Tag Archives: Creatures

I’d almost forgotten that I’d lost two norns. It’d been a month since I stopped blogging in favor of welcoming my husband home and seeing to a TON of obligations with his family. Maybe someday I can afford the trip home to see mine.

Anyway, I still had 4 norns – two male and two female but not one of them was younger than 4 hours. Opal, who was over 4 and a half hours old and Lydia who was over 7 and a half hours old were both starting to take longer and longer to recover from their pregnancies.

I took some time to teach the norns the rest of their vocabularies while I mulled over what to do about the population. I basically had two open slots now but I wasn’t in a rush to hatch those eggs just yet. I had just come back and wasn’t sure who was who or what I was doing.

A quick census was all I needed to come back, though.

Aidan was still stuck, staring at the lemon, Bobby was playing with the lifts, Opal was napping in the lower levels of the island and Lydia was playing with the jack in the box and having a generally good time, smiling even.

I then glimpsed at the eggs. I had a total of 6 of them and a gap after the first. Because of the gender ratio, I guessed that I’d made a slot available for a first gen egg! Sounds just like me, anyway.

I then remembered to turn on the observation kit and lo, it seems everyone was feeling just fine! I did have to feed Opal once when her health dipped below 60 but a honey pot had her fixed right up. She did sample the Campanula on the island but she fought off the effects fine on her own.

As I tried to figure out how to use the “Think” word from Encyclopaedia Nornica, Bobby made his way to Opal on the island. I kept them well fed but if I remember right, these two were such good breeders I didn’t think they’d need my help.

I checked on Lydia in the meantime and found she’d reached the next stage of life – she had grey on the tips of her ears and in the hair on her head. She seemed very tired but after a long nap, she was ready to pull mama. However, I’d noticed an issue. In making my rounds, I learned that Lydia, Aidan and Bobby weren’t experiencing hunger.

It was about then that I’d decided to export everyone and their eggs and start over. It seemed like I was starting to have all sorts of weird issues.

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All it took was finding the bees, apparently. She scooped up a honey pot and started chowin’ down. I was glad to see she was finally going to be OK! Look at that smug smile. It just says “I knew I’d be OK all along. Hah! Made you worry for nothing.”

As for Aidan, I don’t know what was wrong. My best guess is that something happened to his drives when he got sick. A closer look at the Norn genes showed that this sort of thing shouldn’t happen. Poor guy. I wish I could help him.

He did manage to settle down long enough for a nap, though. That was a good consolation.

Meanwhile, Bobby and Lydia were playing near the jukebox. I eventually shut the thing off myself but they were otherwise just fine. Opal and the grendel were in the underwater observatory and our grendel friend was saying “food”. The empty honey cans gave me an idea what he wanted. Also, he’d apparently named himself “bpbp”.

Soon enough, I had another pregnancy notification. Even though she was nearly 7 hours old, Lydia showed no signs of slowing down when it came to laying eggs. Ths was good news. A 6th egg would be great to have in case a plague wiped out this population. That wasn’t likely with everyone spreading out the way they were, but a backup plan is always a smart idea.

Speaking of smart, I wanted to communicate better with my norns, so I got the Encyclopedia Nornica and visited each norn with each book. Strangely, visiting Aidan with the book seemed to cheer him up!

Somehow, Gavin became sick with Antigen 1 and, naturally, Babs didn’t want to leave his side . Gavin wouldn’t be separated from her to feed or to quarantine. He stubbornly stood his ground and eventually got Babs sick too, despite my best effors to prevent it, including using the sky tram.

They both coughed and cried in the company of the grendel, who also managed to make his way up to the bees nest. It seemed like there wasn’t much I could do. Even surrounded by honey they didn’t eat. Despite my best efforts, including slaps when Gavin got desperately ill, he wouldn’t eat. His health dropped to 7%.  When it dropped to just 6%, he passed away.After that, I wasn’t in the least optimistic about Babs. I didn’t have time to mourn Gavin when I was trying to feed Babs who was difficult about eating anyway. Then, out of the blue, Opal became pregnant. I prepared myself as Babs’ health dipped to 9%, 8%, 7%, 6%, all the way down to a paltry 2% and then she said “sleep” and passed away. Eerie last words.

I suppose a macabre consolation to this is that she died doing what she loved – ignoring my pleas with her to eat food.

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