“Great Mother damn it!” howled a Lesser Lyrhean as he pounded his fist into the ground. “How the hell do your kind know more than us?!”

A very apologetic cultist, a human one, tried to explain that they had generations of time to learn and perfect these things, but as you might expect this did little to lower the anger levels of the Lesser Lyrhean.

“And that just adds injury to insult, or vice versa! How can humans, mere naked apes, with no magical or divine power whatsoever be capable of that?! It makes no fucking sense how your kind existed before ours!”

“Evolution and natural selection are bitches, aren’t they?”

“Who the fu-…” the Lesser Lyrhean stopped mid-sentence as he noticed Luxnilae looming over him. “Oh.”

Luxnilae shrugged. It wasn’t like she had not asked that very same series of questions a few dozen times since her ascension. But the rules that governed Old Earth and the New Earth were (in some cases) radically different, and while nature still selected the most decent via brutal trial and error and while it was hypothesized that, given enough time, evolution would occur via natural selection, the fact remained that the rules had, at least partially, changed.

“Old Earth very well might have been ruled by the reptilian master race had the universe not thrown a massive chunk of rock at it, among other things. Thank the universe for the KT Mass Extinction Event and the relegation of Old Earth Reptiles and Birds to being mere animals while Mammals took control.” Looking away, Luxnilae shrugged again.. “Or don’t.”

“But…” The Lesser Lyrhean whose name is so inconsequential it doesn’t bear mentioning tried to come up with an adequate reply, but couldn’t. “It… it just isn’t fair…”

“Old Earth was never fair, nor was it just, save for those with the power and authority to make it so.” Frosrahsa added as she walked over. “The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the ones in the middle had to go either way. Those in high places used their position to grow and control and manipulate, and the rest of humanity just kinda nodded their heads and accepted it. The world slowly died, and yet humanity decided it had better things to do than avoid the end of civilization, and for various reasons.”

“Then that just proves-!”

“But.” interceded Pynzar as she, too, joined the rant about the Old Earth. “did that make things truly bad?” She looked at the ones present. “I believe a dead man once said that all of modern life was made because those who lived stood on the shoulders of giants, or some such thing. That those who came before gave their lives and effort to allow their descendants to live a better, more peaceful, more pleasant and easy life than they themselves.”

“And?” Luxnilae was obviously not convinced about that being a thing that applied here.

“Well,” Pynzar’s helm accidentally slid down to cover her face, and instantly the normally collected and formerly shy woman vanished, replaced by a bullish and crass brute. “What it means, dumbfuck, is that we, as the gods damned superior race, can claim the spoils of those that came before us as our rightful prize and plunder. The ‘giants’ that carved that fucking path are gone or belong to us, so we can take from their broken corpses what we want and leave the rest to rot. Or did that really go over your dumbass head you idiot bitch?”

“Off this goes.” Frosrahsa lifted Pynzar’s visor and her demeanor shifted just as fast.

“What I was trying to say is that everything from the past now is ours, and therefore we can claim the work of the past as our own, as we are the inheritors of it.” Pynzar’s more mellow and calm persona stated. “So, the giants whose shoulders we now stand on are giving us all that they made and all they achieved, all so that we can do what they could not and would not. The Old Earth’s legacy all the good and ill, is ours to do with as we see fit, and we need to-” the visor slipped down again “- fucking stop being gods-damned pussies about it and just do what we fucking want when we fucking want to do it. Stop whining about the past that can’t be changed like a little bitch and just learn already, fucking pussy!”

“Ah…” the Lesser Lyrhean had stayed silent during all of this. “Sure.. I guess…”

Pynzar grabbed him by his throat and lifted him up off the ground, slightly choking the weaker being.

“You fucking guess?!” she roared. “No, you don’t just fucking guess, you fucking will do it, and you’ll fucking like it, you damn pussy bitch!” the threw the Lesser Lyrhean to the ground. “Stop being a whiny little cuntwaffle and learn how to do the stuff that dumb ape has to teach you so we don’t need to rely on them for much longer! Do your gods-damned job or I swear to my Mother that I’ll-” A bit of magic ice formed on Pynzar’s helmet and lifted the visor up and held it in place. “-have some strong words for you. Please, do your best. I know you have potential that has not yet been tapped.”

Pynzar nodded as if she had made a valid point and walked off, leaving the Lesser Lyrhean, human cultist, and two True Lyrheans around to stare in silent awe at how swiftly the Great Mother’s daughters could swap between extremes.

“Well, I’d prefer to learn that face that again..” the Lesser Lyrhean muttered as he rubbed his neck.

“Good choice.” replied one of the other True Lyrheans as she and the other walked off.

And then, in that place where silence, an awkward silence, reigned, both human and non-human looked at each other for what felt like an eternity until one spoke.

“So… shall we pick up where we left off?”

“Yes, please. Anything but having to deal with that again.”

“Indeed. So, as I was saying before. Just hold the flint like this and with deliberate and roughly precise strikes with a much stronger rock, hit the flint in such a motion that you partially slide towards the ground. Do so in a motion that aims away from your body, and remember to wear eye protection when possible to avoid stray fragments.”

“When do we start making arrowheads?”

“You first need to learn how to make a fist-sized sharp rock before you can make a much smaller, even sharper and more delicate rock.”

“Fair enough. So, like this?”