Circle of life

[Originally written July 11 2020]

As always, things started off calmly enough. My genetically engineered docile Grendel, Caliban, was settling in nicely. Cleo contracted a minor illness in the Jungle so I brought her to the Meso for some lemons and a puff of pink spray from the hoverdoc, then took her back to the Woodland. Brutus had made his home in the Learning Room, and in fact it seems most of the Grendels had learned to prefer it to the Jungle. Sadly, while I was checking in on him, I got a death notification – I was now down to two Norns, both male. There are two Grendels in this picture and I know which one I blame (hint: it’s not the blue one).

Before I corrected this though, I had another problem to deal with – one that Cleo was not helping! I had four Grendel eggs in my inventory, and the old girl added two more at once. They would turn out to be her final eggs, as she sadly passed away not long after. She was one of my favorites and I was sad to see her go, so when I decided to airlock the extra eggs to keep the population and gene pool under control, I spared the last two. I’m very glad that I put them to the far right of the cluster when I picked them up rather than just tossing them into the pile; otherwise I wouldn’t have known which eggs were Cleo’s!

With that taken care of, I needed to hatch a female Norn. Since we were down to just Yorick and Horatio, both generation 1 Norns, I once again hatched a Chichi rather than introducing a new breed. For safety’s sake, I brought the other two Norns and Caliban with me to the Meso so I could keep them safe while I hatched Helena.

I also took the opportunity to visit the crypt and register all the many deaths that had occurred since the last time I had a break long enough to process them. At this rate I’m going to use up all the best names!

Of course, Caliban’s not doing much good for the Grendel gene pool if he’s isolated with the Norns. He expressed being friendly so I moved him back to the Woodland with the females, and after making sure they got along, left them to their own devices while I returned to the Meso. I did, after all, have two eggs to hatch, preferably before the gene pool starts to shift and their introduction would become a step in the wrong direction.

I could not have been happier with the little ones who rolled out of those eggs! Two pure Banshee Grendels, one male and one female. The spitting images of their mother. And typical siblings too; while going through their training with the dummy, they kept proclaiming how much they liked their sibling while beating the crap out of each other! These special little Grendels needed special names. After some digging, I found that there was indeed a male/female pair of twins in a Shakespeare play. Thus they earned the names Sebastian and Viola!

Gertrude came down with something so I brought her some lemons and cleared the bacteria from her, and she seemed to be on the road to recovery, but she died mysteriously not long after – I am not sure whether Antigen 5 did her in or not, as it was clearing from her system at the time of her passing. But on the bright side, I collected two eggs, both fathered by Caliban. Out with the old and in with the new, I suppose.