They had a new friend!!  A wonderful, new, extra friend!  Sona-sugandh had simply been minding her own business - really! - not doing much of anything, not even looking for a new friend, oh no.  Not actively, anyway.  But then she had felt it, the pull of a cub wishing for better, needing better!  All alone and scared out in the big wide world, and much much much too soon for that.  It was awful!  Terrible!  Who would leave a defenseless little cub all alone like that, where no end of horrible things could happen to it?  Why, if Sona hadn't found it, it might have died!  Terrible, just terrible.  It made her very upset, deeply so, and angry!  Oh, so mad she wanted to stomp her feet and yell about it! 

But there was no one to yell at, and even if it was awful for someone to just abandon a cub like that (or, almost as horrible a thought, kill its mother and leave it behind to die too), it did mean that Sona had a new friend all her own, so she couldn't be too mad.  Not with delightful, adorable, perfect little purple Kupotea to play with.  Umngane and Umshomi were fine and all, and certainly lots of fun, but it was good to have new friends!  There was no such thing as too many friends; more importantly, for Sona-sugandh, there was no such thing as enough friends.  Whether she had three, or ten, or twenty, she would always want and need more, especially since her friends were constantly committing the terrible crime of growing up on her.  Every day they got a little bit older, until the time came when they weren't cubs at all anymore.  Some of them were still fine through their adolescence, but once real adulthood hit...

It was awful.  Why did friends grow up?  It wasn't fair!  The goddess desperately wished that, like her, they didn't really have to.  She could make some of them young again, but she didn't have enough power to keep all of them that way, and even when she did, sometimes they were...different.  So, for the most part, she just let them go.  And then she went looking for more new friends!  That made it less sad.

Kupotea was a very good new friend, just absolutely a treat, but Sona needed more...more to the point, Kupotea needed more!  They needed a bigger family, yes, that was exactly what they needed, and so Sona had left her little pack of playmates to find them some new ones.  She'd ended up somewhere with a lot of cubs.  Just...just so many cubs!  If it hadn't been for all the adults around, it would have been paradise.  As it was, she had to be very careful not to be found out not to belong, so she'd disguised herself as another cub to play with the rest.  It was much stealthier than going about as someone bigger, and who could really be suspicious of a cub?

In its own way, being disguised was fun, too!  But she was having so much fun, in fact, that she got quite sidetracked and very nearly forgot why she had come here in the first place, and didn't remember until the sun began to set and her playmates for the day had to go sleep.  How boring!  This also presented a problem for her disguise, since a lone cub wandering about in the dark would be sure to attract attention, and so she'd had to make herself invisible.  She'd come to find a friend to take home, and now that she'd had her playdate, that was just what she was going to do.

The only trouble was that all of the new friends she'd made were happy and well taken care of by their families.  Sona couldn't take happy cubs, no!  That would be mean, especially when there were unhappy cubs.  Just...none here, apparently.  If there were no unhappy cubs, well then, she would have to make do with something else!  She needed someone to make happy, and in this relative sea of lions, there had to be someone who needed that.  She crept around for what felt like hours and hours, and spotted no few candidates - there were at least as many very old lions around here as there were cubs!  She could work with that, yes...surely no one liked being old, after all, and would appreciate being not old!

While she pinpointed quite a few likely candidates, however, she could only choose one today. If she wanted another, she'd have to come back another time! The deciding factor, then, was that...that she eenie-meenied it, because she couldn't decide on her own. Once it was done, though, she was quite pleased. Surely she would make an ideal friend for her! (And Kupotea and Umngane and Umshomi, of course.) Yes, yes, she would do quite nicely, and was also very conveniently asleep. Hopefully she would stay asleep, and she could carry her off before she woke up, and no one would ever be the wiser!

And she, of course, would have no idea that anything at all had happened to her, or that she'd ever been anywhere but with her and the rest of their family. No idea that she'd once been a sleek and elegant lioness, or lived in such an enormous pride, or ever been old or tired or whatever else she was in this moment. Sona had to rein in her excitement and keep from bouncing once she'd made up her mind, and summoned her power to make her what she wanted: a cub. Still the same brownish lioness, more or less, but as she'd been before he'd grown up, which she was sure had been a very long time ago. Before she'd even been born!

But it didn't matter now. Thanks to her, she was young again, a perfect little cub destined for nothing but happiness. The goddess scooped her up and disappeared, spiriting her away to a new life.

((ICly she's probably had Kupotea for months by this point, but Sona has a very screwy sense of time. What's 6 months when you're having fun?!))