"My experience with nice people is limited. I parse his actions as 'foolish'."

"They are, yeah, but– well, I haven't actually been there for them but this place doesn't seem that nice overall, so maybe he was just trying to poke it to get something useful?"

"The ratio of harmful or useless to useful effects is far too high, in my estimation."

"Yeah," she agrees. "Probably. But then you'd just end up living in the forest or something if you didn't poke anything? I mean, even coming into this store and then through the cylinder is– sort of poking stuff."

"He touched a crystal that was so sharp it sheared his hand off. Right after we patched that up, he went and touched another crystal in the same place. That one put him in a bubble of altered time such that several weeks passed for him in a matter of seconds for the rest of us. His soul animal was outside the bubble. He was practically catatonic by the time it got over to him."

"… Right." She blinks a couple of times. "Well, ow. But this place has put some things sorta like that together, from what I've seen – really good and really bad, right next to each other. Still, um, ow."

"Quite."

So, these flowers. Anything interesting about them or are they just flowers?

They are quite colorful. They seem to have been arranged purposefully and decoratively, and some of them seem slightly dangerous – think 'rose thorns', not 'man-eating'.

Maya looks at one of them then flares her aura yellow, spinning around to look for something and catching herself on one of the thorns. "Sh– ow," she says, looking between it and the door that leads to the cylinder.

"What?"

"I thought I– heard something," she says, looking down at her arm again. "And… what the hell? How did I forget about my cut all this time, that– doesn't make sense. And– I hope this new one doesn't do something to me."

She makes a bit of a noise of frustration and then stalks towards the door.

Elleira follows, careful of thorns.

Maya opens it and looks up and down. Then, seeing nothing, goes around the back to look for something and comes across– a bunny.

It seems quite damaged, though, like it got into a bad fight with the thorns, and is being very cute and slightly horribly damaged.

She does not get any closer to it.

Elleira, when she spots it, flicks the bunny off the roof.

The bunny: is flicked. Also falls.

Maya flares her aura red when she notices this so she doesn't have to hear it hit the bottom.

"Eugh."

"Those creatures are bad news. Especially when they appear from nowhere."

Maya nods. "All of them or just the rabbits?"

"Just the rabbits. There have been one or two ferrets that were mostly unobjectionable."

"Any helpful animals yet?"

"We used one of the ferrets to test some strange fruits we found. And then I turned it into stone so that Thario would get unturned from being stone."

"… So that you could keep having him test things? Or was this before Blue and you didn't want to be exploring alone?"

"This was before Blue and there were others present I didn't share a language with."

"Right," she says. "Okay, well anyway – are we done with this garden or do we want to try going down into the building by flying over the edge, or…?"

"Let's go back for now."

So to the door Maya goes, spark aura flared, and then she grabs ahold of Elleira and starts to take them up.

The drop: continues to be very far. Maybe she could manage to catch the ledge of a doorway.