Probably?

Everything is very... Everything. Big and loud and smelly and weird-feeling and there's a whole world and it's too much but also she wants to go see and do all the things right now and the shower is annoying and she feels like she should be alone right now instead of with mushroom-teacher Pep and sky-teacher Tathsei and she's hungry and everything smells weird and-

She scrambles out of the shower and dashes to and dives into the pile of dry leaves her egg once sat in.

...Tathsei goes and gets her a raw chicken.

She pokes her head out of the leaf pile. That's a lot of meat, as small as she is. It feels confusing that she doesn't have to do anything to get it, but she's both hungry and grateful.

She slowly walks over, introspecting. Pep and Tathsei feel good to be around because they like her and teach her things, but also weird and bad to be right next to, which is very confusing.

They give her some more space.

Eating the chicken takes a little while. Her tail wags.

She's thinking about running around the woods, or maybe trying to climb a tree, or looking for mushrooms, or watching clouds, after this. What do her teachers think?

All excellent options! They are a bit worried she'll get lost if she goes very far; they don't know how good her sense of direction is. But there's a reasonable amount of woods and mushrooms within shouting distance.

She can almost definitely follow her own smell back even if she can't remember where the cabin is. This is how obvious smells are to her.

Gosh, very obvious, she should be all set if she doesn't fly or cross water. She should come right back if she meets another person and is at all confused about what to do; there shouldn't be any today but there could be somebody lost or trespassing.

Oooh she's got to try flying.

She starts to run off excitedly, then just as excitedly turns around and runs back.

!!!Maybe smelling better can help with mushroom science!!!

"It probably can! Some are really hard to find just by looking, or hard to tell apart!"

She rears up on her back legs and roars a very smol roar!

How do I try it??

"Let's go find a mushroom and see if you can find more like it! I'll show you a shelf fungus that's growing just over this way."

Here is a shelf fungus jutting from the side of a tree.

She stares at it for a while, head tilted, then sniffs at it, then moves her head forward to taste it...

"This isn't poisonous to Amentans, so it's probably fine for you too, but if you eat the whole thing it'll be gone. If you leave a bit it'll grow right back."

She does a tiny tail-flick upward (acknowledgement body-language) and takes a tiny nibble. She wonders vaguely whether it's eating the tree reaaaally slowly, so slowly that the tree grows faster than it eats. Trees can't run away. It would be boring to be a tree. The sun probably feels really good to a tree though?

"Trees don't have any nerves to sense things with or brains to experience things with. And you're right, it eats the tree very slowly; if it always had shelf fungi all over it that would be bad for it but they don't live that long and there usually aren't too many because animals eat them and not all parts of the tree are right for them."

She can 'see' the tree's soul. It 'looks' like it could feel things a little tiny bit. The fungus, too. But if they don't have any Mind at all...

Anyway, I will look for another one now!

Looking for another one involves walking erratically through the forest and sniffing. There are a lot of smells, it's hard to sort out which is which, but she's gonna try her best!

Pep follows her cheerily.

She gets distracted from her mushroom-hunt to chase a squirrel! It flees up a tree and she tries to climb after it, but falls from about Pep's head height. She shakes herself off, unharmed. Oh well. Back to looking for fungi.

Eventually she finds another one!

"Very good!" Pep takes a picture of it. "I like to have pictures of all the samples I find so we have lots of examples of how they can grow."

She can't just remember what it looked like?

"Not perfectly! And I can't show other people from my head like you can."

That makes sense! Finding a fungus was fun. And helpful! She wants to keep doing this sort of thing.

"Sounds good! Next time I find a rare one I'll show you so you can get a sniff."

Being alive is great! Doing things is great! She is going to go explore some more now!