"Wow. I think that is not such a thing here."

"Which is weird, right, people are even more disposable here than at home."

"They're not making the comparison here, though. Nobody's saying 'well, my friend was murdered, but at least I don't have to settle for a new one who won't know how to bake my favorite casserole or play the board games we liked', they'd be like, 'that was my friend! I liked my friend!'"

"Yeah."

She - thinks that was the insight she was reaching for and she doesn't want to keep talking now but it's suspicious, to leave a conversation there. She spends a couple seconds frantically thinking of a appropriate mood to end it on instead. "I think I like it here," she says.

(She does not like it here. Though it's definitely thought-provoking.)

"Lemondale or the plane?"

"The plane. Seems like a nice place except for the stuff we can patch right up for them."

"It's going to be great." He wanders off to get lunch.

Disposable people who don't think they're that, because they've never had any other kind of people. It's - she's not actually quite sure how to think about it. 

But maybe if she keeps making people who aren't inclined to kill her, it won't matter.

She does magic research.

So do the others. Kytar, when he wakes up a little before Carissa would normally go to bed, looks at her speculatively but doesn't say anything about how he thinks she's hot. He does wonder if somebody should go meet the neighbors.

"You can meet and fornicate with the neighbors when you get all your spells down," insists Daron, "don't keep us waiting -"

"Fine, fine -"

He can have the neighbors. She goes to bed.

When she wakes up Kytar's made more progress and also has an orange and brown sugar cake from one of the neighbors.

It is incredibly astoundingly stupid to feel slightly judgmental about this, it's good for rapport with the locals and potentially even for intel and they literally made him that way, but also she does in fact feel slightly judgmental about this. She will get over herself, probably. It is not like she is holding out for a boyfriend who will pretend to be exclusive like she is twelve and has read too many romance novels. 

She wants to see the spells and try to prepare them and try to summon a small water elemental.

A little blobby water creature appears. It burbles in Aquan.

Which she doesn't speak (she's rubbish at languages, it's the only class she was ever punished in) but she beams excitedly back at it. Casts Tongues so she can ask it about where it's from (it will probably think she's an idiot, but that's better than not asking and not learning something highly relevant).

"I'm from central Onsen!"

"What's it like there?"

"Warm! Sometimes fizzy, but not usually. I'd move if it were often fizzy."

"Are there other water elementals there?"

"Yes! That's why it's central. I don't live out in the mists where there's nobody around for fathoms."

"What's the farthest from home you've been? Not on summons, I mean."

"Once I went all the way to Cascade but it was really touristy."

"Huh. Thank you." And the summons expires; she can't hold them very long. She looks around for Kytar and Daron.

Kytar's outside trying to fix a sick lemon tree that didn't get chopped down yet with druid magic; Daron is doing some laundry for the good people of Lemondale.

She finds Daron first. "Water elemental worked. And the water elemental seemed to be from the normal Elemental Plane of Water."

"Huh! I guess we could ask them to pass messages, though it'd be horribly cumbersome. I think probably that wants to wait, maybe till we have a god, unless you have an angle on how to get the Starstone solely by diplomacizing elementals."