The Beast watched as Steven acted rather peculiarly, which was saying something since nearly everything Steven did struck the Beast as odd. Steven would, for no apparent reason, let out these wailing noises that the Beast recognized as a noise others made after he’d stabbed them. It didn’t make sense, since Steven hadn’t been stabbed since before, and a little during, his nap.

It had gotten so bad the Beast had even attempted to stop Steven from making the highly irritating noise. His usual tactic of stopping the death screams as he thought of them, the same one he’d used on the deer a few minutes ago, wouldn’t work. Steven seemed to need his throat too much for that. But it was frustrating, all his non-lethal attempts seemed to do was make things worse in different ways. First, he’d tried to force Steven to look at his dead prey. That always made the Beast happier, so it was obvious that would work for Steven. Saying that had gone badly would be an understatement. Next the Beast had tried to give Steven his new favorite sharp lump of metal. He’d taken care to craft this one with a bit of a curve to it, with nice ridges for a handle and sharper than normal. He even washed the red gooey stuff off before handing it to Steven, who immediately started screaming at least two octaves higher.

That’s when the Beast decided to look at this through his new lens of thought. What did he want to stab? Steven’s need to do the rocking, crying, snot and slobber running down his face screaming thing. How should he go about stabbing that? By giving Steven something that would distract him from it. That was it, the Beast needed to stab the skin off the animal, that would make Steven happy!

The process was an absolute mess, but the Beasts lumps were sharper than they used to be, so there was less ripping and more cutting than when he’d made his own second skin. The deer smelled delicious, but the Beast was too distracted by Steven flailing his arms around and rolling on the ground to really appreciate the smell. There was a lot more to consider in putting something together, than tearing it apart. The old Beast would have just wrapped this second skin around itself and called it a day, but instead it magiced up some thin metal and started to craft this second skin into something that would hopefully shut Steven up for a bit. Twenty minutes went by lost in concentration. Then an hour. Then three. The beast noticed at some point Steven had stopped being a total nuisance. He’d had enough time to walk around, get lost in the woods for a minute, run back with a frantic look in his eye, and then settle down to watch the Beast craft.