That sounds affirmative to Aril! He scritches it behind the fins.

"Never really had a pet before. Unless Elin counts, I guess. He'd know what to do with you, I bet. I don't even know what I'm going to call you."

He considers. "I'll call you Daana'd. Kind of heretical, but I'm Anathema, so who gives a shit. How d'you like that? Daana'd?"

Daana'd leans into the scritches. "Raa!"

“Excellent.”

He leaps out of the water onto Daana’d’s back, water falling from his body as he moves through the air. He stands on her back and conjures his riding leathers onto his body from the Elsewhere, then sits down, his legs straddling her neck.

He attempts to invoke Sometimes Horses Fly Technique, only to find that Daana’d can already fly. “Full of surprises, huh?”

Well, if she can fly she can presumably breathe air; that’s one more charm he doesn’t need. So he urges her upward and forward, out of the water and out of the cave. 

She gets the hang of what he means pretty quickly, and manages to get them both out of the cave without whacking either of their heads on the entrance, which is pretty impressive.

He pats her in congratulation for this feat, then takes her up vertically until he can see signs of civilization on the horizon, or failing that, at least a major landmass.

There's a major landmass in the direction he might or might not recognize as north! It has clear signs of habitation on it.

Excellent! He takes a downward angle and heads towards the signs of habitation, riding his magnificent serpent. (He's not really thinking too hard about the reaction people may have to a demigod riding a giant flying snake-dragon approaching their community. Syl and Elin always handled the interfacing with normal people.)

(Also, speaking of his magnificent serpent, he's got to meditate for a while to develop his Essence and pick up some animal handling charms soon. Friendship With Animals Approach, at the very least.)

The people in the nearest town seem only mildly surprised by the flying snake-dragon! There are plenty of open spaces in the town where he can land, too.

He lands in an appropriate parking space and hops off of Daana'd's back.

"Hello!" he says to the nearest human. "Would you happen to know where I can stable my serpent?"

(He looks mostly human, to the naked eye. "Mostly" is a key word here - his eyes are catlike and a faintly luminous, unnatural blue, and he has floppy golden-furred dog ears and a small tail poking out from the back of his tunic. Also, he's almost seven feet tall, and so unbelievably beautiful that he doesn't look like he exists in the same universe as the things around him.)

The nearest human looks at him, puzzled, and says something question-sounding in a foreign language, then tentatively points at a red-roofed building a little way down the street and says something statement-sounding but uncertain.

Ah, this is some manner of sun-forsaken backwater. Aril opens his mind to divine knowledge, flaring with golden light as he invokes Excellent Emissary's Tongue...

and it fizzles, because he's only heard eleven words of this language and he's not actually that good at this charm. Shit.

Caste mark shining on his forehead, he shrugs apologetically to the bystander and heads into the red-roofed building, leaving Daana'd parked where she is.

The passerby looks back and forth between him and Daana'd as he was off, and says something deeply confused-sounding. Inside the red-roofed building is a counter with a machine on it, and behind the counter a smiling woman whose pink hair is styled in a way that blurs the line between "hairdo" and "architecture".

Aril smiles brilliantly at the woman behind the counter, says "I don't speak your dialect" demonstratively, then invokes Poetic Expression Style to convey through intricate charades that he needs some way to contain a very large friendly animal while he explores her fair city.

The woman takes a red-and-white plastic sphere about the size of an orange off her belt and points at it, then grabs a pen and memo pad from under the counter and sketches a map from this building to another one a block or two away. She does some more gesturing with the plastic sphere, conveying that he can obtain one at the building indicated on the map.

"Thanks!" he says brightly.

He goes to the other building. It does not look like a stable. There's stuff on shelves, like a merchant's stall expanded into a whole building. So he's to buy one of these spheres, and... do what with it? Is it enchanted to send a creature Elsewhere, to be retrieved at his convenience?

Seeing an entire shelf of the things, Aril whistles under his breath. If it's true, he was definitely wrong about this place being a backwater.

He picks one up and brings it to the shopkeep, then retrieves an intricately etched copper coin from Elsewhere and lays it on the counter. Fair trade? (Probably not, one siu is kind of a pitiful amount of money, but he's been surprised by what peasants will accept before.)

The proprietor offers him a handful of pieces of paper for the coin, and indicates that the ball costs four times as much paper as that.

Oh! How convenient. Three more siu appear between his fingers, and he hands them over.

Then he can have a sphere! The shopkeeper smiles and puts the coins in a drawer behind the counter next to a lump of gold, a gorgeous piece of coral, and some shiny pearls.

Aril takes his sphere, flashes a bright smile to the shopkeeper, and exits the shop to check on Daana’d. Has she been behaving herself in his absence?

She is engaged in combat with a yellow mouse the size of a cat; they appear to be evenly matched. Possibly this is because the mouse can shoot lightning out of its face. A teenage girl is standing just far enough back not to get hit, egging the mouse on.

...well, that’s moderately fucked up. (Why would an elemental take the form of a mouse - no, no, this place is fucky, that’s been well established.) Aril’s not about to interfere in an honest duel, though. He takes Daana’d’s side, cheering her on. “Go on, Daana’d! Show that rat what you can do!”

Daana’d seems to find his cheering encouraging, and presses the attack; eventually the mouse flops over panting. The teenager points another of those spheres at it, and it turns into a beam of light and is absorbed inside. Then she turns to Aril and asks an incomprehensible question.

Elsewhere pocket it is! This place is insane.

Aril- pats Daana'd first, that's important. Good girl, destroy your enemies. Then he points his own sphere at her and... intends very strongly to store her within? He's decent at mental actions like that, First Age artifacts tend to have a thought-based interface.

Nothing happens.

Oh, this is just embarrassing. He's going to have to ask for help from a little girl.

He's had enough exposure to the language by now to make a better go at Excellent Emissary's Tongue. His caste mark burns on his forehead, and it finally clicks. He turns to the girl and says, in his native Old Realm, "I'm sorry, I've never used one of these - I tamed Daana'd here myself. How does it function?"

His words, though incomprehensible, ring with meaning. She probably wouldn't be able to pinpoint which word means what, but she knows exactly what he said.