence particle beams. Cutting off the approach of the feeble food stings from well before they even crossed into the black leafed perimeter that surrounded the nest in a glistening belt.

The sound of her children at play made all the frustrations of earlier in the meal melt away from Mother Grue’s munition factories.

She loved to see them happy.