"You're lucky I found you before your mother..." Vibrant told the small child, narrowing his eyes. "You know he doesn't like when you're out of the sewers... humans are dangerous. I don't think he's noticed yet thankfully."
Baby had been standing before a maintenance ladder in the sewers, a means away from her home with her guardians at the Neibolt house. She had waited until her curiosity ate away at her, until it reached a point where she could practically feel it clawing at the outermost layer of her patience. After having seen the children walk down the street and after having heard their laughter as they made their way to school, she decided that she needed to know what it was.
While proportionately she had made her discoveries based on what she had eaten thus far into her life, she learned many other things from watching them herself. ( and from a health textbook that someone had left behind with their backpack near the sewer grate, though wittingly or not she had long since decided it would be hers. )
The young clown had only recently made her decision about the form she would commonly keep ( aside from the switch back to her ‘true’ form as she laid down to rest ) though despite that, she had developed a considerably well understanding of the human body and it’s functions. Baby had learned all about their sweat, their voice changes, their bizarre diets, and all about how they would face a ‘big change’ that one should not be ashamed of.
But she had decided that it wouldn’t be very worthwhile to read about their reproduction process. Who would need to know that anyway? If it was anything like how she had heard her own species did, she didn’t want anything to do with it. Even so, it was creating her own different form to conceal herself in that she as more concerned with.
Her pale complexion would be alright if she added a warmer pigment to it, and she decided that her body shape was just fine - She had used the humans she had seen as a reference after all, and as such she had no doubts that she had made her form satisfactory in the very least. The child then allowed the various other hues in her expression to fade back into the pale creamy color that she had decided would be fitting for her skin tone.
Her hair, she knew, would have to change. The bright color she had decided on was unnatural in humans, so Baby knew that she would have to change that temporarily if she desired any worthwhile results. But before she was able to make any changes, a voice she easily recognized behind her stopped her in her tracks; It was Vibrant.
Before anything else, she made sure that she quickly reversed whatever changed she had applied temporarily to her appearance - Her skin again was flushed of the foreign pigment, her markings returning to her face. Her body shape had stayed the same, and she hadn’t considered what other sort of clothing she would need to replicate - but she knew that there wouldn’t be very much of a point now, considering that she had been caught.
Baby quietly turned her back to the ladder, stepping softly towards the taller. Her gaze followed the pompoms on her shoes, until she was within a few steps of Vibrant - it was then she looked up to his face, her feet shuffling beneath her. The little clown’s mind raced in search of a reason to go, but she soon found what she was looking for. In a soft and smooth voice like a bird’s song, she divulged her intent, a few mispronunciations here and there going to show that she still had work to do with her language skills.
“The humans go to the school almost every day, and I wanted t’ see why they went out of their way to do it so often. I promise I was gonna come right back, but...” She hesitated briefly before continuing. “I wanted to know about what they do. They’re confusin’, but we’re so different from ‘em, and there are so many... I wanna know about what they do that we don’t, and - and I wanna know how they work!”
Suddenly an idea struck her, and with a newfound excitement for something different bubbling under the surface she asked, “Can I show y’a something I found? They dropped it, but it’s interestin’!”
