Blink.

”I’m glad to know that ahead of time,” he says. “Um. My sexuality is dreadfully standard for a red, which means I’m attracted to anyone in the chartreuse to azure range? And right now you round off to ‘chartreuse or cyan with a different skin color’, and I desperately want to kiss you and make you really happy, and I expect that’ll go down to a platonic ‘make you really happy’ if you instead resemble someone in the range of blue to gold, or an animal? So we might want to schedule dates for when you’re feeling masculine-shaped.”

He hesitates.

”Um. If you want to go on another date, some time?”

"I would like more dates! And that's perfectly fine. I usually feel a certain shape for around five to fifteen-ish days at a time? But it really varies."

Eeeeee, that smile- he nods. 

”Lovely! We can schedule around that, definitely- and I suppose we should be getting back?”

He gestures at the stairwell leading to the roof.

"That does sound like a good plan, yes."

And so they can proceed to the roof, and then beyond.

After being spat out by a whirlwind once more, into the same courtyard- it apparently receives this sort of abuse rather regularly- they can move indoors, proceed through the same set of hallways the landing crew initially went through, and eventually reach the game room.

And Sira can abruptly pop out of a ceiling vent, directly in front of them!

Kadlawen squeaks, and scrambles backwards a few paces, before composing himself.

”Sira. I’m sure that you have some perfectly lovely excuse for this, but could you please-“

“He could’ve done some sort of bodily puppetry to you while you were gone!” she says, still upside down. “Honestly, nobody else here is nearly paranoid enough- you suddenly develop a crush on some random alien, disappear for a few hours unobserved, and you expect me not to be suspicious? I noticed an increasing fuzz in my astral sense, figured you were about to come back, and hid in one of those ridiculously large air vents that Sasha insisted be installed.”

“And this translates to hiding in a vent how, precisely-“

“If you were being puppeted, you wouldn’t have flinched,” she says, reasonably, while gracefully floating down to the ground. “And it was amusing. Even I get rather bored of question and answer sessions eventually, you know.”

“The fact sheets are in that corner over there,” Rakaskem says, gesturing vaguely and subsequently going back to his book. 

"I'll leave sorting through all that to the wizard-types," he says amicably, "Though I might want to look at biology notes at some point. And in the spirit of full honesty, a sufficiently powerful telepathy-focused psion or maybe cleric could do compulsions that wouldn't overtake someone's body. People that powerful don't get sent on exploratory vessels, they're incredibly rare, but they exist; the compulsions are fightable at least and most of them someone will be acting extremely out of character."

He nods.

”We aren’t, really, that concerned; if you had readily available mind control you’d use it on the person who wasn’t mostly immune to it. Sira just enjoys making up reasonable-sounding excuses to act like someone fresh from hatching.” 

“I am not the one who yarn bombed Sasha on his hatching day, dear- and I can get a copy of the biology notes for you. I see that you haven’t had much of a date, if you’re still curious about that- Kadla, did you even ask him out or did you just lead him around on that ‘tour’ like a lovestruck puppy-”

“Since everything seems settled here, I don’t suppose I could escort you to a guest room for the night?” he inquires, brightly, and with the air of someone well used to ignoring certain others. 

"Sure! Runla and I usually share a room, or at least a suite, though she does need a pretty big bed."

“Lovely! There’s a room that ought to suit- it’s over on the other end of the palace, but distances don’t matter much with the anti-wayfaring doors- I really do adore them, even if Sasha had to stab me for their installation-“

He knocks sharply on a nearby wall, and it promptly opens up to a hallway, which in turn ends in a single door.

The room at the other end of the door is, unsurprisingly, stunning. 

The walls seem to be made out tricolor tanzanite, with subtle, rippling patterns, and the floor seems to be made out an obscenely luxurious carpet, with matching (if immobile) whirls of color. The room itself has two floors, the second one being freely visible to the first, and accessible via two dignified marble staircases, a dignified marble ladder, and a (not particularly dignified) marble water slide. The lower floor has a seemingly natural, gently burbling hot spring, a dining table, several sofas, and a piano (labelled ‘I take requests!’), and a few bookshelves; the upper floor seems to instead have three beds- going substantially beyond ‘king sized’, a mirror (also, strangely enough, labelled ‘I take requests’!), and a few miscellaneous cabinets and closets. The whole thing seems lit primarily by an even, mystically-sourced glow, alongside a window.

A waterslide!!!! He will not jump straight on it because he isn't five, but - "I love it!" He looks around, clearly delighted.

Runla, meanwhile, flops straight into a sunny patch on the carpet in front of the window, huffing. Then: "Why was stabbing involved in the magic?"

‘And I love you’, he does not say, because they’ve known each other for a few hours and it’d be weird. Even though he is so in love.

“Um, enduring portals are really hard, enduring portals that go anywhere you want are impossible, and enduring portals that go to arbitrary physically contiguous places are just barely possible, if you have a royal mage and a virgin sacrifice? And since I have a royal unicorn familiar, I can be a virgin sacrifice repeatedly, while basically nobody else can? And there are complicated fiddly reasons why magic in general works better when I’m the one being sacrificed instead of some random ruwien. So: stabbing.”

He looks out the window (which is showing two suns, one of them noticeably higher than the other, alongside steadily more visible stars), and blinks.

”Goodness, it’s already dusk. Um. I should... probably go see Bradaton? He’ll be expecting me, and if I’m not there he might come looking, and he really shouldn’t be anywhere near interdimensional visitors.”

"Sure! It's been a long day for me, I'll get settled in."

“Okay!” he says, eloquently. “Um, have a good night! I’ll be back in around ten hours, if you want to go anywhere just knock on a wall three times and think of where you’d like to be.”

And then he’s just going to flee before he embarrasses himself, howabout. 

And he teleports over to Dato’s palace, and successfully distracts him from the topic of interesting alien visitors with copious amounts of sex (punctuated with the customary mix of tear-inducing vitriol, effusive praise, and sensory deprivation- Dato tended to be a bit more cerebral about this sort of thing than Sasha, in spite of their customary gender stereotypes), and gets around to all those miscellaneous requests from people at the group-singing gathering, in due time. 

One sun falls, and the other lingers in a sort of perpetual sunset, though the window obligingly dims enough that this isn’t distractingly bright. The moon rises. About three hours in, every plant in the world starts glowing in prismatic hues, and the moon becomes similarly bright and prismatic; this peaks over the course of another three hours, and dims over three more. 

And then it’s morning! Sort of! One sun still seems to be down, and the other still seems stuck at sunset, and the actual period seems to want to translate as ‘midnight’, but it’s close enough.

A platter of mysteriously exotic food seems to have appeared on the table of Ateshai’s room overnight. 

He contacts the ship as soon as Kadlawen leaves, updating them on what he's seen and getting updates on the others. He chats a bit throughout the night - nothing sensitive, nothing that they can't afford to have read by outsiders.

He doesn't sleep well in strange places, and doesn't need as much sleep as a human, so he sees all that. It's neat.

Ateshai out of habit directs a 'detect poison' cantrip at the food (which will also get 'is incidentally incompatible with shifter or wolf biology'), then if it comes up clear divvies the food between himself and Runla. He steers towards less sweet things - fruit preserves are about as much as he can stand - and shows a clear preference for savory flavors.

Their breakfast cuisine- which registers as a non-poison- seems to lean towards a mix of meat (drizzled with a delicate cream sauce), raw fish (marinated in lime, onion, and a delightful array of spices), little twists of warm bread (with an associated key-lime sauce), and elaborate bowls of fried onions and vegetables. In lieu of silverware, there’s an assortment of spongey flat bread, which he’s presumably supposed to grab things with.

When the plate’s been largely cleared, a message appears on it:

I never have a sunrise seen,

From glimmer night, or whispered dream,

Quite so lovely to the eye,

As one known as ‘Ateshai’:

And as eyes see into the soul,

I have seen one forged from gold,

Forged from virtue, long and old;

I have glimpsed a kindred soul.

And as teeth bare in joyous grin,

I discern but a single sin:

This fellow from a foreign land,

With radiance plucked from diamond sand,

Cannot perceive his glaring worth-

And so I felt so swift compelled,

To take a pen and sin correct.

And though I can but scarce inflect,

In mediums so indirect,

One truth I know will never bend:

You’re great and I like you,

~ Kadlawen.

P.S. Um, sorry if this was weird, or anything! It’s a pretty standard courtship thing, here. :~)