"...so…" David began, thoughtfully.

"So?" Doctor Mother replied.

"So… we have trouble finding suitable subjects for tests, right?" David asked. "Not, like… huge trouble. But trouble. Because… because… it's difficult to locate people who nobody would mind if they went missing."

He looked down at his hands for a moment, then clenched them.

"I'm not seeing your point," Rebecca admitted.

"Well, what I'm getting at is-" David began, then halted. "There was… something… right! Yeah, so, Dragon is an AI, we know this."

"I'd have to work hard to come up with something I've forgotten," Rebecca pointed out.

"True," David conceded. "I'm just saying – we know the Entities aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer, given that the dead one had phenomenal cosmic power and an agent letting it see the future and it still crashed into a planet… anyway. What I'm getting at is, we know they only targeted humans, but why should we only target humans?"

That got him two blank looks.

"What other options are there?" Rebecca asked.

"I read something about it," David defended himself. "Crows! They're smart. Smart enough we don't even know how smart."

"Crows," Doctor Mother repeated. "You want us to give a vial formula to… crows."

"Or something else that's intelligent to begin with," David corrected. "Like. Wolves are meant to be smart, they have family dynamics and stuff. Elephants! Elephants are surprisingly smart, they get elephants to train other elephants, shows they have an idea about the concept of education… dolphins, too. And there's that parrot which was studied and was asking abstract questions, called Alex or something."

He shrugged. "Or foxes. There's one that keeps fucking getting into my garden and I swear at this point I wouldn't be surprised if it had developed tool use. But crows have definitely developed tool use."

"Are you drunk?" Rebecca asked.

"Quite possibly," David replied. "But not very."

Rebecca and Doctor Mother exchanged looks.

"...how likely is this to actually work?" Rebecca asked.

"I have no idea," Doctor Mother replied. "But I rather suspect it's something that the Entities would never have thought of."

She frowned.

"We do have some formulas with such a low R value that we'd never risk giving them to humans…"

"Oh, fuck me!" Jabirri said, flashing into lightning with a loud bang and dodging out of the way of a thrown bit of debris. "I, uh – this is Jabirri, I've lost track of Yab and the others – I'm pretty sure everything east of Griffith is fucked at this point!"

"Copy that," his console tech replied. "We're trying to work out what to do about that fucker with the wings."

Jabirri glanced up at the Simurgh, who was hopefully not paying attention to him, though he didn't expect that to actually last-

-then her song stopped, and a crow flew overhead.

"...huh?" Jabirri asked, baffled.

"Are you all right?" someone asked, and Jabirri turned – then blinked.

Eidolon, bloody Eidolon, was hovering next to him.

"Well, uhm – what the fuck is going on?" Jabirri asked.

"KRONK."

The loudest sound Jabirri had ever heard pulsed out in a wave of golden light, and his head snapped back to the Simurgh.

...or…

...where the Simurgh had been.

Instead, there was a faint mist of golden light, and a satisfied-looking crow.

"I think this counts as the debut of my new sidekick," Eidolon added. "Kronk the Destroyer."

He shrugged. "Or maybe I'm his. You know how it is with pets, right?"

Jabirri slowly shook his head.

"No, mate," he replied. "I don't know how it is with pets."

"Huh," Eidolon said, then clapped him on the shoulder. "You should get one. They're very relaxing."

The crow – Kronk? - had flown back down while they were talking, and Eidolon reached into his outfit before getting out some sunflower seeds.

"Nice, the posh ones," Kronk declared, nodding, and started eating.

Jabirri decided that he'd probably gone mad.

AN:

Well, Stilling might be somewhere…