A sexy woman grabs a young boy and holds him to her naked body. It's 'necessary' because he was made to slip and fall into a hole in the ground.
When they set out to get the children back, the Mithraic survivor team finds an interesting unnatural structure that must be a Mithraic temple of mysteries because it has five sides and it's warm.
Returning to the barracks with Paul asleep in her arms, Mother tells the kids she'll kill them all and let the maggots sort them out if they don't keep their eyes shut. She wouldn't really mean to because she's really very caring, of course. She goes outside to a silo where Father has imprisoned a creature and looks at it through a hole in the door with mild fascination. The creature lunges at her with high-speed shrieking ferocity, evoking no response, and Father mildly advises his perception that it's mildly aggressive. Mother doesn't really care much what happens with it.
Mother has a charming 'female bonding' chat with Tempest while melting down the children's gold pendants by simply blowing on them (in the mundane way that one blows on a bowl of hot soup). She suddenly crafts a precision cutting instrument from the molten metal with her impervious fingers and muses that she's always wanted a child that came from her (where "always" means for as long as she's been repurposed to not exactly always want to murder children). Tempest gets the right idea as Mother advances on her, scalpel in hand - Mother can't be stopped. She cuts into the children to remove their trackers.
Now that they're spudless and therefore foodless, Father says he'll kill the creature so the kids can eat it. Campion asks for time to find another food source so they can let the creature live. He manages to fell a bunch of benign-looking acorn things from one of the cactus-looking trees, names it "Pizza", and the chemical analysis reveals that it's inedible due to trace levels of hydrocyanide (like cassava). No matter what you call it, it's poisonous.
While performing maintenance on her craft kit for growing humanoids (preparing to extract Tempest's baby from her body to bring to term in a box), Mother reminisces about the "snowballs" that rotted in the Generation Two embryo containers.
Campion finds no other viable food source and attempts to free the creature. Due to Campion's objection, Father suddenly decides that instead of the no-kill policy they started with, Campion will have to kill the creature himself and then continue killing them until he becomes comfortable with it (if ever) because it's only natural, now. When Campion objects to this, Father decides further that all of the kids will naturally have to participate in killing the creature; even the youngest and those with strongly-held ideological and personal convictions otherwise. Campion runs to get Mother (interrupting her from her perfectly natural dead embryo magic circle rite), and she grants conditional agency to Father, saying she'll kill the creature herself if he doesn't execute the lesson in a punctual manner. Campion pleads with her, but she doesn't really care. Father has starvation on his side in the argument with the kids, and after pressuring them to kill the creature with a spear he's made, Holly takes a stab at it. She's appalled at the result and the kids run away from the silo. Father tells them they're only prolonging the creature's suffering by not finishing the job, assumes too much, assumes too much more, and then cruelly leaves the suffering subhuman to suffer.
While searching the Mithraic wreckage for parts for her craft kit, Mother decides to enter their simulation to view some different data. She lies prone on an impossible stasis pod and simply ignores the warning that the simulation is not intended for her demographic. She experiences firsthand an exceptionally vivid and distorted interpretation of the incident when two of the kids accidentally "melted the snowballs" while playing; not knowing what they really were.
'Marcus' cuts a woman open, crams his hand into her guts, and there are batteries that make it useful. There's a children's lullaby about the reign of darkness, and a resolution to make it look like an accident (but it's not going to work). He then hears a voice and sets a man on fire to suffer an agonizing death and it must be divine because of the interesting unnatural structure.
Father experiences a sensory anomaly, seeing a vison of Tally, and starts to piss off in pursuit until he hears a scream. Tempest has killed the suffering subhuman with Mother's scalpel at great risk to herself and has been eating it's organs bloody and raw on the spot at great risk to herself which is only natural of course because she's pregnant. She apparently found this event acceptable until she realized the suffering subhuman was pregnant with a baby subhuman, and she presents the bloody thing to Father to our continued suffering.
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