She giggles. "I do like diner food. It's delicious. And I can just show up whenever, show the clan tattoo, and bam, food?"

"At this particular restaurant until - next summer, I think, then the clan and the diner renegotiate."

"Alright," says Zeviana cheerily. "Then I will probably be coming here a lot."

"There's more restaurants, you may as well try them all, but that is certainly reasonable. The food on the lands is very much meat and vegetables, and I happen to like cheese."

"That's why you're willing to try maggoty cheese, I guess."

"No, plenty of people like cheese and wouldn't try that kind."

"I'm adventurous."

"... All right, I'll accept that instead. You're adventurous. You eat strange things that brothers and daughters everywhere shy away from."

"Yes. Yes I do."

"Any other strange foods I should be on the lookout for? You're in charge of trying things out first and giving me an opinion of it. Congrats. You're adventurous."

"Well, I grew up in this country and don't think of anything conventionally available here as strange... I don't know, sushi? How do you feel about raw fish?"

"Never had it before! Why is it eaten raw?"

"It tastes nice! They serve it with rice and seaweed and other ingredients and you put soy sauce and wasabi on it."

"Would I get sick from eating things raw? That's... Usually why we cook things."

"No, no, they make sure it's safe. I mean, you can get food poisoning from anything, but sushi served correctly isn't especially likely to do it."

"Eh. Okay, I can give sushi a shot. If I die from it I'll just haunt the hell out of you."

Ranata laughs.

"And you get to explain to Adarin what happened. 'Oh, by the way, your sister is haunting me now because I got her to eat a strange thing.'"

"...Wait, do you people leave ghosts?"

"Er. Well. Yes? Wait, you guys don't? But you're magic!"

"That doesn't mean we have ghosts! Nobody has ghosts."

"Mages do! Normal people don't. Adarin tried to explain it to me once and I kind of zoned out so the general idea of it's that we're not completely mortal? So the immortal part of us just - keeps on going as a funky non-functioning us that can't do much? I thought witches were the same, you guys live as long as we do!"

"We don't live any fixed amount of time, but when we die it's like anyone else. Witch-shaped corpse and a puff of golden light."

"Well we leave corpses, too. We're not alive anymore, or anything. We're very definitively dead. Part of us just gets doomed to stick around for a while until it runs out of mana and then it just kind of fades away."