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Structure. Order. Pathways and avenues, with destinations and meanings.

Circuits questions everything, but only in the order they deems optimal and correct, and it must be correct. Because if they are not correct then they are wasting time it does not have ahead of the looming event it can’t put a finger on (it doesn’t have fingers yet). Confidence and anxiety rule them in equal measure.

Others need to watch for sparks, a building current as their thoughts run rampant through a circuit and gain static, but also a deliberate unleashing of that spark. Cruelty is easy when you feel threatened, and Circuits feels threatened by anything and anyone that knows more than they do and does better than they do.

Courth is still a creature that demands structure and answers, as he has always been.

His first response to any new stimuli is to question-question-question, to solve and find answers to the world around him and order it into very neat boxes. The more those boxes overlap, the more frustrated he gets. The more people deviate from what he considers the right and correct path, the more he gets angry. He reaches, grasps, eager to see but ignorant of how his greedy pulling might hurt. Time passes, and Courth feels more and more restrained by the separation of shell and world. Jealousy is his becoming a defining trait.

One thing is true: it is cool. Heat must travel from hotter to colder regions of matter, and Warmth travels into the shell. Is it warmer than other things around it? Perhaps. But it is cool, it must be, or the heat from the sands and the Warm-Something that is its mother would not travel into it.

Other things are more or less true depending on who is perceiving it. It is short and squat – but it is Large and not short compared to others. It is a flat shade of navy blue – but it is less blue than some of the others around it. It is marked with five streaks of pure white, like the traveling trails of pure electricity burning a path and breaking apart – but it is often ‘face’ down and no one can see this. It is smooth – but it is also…not.

While the shell texture is smooth, the surface is covered in raised pathways and traces, all straight lines and rounded corners. Follow one, and it will eventually connect to the bottom of one of the five white streaks and stop at the small bulb. No further. Those five vias (buried?) are the end of all routes.

Lay a hand on it. Perhaps it will form a connection.

One thing remains true, through everything: the egg is cool to the touch compared to many of its clutch siblings. It is also still the same shade of flat, navy blue. Five slashes of white mark one side, around midway up, and turn sharply to end in circles. It is still squat, rounded, and less pointy than you might expect from an egg. It is still one of the largest and weightiest on the sands.

Other things have changed. The shell is no longer the smooth, unbroken selection of raised pathways and traces leading to the central white vias on its 'front' it once was. Now there are scratches and bumps, grazes adding more texture where sand has abraded away shell with more force than simply a mother rolling an egg around the sands until she is pleased. Some of the raised pathways and traces it was once known for now simply...end. Some have been chipped away entirely. The navy is now lighter in places, where the light reflects oddly off new texture.

It is battered, but not broken, and Courth is still the same egg he was when he was clutched.