Sticks awoke a miserable person.

If you could call it waking up. It was hard to sleep when you were arguing with your conscience all night.

She sat up from her moss nest and her warming rocks. Twigs and a few bugs were stuck in her thick hair. She shook herself and rubbed at the dark circles under her eyes.

"All right," she muttered. "It's no use is it? There's only one way to get him to leave, and that's with me guiding him to wherever he needs to go." She paused.

Then with a flying leap, she scrambled over to her makeshift door, unlocked her trap system, dug out the door, and hefted the rock off her door hole. She poked her head outside.

It was a bright day.

Sticks wrinkled her nose.

"Hmm…it's going to rain. It's probably going to rain for a very long time…no good travelling in the rain." She smirked to herself.

Sticks armed herself with her nunchucks, spear and boomerang, a net and a small knife. She scrambled out of her hole, ready to check her traps and begin her perfectly normal day. If she concentrated hard enough, she could almost pretend that she didn't even have a guest in her pit. It would take her awhile to return to the hole. Maybe he would die of starvation.

Sticks. You cannot do that.

"I know, it was just a little thought," Sticks muttered. She re-covered her hole, and ambled off into the forest.

Sticks had a wonderful time checking her traps.

But then she returned to her hole, a quail in her net, and saw the entrance to her hole destroyed.

Sticks froze.

The rock had been tossed aside as if weighed nothing more than a child's ball. Mounds of dirt surrounded the opening, as if something too big for the hole had dug its way out.

Sticks took one look and knew she had been too late. The dirt flowed out, not in. Her guest had escaped.

Sticks ran straight into the hole, her blue eyes flashing, panicked. She let out an injured yowl, scrambling over her home. "What did he take? What has he done? Where has he gone?"

Everything was the same in her main room. Except her store of handy food was gone.

Sticks crawled down the tunnels and checked the pit, panting hard. She froze in shock.

The pit wall, once straight and smooth, had been crumbled down into a sloping pile.

Sticks did not move. Her blue eyes glowed in the darkness.

She knelt down and picked up a brick of rock. Two sharp indents shown in it. As if the rock had been stabbed with a pitch fork.

She had not left him any tools.

For the first time, Sticks realized exactly what—who—it was she had had in her hole. She realized why maybe her conscience had been so serious about helping him. She may have heard everything her guest had said, but she had not understood it.

She understood a little better now.

Sticks crouched in place, her eyes fixed on the rock. She did not know how he had done it, but somehow, he had been so determined to get out that he had done it stab by stab. Either with that evil rock thing, or—

With his hands.

She remembered the two spikes on his knuckles. It was crazy to think two little spikes could do this but…the indents matched her memory of them perfectly.

If anyone else had just escaped, she would have begun making plans to relocate her hole, or go after them and "kill" them. But she couldn't do that now. It was too late for that.

Without her even knowing it, she had crossed a line. And even though she hated it, she felt deep down that she would never be able to go back to living her normal, safe, secluded life ever again.

So this time, when her conscience prompted her to find the echidna, she did not fight them.

She got up, turned around and went.