...because being in charge never mattered, before, right. Hopefully they've learned better, at least a little, since you last saw them - I'm a Speaker; I can't actually work miracles.

I really doubt they've learned anything, they're in far too much pain to be in a good place for learning. It's all right. They can be worked with and worked around.

She's briefly confused. ...Eldar timescales. It's going to take me a while to get used to that. By which I mean months, a couple years at most, she says, amused, then goes serious again. Their parent, or something else too?

I don't know who else they've lost, I didn't even know their father was dead. I am giving them enough credit to assume they're pretty broken up about Maitimo. And - there were a lot of awful things before that, too. 

Nod. Snuggle.

Well, I'm sure I'll find out eventually, if it matters.

...Would you like to see the jungle? I can do that without taking you there, with portals.

I'd love to!

She grins and scoots over, and a moment later, the walls of the tent are portals. The tent flap is still visible, and the floor, but aside from that it's like being there.

He is delighted. How did you find this! It's so pretty!

She giggles. It was Maitimo's idea, actually. It's nearly winter at home, and I had enough food for myself but not for another person, and I'd only just figured out how to teleport to places I hadn't already been to, and they suggested I look for someplace warm enough to have food growing all year, and when I did this is what I got.

What's winter?

...right, you don't have seasons. Or, yet, maybe, if the sun is new. On my world years have a hot part and a cold part with milder parts between them before and after; winter's the cold part. Fall's the mild part before it, and there's lots of food then, but most things don't grow in winter, so we gather things in the fall and save them to eat until it gets warm again.

Good to know. I'd worry we should be doing that but I guess we've got you.

She grins. Mmhmm. And you can still hunt, in winter, that helps. A lot of animals hibernate or migrate to warmer places - she sends a memory of six formations of geese flying south together - but some are still around, and some from even colder places migrate in - memory of a flock of juncoes flitting around in a snow-covered bush.

The Ice was too cold for any of those, I think, or maybe they just don't live there.

Very hug. Yeah. Even winter is nothing like this. There'll be cold spells, and some winters are worse than others, but usually it isn't even always freezing cold, just mostly.

So many of my people died. 

So very, very hug. So very. She shifts to his lap, that's the better way to do it. You don't ever have to be someplace cold again, if you don't want to.

He's just gonna assume her society doesn't have taboos around being this close with people you've just met. I want to kill the Enemy, he says. I can shiver a little to get that done, as long as my people are safe.

She nods, solemnly.

Anything more you wanted to tell me, about yourself or your world?

She thinks. Not especially? ...the magic's dangerous to learn to use and mages can be pretty scary if we want to be, but it's shareable and there are more kinds, I don't think I'd mentioned that yet. We don't have a very specific plan for getting more, but Maitimo thinks we should get the kind that makes fire first.

Oh, why's that?

Why's it dangerous? It takes a while to get good enough at casting for your spells to be stable, she scoots back off his lap and cuddles up beside him again, and if you leave an unstable spell around it'll break on its own and kill you. It's not that big of a problem with a safe kind of magic to learn with - mine is definitely not - but it takes a few months before that stops being an issue, and it's not automatically obvious that it is one.

That makes sense. And why fire magic?

It'd be useful for metalworking. I'm mostly sure they weren't thinking in terms of using it as a weapon. She's cringing a little. Not a happy topic, weaponized fire magic.