by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Ursine Exchange Officer, August 2025
Most weeks, Grawf taught her Ursine martial arts class in one of the starship Initiative’s exercise rooms which had tumbling mats for a floor and a full-wall mirror where her students could watch their forms. But this week’s class was special. This week, the bear was holding her class in the lumo-bay where a grid of blue, glowing hexagons covered the walls, floor, and ceiling. Her students — who were mostly uplifted cats and dogs from Earth — filed in and took their places standing around the much larger bear expectantly.
Grawf was happy to see so many of her fellow officers interested in learning about Ursine culture enough to return to a grueling martial arts class week after week. The bear did not go easy on these smaller mammals, and yet, they kept showing up to hear her stories about hive gods and honey golems warring with each other and practice the traditional fighting forms that went along with those tales. Grawf was proud of her students. All of them.
Well, almost all of them.
Right as the bear was about to begin this week’s lesson, a particularly scrawny white cat scurried in and tried to take a place near the back of the group, as if he hoped the Ursine teacher wouldn’t see him. The cat’s triangular ears were splayed, and his workout clothes were in disarray, as if he’d thrown them on in a hurry. Ensign Mewly always seemed to be in a hurry. He always seemed to be running late for something, and even during class, he always acted like he halfway thought he should be somewhere else.
Grawf wasn’t sure why the clumsy cat kept coming. He certainly had no proficiency for martial arts, and he tended to wince while Grawf was telling the myths that went along with her legends, as if he wanted to jump in and correct her, perhaps pointing out that there were no such things as honey golems and gods weren’t real, especially ones composed of swarms of zumble-bees. The white cat’s nervous, awkward energy made Grawf feel nervous and awkward which made it harder for her to teach. She had hoped that her warning at the end of last week’s class about how this week’s class would be special and difficult and only intended for very serious students would have been enough to scare him away.
Unfortunately, apparently not.
Grawf tried to cast the irritating white cat out of her mind and focus on the lesson she had planned for today. The bear closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. Her class was trained well enough that this simple, subtle action was sufficient to bring any conversations among the students to an immediate close. All meowing and woofing stopped in an instant, and the room fell silent.
“Computer, begin program: Ursine Mythology One,” Grawf said in a low voice. The computer had no problem picking up the order, and without even opening her eyes, Grawf knew the program had begun.
The air changed in the room, growing cold and wild. Not windy, just free enough to imply the sense of a wide, open space around them. A space that wasn’t really there but was flawlessly, impeccably simulated by the lumo-bay’s holographic generators and environmental controls.
Knowing the rhythm of this particular program by heart, Grawf opened her eyes at exactly the same moment as lightning broke across the stormy, simulated sky.
Several of her students gasped — a quiet, hushed, reverential sound that caused Grawf’s bear-like muzzle to quirk into the slightest hint of a smile. Ensign Mewly, however, fully yowled in fright as the ensuing thunder cracked a moment later, erasing her hint of a smile and replacing it with a poorly disguised frown.
The grid of blue hexagons that covered all of the lumo-bay’s walls were gone, and in their place, the cluster of animals — bear instructor and nearly two dozen students, mixed about evenly between cats and dogs — were now standing on a rocky ledge on the side of a towering mountain, overlooking the stark vista of a snow-covered forest. The limited light that escaped through the thick cloud cover above left the terrain dimly lit — a scene drawn in black and white.
“This is Mount Aggrevan,” Grawf rumbled, fully aware that the tone of her voice mimicked the cracking of the thunder. “The first Ursine was born far below here, beyond the reach of the wintry forest on the great dusty plains when the Breath of the World got caught inside a tumbleweed instead of simply blowing it along like the other tumbleweeds.”
All of the students stayed silent, raptly watching Grawf tell her story. Even Ensign Mewly. Though, the white cat’s ears had twisted disrespectfully backward like he didn’t even want to hear the most foundational myth of all of Ursine culture.
“Once the first Ursine was filled with breath,” Grawf continued, “she could no longer be content blowing randomly, haphazardly from one ravine to the next. She needed a purpose. A place in the universe that was meant just for her and would make her breath useful. So she traveled from one end of our world to the other, seeking purpose and seeking a name.”
Some of the cats eyes had widened, and a few of the dogs were slowly swishing their tails, excited to be listening to a story. All of Grawf’s pupils looked happy and absorbed except Ensign Mewly’s whose tail tip was twitching irritably. Grawf tried to ignore him and continued:
“The first Ursine faced many adventures as she traveled without a name, but today, we are going to learn about the most important one: the final trial where she earned the name Yirsa and found her role in the universe.”
Grawf paused a moment, hoping to let the tension build before continuing her story, but a meowing voice interrupted the silence that had been swelling with portent to ask:
“Did the trial take place on this mountain?” Ensign Mewly’s ears flicked forward and back, independent of each other in some sort of nervous twitch, as all eyes on the mountainside turned to him.
Grawf huffed angrily and said, “Yes, of course, that’s why I’ve brought you all to this mountain top. Now silence while I finish the story.”
Ensign Mewly looked like he wanted to object or perhaps explain his reasons for interrupting in the first place, but the white cat thought better of it when he saw that his fellow classmates also looked irritated by his intrusion on the lesson.
Discomfited and discombobulated, Grawf tried to get herself back into the right frame of mind for telling the most important story of her people. The bear’s voice started out quiet, but it grew in strength with every word: “The nameless and lonely Ursine who found her way to this mountain discovered a goddess here.”
As Grawf said the word ‘goddess,’ a deep thrumming, rumbling, buzz rose in the air all around them. Usually, the buzz would have begun a set amount of time after the program started, but Grawf had altered her program for this class so that the different stages would be automatically triggered by the computer hearing particular words spoken in her voice, giving her control over the pacing.
The buzzing grew louder and louder, and the officers in Grawf’s class clustered subtly closer to each other, instinctively seeking the safety of being in a group. Now all the cats’ ears flattened, clamping close to their heads, and the dogs’ hackles rose. Ensign Mewly eschewed subtlety and wended his way past the other students who’d been closer to Grawf until he was standing closer to the bear than anyone else.
“Who is making that noise?” Grawf called out to the mountainside, her gruff voice taking on the sing-song tone of a highly rehearsed, ceremonial line.
Lightning flashed, and this time, the sudden brightness of its light illuminated hundreds — or perhaps thousands — of tiny shapes flitting through the air, looping and zooming in a complicated, intricate, mesmerizing dance.
Grawf tended a hive of zumble-bees in her quarters, and those insects were small, fuzzy, amber-colored creatures with iridescent, teardrop-shaped wings. The shapes flitting through the air on the simulated mountainside in the lumo-bay were similar to those very real insects, except idealized. These holographic renderings looked like they’d been carved from true amber and their wings composed from flakes of real diamonds. They glittered, even in the dim light on the mountainside. They weren’t normal zumble-bees. They were the divine abstraction of zumble-bees.
After the crack of thunder that followed the flash of lightning, the buzzing composed itself into a voice and said, “We are the Queen Mininizi and Her Entourage. Who are you and where is your community?”
Grawf strode away from the cluster of students clinging closer to her. She left them behind and approached a tree that had suddenly begun glowing at the edge of the mountain’s ledge. A zumble-bee hive hung from one of the tree’s branches — except once again, it wasn’t an ordinary zumble-bee hive, all lumpy and organic. No, this hive looked like it had been carved from a giant topaz, the size of a watermelon, and it glowed from within. The zumble-bees flitted more thickly around it.
“I do not know who I am, and I have no community,” Grawf answered the amorphous, multi-faceted goddess surrounding them.
The buzzing answered back: “Of course you do not know who you are without a community. We are the Queen Mininizi, the drones who tend to her, the pupae who need tending, the workers who tend the hive, the scouts who explore for flowers, and the warriors who protect us all. No one of us is anything without the rest.”
“Then I will join your community,” Grawf answered. “And then I will know who I am.”
The air around them laughed. “We do not need you.”
“I am big and strong,” Grawf replied, enjoying playing out this role for an audience. She had played through this preliminary part of the program by herself many, many times. This was one of her favorite exercise programs, and she rarely skipped the background story intro. However, it felt very different knowing that a bunch of her fellow officers were watching her, learning about this part of her world’s mythological history for the first time. It felt like really being Yirsa, the first Ursine before she even had her name. “Surely, there are tasks I can do for you that tiny creatures like yourselves can’t do on your own. Let me be a part of your hive.”
Mininizi laughed again, filling the air with jovial mockery. And then, honey began dripping from the sky like rain, except thick, viscous, and golden. Several of Grawf’s feline students jumped away from the honey rain, clearly afraid of getting their fur sticky. Whereas one of the more adventurous canine students reached out a paw, trying to touch one of the golden liquid drops, but it bent away from their paw, unwilling to be touched.
The honey fell to the ground in puddles that reflected the stormy sky. Then those puddles coalesced, coming together, forming one growing, globby form that increased in size until it more than matched Grawf’s Ursine bulk. Then the golden mass bulbed and blorbed, wobbling like a gelatinous dessert, deforming itself until two arms, two legs, and a head appeared. The shape refined its features, growing a muzzle and two small round ears, until it mimicked the bear’s shape, as if she were looking in a gold-tinted carnival mirror. A bear made from honey.
A honey golem.
“We have no need of your help, nameless one,” Mininizi buzzed from all around. “For we can build honey golems, capable of doing whatever you might do.”
“Can they care about being part of your community?” Grawf asked, voice ringing out with the weight of generations of Ursines who had reenacted this moment in everything from pretend games played by cubs to the most exquisite operas performed by thespians and choirs who had trained years for their roles.
“Prove that you care,” Mininizi buzzed. “Defeat our honey golem in combat, and you may join our hive as one of our caretakers. Whether you win or lose, when the battle is done, we will give you a name, but beware: if you lose, the name will not be a kind one.”
“I will not lose,” Grawf said, her voice still raised with that particular timbre that meant she was playing a part. But then, the bear held up her paw — a sign she’d told the computer to recognize as a signal to wait before proceeding with the program — and said in a voice tilted lower for her students, “I will fight the honey golem as a demonstration for all of you, using the techniques I’ve been teaching you for the last several weeks. When I am done and you’ve seen The Story of Yirsa’s Naming concluded, the program will provide individual honey golems for each of you to fight as well so that you may practice and demonstrate what you’ve learned.”
Several of the canine students began eagerly wagging their tails again, muzzles splitting into excited grins, and most of the cats’ eyes flashed with determination. All of them were excited to prove themselves to the holographically generated zumble-bees. All of them except Ensign Mewly, of course. The white cat looked wobbly on his feet, and if he hadn’t already been covered in ghost-white fur, he surely would have paled at the prospect of fighting his own honey golem.
Grawf turned her back on her students and strode toward the honey golem that was waiting for her. The two bears — one with workout clothes over brown fur and the other translucently golden — squared off, raising their paws threateningly and beginning to edge around each other in a small circle, almost like the beginning of a dance.
Grawf threw the first punch, launching her right paw at the golden bear like a missile. The honey golem didn’t dodge. Instead, it mimicked her actions, a fraction of a second behind her, leading to their paws striking against each other, and when they did, the honey golem’s paw blorped around Grawf’s, ensconcing her brown fur in sticky, sticky, golden honey.
Grawf yanked her right arm back, putting so much of her weight into the backwards motion that she managed to pull the honey golem — still clinging to her paw — off balance, throwing it to the ground beside her. Of course, the honey golem didn’t let go of Grawf’s paw, so when it tumbled down, she tumbled down after it.
Grawf landed on the honey golem’s belly, and if they’d truly been two bears, they’d have been set up for a perfectly normal sort of wrestling match. Except the honey golem was not a normal bear, and so Grawf sank right into its amorphous belly, honey encasing her like she were a piece of dried fruit that was being turned into a particularly tasty candy.
Grawf was not a candy. She was an angry bear, still mad that the blasted white cat had showed up to her class again, even though he didn’t seem to care at all about what she was teaching. And so, since she needed to fight anyway, Grawf unleashed all of her anger on the honey golem, struggling against its jelly-like embrace.
Channeling her frustration into the moves she’d practiced many times before, Grawf fell into a trance-like state. The Ursine whirled and pivoted, changing direction in surprising ways, using the honey golem’s fluidic qualities against it, until at last, the mass of honey dripped from her like so much rainwater. Exhausted of its cohesion, the honey golem gloomped to the ground, becoming nothing more than a golden puddle reflecting the stormy sky and the triumphant face of its vanquisher.
Grawf looked up at her class with a fearsome grin as they all listened to the buzzing voice of Mininizi announce, “Impressive! You have earned a permanent place in our hive. For so long as there are zumble-bees, your progeny shall be our caretakers, looking after our hives. They shall be known as the Ursines, and you, the first of them all, shall be Yirsa.”
Grawf — playing the part of Yirsa — lifted her arms toward the sky, and she was rewarded by twisting, spiraling tornadoes of the idealized zumble-bees whirling around her, alighting gently on her and cleaning her fur from the traces of honey that still stuck to her. When they were done, Grawf’s bushy brown fur was completely clean, and the zumble-bees returned to swirling around their glowing hive and filling the air at the edges of the broad ledge. Grawf’s class stood a safe distance from where the fight had taken place, watching all of this with awe, even Ensign Mewly.
“Now you have seen the origin of the fighting style I have been teaching you,” Grawf said. “The moves of Yirsa’s fight against the honey golem have been passed down from one generation to the next for thousands of years, but you are the first animals from Earth to learn them.”
Grawf waited a moment to let the power of her statement sink in. She was sharing something that mattered deeply to her — and to all of her people — with these cats and dogs from Earth. She hoped they would value it as much as she treasured what she had learned about their history and their world.
“You may now each summon a honey golem of your own to fight with you by raising both paws in front of you and stating, ‘I will not lose!'”
Grawf had hardly finished her explanation when the first of the dogs — a big yellow lab — raised her paws up and barked, “I will not lose!” The rest of the class followed suit, barking and meowing the ceremonial words, until each and every one of them was locked in combat with a honey golem that mirrored them.
Cats fought cat honey golems; dogs fought dog honey golems. Grawf had designed the program to work this way, because it only seemed fair and in the spirit of the original myth for each student to face their own perfect match.
Cats, dogs, and honey golems sparred, tossing each other about the wide mountain ledge. The yellow lab who had summoned her golem first fought beautifully, executing each of the moves they’d learned in previous weeks exactly as they had been taught. Others struggled more, seemingly losing track of their lessons in the excitement and confusion of fighting golden, liquid versions of themselves. None of them had foreseen this particular eventuality. Except for Ensign Mewly.
The white cat had been tasked with fixing a glitch in the lumo-bay several months prior, and it had had led to him accidentally encountering one of Grawf’s honey golems in a mish-mash of programs belonging to a number of different officers.
The giant, sticky, bear-shaped warrior had haunted the white cat’s nightmares and daydreams ever since. Ensign Mewly had joined Grawf’s class in the hopes that he’d find a way, finally, to vanquish his fears. Instead, the cat had found that the fears only intensified as he was forced by the lessons to really face the magnitude of his own clumsiness. Ensign Mewly was not a fighter. Never had been, never would be, as far as he could tell.
As the other students vanquished their honey golems one by one and were each rewarded with tornadoes of zumble-bees naming them Yirsa, Ensign Mewly’s honey golem only seemed to grow stronger and more undefeatable.
Eventually, every other student had bowed to Grawf, thanked the bear for today’s class, and filed out of the lumo-bay. Only Ensign Mewly continued fighting his honey golem without any apparent progress.
Grawf stood to the side with her arms crossed and frowned at the situation. The bear did not like the white cat, but part of her had to admit a certain admiration for the way he continued struggling, refusing to give up even in the face of his absolute, almost hilarious incompetence.
Eventually, the white cat found himself floating upside down in a giant glob of honey that had grown larger and almost completely formless in response to his inept struggles. The bear decided it was time to step in.
Grawf reached a paw into the blob of honey, took hold of one of Ensign Mewly’s paws — giant brown paw completely dwarfing the little white one — and pulled her least favorite student out of the predicament he’d gotten himself into. The blob of honey blorped as the white cat popped out of it, and then the remaining mass of sticky gold melted down into a puddle at their feet. Another little trick that Grawf had written into the program, so that she could easily help any students who needed her.
Ensign Mewly’s white fur was matted with golden goo and his workout clothes were wet with it. He was sticky from head to toe and looked completely miserable. “I lost,” he meowed, ears flattening unhappily against his head.
Grawf frowned, a fearsome expression on her already dour Ursine face. “Losing is not an option in this fight,” she rumbled.
Ensign Mewly shrugged.
“You said you would not lose,” Grawf pointed out. “That’s how the fight began.”
The white cat gestured helplessly with both paws. “I guess, I succeeded at something no Ursine has ever done? Losing?”
Grawf was sorely tempted to write this cat off. He sounded like he was being flippant about her entire culture. But on the other paw, she’d watched him fighting the honey golem — he had no skills, but he’d put all of his energy into it. He’d kept fighting long after all the other students had left, and he never asked for help. He hadn’t asked her to end the fight. She’d stepped in and done it for him.
“Or perhaps,” Grawf rumbled, “we simply haven’t yet discovered the correct definition of winning in these circumstances.”
One of Ensign Mewly’s triangular ears flicked up, giving him a skewed but hopeful expression. He was listening. However annoying he might be, this cat clearly did really want to learn from Grawf.
“Why are you here?” Grawf asked.
“Because it scares me,” Ensign Mewly answered far too quickly for the bear’s liking. It made his answer seem off the cuff, easy, and like he hadn’t really thought about her question.
“What scares you?” Grawf pressed, trying not to let her annoyance show.
“Well, right now,” the white cat hedged, “you do.”
Grawf listened impassively to this answer, standing as still as a statue with her arms crossed in front of her. She definitely looked like she was judging Ensign Mewly, but she refused to let on with her demeanor how much he was failing to measure up.
“You scare me,” the white cat eventually continued, unsure of how else to handle Grawf’s stony silence. “Fighting scares me. The honey golems scare me. And all these bees buzzing around scare me!”
“The zumble-bees?” Grawf asked in confusion. She hadn’t expected that. Zumble-bees were perhaps the most gentle, kind, generous creatures who’d ever existed in the universe. All they did was quietly visit the flowers on zinzinar bushes and bring home the pollen to their hive to make honey which they gladly shared.
“Yes,” Ensign Mewly meowed pitifully, eyeing the throng of insects that kept buzzing all around them. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll sting you? Or I guess, maybe your fur is thick enough they couldn’t? My fur isn’t very thick though, and I’m allergic to a lot of things.”
Grawf sighed deeply. This cat seemed like a lot of trouble, but for whatever reason, he had showed real devotion to her class. It was her job as a cultural ambassador — and simply as his teacher — to do her best to teach him.
“Zumble-bees rarely sting,” Grawf said. “I keep a hive in my quarters and tend them.”
“Because you’re a descendant of Yirsa?” Ensign Mewly asked.
Grawf brightened a little, hearing that her student really had been learning and not just suffering through her lessons. “Yes,” the bear said. “I bring them to the arboretum on Wednesday evenings so that the botanists can learn from their pollinating techniques. You should come and meet them next time. I think they’ll scare you less if you meet them.”
Ensign Mewly nodded solemnly. There was a fidgety quality to his paws though that made him look like he wanted to be taking notes.
“I’ll send a reminder to you through the computer before the next time I take them there, okay?” Grawf asked.
The white cat nodded more eagerly this time.
“As for me, I’m one of your fellow officers,” Grawf rumbled. “I know we don’t know each other well, but we serve together. Are you afraid of me just because I’m big? Are you afraid of the Great Danes and Mastiffs on the crew?”
“Well, yes,” Ensign Mewly admitted. “A little.”
Grawf couldn’t stop herself from sighing again.
“But it’s really more because you seemed angry,” Ensign Mewly explained.
“Captain Jacques often seems angry,” Grawf said, feeling this lead out. “Are you afraid of him?”
“Definitely,” Ensign Mewly meowed without hesitation.
This time Grawf frowned. She was trying to find something that this cat wasn’t afraid of, and she wasn’t doing very well at it. “Do you just like being scared?” she asked in frustration.
“No!” Ensign Mewly exclaimed.
“Then why do you keep coming to a class that scares you?” Grawf was truly bewildered by this point.
“Because you never seem scared, even though your mythology is filled with terrifying honey golems and apparently your quarters are filled with stinging insects,” the white cat explained with a touch of that same fervency that seemed to have kept him fighting the honey golem long after it had become clear he would never win. “So I thought, maybe, I could learn to be brave like you.”
Grawf laughed. It was the kind of big, hearty, belly laugh that only a bear can do. “I’m not brave, little cat,” the bear said. “I’m just not afraid. It seems pretty clear to me that you’re the brave one, surrounded by so many things that scare you and yet still fighting.”
Ensign Mewly looked truly surprised by this statement. His triangular ears turned completely forward, and he stood a little taller. No one had ever called him brave before. “You really think so?” he asked, almost afraid that this bear he admired would take the compliment away.
“Yes,” Grawf stated firmly.
The two of them looked at each other for an uncomfortable moment — small, fearful, white cat and large, irritated, brown bear — before Ensign Mewly couldn’t handle it anymore. The white cat looked away and said in a strained tone, “But then how do I stop having nightmares about honey golems?”
This perplexed Grawf. “Why are you having nightmares about honey golems?”
Ensign Mewly explained how he’d encountered rogue components of her exercise programs all jumbled up with aspects of other officers’ programs when he’d been fixing a glitch in the lumo-bay several months earlier. Suddenly, the white cat’s behavior made so much more sense to the bear.
“If I had known that’s why you were attending my classes,” Grawf said, “I would have taught you about an entirely different legend.”
Looking up at the stormy sky as if the ship’s computer was a god hiding among the lumo-projected clouds, Grawf said, “Computer, end program.”
The mountain ledge, the stormy sky, the buzzing zumble-bees, and everything else around them vanished, replaced in an instant with a pattern of glowing blue gridlines in a hexagonal pattern. The white cat immediately looked less on edge.
Now Grawf said to the ceiling, “Computer, begin program: Ursine Mythology Five.”
Ensign Mewly jumped in startlement as the new program began, but when he saw what had appeared all around them, the white cat visibly relaxed. The bear and cat were standing on a flower-dotted hillside, gently sloping and covered in bright green grass. The sky was clear and blue, albeit a more purple shade of blue than would have been seen on Earth, and three moons hung in the sky like ornaments.
“Follow me,” Grawf said.
Then the bear led the way down the hillside to a crystal clear lake. Fish swam through the lake’s waters, looking as if they simply floated above the pebbled bottom, their shadows following after them. Beside the lake was a small, rustic shed built from logs and branches. It only had three walls, and the fourth side looked out upon the lake. Inside was a simple cot and a few shelves built into the side walls.
Grawf took a net with a long handle down from one of the shelves and held it out to Ensign Mewly. Looking terribly uncertain, the white cat took the net in his paws.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Ensign Mewly asked.
“Catch a fish for your supper,” Grawf answered.
“That’s it?” Ensign Mewly asked, looking for any hidden tricks in the bear’s request. “Just catch a fish?”
“That’s how you trigger the story,” Grawf said. “This myth is about an old Ursine who lived by a lake. If you catch the fish, then you’ll be playing the part of the old Ursine.”
Ensign Mewly immediately thrust the net back toward Grawf. “Oh no,” he meowed. “I don’t want to be the main character. You do it.”
Grawf did not take the net back.
Ensign Mewly tried shaking it appealingly at her.
Grawf glared.
Now it was Ensign Mewly’s turn to sigh, but even as he did so, the white cat stepped closer to the lake and began eyeing the fish, looking for a promising one.
When Ensign Mewly finally chose a golden-scaled fish and swiped at it, the net dipped into the water with a pleasing smoothness and readily captured the flitting fish. As he lifted the net back out of the water, the fish’s wriggling, writhing weight within made the white cat’s whiskers turn up in a grin. “That was easy!” he declared, feeling like a success.
The feeling didn’t last long.
The purple-blue sky turned an angry shade of red, and the clear water in front of them spiraled up like a tornado, lifting a gigantic fish-like being from within the depths of the lake.
The being had shimmering blue and coppery scales all over its body which twisted down into the water until the lake and creature couldn’t be told apart. It had fins and gills, but its face looked Ursine. If Ensign Mewly had been able to think at all in the face of this terrifying fish-monster staring down angrily at him, he might have thought that it was perfectly natural for the god-figures from Ursine mythology to have bear-like features, matching the people who had made the stories up. However, rational thought was far out of the frightened cat’s reach at that moment.
“You have stolen my little kin!” the fish-god roared.
Grawf stepped close beside Ensign Mewly and whispered, “Your line is: I was hungry. I meant no harm.”
“I… I… I…” Ensign Mewly stammered. The cat showed no signs of being able to get farther through the line, so Grawf finished it for him.
“He was hungry,” the bear bellowed on the cat’s behalf. “He meant no harm.”
“No harm?!?” the fish-god roared. “You would steal the life of a child of the great god Rookmook and claim no harm? You shall pay the ultimate price, trading your life for the life you intended to take. You meant to eat my child, so I shall eat you!!!”
Ensign Mewly backed away, terrified, and ended up tripping on the cot. He fell back onto it and lay there in a kind of half-fallen position, trying to ward away the vision in front of him with his paws. “Computer end program!” the cat cried. “End program!”
“Belay that order,” Grawf growled fast enough to stop the program from doing anything more than flickering briefly with blue hexagons. “This is your next line: I PRAY TO MININIZI FOR AIDE! ONE OF YOUR CARETAKERS NEEDS YOU!” Grawf’s voice roared loud enough to make the hillside shake, partly because the program had been designed to respond that way.
A grand and glorious buzzing arose in the distance, and formed the words, “I will send my honey golem to save you.”
“Oh no,” Ensign Mewly yowled, trying to cover his ghost-white face with his paws, but Grawf grabbed onto the cat’s small paws and pulled him back up, not letting him cover his eyes.
Perhaps if Ensign Mewly had been less terrified all the way down to his bones, he would have thought to close his eyes, but then he wouldn’t have seen the gigantic, glowing, golden honey golem come striding across the hills, rising over the horizon like the sun beginning a new day.
The luminous golden bear came to the edge of the lake and reached out with an amorphous, drippy paw toward Rookmook the fish-god. The two titans of Ursine mythology clashed and brawled, golden paws tearing away at copper-blue fins until bits of honeyed fish rained from the sky.
The tornado of water dwindled back down into the lake, and the mass of honey shrank down to the size of a normal bear. By the end of the fight, the lake was calm again, and the honey golem was only the size of a cub.
The honey golem cub gathered the bits of honeyed fish that had fallen on the shore onto a silver platter that it pulled from out of the lake. And when the platter was full, it brought the glistening, tempting morsels to Ensign Mewly and presented them with a bow.
“So long as you serve Mininizi, may you never go hungry,” the honey golem cub said. “This lake is yours now, and all the fish in it will need a new god. Take the place of Rookmook, and care for them, eating only what you need.”
Uncertainly, Ensign Mewly accepted one of the honeyed fish morsels from the silver platter and was pleasantly surprised by its sweet, buttery flavor.
The honey golem cub left the platter with Ensign Mewly and Grawf before melting away like the golden-orange color of the clouds after sunrise. The sky turned purple-blue again, and once again, it was a lovely day.
“That was utterly terrifying,” Ensign Mewly complained. “Why do you even have a program like this? When would you ever use it? It’s not like it’s an exercise program.”
Grawf shrugged. “True, but I find it relaxing. And now that the lake is ours, we can fish as much as we like.”
“No thank you,” Ensign Mewly meowed snippily. “Besides aren’t you only supposed to take what you need?”
“The fish are lumo-projections,” Grawf intoned drily. “It’s not a real lake.”
“How was this supposed to help me?” Ensign Mewly asked with a complaintive warble in his voice.
“Well, now you can see that the honey golems are merely servants of Mininizi — not dangerous unless you cross her,” Grawf explained. “And extremely protective if you’re on her side.”
Ensign Mewly eyed the bear begrudgingly, seemingly considering her point. “I suppose that might help with the honey golem problem,” he eventually admitted. “But now I have to be afraid of fish-gods!”
“You eat fish-gods,” Grawf objected. “They’re delicious.”
The bear and cat stared at each other for a long moment over the platter of honeyed fish bits. Their different cultures and personalities clashed horribly. And yet, Grawf felt like she’d learned something about bravery and stubbornness from the frightened white cat in front of her — how they could be imperfect and entangled with each other. She hoped he’d learned something from her too.
“Will you keep coming to my classes?” Grawf asked. “Now that you’re no longer afraid of honey golems?”
Ensign Mewly’s triangular ears skewed, one twisting back and the other merely tilting. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not very good at martial arts.
Grawf hated herself a little bit for what she was about to say, because a large part of her wanted Ensign Mewly to stop coming to her classes. But she cared too much about being a good teacher to let it happen for the wrong reasons.
“You’re trying to learn too much at once,” the bear said. “When I have the other students repeat a move ten times to cement it in their muscle memory, you should simply try to get it right — really, actually right — just once. If you can get each move right once, then you’ll start making real progress.”
The white cat looked skeptical, but he said, “I’ll think about it.”
“You might be less afraid if you were better at martial arts,” Grawf pressed. “It could give you confidence. Besides…” The bear hesitated a moment before committing herself, but she knew this was the right thing to do. “I’ll be starting a new class soon — an easier one.”
There were surely more officers aboard the Initiative who would be interested in learning about Ursine mythology but had little aptitude for martial arts. Grawf decided that it would be worth reaching them as well. After all, she was an ambassador to the whole ship, and that included its fearful, annoying, or even clumsy crew members. Sometimes those officers proved to be the bravest.
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