Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom

There were certain concerns involved in taking care of a species which you didn't know anything about, and Fluttershy was fully familiar with all of them. Any deliberate attempt to tell herself that a dopey-seeming bird couldn't possibly be any trouble was neutralized with a memory of Philomena, and when it came to preventing the ground parrot from hurting itself... she was desperate for a guidebook. If she just had any degree of extra information...

There were a lot of paper scraps in the cage. Most of them had slid down to the bottom of a shallow, bowl-like depression which had been shaped into the soil which lined the bottom. As a result, they were decidedly stained. And torn from repeated talon contact. Others had been befouled in a different way, and just about nothing was legible.

Fluttershy sighed, cleaned the cage, and went back to work.

Experience, added to an expert estimate of the bird's weight, allowed her to figure out how much it should be eating: inspection of the cage's removed debris and the bird's droppings allowed her to work out what it liked beyond the berries, and she quickly managed to sort out a diet from the cottage's supplies. But she didn't know what risked making the kākāpō sick. What it liked to do, and the things it avoided. She really needed to figure out what would set off a fear response, and quickly.

Because so far, the answer to that last was 'nothing'.

She tried to keep an eye on it as much as she could, but there were dozens of cottage denizens who needed care. (Also some other birds: new adolescents, and she had to give two of them the usual caution after she caught the pair being very birdish indeed.) It meant she had to rely on regular reports from long-term residents regarding what it was doing, and...

The kākāpō was becoming more active as Moon took control of the cycle. But it wasn't exploring the cottage. It just -- blundered. It moved around the completely new environment of indoors as if trees had always come in wall shapes and there just hadn't been any point in worrying about it up until now. Demonstrating curiosity or fear over the changes would have meant recognition of -- anything.

There were times when she got to directly watch its face as it encountered something no forest had ever held, like a softly-glowing lighting device. And it was easy for her to describe the bird's expression, because she was the team's medic and multiple Bearers had been knocked unconscious during previous missions. To truly black out was to temporarily lose all of the brain's anchors -- including the temporal. It was part of why ponies who were reconnecting to their own forms tended to say some odd things because for all that first randomly-firing neuron knew, there actually was going to be a Final Exam starting in five minutes.

The kākāpō moved through the world like somepony who had been knocked into the concern-free bliss of the deepest concussion and never, ever had to worry about coming back out.

It didn't treat the other animals as a concern. It didn't seem to know what concern was. And the good news was that a bird who'd been described to her as being in heat wasn't making any untoward moves on the cottage's other avian residents -- but it also wasn't showing any signs of wanting sex at all.

It wanted to move around, and it very much wanted to climb. The claws were very good at wrapping anything under a given diameter and when that happened, the bird inevitably tried to go up. And it was good at the 'up' part. It wasn't demonstrating any actual thinking skills, but it had an absolute lock on the sort of short-term anti-genius which was only possessed by those who wanted to reach high places and had no safe ways of getting back down. You generally found it in kittens and pre-adolescent pegasi. The kittens were easier to reason with.

And the kākāpō wouldn't talk to her. She kept trying to start conversations. How did the parrot feel? What would make him more comfortable? What did he want -- well, other than the obvious, but still. And it just kept blundering along while she took care of all the other residents and loud thumps from poorly-chosen hop-down surfaces suggested the bird had some issues in taking care of itself.

It didn't run away from her. It didn't really run from anything. But it hadn't truly approached, either. It would look at the loops of the trust hat around her ears, and her mane. But then it looked away. Every time.

Don't force the relationship. It took time to make a new friend, and he was so far from home. Of course he was going to be skittish. But it also felt as if 'skittish' was beyond his emotional vocabulary.

She had to take care of him. To make sure he didn't get hurt, and that she herself caused no harm. The pegasus was desperate for helpful information, and had a squirrel runner posted at the door to report on returning courier wings -- along with keeping a personal eye out for any flickers of green flame. Nothing had arrived.

But with night fully closed in, and so much of the cottage starting to prepare for rest -- she noticed something.

The kākāpō was at the front door. And the nostrils (large for a parrot) kept sniffing at the traces of air which came in around the frame.

Do what's best for him.

There was a non-joke among those who studied animals: the unnatural act was the one you couldn't do. The cottage grounds were safe: a hundred carefully-arranged protections made that so. And the kākāpō wanted to go outside. A natural desire. And he was in heat. A state which she'd been asked to keep him in. Going outside meant he was likely searching for a mate.

You had to be careful. Animals who couldn't find a mate had been known to go a little -- weird. A rabbit buck in heat, denied a doe, tended to work out his frustrations upon the inanimate. (Bowling balls were popular, and never asked for child support.) But the parrot hadn't tried to move on any of the cottage birds. Not even his distant relations.

He wanted to go outside. And to interrupt or deny his natural behaviors -- even on the right diet, that would chance losing the heat state. Which risked the preservation of a critically endangered species.

He would be safe enough on the grounds. But Fluttershy still decided to supervise the initial stages.

They'd be together, while he did -- whatever it was male kākāpō did while in heat. She would be among the first Equestrian naturalists to witness that.

Maybe he'd want to talk about it.

He didn't.

For the most part, she'd stayed in the air, a little off to the side: it was easier to watch the area under full moonlight that way, and -- she'd noticed that when something was directly above the parrot, he froze. Just for a moment. A natural response to the increase in shadow, and the first indication of something approaching a fear response. Or maybe he was waiting for fruit to drop down -- although she was almost sure that wasn't how he managed. She'd seen enough movement to recognize that the bird was pretty good at climbing. Enough narrow, strong branches tilting down to ground level, and he could climb to his food. Presumably getting back down again was a Future Parrot Problem.

But he wasn't trying to eat. The parrot had done quite a bit of that before going out that door: loading up on calories for whatever the mating behavior was. And then...

He'd wandered the grounds for a while.

(The chickens had madly stared at him from their coops, and he'd failed to recognize that chickens existed.)

Eventually, he'd found a boulder. There were a few on the property: Fluttershy had cleared out most of the soil, because exposed earth could take seed and grass was a meal for so many -- but there were animals who preferred the high ground. Snakes and lizards liked to warm themselves on Sun-heated stone, while cats enjoyed tall perches because when it came to condescension, superiority was clearly aided by height. Also, Pinkie had told Fluttershy that there was at least a small chance of Maud dropping by and given the overwhelming number of animals around, it was best to retain something which the earth pony could relate to.

The parrot had examined the area. Carefully, to the point where it almost seemed as if he was on the verge of thought -- but it was just every instinct coming to the fore at once. Then he puffed up, breathing deeply, making his feathers stand out -- and Fluttershy instantly realized it was a display.

Coming on to the females? But there aren't any --

-- no. The talons were scratching the ground, over and over, and the beak ineffectively jabbed at empty air. Wings spread, uselessly beat as the bird made a sound very much like a growl. She hadn't thought it was capable of the noise, but -- parrot. Only flight (and possibly intelligence) had been sacrificed. The sound reproduction was still there.

Too much aggression in the display. He's trying to scare off other males. Telling them this is his territory.

Except there weren't any other males, and Moon appeared to be less than impressed.

The bird's feathers settled down. Wings refolded.

The talons, however, went to work.

"...I don't get it."

The kākāpō ignored her.

"...I really don't," Fluttershy told bird and night from the midst of a fast-tiring hover: it was late, and she'd been in the air for too long. "Could you just tell me...?"

Or maybe it wasn't ignoring her. The parrot might have forgotten she was there. Words were clearly meaningless, especially when they were pony ones...

"Please talk to me?"

And it didn't look up.

It had been -- scratching at the soil. For hours. Digging, and while a lot of birds would dig down to food, you seldom found those who were this dedicated to the pursuit. Especially when he wasn't eating anything which got turned up. The parrot appeared to be a pure herbivore: all insects, grubs, and worms were just as ignored as Fluttershy, although presumably less miffed about it.

The result of all the digging was, quite naturally, a hole.

...technically.

Well, to be fully fair about it, the bird hadn't even gotten that much right. There was a bowl-like depression in the soil. The edges were roughly oval, conforming to roughly a pony's length along the wider end while accommodating the parrot's wingspan at the narrow. The deepest part of the dip was about a hoof-height below the edge, and the central result was that Fluttershy now had a significant amount of extremely torn-up lawn.

But it was what the kākāpō had wanted to do. The natural behavior. So she hadn't interrupted, and all her questions had gone unanswered.

The parrot settled into the deepest part of the bowl.

And that was it. The bird folded its legs, and stared out at the Equestrian night. Nothing else happened.

Fluttershy's hover bobbed. Dipped, and nearly came apart entirely as the first yawn hit.

"...we have been out here a while, haven't we, Mister -- Mister..." and stopped. It was hard to give someone a nice, loving, funny name when they weren't speaking with you. "And you didn't want to stop." "Are you hungry? I can get more berries."

Nothing. The parrot was now a green and yellow ball within the Moonlit night. Whiskers lightly brushed against the soil.

"...you want to be outside during your mating season," the pegasus finally sighed -- and then yawned again. Trying to keep up an entire conversation was exhausting. "That's the natural thing for you, and I shouldn't interrupt that. And you're safe enough out here. I know that. I'll still set someone to watch you, of course." A nightjar. The false owls weren't the least bit predatory, but were equally as nocturnal as the hunters whom they resembled -- and would be willing to watch from a distance. "She'll tell me if you need anything. Unless you want to, right now...?"

She repeated the whole thing in what she currently understood of Basic Kākāpō, to the extent which the limited vocabulary would allow. No response.

"...all right," the weary mare temporarily gave up. "I'll see you in the morning." Maybe they could get off to a fresh start after she'd gotten some sleep...

Nightjars weren't slow birds, and that was another reason she'd chosen one as that night's bodyguard. They could fly at a rate of three gallops per hour. The fastest bird in the world was the peregrine falcon and they could reach nearly five gallops, but only when in the heart of a hunting dive. And besides, she hadn't wanted the new arrival to be stared at by a predator for hours. Not on his first night.

So when it came to alerting her to any possible problems... all Fluttershy had to do was leave a window partially open onto cool fall air. The nightjar was fast enough.

It just wasn't faster than sound.

Ponies are a prey species.

For Equestrians, it can be argued that this is largely true on technicality: after all, you're looking at a trio of equine variations who can levitate enemies, shock them into unconsciousness, or just kick them into the middle of next week. But it's a dangerous world, and when compared to some of what populates it...

The herd, united and coordinated for group survival, is a globe-taming force. The individual pony, facing down a hydra, is prey. She's also probably too freaked out to remember she can teleport, so the whole 'run away' thing is about to get a lot more complicated.

A prey species, upon hearing a strange noise in the night, wakes up. Ponies are just the ones who can think about the consequences of what they've just heard.

It doesn't help.

The sapient brain, jolted out of sleep, generally scrambled to define whatever had just brought it into a survival state while simultaneously trying to figure out what to do about it. Reaction time for this varied, but a prey species needed to be capable of moving in a hurry and even when it came to those whose personal recorded flight speed record was decidedly lacking, this was Fluttershy. Her subconscious registered the sound and finished telling her waking mind about it while she was already hovering over the bed, ready to break for any given window as the wing-flung blankets were still falling to the floor and two inadequately-disciplined young rooks were doing their best to clear the room.

(She'd slept in the trust hat. Corvid talons nearly wound up hooked.)

"...what?" the mare gasped as the survival part of her mind lined up on east: that way, if things went really wrong, she had the option to keep going until she reached the capital. "What was --"

The sound repeated.

The sapient mind tries to define events: after all, if you can lie to yourself about knowing what's going on, then you've clearly got it all under control. As such, Fluttershy's brain did its best to assign some level of initial meaning to the sound, and mostly came up with -- bass.

It was one of those low, reverberating bass notes which treated every solid surface as one more sounding board. It effectively came from everywhere, at any given moment, at just about the same time -- and then the echos lingered for a while. It had projection, range, and resisted fading like the best of Rarity's dyes. It was its own interference pattern. It was sonics as a shapeless drape of pressure with no true origin and a single target: her.

(Her fur kept rippling. It was like being next to a gramophone's speaker -- if somepony had deliberately overwound every mechanism and then enlarged the sound cone to the size of a small kitchen.)

It was possible to think about the sound in more detail than this, but there was some difficulty involved. Applying the sound directly to rationality was somepony like trying to examine the interior of a gold nugget through applying aqua regia to the surface. Technically, it worked.

The noise defied reason. It spat on sanity, then beat up common sense and stole its lunch money.

It also sounded vaguely like something going VHNOOOOOM as if the consequence for stopping was immediate death, but that was mainly by coincidence.

The cacophony briefly stopped. Echoes tried to fade, then desperately attempted to do it faster. A nightjar came in through the window gap, frantically twittering at the species signature pace of a court stenographer trying to keep up with a narcissist who'd just been asked to talk about himself.

"What's going on out there?" Fluttershy desperately asked -- and now there was sound erupting from all over the grounds, every last sleeping animal awake again and growling, hissing, mewing, barking and yelling while the nocturnals tried to figure out what had done that and how much distance they needed to put between themselves and it, the entire cottage was awake and the land beyond the property borders was going to be right behind... "Did something --"

The sound hit again, dove into her ears at a speed no peregrine could match, and slammed into an invisible button marked TALENT.

To most of her hearing, the noise simply repeated, only louder: VHNOOOOOM

To her magic...

SEX

Fluttershy softly groaned. No part of that got through the main reverb line.

SEX WITH ME

"...oh, no..."

I AM THE LOUDEST NO OTHERS HEARD I WIN SEX SEX SEX

...natural behaviors. 'Why' was a major question and when it came to the species being endangered, having to attempt sleep in the vicinity of a horny parrot turned that inquiry into Just Now? But for being in heat, this was just what a normal male kākāpō did.

...she was really, really hoping this was normal. For a naturalist to have tried to save the species through using the one oddball out of the group indicated either a very poor naturalist or some well-hidden traits which really needed to be passed on and while Fluttershy hadn't known the parrot for very long, she was guessing none of them were 'intellect'.

"...I can't stop him," she sighed to herself. "Not if this is normal, and not when I don't know how to get him back into heat if trying to make him be quiet knocks him out of it. The berries might not be enough to maintain or restart..."

Words she could barely hear, because the parrot had just gone off yet again. And the cottage, confused and scared, was getting louder as all of the confusion ramped up with every fresh blast, looking for a way to lash out --

-- yellow wings flared, and the pegasus got the eastern window open, easily passing through the giant Emergency Exit gap. It was the fastest way to begin an emergency outer circuit.

"It's okay! Nothing's wrong! It's the new one, I'm on top of it, everyone can just go back to sleep now or start playing again and go back to getting your share of Moon-graze time in, everything's fine...!"

The parrot, who had yet to experience the joys of reproduction and felt that was not fine, went off again.

She circled, calling out, darting into the cottage on swoops because the interior residents needed to be reassured and then coming right back to the grounds again. But there were so many animals, none of them had been through anything like this and she had to calm down them over and over, trying to reassure them that there was no threat while the kākāpō just repeated the sound without mercy or the ability to recognize that mercy could exist. Repeated sonic bursts and explosions, destroying what had been the peace of the night.

VHNOOOOOM

She tried to anticipate itself, brace herself for the impact. But it was a clockwork bomb, going off without fail. A localized sonic calamity. She tried to block it, attempted to use cotton wadding to muffle the effects. It didn't help. Stopping it via countervibration -- even at the outside edges of theory, that would have required an audio expert. And perhaps not even that would have been enough. At the darker limits of fantasy, to bring Vinyl Scratch within range might have risked seeing the unicorn demarked and, nearly as bad, dewubbed.

The parrot wouldn't stop. And she had to hear all of it on every level, because she needed to keep her talent activated. Track the cries of confusion from the cottage, locate the truest distress.

The rest of the world got to hear VHNOOOOOM. But with her talent in play...

At the base, animal vocabulary didn't contain a lot of terms. Still, you could find a sound which represented "Food?" for just about every species, and it was possible to build a lot from there.

If you wanted a truly universal term... that which arguably served as the foundation for all language everywhere...

The kākāpō took a breath.

WANNA FUUUUUUUUCK?

The world did not. And so the question was repeated, long into the night.

Somewhere around three a.m, a rather fed-up and extremely promiscuous saltmarsh sparrow attempted to scream back with a rough equivalent to I'LL THINK ABOUT IT IF YOU'LL JUST SHUT UP!

It didn't help.