"Is he particularly charming about it?"

"No. He is particularly self-righteous about it. Aha!" he exclaims suddenly, reaching into a bush and grabbing a round red fruit like a pomegranate.

"I will probably hate him. Oo, what's that?" She peers at it in lieu of waiting for an answer. "Oooooo, nice. A pomegranate that strengthens abilities, it matches the aesthetic very well."

"You mean there are pomegranates that don't do that?"

He straightens up and resumes his search around the garden while he squeezes the fruit open to start eating it.

"Yes. Yours are magic Underworld pomegranates. Normal pomegranates are just delicious. I hear. I haven't eaten one."

"Huh. Well these are pretty nice if you want to try some." He doesn't quite raise the fruit up to his shoulder but the aborted motion was definitely that.

"In mythology eating food from the Underworld is the sort of thing that would tie me to it forever! ... I have no idea if that's accurate or not. But probably best to let you have it, since you're the one with the god-slaying weapon and I'm unarmed."

"That sounds like a very strange thing to tie you to the Underworld forever but if it's true I'm in for a rude awakening when I get out, aren't I."

Not finding anything else of note, he walks over to the bronze-shield-door-thing that will take him to the next place. This time there's only one, and rather than a tunnel behind it there's a hedge "maze" that only goes as high as his knees and that is decorated with hedge statues and fountains here and there, as well as the occasional shade admiring it all.

"Well, I hope you're not. And if your mother disappeared that implies that this isn't a thing, because if she had all the time to go and have a kid before she left, she probably ate something. Not to mention these are myths from another world that have already proven to be inaccurate in major ways, so. Eh."

"Oh yeah that is a good point, my mother did stay here a while."

“Yep. Still going to avoid eating any pomegranates, though, because I will be so annoyed with myself if I fail to follow a very basic premise like that.”

"Sensible."

Zagreus strolls through the hedge maze towards the next potential destination, and there they have it, another walled garden that traps them as soon as he walks in. In this one, the bronze statues of archers start shooting ethereal arrows at him. All in a day's work.

Huh. Well, if the arrows are predictable she expects Zagreus can avoid them on his own, but if it looks like he's about to get skewered by one she can try to deflect one for him.

"Are traps common here?" she wonders, thinking of possible ways to use this.

"Fairly." Another summoning circle of light shows up and a pink sphere surrounded by pink butterflies emerges. "Oh, one of those," Zagreus groans.

“I’m going to try shoving it in the trap,” declares Yvette, who emerges from her perch on his shoulder to night-tackle the butterfly ball into some traps.

"Deeply appreciated!" says the godling, parrying a sword-wielding shade.

“You’re welcome! I’ll try to hinder the butterflies even if I can’t kill it!”

But she can kill it, right? Just kick the big pink butterfly ball into the nearest trap, it’s easy enough. It’s not like it has any decent footing, it’s hovering in the air.

Oh yes it is pretty easy to kill if you don't have to deal with the cloud of explosive butterflies it generates to do it.

And she has the easily modifiable body plan and 360 degree vision to make dodging or hitting the butterflies achievable, and the massive cheating brain space to be able to keep track of them all. It dies pretty quickly!

“Ha! Got it!” she calls, once it’s properly destroyed. Then, back she goes to continue playing support to Zagreus at his shoulder.

What about those two other butterfly balls that show up though?

... okay, she doesn’t have the mass available here to properly shove them both at the same time. But she can have a little part of her play bug swatter with one of the butterfly balls, while the rest of her shoves the other one into another trap. The butterflies are small and weak enough for her to directly kill, though it’ll mean she’s too busy to watch Zagreus’s back for things that might stab him in it. The butterflies probably take priority, though.

They sure do, he can deal with stabbing.

Eventually they have killed enough shades that whoever else his father is sending his way is probably too far to show up right there and then.

"Now for some ransacking."

“Hooray, ransacking!” she chirps, returning to her designated night storage spot. “Don’t mind me, I’ll leave you to it while I try to figure out something that will actually have any kind of direct bite to it. Unless the coliseum has traps in it?”

"No, just four huge regenerating statues."

“Bah. They couldn’t make it easy for me, could they.”