"It smells even better now."

"Just wait 'till you taste it."

The cake comes out... Not perfect, but pretty good. Firm and spongey and delicious-smelling. The fruity sugary filling layer even survived, and Link places a few cut strawberries and other fruit on top.

"It's so sweet! It's amazing, I've never had anything like this before."

"Cooking is great. Though it might be tricky for you to get butter and wheat in the Hari empire."

"I wonder if Bar has books of recipes. I think I'll ask when I'm there. Oh, that reminds me, how much do you want for making the cake?"

...Link laughs out loud. "Money again. You bought the butter and sugar and I wanted to show you cake, it's cool."

"No, it's hot! I wonder if it'd be better cool, then you wouldn't have to worry about burning your mouth."

"I've had cold cake, it's not bad. If it's cold you can put frosting and stuff on it, and it stays soft for longer. But hot out of the oven is nice, too - and this one isn't too big for us to eat up all by ourselves."

"How do you make frosting?"

"Sugar and butter and maybe a bit of other stuff?"

Nom. The cake is steadily disappearing.

"So it's more of the things that make this cake... cakey... added on top of the cake."

"Yep. Super-concentrated cakeyness right on top of the cake. Cake is really sweet, though, it can be too much if you have it a lot. And it's not really nutritionally balanced if you have it too often."

"Nutritionally balanced?"

"Like, you should try to eat a variety of things. Not too much sugar, not too much fat, not too much protein. The body needs some of everything and copes better if you eat correctly. You need particular vitamins too, I don't know the details beyond 'try to eat a variety of different things'. Scurvy is a sailors' disease caused by lack of fruit in the diet, it used to be common when they didn't bring fruit on long voyages before they knew about nutrition, and it's nasty stuff."

"Thanks, I'll have to look that up on my way home, I never heard of that. It's so nice to be around a lot of people so similar to me, you all know what we can eat and what kind of tools work for our bodies."

"Building a society for multiple species sounds really hard. Different buildings, different values, different tech... Probably different morals..."

"Different morals, huh? That might be right, now that I think of it. Do you think it's better having people living separately like they do here?"

"Maybe? Not completely separate, even, but having a, a city block for caralendri, and a block or two for snakes, and so on might help? I really don't know though. Never tried it."

"There's some of that. Caralendri and thwilit tend to live in big families of their own kind and they seem to have... different ways they act with each other. Essi, those are the snakes, don't seem to care what kind of people they're with, I'm not sure how much it would matter to them. I think almost every other species is less separated from each other than humans, maybe I should try to encourage a lot of humans to come to my colony and live together."

"Be an interesting experiment. I don't know how much you would trade off, trying that, though."

"I'm not sure either... every kind of mage can be human, you can feed humans more efficiently than agerah, having a lot isn't a problem, but anything I build to attract humans will attract caralendri. I can just tell everyone I want more humans and pay them to immigrate, I guess."

"You've got a lot of open land? Get a bunch of livestock! Herders don't grow as much food per acre, but they grow more food per hylian. And meat-plus-veggies is specifically a human thing, right?" (Link looks a bit smug to have thought of this.)

"It is! That might work but I'm not sure how to get people to start selling meals that only humans will eat before we have enough humans buying them."

"Invite some cats and just sell the meat next to the veggies at first?"

"I like the idea but we have cities with markets where you can get both meat and vegetables within a few yards of each other and that hasn't done it yet. The city I was born in has that and lots of housing for caralendri and it's... it might be more than one percent human, so there's an effect, but it's not strong enough."