He laughs to himself a little, replaces the current bandage with a freshly ripped part of his chiton (he should've remembered to bring that with him to the spring), and goes looking for her.

Here is Eutelia! She is up a tree, and is being a menace to the tree's foliage. Which is to say, digging in to where branches meet with her claws, and tearing the smaller ones free to drop to the ground below. She's surprisingly high up in that tree, actually, and seems less awkward than one might expect someone who's half fish to be. Apparently she's very flexible? Not quite to the degree of a snake, but something in that vein.

...man she needs to be less hot. Or alternatively not that.

"You seem to be having fun."

"It's sort of viscerally satisfying! Also much easier than trying to drag myself over land, since most of my ability to move is in my upper body anyway."

"Any particular reason for the sudden interest?"

"I," rip, followed by a crash of a branch falling below, "would like to learn how to make fire! It seems like a terrible waste for Prometheus to go through all that trouble of stealing it from the gods, only for me to refuse the opportunity of learning how to make it." Pause. "Assuming you're willing to teach me, anyway."

"Naturally."

"Great! Experimentation from theoretical first principles would have been much more annoying!" There's another crash as the latest branch meets doom at the hands of a demigoddess.

She is far far far too attractive. Herakles would have liked to have met her.

"Well, for a lesson I wager we have enough wood and I hunger."

"Okay, hold on." Descending is significantly more awkward than ascending, but she manages to make it look almost graceful. Just falling out of the tree is apparently not as much of an option when one... doesn't have legs.

"Can I persuade you to carry the wood?" she wheedles, pointing her pretty smile at him. "I am awkward enough over land without it, I think."

"How could I possibly refuse?"

Wood! In perhaps more than just the one sense.

"Well I hear it starts at 'no,' and from there can escalate to running away, but honestly I'm really not an expert on the subject!"

Moving out of the water and over relatively flat ground: it still involves a lot of dragging herself around. Her tail is pretty flexible, but not really built for this; while it's better than literal dead weight, it's only just.

"Want some help moving around?"

Eutelia tilts her head and eyes him. She's clearly still a little bit twitchy, but she's at least attempting to follow the premise that he does not in fact have only his own best interests in mind.

".... Maybe? That depends on the kind of help."

"I was going to suggest carrying you but if you still feel unsafe I will not feel slighted."

"I think... not yet. But thank you, and maybe eventually." She sounds like she means it!

He's sure his wood did not help matters but it's not like he has volitional control over it.

Back to the beach!

To the beach!

"I didn't gather the quick-but-easy-to-burn stuff, I don't think I understand the criteria well enough to pick it out on my own."

"Very dry, very thin, that should be an approximately good enough criterion." He has spares because he comes prepared!

Hooray!

He has a rapt audience who is excited to learn about how to turn sparks and tinder into fire.

Zotikos gets rid of the already too-burnt-out stuff, mostly piles of ash, and then shows her how to set dry leaves and twigs and the like around evenly. Some sturdier pieces of wood go on top of that, crossing over each other and with space for the lower fire to reach up. He adds some more dry leaves on top of those bits of wood, as well as between and around them, and then more sturdy wood piles up. At the end he has a fairy respectable unlit fire pit, most of its mass concentrated in the slow-burning pieces but with enough of the faster ones to keep everything going until the fire is steady.

He explains everything he's doing and why as he does it, and if she wants to participate in the process he'll absolutely let her.

She absolutely wants to participate in the process! Though it all seems pretty straightforward to her, so far, it's a matter of making sure the fire has the right kind of fuel in the right kind of place for when it's starting. But what about making the baby fire itself?

He can show how to do that, too! The rocks he's been using for the initial spark aren't proper flint but they're good enough.

... Okay, this part's harder. Not impossible, but harder, at least when you need the sparks to light and then nurture the fragile ember into a proper fire. Eutelia's actually kind of insistent about being the one to get to do this, this is the sort of thing she needs to learn by doing instead of by watching. She's going to get it, okay, she will not be beaten by fire!

...she's adorable. He'll try to point to what she needs to adjust to the extent he can but mostly leave her to figure out the muscle memory for it.