"Having conversations with demonish sorts of people is probably not a good idea."

"I wasn't planning to try to start one," she says, a little amused. "Telling someone to go have a chat with the Outsider is generally not a nice thing to say to someone, and I doubt it'd be a nice thing to do. Apparently the people that he bestows his gifts upon don't tend to have happy endings."

"Sounds demonish all right!"

She doesn't say, Granted, a lot of this might be religious revisionism by a bunch of zealots, and should be squinted at accordingly, because while she doesn't very much like the Overseers and their cult, they are actually more sane and pro-social than people that worship the Outsider. As the heir to the empire, she'd really rather not casually piss them off. On purpose, sure, but not when she doesn't mean to.

"It's possible that my information might be incomplete," she says, instead. "So I should probably go to Manafall and ask them for solutions to my inexplicable problem?"

"Yeah, I think that's your best plan from here. Somebody in the City of Light is bound to have an answer."

"I think you might need... money, and things?" says Sunpatch, dubiously. "I've never left the Forest, I'm really not sure how all that works."

"I will probably need money and things," she agrees, a little amused. "I would like to get home as soon as possible, but I would like to get home in one piece as soon as possible. So I'd prefer to take a little while to make sure I can successfully not starve in the wilderness trying to get to Manafall, if that's all right with you."

"Oh, well, of course," says Sunpatch. "I'm hardly going to leave you to wander around in the woods by yourself, that wouldn't be nice of me at all!"

This place is so very, very twee.

"Thank you kindly for that, I appreciate it very much," she says sincerely, curtsying again.

"We're a little far from the Tree—it's where most of the buildings in the Forest are, humans are usually more comfortable there—but my house is just around the corner and I've got an elf-sized guest room, you can stay with me for a few days while you get used to roads and so on," Starshine offers.

"That sounds excellent, thank you!"

"You're welcome! It's a good thing you landed in the Forest; most places aren't nearly so hospitable."

She nods. Note to self: only the Forest is twee. Probably. The twee status of other places is still to be determined.

"Well, I think you might've done all right in Manafall," says Sunpatch. "I don't really understand the Blessed Lands well enough to know how they handle unexpected visitors but it's probably not as well as us."

"Hmm... the thing about places that aren't the Forest is that they might have good ways of handling unexpected visitors, but you'll have to go farther than the first person you meet to find them," says Starshine. "In the Forest everyone expects to help each other; even if the first person you'd met had been busy or ungenerous, they'd still almost certainly have shown you to a road and pointed you at the Tree. And as long as there's nothing demonic about you—there isn't, right?—"

"Of course not, I did check," says Sunpatch.

"—oh good—then there's no reason to turn you away, since there's only one of you and it's not your fault you ended up here."

That's interesting. And makes her very curious about how this country is run and how they take care of their people so well.

"... Is the Forest the sort of place, where, if it had the resources to comfortably manage it, it'd happily accept as many people as it could take care of?"

"...well, of course it is," says Sunpatch.

"Not everywhere is like that!"

"Well, no, but this is the Forest." He swishes his tail.

"From what I've seen it's very nice so far. My home certainly isn't the sort of place where one can get help from just anyone. How do you do it?"

"Nearly all the fae and unicorns in the world live in the Forest, and the rest is mostly elves," Starshine explains. "Having this many unicorns means all the water is always safe to drink, because that's one of the easiest things to do with unicorn magic, and the second easiest thing is healing, so that's covered too. There's more than enough Sylvan fae to maintain huge living spells like the roads and borders without much trouble, so we're safe from the rest of the world and it's easy to get around; and between the fae and the unicorns, we've got the happiest, healthiest gardens and orchards in the world, so we never have to worry about food. With all that, I'd be surprised if the Forest wasn't a really nice place to live, wouldn't you?"

"I could see it going wrong somewhere despite the starting advantages," she says. "Differences in class and education splitting the populace apart, in-fighting in the government about policy and which problems are worth devoting resources towards... It'd be a pity, though."

"It's - our thing to be proud of," she says. "Manafall is proud of being the best place to learn things, and the Blessed Lands are proud of having lots of angels around, and the Forest is proud of being a really nice place to live where people help each other and things work right."