Boy, that escalated quickly!

 [Originally written July 1 2020]

I began with a male Bengal and a female Chichi, Oberon and Titania, and gingerly introduced them to the Grendels. To my immense surprise, the reactions were the opposite of what I’d expected. Cleo, the supposedly-vicious Banshee Grendel, never laid a claw on them. 

She just… followed them. Everywhere. Wherever they went, there she was, looming over them and staring like the little stalker she is. 

I would include a montage of Cleo creepin’ on the Norns, but I didn’t have much time to take pictures of this behavior in the chaos ensued soon after I moved everybody into the Woodland Terrarium (the Meso gets crowded quickly and is my usual base of operations, so I wanted to enjoy what the Ark had to offer for once).

This was the part where I realized that Antony was a problem creature. First of all, he turned out to be the vicious one. I fully expected him to be the easier one to tame but he’s probably the most aggressive Grendel I’ve ever encountered. This would still be manageable if he wasn’t also the... shall we say, friskiest Grendel I’ve ever encountered. 

I literally did not know Grendels could reproduce so quickly. I didn’t even really have time to take pictures, and that was with me slowing things down by putting eggs in my inventory. I just hatched one egg, taught the Grendel how to speak, gave them a quick course on “hit toy/gadget yes, hit norn no” and rushed them off into the Woodland to deal with the next egg. This later turned out to be a mistake.

I hatched three eggs in relatively quick succession. The first yielded a male I named Prospero. When I hatched the second, I was greeted by a death notification. When clicked, it took me – for some reason – to the Woodland, where I feared the worst… but I couldn’t find anything amiss, so I returned to the Meso, where I saw the cause of the notification. The second egg, sadly, had yielded a stillborn.

I didn’t have much time to deal with this because I got yet another pregnancy notification. This egg hatched a female I called Ophelia. She, too, got rushed through training so I could stop the madness and figure out what to do about Antony – and he was definitely the one initiating all this. Cleo, on the other hand, seemed pretty content to just hit gadgets and stare at Norns. 

I attempted to deal with the problem via the hoverdoc's reduce fertility feature. I soon had two more Grendels to deal with, so you can see how well that worked out. I rushed Iago and Hamlet through training so quickly I didn’t actually get decent pictures of them for quite a while. 

Banshee Grendels age more slowly than Jungle Grendels, which Iago inherited, so he was still small when I finally got his picture. Most of the others, however, took after their father, and grew quite quickly. 

Hamlet had grown quite a bit by the time I snapped a picture of him giving a rather… interesting soliloquy. Truly, Shakespearian wit at its finest.

Ophelia, in particular, had mutated to an extreme and grown old in under half an hour. I then got not one but two simultaneous pregnancy notifications – twins. At first I thought it was Antony and Cleo again but to my shock, it was Titania!

She laid two dark eggs, which I promptly stashed in my inventory to hatch after I’d dealt with the Grendel situation. I took Antony to the med bay with the intention of injecting him with something to make him calm down but I couldn’t find anything, so I decided it was in everybody’s best interests to isolate him. I returned him to the Woodland and left the creatures unattended for only a couple minutes while I set things up to do so, but that unfortunately was all it took – before I knew what was happening, both Norns had been slapped to death.

Well, this has certainly gotten off to a poor start.