And yet!

Fffffffuuuu---

Fine.

He stomps back to the group.

Luvei intercepts him before he can walk in on the elves doing elf things.

Right. Good. Well, it's apparently going to be very necessary for elves to do elf things, because the soil contains zero nutrition and if they want to not starve in the time it takes to gestate at least one egg with enough Strider blood to teleport and raise the kid to the point where he or she can get them all out of here they're going to need to harvest the corpse for as much plant-usable nutrient as possible and be impeccably efficient with their waste.

They may turn out to be in slightly more luck than that.

About an hour after they arrived, a small humanoid figure wearing a backpack much too big for him becomes visible in the distance, approaching them from the direction of the lake.

The elves have all well and finished doing their elf things by this point, and Aduva's the first to spot him. "That's either good, because he knows how to survive here without arguable cannibalism, or bad, because we have another mouth to feed."

The distant figure waves.

Aduva waves back. This is highly visible on account of her being a few inches over seven feet tall.

Yeah, that sure is a thing!

Walk walk. Walk walk walk.

He calls a cheery greeting in an unfamiliar language as soon as he's in earshot.

...Well, that's hardly a surprise. She taps her chest. "Aduva."

He taps his own chest and says, "Tiro!"

"I, Aduva. I am Aduva. You, Tiro. You are Tiro."

"I am Tiro. You are Aduva." He looks around at everyone else and adds, "You are...?"

"Amalta."

"Kaleith."

"Leuska," a woman with great brown wings extending from her back introduces herself.

"Luvei." A man almost nine feet tall with pale blue skin.

"Yttren." A man with green skin, a very prominent lower jaw, and highly pronounced canines.

"Delsmiar." A woman in gauzy black robes that were probably very fine before they were so tattered, with black markings on her face.

"Mirrin."

"Panga."

"Fondai."

"Proust." A quartet of women shorter than he, all with thick curly brown hair and bare, hairy feet.

He smiles a welcoming smile, says something else in his language, and beckons to the group while taking a few steps away in the direction he came from.

They all look warily at each other and at their friend's body.

...yeah, there is that.

He sighs. He takes off his comically oversized backpack. He sits down on the ground and unlatches the lid of the boxy pack and takes out a round metal plate, a book, and a paintbrush.

Okay...

He makes gentle shooing motions to clear people out of the square meter or so directly in front of him.

Inside a compartment of his pack, sixteen glass spheres are strapped tightly into individual leather holders, each a different colour. He dips the brush into the brown one, somehow; the dense spongy brush-tip passes through the shell of the sphere like it isn't there, while the shaft of the brush ticks against the outside and stops the tip from going any farther. Using a diagram from the book as a reference, he paints an abstract diagram onto the flat surface of the plate in brown ink with glints of green and grey.

A cubic meter of rich soil appears in midair directly in front of him and falls into a heap on the ground. The curves and lines of his diagram vanish from the plate at the same moment.

Yttren steps forward, reaches towards the soil, and makes a "can I?" gesture.