The reaction to jerk backwards and bare teeth and raise one handful of claws towards the surprise, the threat, is instinctive and automatic.

She catches the reaction a half-second later, five sunset-painted knives raised to the kid's head's height. She freezes, all her feathers puffed out, hissing quietly.

BAD! You do not touch without asking, hatchling!

Another grey reaches the kid and yanks her back. The kid's mother, horrified and panicked, is standing frozen past the perimeter. The child bursts into tears.

I am not going to hurt a child who does not know any better, she announces, still unmoving. I am going to turn around and be on the street and calm down.

The grey marches the kid back to her mother. The grey who fell gets up, apologizing under her breath to the lead grey and Ruan. Ruan catches his breath. "That seems prudent," he agrees.

She squeezes in the stairwell and manages to turn around without much difficulty. She goes up to the street.

Draak really, really, really do not like being touched unexpectedly, she tells Ruan. Everything in my mind and body says it means something is trying to kill me! Another in my place might have finished that swipe! And I have to fix my feathers now, threat response tangles them like nothing else! Her mental voice sounds fluttery and almost-panicked.

"I'm so sorry," Ruan says. "I can get some more greys so they'll be able to stand closer together."

I refuse to let surprise and anger rule me! I am more alarmed that I nearly killed without meaning to in a moment of instinctual passion! If she had asked - if I saw her coming sooner - if I was aware that it might happen -

She starts running the flat side of her claws over herself.

If I have a wall behind me. If several or all of those things are true I am in no risk of reacting that way again. Don't punish her if you were inclined to, the fear is lesson enough.

"Her mother might, but we won't. - how would the wall help?"

I would know I wasn't surrounded. Just knowing that your children don't know to NOT DO THAT is almost good enough. And touch I'm aware of and expecting is not a problem at all.

The feathers are starting to lie flat again now, except for the ones on her head. She runs the sharp tips of her claws through the colored ones on her front lightly, preening. 

...I'll finish this later, it takes a long while to do properly.

"Most children by that age know better. I think she was probably very excited to see you and forgot herself."

Excitement does that. If she were a Draak I would say she needs a minor injury to make the reason not to touch people unexpectedly memorable.

Whuf.

But you're very much not Draak. I think you relate to pain differently, I've seen this in my observations already.

"- oh?"

I have no hard conclusions yet but it seems like pain causes... Lasting conditioned responses in Amentans. Trauma.

Most Draak have experienced great pain, and fairly often. Some prey fights back. We fight each other. We occasionally get sick or poisoned or unpleasantly close to starvation. But once the pain is gone, it is gone. Especially those strong in Earth can learn to turn awful pain from a mind-numbing, crippling experience into a mere signal of wrongness so that one is aware of damage to one's body, not distracting, barely unpleasant.

"Huh. That's indeed not typical of Amentans."

Already my insight grows. You can learn a lot from the spirits of things, that which we sense in the Song other than deliberate telepathy, with practice. I'm ready to go back down now.

"Would you like to stay to one side so you have a wall there?"

Yes. It might also help if I were less hungry.

"I can have someone bring you something here. Meat, is that right?"

Meat, yes. I can also extract energy from particularly high-protein vegetables, from fats and oils, from several specific kinds of rocks and minerals, from sulfur and phosphorous and nitrates, but meat is easiest and pleasantest. Raw would be fine, fried and salty might make each pound of flesh sustain me longer. I don't need to eat every day but I do need to eat a lot. More for my size than Amentans, and you can see that I'm much bigger.

He consults his pocket everything and says, "Somebody's going to bring you a lot of raw bacon and a couple orders of fried beef and if you're hungry I can send them back for more."

Alright. I would say I'm about three-quarters of the way from stuffed to starving right now. It's a little bit distracting but not urgent or painful at this level. It may be best to eat as much as I can now and then not have to bother for a week or two. Whatever is convenient for you to arrange, I suppose.

"It wouldn't be hard at all to bring food to the warehouse every day," he assures her. "I suppose I was expecting you to tell me when you needed to eat, but I ought to have asked."

I wasn't expecting getting food when I needed it to be a problem unless I needed to do a lot of magic unexpectedly, so I didn't mention it right away.

Oh. I can sing the Least Song of Healing. It should work for Amentans but bears testing if there will be volunteers. It works best on wounds.

"I'll put out a notice to some hospitals and we can swing by one that will like it to be tested! Will it affect everyone within a range, or just who you're trying to sing to?"

I haven't had the occasion to test that. It affects me, and at minimum the animal I'm focusing on. It might affect more, or not.