"--Hello! Are you a druid?" 

"Yes!" Finally another normal person to talk to. Studying the outsiders would be so much less emotionally exhausting with a support group of more than one person.

"I'm Bright Morning Feather, druid of Ravounel forest. This is my companion Greystripe. I'm pleased to meet you! Are you here because of the human convention too?"

"Yes! I persuaded some other Itarii to elect me." 

"I was chosen by the senior druids and I'm glad I was chosen, because I'm trying to understand the outsiders - the mostly-human society outside the forest. Why did you want to come? And I don't recognize the name Itarii, where do you live?"

Feather being friendly with strangers tends to consist of a rapid stream of questions, but unlike with Chelish humans she can totally read the body language of a strix in flight and will react accordingly! Assuming this strix is like the ones she knows back in Ravounel, anyway.

"I'm from Mountainhome, like all the rest of us. It's northwest of here. I don't understand the humans very well either, so I don't think I'll be able to help much, unfortunately. What are you, under the owl? I've learned about halflings and orcs and their not being human, since coming here."

"I don't know where Mountainhome is." To be honest it sounds like something anyone would call their mountain home, which is very valid but could mean there are dozens of places named that. "Do you know where Ravounel Forest is? It's all the way west and a bit north, past some big mountains, until you reach the big ocean and can't go west anymore."

"And - I'm a druid." Not everyone understands druids though, not even in the forest. "I'm not anything under the owl, I'm just an owl right now. I spend most of my time as either owl or human - well, mostly human and a little bit elf and orc and other things - but I'm the creature that I am at the time, I'm not something else under it."

"...Itarii druids are still Itarii when they're shaped like something else, or they wouldn't be allowed to be chieftains. I don't know why it would be different for anyone else. I mean, it's not that I don't believe you, but I couldn't have guessed it ahead of time. And no, I know what forests are but I don't know much about anyplace too far from home. West and north of Mountainhome is also ocean, though. I mean, there's a human city for a bit, but besides that."

Huh. "You have your own druids? How many people live there, is it just strix? I haven't met any druids who aren't from a forest, maybe they're different in a way I don't know about."

"The way a druid becomes a creature of some race is by studying that race and understanding them in every way and gradually learning to think and behave and live just like them, and then the magic supplies the shape. The shape is necessary, but it's not the important or the difficult part. I can't become a new kind of creature without meeting a real one first and learning a lot about them for a long time."

"I think wizards and maybe clerics have spells that just reshape their bodies, they don't need to understand anything about the creature they're pretending to be. But I really am an owl. I grew up knowing owls, some of my best friends are owls - I mean they were hatched owls, like Greystripe here, he's not a druid. And when I became a druid I learned to become an owl too."

"If something killed me while I was an owl then the magic would end and my body would return to being human-shaped. Maybe that's what you mean? But if something killed me, I'd be dead, and that's a much bigger change than what shape my body is!"

"Well, you can understand a creature without being it--I don't just mean in terms of bodies or magic, I mean, if I argue with one of my friends, sometimes I will understand their point completely but still disagree with them. So I bet you can understand another animal while still having a sense of identity as your original species. It's just Itarii, on Mountainhome, as far as sapient beings go; when the humans come in we kill them. But halflings and orcs aren't human so maybe we won't kill those, going forward! Druids are rarer than--uh--I don't know the word--[shamans,] but we have them."

*[] indicates Itarii word instead of Sylvan.

"I mean, yes, of course! I understand many races but I can only be one at a time. And I understand many other races but not well enough to be them; I can't become a strix, not until I'm a much much better druid. But I can't become a race while - disagreeing with how that race is. It would be like - becoming something I hate being, I guess. Like becoming an owl but hating and refusing to ever fly. So I wouldn't do it even if I could. Understanding lots of very different races at once means a druid has to accept how they are and not think some are better than others. Druids are supposed to help everyone in the Forest." Maybe if a community's druids are all hatched strix for many generations, they could lose sight of that? But Feather isn't going to judge druids she hasn't even met; Liushna could be misunderstanding her own druids too.

"Why do you kill humans? I mean, we do it too some of the time, because we know the humans are usually coming in to hurt and kill people without need and to cut down or burn the forest and not let it grow back. And I'm still not sure why they do that, at least not - in all the cases that they do. Why do the humans bother you, if you live on a mountain and not in a forest with trees they want?"

"I didn't mean I thought you should disagree with it, just that it's possible to understand and even inhabit a perspective without being it. I think the humans want to live where we live, and that's why it started, but right now we kill humans because the humans will kill us if we don't. The human Queen who was just overthrown is supposed to have been really bad, so I came here because I hope that with less bad humans in charge, we can have peace again. We had peace a long time ago." 

"I wish the Forest could have peace too. But we never had, even back under Aroden. So - I don't really know what to do," Feather confesses, "but I hoped that maybe I could understand the outsider humans better, or meet someone who could explain them to me, and find a solution. Because we can't - just not try, right?" 

"...and of course it will be useful regardless to know what the new human Queen is going to do, and she promised safe conduct to the delegates."

"I'm a little surprised humans want to live on a mountain, but - some humans try to burn whole forests to get more territory. Adjusting to life on a mountain has got to be easier than that." This is getting depressing. "I'm glad you're able to defend your mountains, at least!"

“Humans can’t fly. It’s a big disadvantage.”

"That makes sense! Flying is great, isn't it." (Greystripe hoots in acknolwedgment.)

"Speaking of, where are you flying to? I don't mind flying along while we're talking, I'm just curious." Owls aren't the best at endurance flying, or hovering in one place for that matter, but she can keep going for a while, she hasn't been doing anything else strenuous recently; worst case she has lesser restorations.

“Nowhere in particular. Just trying to familiarize myself with the layout of the city.”

"It is hard to find your way around, isn't it? I guess it took me a long time to learn the forest too. I flew over it when I came in but I don't think I really understand it yet. It's all built by humans but I don't know if it could have been built different or why it is the way it is."

“I don’t know what enough of the landmarks even are to guess,” Liushna admits cheerfully.

"Me neither! I found some temples, and the place for the convention, and then everything I checked seems to be private homes, for sleeping and eating and - I guess lairing in, for the really big ones? But I only checked a few, the others just look similar. And some are probably for work, like making tools and smaller things. And I know those over there are for storing grain, I found them because I was looking for the local rats. But that still leaves a lot I don't know about."

“Sorry, I don’t know the word ‘temples?’”

"Places that belong to a god or the god's clerics, so the people who follow that god and want help from the clerics or to help the clerics know where to go and meet each other."

“Oh, gods. Itarii don’t do gods.”

"Fair enough! We have very few clerics in the forest, and those are mostly of Gozreh, although some people do worship other gods." Like the hags who worship Rovagug, but she's not going to mention that in polite company, it makes a bad impression and probably deservedly so. "I've been trying to understand what the gods tell humans to do, or what they think the gods are telling them to do, but they seem very confused about it themselves."

“Gozreh isn’t a god, Gozreh is just the world.”

"I... can maybe see why you'd think that? Gozreh is the god who's closest to being all of Nature. Honestly I'd feel more comfortable with them if they really were the world and not a god, I don't think any gods have our best interests at heart! Everyone I know calls Gozreh a god but I don't really know how you'd tell if it's true, so maybe you're right."

“I’m not sure what it would mean for Gozreh to be a god.”