"Oh aye?" the blond spirit asked, skeptically. "This explains why your 'attackers' look like ground meat?"

He jerked his chin over his shoulder at the dark entrance towards the stable behind him. In the doorway, General Russett had two other figures cornered, and was bent almost double with the amount of fury she was pouring into whatever Aetherian diatribe she was subjecting them to. One figure was a man with deep crimson skin, yellowed tusks and horns, and long ears; the other had a mostly human shape, except that their head was that of a sickly green dragon. They both--wearing the same pale teal shirt as General Russett--looked considerably worse than Yoshi and Liya. The horned man could only see out of one eye, and the dragon appeared to be holding its own jaw closed.

Liya tilted her head warily. "Wull," she said, quite reasonably, "they wouldn't stop. They din't even pause when I walked up. They just tried t'wail on me, too."

She'd walked up on them with a shovel in hand, in all honesty. Yoshi had sunk his teeth into the dragon's forearm and was stubbornly breathing fire onto it, even while the horned man laughed and tried to haul Yoshi back.

Liya sneered a bit. "It took 'em a while to work out that they oughta back off."

The blond spirit rounded on Yoshi instead. "And what's your excuse? How did this start, exactly?"

Yoshi tilted his head to shake a stray lock of hair out of his eyes. "Er...they have been harassing me all afternoon, lurarem," he said, and added rather irritably, "As I have been reporting. They kept trying to prevent me from performing my stable work. I didn't respond to their...harassment, so finally they tried to hold me down, and--"

"BULL SHIT," a new voice interrupted.