But he'll figure it out quickly enough, and pulls a leg off of the chicken to hand to Isidonia and then gets another for himself.

Wow with their bare hands o-fucking-kay! If that's how they roll! Everybody else does it with forks and knives!

It is not how she rolls. The dainty duchess delicately debones delivered delicatessen delights.

He, on the other hand, has the casual air of someone who can clean their clothes with a second's magic. "I find camp food tastes better eaten camp style," he explains, and then switches to knife and fork for the rest of the meal.

"Oh, is this the sort of thing you'd eat while camping on your world?" chirps Tahu.

"A roast bird? Indeed. Simple to catch, simple to prepare. I've probably eaten more meals around campfires than in dining halls."

He quickly filters thru his list of stories--Isidonia is in the ones of their Chelish tour, but that will make them too homesick, and ones from Galt will predate her. He settles on a Mendevian contract he fulfilled which involved many weeks traipsing throughout the woods, and the supply challenges they ran into. He doesn't expect it'll move at a narratively satisfying pace, but at least it will give them a framework for clarifying questions. 

"It's not wild," says Tahu. "The bird. Amentans eat almost no hunted meat in the modern day."

"Few of our city dwellers do, if you count fish as caught instead of hunted." Do they... all live in cities?

"Even farmers, I wouldn't expect them to hunt anything - they might shoot pests but a pest animal could have been anywhere, I wouldn't trust it..."

"We farm fish, too! Pen 'em up in great big stationary nets. There is some wild caught, though, some fish are very difficult to farm."

"I hear the sedacthys or mermen have some arrangements like that, but I am unfamiliar with the details." 

"Oooh what are those?" asks Hepka.

"Mermen are much like you or I, but they live and breathe underwater. Their upper half resembles that of a human, while their lower half resembles that of a fish." He's more familiar with them because of the archhealer's reincarnations, but--talking about that would probably lead to too much digression. "Sedachtys are--do you have sharks, or something similar? If the merfolk are half-man and half-fish, they are half-fish and half-man. They are bloodthirsty in the extreme and the ocean floor is a giant patchwork of their feuding kingdoms."

"...half-fish and half-man as in they have fish heads and human legs?" says Tahu. "How'd that happen, do you know - do you know about evolution -"

"I'm so curious about the grammatical caste you must have in your language which is sex-based, that's such a way to do it," says Ashuao. "And it's leaking into so much other word choice, or is it the other way around -"

He really doesn't know very much about linguistics or etymology, and so will continue steering around those subjects.

"You would be able to tell apart a sedachty leg and a human leg from twenty paces, whereas the difference between a merfolk arm and a human arm would be subtler; you might have to feel their skin. As for the gradual development of things, I'm not sure what that has to do with the many different races of the world."

"Well, on Amenta," Tahu says, "all species of creature are related. Very, very, very distantly related. But we can dig up ancient bones and eggs and skin imprints and petrified wood and so on, and figure out how old they are, and get a picture of how everything alive is descended from things that lived millions of years ago. Now, with magic in the mix maybe that's just not true at all where you're from, but if the assumption breaks down I'd be so fascinated to know where."

Millions of years ago! And their years, not his.

"I think your world might be older than mine," he begins. "It is thought that there have been about ten thousand years of mortal history on Golarion; before that was the Age of Creation, when time had little meaning to the gods. The creation or alteration of life through the use of magic is... not common, but not uncommon either. It is said many monsters were born in the lab of some wizard, and demons are eager to sow corruption among the living things of the world."

"Are demons a wizard-made creature, then?" asks Tahu.

"Demons are from one of the nine afterlives I described earlier. One of the many crises Golarion faced was that a durable portal had been opened between the home plane of demons and Golarion, which required colossal efforts to contain. Thankfully, it is now closed." He will, once again, say a silent prayer of gratitude for the heroes that closed it.

"The demons are... dead people...? Not their bodies, presumably, but their - identities, re-embodied...? And they showed up to do... what exactly."

"Let's discuss something else over dinner," she interjects.

"Of course, it is too heavy a subject. Tell me more about how you can read the record of millions of years."

"Oh... sure," says Tahu, and he pulls up pictures of fossilized creatures, including prehistoric ancestors of Amentans - "These aren't bone any more, over time the bones mineralize, but the shape is informative" - and give an executive summary of the dating methods they use.

At some point things snap into place. Their brightly colored hair had made him think of gnomes, but the picture that's being painted is not of the residents of Tapa, but the residents of the whole world. "Your civilization... is only made of humans? What happened to the rest?"

"- we're not the same species as you!" says Tahu. "I admit we look a lot alike but our hair doesn't come in that color, and your teeth are bigger than ours, I think, I haven't gotten a close look. But there've never been any other sapient species on Amenta that we know of. We haven't found any tools or other artifacts that couldn't have been Amentans'."

"My mistake, Amentans." Something about the situation seems simpler, thinking of himself as transported to a faraway kingdom with denizens of an unfamiliar race.

But it also feels lonelier. He always got along better with humans than nonhumans, and now the only human around is Isidonia--he strengthens his resolve to return to Cheliax.