No signal.

Ah huh. Okay. She slows down a little more. Adjusts herself in the saddle because there was a slight flapping sound and it's probably better if there isn't a slight flapping sound. 

She turns around.

There's also a forest in that direction. Some stumps that look maybe cut rather than fallen.

She resists the urge to yell at the forest "fuck off, this is stupid" because she doesn't actually want to die. She doesn't even mutter it. The forest might have good hearing.

Well, okay, if there are signs of habitation she will go check out the signs of habitation. Very carefully. They'll probably know how dangerous the area is, at least. 

- she is wearing the useless pendant and a circlet (+2 dexterity) and a couple other pieces of jewelry that are expensive and magical and look it. She debates 'useful in a fight' versus 'makes it likelier I'll get into one' for a second and then slips them off except the circlet, which is concealable if she ties her jacket around her head. This makes her look like a bit of a lunatic but hopefully not one anyone'd be particularly inspired to fight. 

Her mare's saddle is also fancy enough to be suggestive that she is interesting. Is there mud or dirt or something about.

Yes, given that she's outdoors.

While inspecting the forest floor for places to kick aside leaf litter she might notice that this is a really... boring forest. You could get a patch of forest like this, maybe deliberately cultivated that way with antimagic or gardening so you could have picnics in it with small children. It's samey, with just normal plants doing the normal plant thing and normal mushrooms doing the normal mushroom thing, and nothing glowing or catching fire or shifting without the wind's help or harboring a hive of sapient bee people or any such behavior, but if she looks farther it's, to the naked eye at least, all boring in all directions.

Maybe that should be reassuring but actually it isn't. She scuffs up her saddle. 

An antimagic field of some kind would explain her pendant not working and the forest being same-y but someone with the power to do it over this range would be really impressive. Maybe it got like this naturally when someone was trying too meticulously to document the behavior of the magic things in the forest. Maybe - 

- this really isn't a useful avenue of speculation. And she's not going to disrespectfully fling cantrips at the magicless forest to determine what happens to magic in it. 

She gets back in her saddle and tries to follow the signs of habitation.

Chopped-down trees. Abandoned campsite with cold campfire. Designs, foreign letters, carved into the bark of that one tree - maybe three symbols, depending on how "a symbol" groups and if it's writing and not a badly drawn dead dog. Braided-into-a-chain wildflowers left on a rock and dried up into faintly colorful ruffles. A milepost, and marked by the milepost, a dirt road, hoof- and foot-prints going both ways.

...fine. She'll go left. 

There's a branch in the road off to her right, after she's gotten as far as another milepost. She can't read the sign, but there is one, painted wood nailed to a tree pointing the way she came, off down the fork, and the way she's going.

Two mileposts later, the road quality somewhat improving at one point along the way, she comes over a rise and can see the forest give way to a barley field and the barley field yield to a farmhouse and down in the valley a whole cluster of little simple habitations all huddled together. They look proportioned for humans or similar but the architecture's rough enough it wouldn't be out of place in monster territory.

And it's all aggressively boring. 

Huh.

She tries her pendant again - doesn't work. 

She reties her jacket around her head because it's slipping, and heads tentatively towards the village. 

Then less tentatively, after a bit, because this is really boring and she might as well at least get a ride out of it.

Barley barley barley chickens pigs wheat wheat wheat house rice rice rice plum orchard house mustard greens house house.

Humans?

There's one in a straw hat feeding chickens!

Then this could be worse! ...humans who speak Common?

Nope! When she tries it he tilts his head and says a few incomprehensible syllables.

After a minute of indecision she tries to pantomime out "where is the nearest location where my pendant will work".

He clearly has no idea what she's saying but when she's gestured to the pendant a few times he points farther into the village.

Okay. She will dismount and walk farther into the village.

There are more humans there. Herding ducks, arguing about a bolt of cloth. She is apparently interesting but not that interesting; everyone looks, no one sees the need to accost her.

Do they look nervous, that's not a terrible proxy for 'how hazardous is this area'.

A little wary, but they check her hands for weapons and her face for hostility as seemingly their first and only pass, and nobody's darting around corners or behind doors.

"Well," she says to the horse, "we are mysteriously in the middle of nowhere but it seems to be a super boring middle of nowhere so that's great."

Any more luck here with pendant pantomiming?

She gets progressively waved towards a little old lady who wants to hold and examine the pendant.

...okay. She reluctantly hands it over.

Little old lady turns it over in her hands, squinting, tugs at the chain, holds it up to the sunlight. Eventually gets out a scale and unlocks a box and weighs out an amount of silver that would be a lowball if the necklace weren't enchanted and is outrageous given that it is. She gestures at it inquisitively.

" - yeah, no. Do you know where it'll work?"

The little old lady babbles at her in Local Language.

She remembers a couple words of a couple other languages from school? She can try those. She isn't optimistic.

Nope. She eventually convinces the little old lady to put another silver coin on the bunch.

"I'm not selling it. Where's - where's the nearest big city that sells more -"

This does not convey anything useful to the little old lady.

She doesn't have Comprehend Languages prepared today but she can prepare it tomorrow. The place is still worryingly devoid of magic but no one's acting alarmed by the amulet either.

She sighs and tries to gesture for 'somewhere to sleep'.

She successfully mimes her way into a straw-filled loft above a cow and a donkey.

....oh, well. That'll do. 

It is not the most restful sleep she has ever gotten but in the morning she can cast the spell and find out whether it blows up in her face.

It does not!

Awesome. Today is going to go so much better than yesterday. 

"What's the nearest large settlement to here, and how far is it?"

Her hosts are very confused that she can suddenly talk. "- there's Yarisong, up the river, maybe a day."

"Is the pendant going to work there? It'll let me send a message home, there'll be people looking for me."

"Work? What does it do?"

" - it'll communicate a message. Twenty-five words."

They frown confusedly at the pendant. "...why wouldn't it work here? Do you need a lot of people to work it?"

" - no, it should work everywhere, but it doesn't work here. I thought it might be some kind of localized effect. This place is unusual."

"It is?"

" - yes. Compared to where I'm from."

"You can go to Yarisong if you need a lot of people. I don't know if there's a spellgroup there now."

"Yarisong's not big enough to have one. If I were magic I'd go to Amilu."

"Yeah, if you want to travel for a couple of weeks, Amilu."

"Sorry, why would I need a lot of people?"

"To - magic up your necklace?"

" - I'm from really far away. Things work differently. I'm not familiar with your style of magic. I haven't heard of these towns, either."

"Well, you are dressed very oddly."

"I got here by accident. I just want to make sure I know what's safe to do, and then I want to figure out how to get back. - what country is this, even -"

"I don't know what foreigners call us. The village is Ninpai, we'd answer to the Tiger Emperor..."

....there are plenty of places on the Material Plane ruled by an Emperor. Local quirks could have introduced the 'tiger' title. Or maybe the emperor is actually a tiger. She would probably have remembered that from her education if it was an important empire. "Okay. Well, thank you for hosting me. How safe are the roads to - the places you mentioned -"

"You might get bandits, especially looking foreign. Might be wild animals or strangers, might be bad weather -"

"Not this time of year."

"All the way to Amilu? You don't know what it's like that far away."

"How far is it?"

"A couple weeks, if you don't want to kill your horse."

"Does anyone here make the trip there regularly?"

"To Amilu? No. Yarisong, sure, some people go every year."

"Can I pay for company to Yarisong? And in Yarisong pay for company to Amilu?"

"Maybe -"

"Going at a horse's pace?"

"Sure, ask one of the Bizou boys -"

"With whose horse, their father can't spare -"

"He's got an ox, hasn't he?"

"I don't know..."

"Well, worth asking. What are you paying for it?"

"No idea what you'll be able to buy in Yarisong, anyway."

"If it's safe enough to do magic here I can do minor healing, protection from poison, plant growth..." more than that but those are all low-level enough they shouldn't be startling -

They look disproportionately impressed, actually. "All that! By yourself, or is it stored up in things, like your necklace -"

"Necklace doesn't work."

"Necklace does something, doesn't it? Just doesn't do all of the thing, I suppose -"

"It'll still register as magic but the only enchantment on it is Message and that's not working - do people here not do magic alone?"

"No one does magic here."

"My great-aunt was magic! She never came back from Yarisong after she found out."

"I think you need a lot of people to do magic but I don't know hardly anything."

"Great-auntie wrote a letter once but Grandfather got into an argument with the civil servants' office and we don't know what it said, a goat ate it before someone else could try to get it read."

" - huh. Where I'm from it's safe to do magic on your own but it might not be, here. I maybe shouldn't risk it. Is there anything non-magic I can do to pay for an escort to Yarisong -"

"Guess you don't want to sell Old Sao your pendant..."

"Ask the Bizou women, maybe they've got chores for you to do - can you make noodles?"

" - I haven't done it before. Probably. I'd rather not sell the pendant, but I might have something else, would that silver pay for the escort?"

"More than."

How about this ring of resistance to lightning. It's pretty. It has gems inset and they're all cracked through and the cracks have been filled in with silver.

That is very pretty and Old Sao will give her a smaller pile of silver for it (smaller because the gems are flawed, however nicely that's been addressed).

"They're all like that, because it's resistance to lightning, see, it's like complaining that frost ones are cold to the touch."

"If I try to tell someone that's what this ring does they're not going to believe me, child."

" - and the nearest person who can do Detect Magic is in Yarisong, right. I can zap you while you're wearing it if you want but it's resistance, it's not immunity."

"No thank you, child. People don't often get hit by lightning, anyway."

It's presumably still enough silver to hire her escort. "Fine. Deal. Who's the people with a horse who might be interested in accompanying me -"

Those people are over there and can offer her a selection of teenage boys to ride with her to Yarisong.

Anyone who knows the area will presumably know what the hazards are! And be less interesting to bandits or strangers.

She and her randomly selected teenage boy, Yun, head out with some provisions. "What's your land called?" Yun wants to know.

"Nolordel."

"Huh. Is it very far? You don't look like you've been traveling for months."

"I ended up here in some kind of accident, I was only a few hours from home. I suspect it's very far or they'd have found me by now - also I haven't heard of a Tiger Emperor -" 

"Huh. That's a lot of magic you're mixed up in. Did strangers do it?"

"No. Where I'm from it's - not common but it's known how to get that good if you want to and if you're willing to accept some risk. What're strangers -"

"Do you not have strangers in - No-lo-ri-del? They're a little taller than people, with feathers -"

"Nolordel's mostly a human kingdom. And, like, a nymph here and there and a dragon in the highlands and some of the port cities see all kinds of things but that's not a species I know of personally."

"A dragon! I've never seen a dragon. But we see strangers, sometimes. If you want we can go through their passage - it's a little eerie, but I've never heard of them hurting someone on the passage, they made it for humans to go through. It'll save us a climb uphill."

"I haven't seen a dragon either. The point of knowing where a dragon is is that you can be sure not to see it. If the passage is safe that's fine with me."

"We'll be there in, oh, two or three hours, when we're through all this bamboo." He waves at the bamboo around the road.

"Okay. I'll have to cast the language spell a couple more times, it only lasts two hours."

"- by yourself?"

" - I think probably you've got a different style of magic around here. Mine you can cast yourself, couple of times a day, more as you get better at it and have more mana to spend on it."

"Wow. Your land must be so different."

"You guys would probably find your lives profoundly improved by an ethernet but I'd be careful about adding it if you don't have it, it might just not work around here."

"What's that?"

"It's pretty new! You teach crystal balls to recognize one another and then you can send messages between them instantaneously, people maintain spheres for talking about the news or crime or pictures of themselves or pictures of cute animals or tutorials on doing things..."

"...I'm not sure I can quite imagine it. One person made this?"

"No, no, that'd have been hundreds, and it took them decades."

"Hundreds of magic people - I'm not sure there are that many in the whole empire."

"There kind of have to be more where I'm from because it's - more hazardous, we'd have run into at least half a dozen things trying to kill us on a path like this unless it was specifically warded against that and maintained more often than this looks like it is."

"But how do you get them?"

"People learn. Some kinds you can teach in a school, like anything else, not everyone'll get it but the same way not everyone can make any sense of math. Some kinds people are born with, though you can train it up. And that's humans. In some species they're all magic."

"I don't know anything about how strangers do magic. I wonder how all the humans in your land came to be magical."

"Our forests are more magical. I wonder if there's something about this area that suppresses magic. Not enough to interfere with spellcasting but enough that you didn't pick it up."

Yun blinks. "I guess I don't know."

"I'd be curious if you lot can pick up a cantrip if you tried but you shouldn't, obviously, in case it turns out that you can't."

"I think someone's checked me for magic before once."

"Your style might be different. Back home if I tried to teach a room full of humans a cantrip some of them would pick it up by the end of the day. Back home that'd be a reasonably safe thing to do, try to teach a room full of humans a cantrip. People do it for a living and die of old age."

"But here we might blow up or something because we're not magic?"

"Yeah. I don't know why you can't do it so we shouldn't try to find out."

Yun nods. "Let's stop for lunch here - then the passage is over there, you can see bits of the stranger village if you squint."

The stranger village is prettier than the human village, and oddly uniform. White, mostly, with some color on the sides of some of the buildings.

It's not even that weird, as settlements of other races go. She squints for strangers.

Too far away to make them out. "We might see some in the passage. They sit and watch people, sometimes."

"Huh. Do you happen to know anything about, like - whether your government formally recognizes them, where they're from..."

"...no? I think they've been here a long time."

Shrug. Lunch?

Lunch is rice and tofu and pickled plum.

The passage is a slightly nicer stretch of road, between two hills with stranger villages and stranger farms up their slopes. She can see strangers if she tries: narrow-faced, gracile shapes, wearing sashes and skirts of brightly dyed cloth. They have feathers, little dense ones over most of their bodies and longer ones still far short of wings on the backs of their arms and heads, but that's the limit of their birdishness; they have no beaks and their feet are in shoes that might fit Iris. Most of them are feathered white but she can spot one in drab browns and one with blue that might be artificial. The buildings' decorations are mostly paint, some chalk, of birds and flowers and clouds. There's a bridge the passage will lead her and Yun under, perhaps so they don't have to cross a human-trafficked road to get around in their own village.

A stranger stops on this bridge to peer curiously down at them.

Cool! She is pretty sure she hasn't seen or heard of this race but it's a big plane and she's probably heard of less than half of its races, if these ones are even native. 

These passersby are unobjectionable boring humans. The jacket on her head is a fashion statement. 

The stranger on the bridge stares, and goes to stare from the other side when they cross under it. It's hard to tell if it's a male or a female, if the concept even applies. Yun looks tempted to wave - his arm twitches - but he refrains.

Another stranger rushes onto the bridge and seizes the starer and hurries it back into the village, chattering at it. With the spell on, Iris can catch a few words - "you'll go mad", if she's hearing right.

- huh. "They build this passage for humans to go through?"

"Yeah. I think so."

"And previously people were going down around some other way that didn't go near them?"

"Still do, if they don't want to get near the strangers."

"That's...kind of them to set that up."

"Oh, yeah. I don't think there's been any fighting over strangers wandering too close to our village since then."

"Mmmhmm. - what do you fight with, if no one's magic -"

"Uh, farm implements? I'm not sure what the strangers call their things but they might be farming implements too."

"Do any of them speak your language?"

"Some. I think some humans've learned theirs, too, but nobody in Ninpai."

"In Yarisong?"

"Probably."

"They're kind of neat. Pretty. Not unfriendly."

"Strangers? I suppose they're not ugly but I wouldn't want to kiss one, you know?"

"Nah. But they seem like they make tolerable neighbors?"

"Eh. Better them than Qurangren."

'Haven't heard of those either. Well, not by that name."

"They're humans. A few decades ago they came through invading, set a lot of fires..."

"Mmmhmm." Does the Emperor help or is he not that kind of Emperor what a horribly inappropriate question that would be. "What stopped them?"

"The lords raised an army. I think all of ours came back but I don't remember for sure, it was before I was born. Grandfather limps."

Nod.

They're out of the passage now, the strangers' village receding into the distance. It's a hilly walk the rest of the way, preventing them from seeing Yarisong till they're nearly on top of it. It has walls, and sits at the edge of a river, and is about ten times the size of Ninpai, the farming village she's just left.

And does her pendant work to send a message home from Yarisong -

Nope!

She thanks her escort. She explores Yarisong.

Her escort wishes her well and heads home.

Yarisong has an inn, if she asks around. It has two restaurants, a large and confusingly laid out open-air market, a gambling establishment, a public square with a busker on a stringed instrument, some houses of two stories and basements.

Anyone who has heard of a place where magic works the way it works in every place on the Material Plane she's heard of, anyone who has heard of species other than humans she's heard of, anyone who'll give her a fair price for miscellaneous magic possessions...

No, and no, but they tend to confess they don't know much about foreign lands. Some of the people at the market aren't obviously trying to cheat her but they're skeptical of her claims that the things do what she says, just like Old Sao was.

That seems pretty unavoidable if arcane magic doesn't work here and the gods who pay attention to this place are different ones and they don't have any of the same magical critters. 

...after four days she goes back towards the forest where she came from. Before wandering the continent trying to find someone who's heard of where she started, or someone who can cast a Plane Shift, maybe it is worth checking whether the thing she wandered through is still around, or whether anyone has come through for her. 

She heads back out.

The forest is boring.

Yep, or she wouldn't be risking this. 

There is nothing interesting in the area where she first found the forest to be boring.

On her way back to Yarisong she encounters a very small stranger, knee-high, sitting alone on a tree stump eating a wild mushroom.

.....awwwww.

She hesitates a moment and then casts Comprehend Languages. "Hi."

The stranger child looks at her, chewing. Tilts its head.

"You don't happen to have seen a portal to civilization around here, have you? I'm looking for portals to civilization."

"No."

Sigh. "Figures. Are the mushrooms good?"

"Yes."

She doesn't take one, because that'd be stupid. "Do your people have the same kind of magic as the humans here?"

"I wouldn't want to be magic," comments the little stranger.

" - the local human kind? It sounds a bit dull. Arcane magic is better than that."

"Is it? I want it."

"Well, I'm still getting my bearings here and I don't know what'll explode us but - maybe? Would I get in trouble with somebody, you look like you are a child and children typically have people who have opinions about endangering them."

Child makes a gesture. It's hard to read its face through the feathers, if the expressions would even mean the same thing; the gesture could be anything.

"Didn't catch that."

"I want the good magic, give it to me."

"I want to go home, can you help me with that?"

"No. Magic!"

"Kiddo, have you taken any classes on diplomacy."

"No."

"Seemed like it. So diplomacy class is the best class aside from magic, it's really useful. It's about how to get people to do what you want. Telling them to do it doesn't usually work if they don't know you."

The stranger child seems to get bored halfway through the sentence, judging by its wandering gaze.

Maybe even though this child looks older than a human three-year-old she should be thinking of them more as a human three-year-old. ...though in that case where are the parents. "Where are your, uh, people who will worry if something bad happens to you?"

"Dunno."

"That sounds worrying."

"I want to learn the magic that's good."

"I will teach you if it's okay with your - parents or caretakers or whoever."

Little stranger scratches its arm. "Oh it is."

" - and I'm not gonna take your word for it - look, what's your name -"

"Haven't got one," it says, tossing its head.

"What do people call you?"

"Segda."

"Okay. Segda, I would be happy to teach you magic, even though you are kind of a brat. I do not want to get killed because someone disagreed with me on teaching you magic, and you are the first individual of your race who I have met, and so I don't know what sorts of things will get me killed and actually this place is strikingly devoid of things that are trying to kill me so far and it has me leaping at shadows a little bit."

Segda blinks at her.

"Who should I talk to to get permission to teach you magic?"

"Me. I want it."

"If you explode, who will be mad at me?"

"Town probably."

"Then I want to talk to them first. I'm sorry."

Segda produces a loud yelping "yark"-ish sound, which one might assume from context is upset, and it gets up and runs off.

Well that was not spectacular. She continues on, a bit more nervously.

It eventually transpires that Segda is following her. Or, presumably Segda. A similarly sized and dressed stranger.

Okay.

She stops and sits down.

Segda climbs a tree a few yards back, peers at her from between leaves.

"I'm not trying to be a jerk, here."

Segda doesn't answer her.

"If someone came to where I'm from when I was - of your approximate level of emotional maturity - and told me I could learn magic, I'd have gone "yay!". And if there'd been an accident and they'd gotten me killed then my grandfather would probably have killed them. Does that make sense?"

"No."

"Okay, fair. If someone killed me being careless, my family would kill them, does that part make sense?"

"No."

"What would Town do if I tried to teach you magic and you died."

"Nothing probably."

"Great. Okay. I'd still rather explain to them first, they might know things we don't about how safe it is."

Segda makes some sort of facial expression.

"I have gathered that you are not in favor of this plan. Dunno why, though. It's safer."

"Don't wanna go back to town."

"Ah. Okay. Why not?"

"Don't wanna."

"- fine. I can show you how to do a cantrip but you might not be able to pick it up, you might be too little."

Segda bounces out of the tree, tumbles, arranges itself at Iris's feet.

....awwwwwww.  She shows her lightning, because she happens to remember the spell chart for it. It's not really a great first cantrip but it'd take weeks or something to reconstruct the chart for a more useful one.

Sagda frowns at the chart intently.

"These aren't really optimal learning conditions but I'll try to explain - it's about holding it in your head and then - following it along. If you've played games where you rotate things until suddenly they fit into place that's sort of the same skill."

"Haven't," it says.

Shrug. "I could maybe whittle one but not today. Where are you gonna go if you don't want to go home?"

"Not go home. Obviously."

"Does your race need to eat and sleep and stuff."

"I guess."

"So where are you planning to do that?"

"Dunno. I found a mushroom."

"You could go to Yarisong and wash dishes or look after animals or something."

"Don't wanna."

"Me neither but that does not leave us with a ton of options."

Gesture. Staring at the spell.

She'll try to explain it again.

Segda is more diligent about this than the average human child of its height would be but still gives up before it's got it and goes and climbs a tree.

She watches a little nervously. 

Climbs tree. Jumps to other tree; catches branch. Climbs across second tree.

Well, maybe she knows what's safe for her. "I'm going to go to Yarisong and see if I can get people to take me somewhere bigger than that. Do you want to come?"

"Hmmmmyes."

"Okay. If your people show up and they want you back I'm not going to fight them, understand?"

"They won't."

"Okay. Do you want a hug?"

"No."

She stands back up and starts walking. "Can you eat human food?"

"Maybe."

"What are you sure you can eat?"

"Mushrooms. Bamboo. Fish. Eggs."

"All right. We can probably make do with that." 

"Radishes."

"I will be on the lookout for fishing spots and towns will sell us eggs and radishes."

"I'm hungry. - chickens! I think chickens."

"Birds in general? Or just chickens?"

"I don't know. Town has chickens but for eggs."

"Okay. Well. If you want to ride with me Ninpai isn't far and they'll have eggs and you can try chicken and see if you like it, and then maybe we'll go to Amilu."

"Don't know human language," Segda frowns.

"I can cast this spell for you too but only a couple times a day. You can probably learn the local human language, kids learn languages easy."

"Don't wanna."

"Then I guess you're gonna find running away from home pretty hard."

"...don't wanna."

"You want to go back? I can take you back."

"No!"

"Don't wanna go back, don't wanna go somewhere else..."

Segda climbs another tree, sits on a branch, kicks its legs. "Don't want it to be hard," it clarifies.

"Okay. Well, sometimes stuff is hard."

Segda makes a hissing sort of noise.

"I'm gonna go to Ninpai and buy some eggs. You coming?"

"Yes."

"You want to ride or walk?"

"Ride!"

"It is a lot more fun than walking. Okay. Can you hold on to me?"

Segda can do that. It has little claws.

"Why'd you want to leave?" she asks when they're on their way to Ninpai.

"I don't wanna say."

"Okay. Do you know why your people built a road for humans to travel through if they don't like humans?"

"Dunno."

"Do they not like humans?"

"I dunno what they like."

"Don't they, like, say "don't go near humans" or "humans are all right" or "my best friend was a human" or - whatever -"

"They say don't run off, sometimes humans can come into town if they're the right ones. They take some of our chickens."

"The right ones being - villages that you're friendly with, or..."

"Specific ones. We see the same ones over and over, who come to take chickens."

"And do they say why they built a passage for other ones?"

"I wasn't born yet. I guess they just decided to."

"Okay. Do you know what you want to do once we're in a human city?"

"No." This word is a little higher-pitched and more drawn out than most of its words.

Pat pat. "I don't know what humans in this society do either. You can run around and learn to read and stuff."

"Human writing is stupid and hard."

"It helps with learning magic."

"Our writing isn't stupid and hard."

"Oh? Maybe you can teach me, though I wouldn't try translating anything related to magic, the magic might not like that."

"Eh I don't feel like it."

"Okay. You're probably gonna have to get better about doing things you don't feel like but this one doesn't seem important."

Segda hisses again, softly.

"I know someone who's a King and he still has to do things he doesn't feel like. Everyone does. Maybe not dragons, I guess."

"Not me. I'm only going to do what I want forever."

" - okay."

"I'm hungry."

"We'll buy eggs in Ninpai."

"Will that take a long time?"

"I doubt it. They didn't seem to mind me and they didn't seem to mind strangers."

"To get there."

"Couple miles. I've been riding a lot lately, I don't want to ask my horse to go faster."

"Rrrr."

"I packed a little food but it's jerky, I don't know if it's food for your species."

"I want it."

She fishes it out of her bag. "You should probably only eat a little and see if you feel sick before you have more."

Segda wolfs down a whole strip.

Maybe she should attempt reverse psychology when she actually wants this kid to do things. 

On they go.

Segda occasionally halts the trip to:

- go pick flowers
- splash in a creek
- chase a squirrel and scream when it escapes
- try staring at the scroll again

This seems like sort of what you should be prepared for when halfway adopting random runaways of an unfamiliar race of beings. Iris mostly does not try to discourage it, aside from reminding it that they can't get eggs until they reach the village.

Segda eats another strip of jerky. It throws up half an hour later.

"That's why you shouldn't eat a lot of an unfamiliar food."

"Weeeeehg," says Segda disconsolately.

"Should I not have let you?"

It spits. "No!"

"Great. Okay. We're gonna wait here until your stomach settles and then keep going, okay?"

Segda doesn't complain about this plan. It flops onto its back and stares up at the canopy.

Poor kid. She waits a while. "Ready to keep going?"

"Yeah." It gets back on the horse. Backwards. It tries to braid the horse's tail.

"She doesn't like that. You gotta face forward and hold me and leave her alone."

"I wanna braid the tail."

"And she doesn't like it so you don't get to."

Segda ignores her.

Segda gets taken off the horse.

"Yah! No! I want to ride the horse!"

"Well, she doesn't want riders who are going to pull her tail."

"I want to ride the horse!"

"Are you going to braid her tail?"

"I want to do that too!"

Iris sits down and watches it and doesn't say anything.

It tries to get on the horse itself. It is too short.

It can however braid the horse's tail while standing on the ground. The braid is asymmetrical.

She picks it up and moves it away. "She doesn't like that. She's too well-behaved to kick you but she would, otherwise. Would you like it if someone started rearranging your feathers?"

It goes for the tail again, quite ignoring Iris.

- Iris mounts her horse. "I'm going to leave now."

"Aaaaaah!"

"Kiddo, you can do what you want, but so can other people. Do you want to ride and leave my horse alone, or stay here?"

"Nooooo!"

She leaves.

Segda chases her but can't keep up.

Leaving a kid alone even in relatively hazardless woods is a bad idea. She can't have a travelling companion who refuses not to harass her horse, though. She picks up the pace for the rest of the way to Ninpai, murmuring at her horse apologetically.

"COME BAAAAAAACK," Segda yells after her faintly.

Nope.Are they selling eggs in Ninpai?

Sure.

She'll buy a bunch and then retrace her steps.

Segda's not right where she left it but it's not hard to find. Up a tree picking apart a pinecone.

"I got you some eggs." She dismounts to find a place to set them down.

Segda scurries down the tree. Cracks open eggs and eats them raw.

"You okay?"

Segda doesn't answer her.

She'll wait a bit.

Segda eats five eggs and then stops.

"Okay. I think we have a couple options. One, you can walk with me to Yarisong. Two, you can ride if you don't hurt my horse. Three, I can leave these eggs here and go to Yarisong myself. Which of those sounds best?"

"I want to ride the horse."

"I like that one best too, but I'm worried you'll keep hurting her and then I'll have to leave without you again."

Segda blinks up at Iris.

"Is that confusing?"

"No."

"Do you think that'll happen?"

"No."

She picks her up and puts her on the horse.

Segda rides along all right for about an hour and then twists around to try to braid the horse's tail.

"Hey." She grabs her. "We talked about that."

"Aaah lemme go."

Sure, she'll set her down on the ground.

"No! No don't go away again no!!"

"Kiddo, I don't want to go away! I want to take you to a city where we can hang out and figure out where we are and do magic! But I won't let you hurt my horse!"

"I waaaaant to braaaaaid the taaaaaail!"

"You are hurting her when you do it! - look, will you be happy if I do it, since I know how to be gentle enough -"

"No I want to do it!"

"- I can try to show you how to be gentler?"

"Aaaaaaaaah," says Segda, spinning around in a circle. "Aaaaah I just want to do it let me do it."

She gets back on her horse. Picks Segda up, sets it in front of her on the horse, sets off.

Segda braids mane.

Segda goes off the horse.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

"Kiddo I know royalty who were raised less of a spoiled brat than you."

"I WANT TO BRAID THE HORRRRRRSE!"

"You can't braid the horse until you learn to be a lot gentler and read whether she's okay with it!"

"AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!"

Does it get less upset if Iris waits ten minutes.

It tries to go after the horse's appealingly braidable hair again!

"Okay, kiddo, in practice it looks like our options are "I tie you up and take you with me" or "I leave." I don't really like these options but I am not thinking of other ones. Can you think of other ones?"

"Let me braid it!"

"- can we do it together, so I can help you be gentler?"

Segda stomps its foot a few times. Then finally says, "Fine."

Then maybe this can be accomplished in a way that is tolerable for Iris's horse and maybe this will be the only thing the child is a tiny fanatic about.

When the horse is all braided Segda is cooperative about riding without further attacking it.

Well thank whichever god the strangers favor. 

They ride to Yarisong.

Segda wants to stop at various points and:

- eat more eggs
- braid Iris's hair
- climb an especially climable tree
- collect sticks
- demand a story (this one is permissible to do while still riding)

Iris isn't really sure if this is typical for a kid; her only younger brother is two years younger and there aren't any baby cousins yet. If it is it's a miracle that anyone ever has kids.

"Story story story tell me a story."

"Once upon a time there was a little girl who wanted to go on adventures. So she slipped away from her house in search of an adventure to have. She walked for a while and then sat down on a rock. It ate her."

Segda makes a stranger gesture of some kind. "Another story!"

"Once upon a time there was a little boy who wanted to be grown-up so he could have adventures. He took a potion to make him grow up faster. Instead it turned him into a mouse. He aged into an adult mouse in the space of about three months, and then into an elderly mouse, and then he died."

"Are all your stories about dying?"

"They're just at the top of my mind at present."

"Why?"

"Because you seem to be a very reckless small child."

"Reckless?"

"You take dangerous actions a lot."

"Do not."

" - yes, you do. You ran away from home, you annoy animals much bigger than you, you climb a lot of trees, you - do a lot of things -"

"I do what I want."

"Yep. The word for which is 'reckless', if you have adventurous wants."

"Rocks don't eat people."

"Some of them do."

"Do not."

"I am bigger and older than you and have seen more rocks and some of them eat people."

"That's not how rocks work."

"Some are magic or actually a critter in disguise as a rock, or cursed, or something."

"Oh."

"This forest seems like a very safe forest but not all forests are like that."

Segda starts pulling pinfeathers from its chin.

And her translation spell wears off and she doesn't immediately recast it and they continue Yarisong-wards.

Segda's chatter, without the spell, is high and chittering, like a cross between a bird and a rodent and the sound of a knife being sharpened.

Well that's unpleasant. 

It's not very loud, at least.

When it gets too distracting she recasts the spell.

"- and they said I'd go mad but I said they were a stupidhead. What's your name, do you have a name? How many names do humans have?"

"Iris. Some humans have lots of names and some have one or two. Why'd they think you'd go mad?"

"Because of the plum, I said. Is Iris your only name?"

"Only one I feel like sharing. I mean, why do they think plums drive people mad?"

"I dunno."