The forest is dark, and calm, and quiet. Birds chirp in the trees, and herbivores snuffle around in the underbrush or bolt at the scent of a predator, but nothing more aggressive than nature itself can dwell long here without being discovered and dealt with, one way or another.
In a clearing, a brook winds its way through shallow curves in the hillside. Anything remotely supernatural that happened here would definitely be noticed within less than an hour.
"Wow, if even you're willing to say that, it really says something about him."
"What, you? What could you have done that Lan Qiren would disapprove of?"
He bursts out laughing. "Good point! He doesn't know about that one, but I guess it proves you can unbend a little bit, huh? Wow, now I'm wondering all kinds of things."
"It's funny that none of the rules are that you have to tell him if anything he'd disapprove of happens, isn't it? I wonder why the omission."
She goes and gets filled up so she won't have to stop to eat right away and packs.
They can leave sooner rather than later, then.
Every evening, they check the arm to see what direction it's pointing from where they are and course-correct.
Isabella may not need to eat as much as a normal eclipsed but if she's safeguarding their travels (and occasionally bouncing reports back into reality for Xichen, who is allowed to start telepathic conversations, back home) she will want to check out restaurants everywhere they stop.
Then she will continue her project of expanding her repertoire of ancient Chinese food. And continue her habit of describing her past diet to amuse confused locals. "Ooh, cheese," she says, buying a cheese, "I used to have like twelve meaningfully different kinds of cheese at my place. For different cheese related purposes. All the most popular foods of my culture have cheese on them."
"We like cheese! Also my ethnicity is better at digesting it than yours, I think."
"Your food is weird," he says, without a trace of irony, while eating something so spicy she can feel it from across the table.
"I bet you'd like pizza if you tried it. Possibly after drowning it in hot sauce."
"Pizza's a flat bread with a sauce made from a fruit you don't have on this continent yet and then cheese on top of that, baked so the cheese melts. Sometimes there's sausage or vegetables or whatever else on top."
"Hmm. Maybe. And hot sauce, is that different from chili oil somehow?"
"It's good! Though I use it in moderation. When, uh, I have any. I miss food from home. There's some good stuff here but honestly whatever your tastes there's no competing with the variety where I'm from."
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