"Huh. Okay. Toning down the anthropomorphization, then, thank you for the warning."

Wide, boyish grin again. "No problem!"

"Does doing favors, I don't know, make you more powerful, even if I'm just accompanying you?" she wonders. This wouldn't, she feels, be particularly unfair, but it'd be good to know in case she meets a fairy she doesn't like quite as much as this one. Or if this one turns out to be secretly evil.

"What, you doing favours or me? To whom?"

"Does, say, me doing you this favor make you more powerful even though I'm not... giving you anything but my company?"

"Hmm, yes and no."

"... Okay? What happens, then?"

"This," he says, springing up to his feet and striding towards the presumably-queen ant.

"Uh," she says, furrowing her brow and standing. Is he about to do something impressive, or really, really dumb?

Yes.

The ants mostly ignore him until he starts getting close to the eggs. There's a certain clicking noise in the background that starts just as he begins analysing them as if he wanted to... to...

Pick one up and run like hell in the opposite direction?

And Evette might want to do that, too, because suddenly all of the ants are looking at them and clicking loudly and then they start chasing.

"Seriously?"

Well, she did sign on for 'not protected from harm or danger,' didn't she, this was absolutely predictable.

"What would you even do with an ant egg!" she cries, picking up her skirts and bolting after him.

"I'll figure it out later!"

He walks straight towards a wall and—

—up the wall? Is gravity not working?

"I don't think you are ready for the responsibility of ant parenting!"

Does. Does running up the wall after him work, because otherwise she's going to be having some problems with the various ants behind her. Please work? Nothing else makes sense, she should just be able to follow the fairy, right?

It works! What it feels like is as if gravity had just decided to agree that wherever she's stepping next is the new down, which may be a bit disorienting but is nothing if not convenient.

The fairy dodges an ant trying to snip him in half, much nimbler than he should be while holding the relatively enormous egg, and makes his way to a different tunnel than the one they came from.

Okay, so, while the fairy is probably nimble enough to dodge murderous ants until possibly the end of time, she definitely isn't, especially not in a dress. It occurs to her that she should think of something clever. Well, the most expedient way to stop the ants from chasing them is to give them a bigger problem to deal with, and she does seem to be near the ceiling, and just because gravity's not working for her doesn't mean that gravity's not working...

She was really expecting that if her little iron herb knife were going to come into play, it'd be for stabbing a fairy. Or maybe stabbing an ant. Stabbing something, surely. Instead, it can get wedged in between bits of sand or gravel or whatever that look particularly load bearing, and then it can be her lever to do the only reasonable thing to do when one is being chased by ants, which is: cause a cave in.

Well.

Whether this would normally work under normal physics is up in the air, but she's not operating under normal physics, is she? So now the ants definitely do have much bigger problems than two egg thieves (or one egg thief and his unwitting enabler).

She can hear the fairy's laughter up ahead from the tunnel while the cave behind her collapses.

She's not really sure if she counts as 'unwitting,' but enabler is certainly accurate enough. Her mayhem appropriately allocated, she can now make her escape. After that egg thief!

The egg thief seems to be choosing paths approximately at random, but between luck enforced by the universe and the fact that lots of ants gave up the chase to go dig stuff up they can easily find their way back out.

By the time they're out of the ant hill, she's flushed and out of breath and honestly kind of a mess, with a death grip on her knife. This is terrifying and exhilarating and she might just strangle her adventure buddy once they're done with this, but being out of the ant hill is not actually being done. There are ants behind them. Most of the ants are still underground, and they can kindly stay that way, so she's just going to cover their escape by causing another cave in to block the entrance.

The world is unfortunately not quite that kind—anthills have multiple entrances. Still, the one they came out of is the one the ants knew they were taking so it'll probably take a while for them to route around to the other exits to continue chasing them so she at least bought them time.

Look, it's fine, she doesn't need to block off all entrances. Sure, she'd do that if she had a way to pull it off, but since she can't: this is fine. Not as thorough as she'd like, but fine.

Back to running, yes? They are not actually in the clear yet, where is her fairy adventure buddy running off to now?

Oh, some direction, who can tell when they're this small, but he's over there, trying for a completely straight path now that he doesn't have to weave between ants so that he can cover as much distance as possible.

She huffs an exhausted sigh, comforts herself by briefly imagining throttling her fairy, and then runs after him. Of course.

After just a few more seconds of running, though, he abruptly stops, drops the egg, turns around, and holds her by the waist, twirling her while bouncing and laughing excitedly.

She squeaks affrontedly, then the sensation of being twirled entices a laugh out of her, and then she remembers she has a knife made of iron in one of her hands and should really be careful about waving that anywhere near the fairy, and laughs, "—Put me down, put me down, I don't want to accidentally stab you..."