//------------------------------//
// Chapter 13: Basic Consideration 
// Story: Silver Spoon Adopts a Naga 
// by Halira 
//------------------------------//

Silver considered going into the kitchen after her wife, but ultimately decided she needed to give Twist some space. Twist said she needed to think, and it was best just to her that time. 

"Doess Miss Twist not like me?" 

She looked behind her to find Sisstet cowering behind her rear legs. How could anycreature find him frightening? He was so timid. 

"She doesn't dislike you," she replied as she turned around to face him properly. "This is just a lot for her to take in all at once." She glanced back towards the kitchen briefly. "And to be fair, this is going really fast for her. Bringing you into our home like this is not the way these things are normally done."

"How are they done?" Sisstet asked.

She sat down. 'First, the adults sit down and have many discussions to decide if they want to adopt. Second, they decide together that they are ready to begin the process. Next, with couples like me and Twist, we would go to an orphanage and tell them that we have intentions of adopting. The orphanage would interview us and check out our home and then decide if we were likely to be a safe and loving home. Then they'd start discussing the kids under their care and… it's a long process, and we've kinda skipped over everything after the first step."

"Sso, wasss I supposssed to go to an orphange?" Sisstet asked in a hiss, stretching his S's far more than he normally did. 

She shook her head and bent down. "No, there's never going to be an orphanage for you. I think everything will be alright, once the princess has negotiated with the kingsnakes."

Sisstet stared down at himself. "I don't wanna be a kingsnake. They're big and mean. Even my guardians are afraid of them, and they aren't afraid of anything. I don't want creatures to be afraid of me, and I don't want to be mean."

She laid her bandaged leg on him. "You are a kingsnake, and we all need to accept that fact, but there's nothing saying you have to be mean or scary."

He squirmed. "But that's what it means to be a kingsnake."

How was she going to explain this to him? She looked back at her cutie mark. "We define who we are, not any cosmic destiny. If we don't like the fate that was laid out for us we only need to make the effort to change it. I changed mine, and you can change yours."

"I can make myself not be a kingsnake?" 

She shook her head. "No, but you have control of how you act and what you choose to do. Nocreature can make you behave a certain way or do something in particular if you don't let them." She pulled him closer. "Remember our lesson about pony cutie marks?"

He nodded. "It is what makes each pony special and different, but naga don't get cutie marks."

She nodded. "That's true, but the fact you're a kingsnake is like a pony having a cutie mark. It defines you, but it is up to you how it defines you."

"I don't understand."

She pointed to her flank. "I have a silver spoon for a mark, and it defines me, but I have chosen how it defines me, and that is not the way it did originally. It means something entirely different than when I first got it. I redefined what having this mark meant, and so I redefined myself."

He stared at her cutie mark. "You said your mark meant you wanted to feed and norsh young minds."

"Nourish, not norsh," she corrected with a giggle. "That's what my mark means to me now, but when I was your age I thought it meant I wanted the best things in life just given to me. When I got a little older I determined that didn't feel very satisfying, and I decided it meant I was supposed to run my family's silver business. Some things happened, and I dropped out of business school. After that I decided that I didn't want anything to do with business anymore. It took a little while to find my new meaning, but it happened, and I'm very happy with it."

He looked up at her. "So I can change my mind more than once about what being a kingsnake means to me?"

She rubbed his head and ears. "You can change your mind as much as you want until you find a meaning that makes you happy." She stood up. "Now, we've been outside all day, and you need to clean yourself up. I'll show you where the bathroom is and you can take a shower. Um- you are familiar with how to take a shower by yourself, right? I didn't get to see what your old bathroom was like."

He nodded. "We had a tub and shower."

She figured as much, considering he didn't come to school filthy. "Come on then. I'll show you where the bathroom is and the clean towels."

He gave her a confused look."Clean towelss?"

She flicked an ear. "To dry yourself with after your shower."

"I dry on my own, if I wait long enough." He then pointed to his coils. "Nagas don't have fur or hair to hold water. I normally took bathss though. Baths make me feel good."

"He's a reptile, Silv." She turned to see Twist had walked back in. "Reptiles absorb water through their skin, it's good for them. He really should have a bath with that in mind. You're a teacher, you should know this."

"I'm not an expert on everything just because I'm a teacher," Silver replied. "Where'd you learn that?"

"I had a pet snake for a while when I was a young foal," Twist answered. "I ended up setting him free because feeding him mice freaked me out, but I remember some things. Let him soak for a while in the tub, it will relax him. It's okay to leave him alone in there, he won't drown or anything. If he's like a snake he can hold his breath for a very long time. My old snake would sit submerged in his bowl of water so long sometimes that I thought he drowned."

Sisstet nodded along. "Yeah, I can hold my breath for like thirty minutess before it starts to hurt. I like being alone though. Even my guardians never stayed with me when I took a bath."

Silver frowned. She wasn't very happy with the idea of leaving him unsupervised, in the tub or out of it, but if he was used to privacy with washing she didn't want to make him uncomfortable. "Alright. I'll let you be unsupervised in the tub. You can take a nice long soak, but you still need to dry off after you're done. You can't be tracking water through the house."

It didn't take long at all for her to show him the bathroom and the linen closet. She made sure he was going to use soap and let him take care of himself from there, while she exited back out to the living room.

Twist gave her an appraising look. "Okay, starting this yet again. He's a kingsnake, you're sure about that?"

Silver nodded after she climbed up on the couch next to her wife. "Cozy Glow and Princess Twilight both seem confident about that. I just learned that most naga are color blind, and kingsnakes are identified when they're young by the ability to see in color. Sisstet can definitely do that."

"So it's like a recessive trait," Twist speculated. "Kinda like how two ponies of one tribe can sometimes have a foal from a different tribe that they don't even have close family members of, just because one of them had a so-many-greats grandparent they don't know about who was that tribe. Is that about right?"

"I'm not sure, but that sounds like that might be how it works," Silver replied with a shrug. She gave her wife a questioning look. "How are you feeling about this after the latest… surprise?"

Twist glanced briefly back towards the bathroom, perhaps trying to judge if Sisstet could hear them. "I heard you talking with him. I think comparing to tribes might have been better, but the talk about cutie marks and destinies got your point across. The important thing is he won't be a monster if he isn't raised to be one, and I know we would never let that happen. So I'm not so concerned about that now that I've had time to breathe and clear my head."

Silver laid her ears back. "But…?"

Her wife exhaled. "Another thing you said is true too. This is going really fast for me and I feel like you're making choices for both of us. I'm sure Sisstet is a sweet kid, but I haven't gotten to know him. This is kind of our foster period, and I'm going to try to get to know him, but we don't know yet if I'll be a good fit for him."

"I'm sure you will be," Silver said confidently, but then dropped her voice. "I am sorry for pushing all this on you so suddenly though."

Twist wasn't done. "It's also clear neither of us know as much about nagas as we should if we should if we were to consider adopting him. We talked about being open to adopting outside our species, but we understood that doing that meant we would thoroughly educate ourselves on whatever species we were considering adopting before we even started fostering them. Us not knowing much about nagas is unfair to Sisstet, and potentially dangerous. I mean, I made an assumption about something a few minutes ago based on my understanding of snakes, but we could unintentionally hurt him doing things like that."

Silver pointed at the large book sitting on the floor. "That's supposed to tell us everything there is to know about nagas."

"And judging by the size of that thing that's a lot of things we don't know, but we should have read up on before we got to this point," Twist replied. She looked at the book. "Since that tells us everything, supposedly, can you go check a few critical things real fast?"

Silver blinked and climbed down from the couch. "Sure what do you want me to look up?"

"For starters, how long is it going to be before he gets physically too big for us to deal with? It would be wrong to just assume it takes a very long time just because it takes dragons a very long time."

"That's fair," Silver replied as she reached the book. She opened it to the table of contents and just stared at it with her mouth agape. 

Twist gave her a single raised eyebrow. "What's wrong?" 

Silver shook her head. "I knew how extensive this was earlier, but it's still just mind boggling how much information they have crammed into this thing. Give me a minute or so, the way they have subjects listed makes no sense at all, so it takes time to just to find it on the table of contents."

 "Who wrote that book? Discord?"

"He might have," Silver replied, then her face lit up. "Here we go! Kingsnake equine-naga growth and development."

"There's non-equine naga?"

Silver nodded as she started flipping through pages to the appropriate spot. "Yeah, they have lots of sections about bovine-naga and avian-naga, just as many sections as the equine ones. I guess that's good."

Twist tilted her head. "Why is that good?"

"Less reading," Silver answered. "That's two-thirds of the book we don't have to worry about."

Twist snorted. "Great- so only a third-of-a-million pages to read instead of a million."

"It's only about two thousand pages," Silver replied as she continued to turn pages to find the appropriate entry. 

"Oh, I guess that makes it light reading then," Twist giggled. "Something small to read between reading the dictionary and the encyclopedia."

Silver turned and stuck her tongue out at her wife, then went back to flipping pages until she found what she was looking for. "Here we go! Average size and weight ranges of kingsnakes by age." She paused and looked through, then grinned in triumph. "Sisstet won't reach full size until he's around eighty or ninety years old, and should be able to fit into an average pony house until he's about forty or so. He'll reach average naga size somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years old."

Twist stared at her like she was crazy. "How long do kingsnakes live?"

Silver pointed at the chart. "This says they can live upwards of seven hundred years, but more commonly live to be around four or five hundred. Sisstet's has a lot of life ahead of him."

"And for the majority of that life he'll be too big to live around ponies," Twist reminded her grimly. "He'll have to go back to the Clutch eventually when he gets too big, and he won't have a clue how to interact with naga there because he'll be so used to dealing with ponies and other creatures instead."

Silver flattened her ears back. "Do you have to keep being so negative?"

Twist hopped down from the couch and came over to her. "I'm trying to be responsible and think about everything involved, including what's best for him. Did you ever think that maybe they wanted the kingsnakes back because they felt it was best for them to be raised in the Clutch if they'd be forced to return to it? That's a pretty jarring culture clash we'll be putting him through."

Silver stomped. "We can find a way! He has made it clear he doesn't want to go there. Regardless, that's not a problem we need to immediately worry about right now."

Twist looked at the chart with a small frown. "Alright, let's wait to discuss that one with the princess, since she'll no doubt need to get involved, and might already be thinking of a plan if she is going to try to negotiate for him to stay."

Silver did a brisk nod in response.

"Now, let's look up what exactly his dietary needs are," Twist continued.

Silver groaned at the thought of another search through the massive book, but brightened up as she had an idea. "Hey, can you grab a box of your old sales fliers?"

Twist blinked. "Sure, but what for?"

Silver pointed to the massive tome. "Bookmarks."

 



Sisstet really wanted to just submerge his head beneath the warm water of his bath, but he couldn't hear clearly that way. Water made sounds all weird, and he couldn't tell what they were supposed to be, just the general direction they came from. 

It seemed to him that Miss Twist really wanted to send him back to the Clutch. He wanted to stay with Miss Silver Spoon, since she had always been so nice to him. He couldn't think of another grown-up that had ever been as nice to him as Miss Silver Spoon was. His guardians definitely weren't nice. They threatened to bite him and scared him that one time they read his report card and Miss Silver Spoon had said for them to encourage him to do better. Miss Silver Spoon came and yelled at them after she found out. He'd never seen anycreature go up to his guardians and do something like that. They listened to her too, and never did anything like that again. 

Staying with Miss Silver Spoon would be the best, but could he risk the chance they'd send him back to the Clutch? Even his guardians didn't want to be in the Clutch. They said every naga in the Clutch lived in fear of the kingsnakes, and if you did anything the kingsnakes didn't tell you to do they'd gobble you up. Sometimes the kingsnakes would eat them even if they didn't do anything wrong, because they said there were too many naga and not enough food. His guardians liked living in Equestria. Ponies didn't just decide to eat creatures like that. He might be a kingsnake too, but maybe the reason there weren't a lot of kingsnakes was all the big ones ate the small ones before they could get big. If they didn't want too many naga then they probably didn't want too many kingsnakes either.

There wasn't much of a choice. If they were going to send him back to the Clutch he needed to run away, but he didn't need to do that…yet. He still wanted to be here, and he was going to hope Miss Silver Spoon stop them from sending him away.