"It's fine."

Shards, shards, shards...? No more shards in this room, moving on.

"Proust was right, those are weirdly pretty."

"It's kind of unsettling when I think about it. Like, I'm used to it, but..." he trails off and shrugs.

"If you think about it, it's also kind of unsettling what an attractive shade of red most species' blood is."

"It'd be a bit hard to make jewelry out of the blood, though, and I've been tempted. The problem is they're so sharp."

"Coat 'em in glass?"

"I'd have to learn how to work with glass, but I guess that's not prohibitive."

"...If you cut yourself on one, does that just sort of...self-perpetuate?"

"No. Well - I only end up with shards like this when I actually have, you know, pieces of me separated from the rest, far enough that they can't just grow back together. And I've never tried cutting off my fingers or anything, because one, ew, two, ow."

"Oh, I wasn't sure how badly you needed to be injured. Three, why?"

"If I just get a little cut then it goes all glassy for a second or two and then I'm fine."

"Good."

He smiles.

Smiles! It's nice meeting a friendly stranger again. Strangers that aren't trying to kill people have been so much outside the norm of late.

And Tiro is just glad to be able to talk to anyone. Strangers trying to kill him might still be an improvement on total isolation.

"D'you have bandages anywhere?"

"Nnno."

"Right, probably wouldn't have been a priority. D'you have something to boil water in?"

"That I do have!"

"Great. We can find some cloth and boil it and bandage Proust's finger, I don't want it getting infected."

"Good idea."

He detours briefly from his shard-collecting rounds to find a cooking pot and a big pile of very fine white cloth left over from recipe testing.

"Excellent." She starts boiling cloth.

And Tiro goes back to collecting shards. He also digs up the collector plants with their cup-shaped leaves full of shining blue liquid, and moves them a ways downslope until they aren't anywhere near the edible stuff.

Yttren starts poking at the food-bearing plants to see if he can do anything for them.

The food-bearing plants are all very happy and healthy. Could use watering, though. It doesn't rain here.