“What’s that?” Ziran asked, pointing at the piece of paper Cain was writing on. The vampire didn’t give him any kind of acknowledgement. The only noise he made was the occasional click as he forced more lead out of the mechanical pencil.

Kunto sighed and curled up on the floor of Adonai’s temporary room. His eyes drifted over to a grandfather clock in the corner, following the pendulum as it swung back and forth. The catboy crawled over to the clock and watched the pendulum so closely that his nose was pressed against the glass.

“Oooooohhh,” he exclaimed, lifting up a hand to poke at the glass. The clock let out a loud chime before Ziran’s finger could reach its target, causing the windigo to scramble back over to Cain and hide under the vampire’s desk with his tail between his legs, literally. The one-eyed man moved his legs to give Kunto more room without uttering a single word.

Ziran stayed under the desk long after the clock stopped chiming. After what seemed like hours, he grew bored and decided to indulge in one of his favorite pastimes: Looking through random rooms in the Dome. The catboy crawled out from under the desk and told Cain, “I’m gonna go to the Dome place now, okie dokie?”

“Sure,” Cain said, putting the finishing touches on whatever he was working on. Ziran turned and started was halfway to the door when the vampire suddenly, roughly, smacked his back. The force of the smack nearly knocked the windigo onto his face and sent him sliding into the door.

“Sorry about that,” the vampire said, helping Ziran up and brushing him off. “You had a really big bug on your back.”

~

Two hours later…

“Aww,” the catboy whined, shutting yet another boring door. So far all he’d found were empty rooms, forests, and training grounds, save for the last one he opened. Inside that one he saw what he assumed to be a man and a woman wrestling with each other and moaning, though he couldn’t exactly see through the blanket they’d had over them.

He trudged on and grabbed yet another doorknob. He promised himself that this would be the last door, and he’d go home if there wasn’t anything interesting behind it. Ziran opened it slowly, and found something very, very interesting on the other side.

“It’s a cloud,” he said happily, starting to get excited. He reached an arm into the room and waved it around, finding that it was a normal cloud. “It’s really a cloud! Awesome! So fluffy looking too!”

He waved his arm a bit more, giggling like a giddy schoolgirl. His giggling stopped the instant his hand smacked something that definitely wasn’t a cloud. Whatever he hit was likely living, because he thought he heard some kind of cry of indignation before whatever it was finished passing through the cloud.

“I should go,” he was beginning to say, when he suddenly felt a very rough kick in the butt. The blow knocked him through the doorway and caused Cain’s “Kick me!” sign to fall off the catboy’s back and drift down to the floor. The lizard man who’d kicked Ziran laughed and closed the door.