Oh yeah. Harley understood. Whether the kid actually was raised by wolves or not, she thought of herself as one. She thought of the shaggy creature beside her as family. If she wanted to talk to the girl, she had to talk to the wolf.
Both of ‘em.
She looked at the wolf, the four-legged one, and smiled without showing her teeth. Teeth were bad, right? It’d look like she was baring them if she smiled that way. So she didn’t. “Didn’t mean it to insult you. It’s to insult them. I can’t set the bar too high, y’know, or they won’t even try. They’re not gonna learn manners over night. It’s baby steps. They can try to be better than a dog, but trying to be as good as a wolf? They’d give up before they tried. I mean, look at ‘em.”
Harl turned her head to look at her babies, smiling indulgently as Bud attempted to regurgitate the glove. Which wasn’t going to be pretty if he managed it. Hyena stomach acid worked fast and it was pretty potent stuff, given what they ate. Oo! She should ask somebody about refining that into a toxin or something. That’d be fun.
But that was later. Right now, she had a wild child sitting in front of her. Talking to her. Which was sort of amazing in itself. Most feral children had a hard time learning human speech, and it was clear that she struggled with it. No worse than some other people she knew though. The kid was way more articulate than Killer Croc.
“I never met somebody that was a wolf before,” she told the girl. “Know a guy that thinks he’s a bat, but he’s got a complex. Seriously. But the only wolves I seen have all been like your brother there. Can I ask you some questions? That be okay? Like, how long have you been a wolf?”