She is currently dependent on this person for food and guidance and should stay quiet. She is currently dependent on this person for food and guidance and should stay quiet. She is currently dependent on this person for food and guidance and should stay quiet. She is -
"You look unhappy," he notes. "Are you hungry? Syl will be done in a few minutes."
He goes off on a tangent about the time they threw a feast for every god in the entire Northeast quadrant of the Isle. It had seventy courses. He loved it.
Most of the dishes shimmer with subtle golden light. All of them look indescribably delicious and foreign. There is so much.
Syl concludes her prayer and beams up at them. "Tuck in!"
"Thank you."
Shara takes some of all the more recognizable and some of the more appetizing-looking unrecognizable foods.
Aril eats an absolutely terrifying amount of food, surprising no one. His manners, at least, are decent. His chopsticks move with force and precision, carting food to his mouth like coal to a furnace.
"Oh, it's a dragonsfruit! Very, hmm... Not too sweet, but quite nice, and they're so pretty on a table it never hurts to put them out. There's one for each elemental dragon, but that only affects the color. Not like firemelons and airmelons and those. Would you like a taste?"
"Just cut it in half and scoop out a bite," she explains.
"I've never had anything like it, except in the trivial sense that I've eaten fruit before."
"Well, I'm glad I could introduce you to it! Feel free to ask what the rest is; I know it was hard for me to adjust to all the different fruits and vegetables and animals in this place."
So Shara asks what more things are - that spice, that vegetable, that meat, this gigantic egg's source animal, this dessert that she mistook at first for a piece of bread.
Her questions are answered enthusiastically, with occasional tangents about how the vegetable tastes completely different if you chop lengthwise, or the difficulty of getting the eggs away from the giant spiders in the first place, but it's so worth it, isn't it.
But to all things must come an end, and delicious meals are no exception. Once the remaining food is cleared Elsewhere for later consumption, Aril flops to the ground and sleeps.
Syl nods decisively. "He'll be out for a few hours; he's been up for half a week, so I thought a nap might be good for him. Now." She turns to Shara. "Would you like to take a walk? It aids humans' digestion, or so I'm told."
"Sure, as long as you can also do the preventing-the-forest-from-mutating-me thing."
She sets off at a decent pace, a faint mark shining on her forehead.
She taps a tree pensively as she passes it. "You seemed troubled during our meal."