"No extra charge?" inquires Isabella archly.

Adarin grins. "Tempting, but if I upset you, you could just fly away and leave me here in the middle of nowhere. You're also offering me a place to stay."

"Unless my teacher objects to you, but she probably won't unless you have terribly objectionable social habits."

"I hope I don't have any of those. Is there anything you or your teacher will strongly object to?"

"Making a lot of noise? Messing with her herbs? Interrupting her while she works?" shrugs Isabella. "Commonsense things."

"Well, it's also common sense here to never touch a daemon that isn't my own. Ever. I didn't know that before you told me," he points out, shrugging. "I wouldn't want to learn that I accidentally did something that was horrifying after the fact."

"Well, don't touch her daemon, but I've already told you that. And if you did it anyway she probably wouldn't bother to kick you out of the house before gutting you," says Isabella, shuddering.

With utmost sincerity, he replies, "I would never, now that I know. It's important enough to me to avoid doing something on that level of horrible that I think it's correct to be absolutely sure there's no chance of it at all."

"I mean - there are some allowances for accidents, emergencies. It's not literally a fate worse than death if it's only for a moment. Some little kids, before they're like three, have glitchy instincts about it and will try to grab people's daemons, and nobody arrests them because they're toddlers. But yeah, do take it seriously."

He smiles at her, just a bit. "I was ignoring extenuating circumstances. If it was- say, a toss up between a daemon dying and me touching it, I would go with the obvious choice. I would feel terrible about it, however. I do take it seriously. It seems like a serious matter."

She nods. "Well, yes. If your daemon dies, so do you, by the way - it seems obvious to me but I don't think I actually mentioned it."

"... Ah," he says, looking at his kagu daemon. "I will definitely have to practice lots and lots of shielding spells before I go home."

"Is your world really dangerous or something?"

"It can be, but I have something of a huge target on my head. An obvious weakness would be something that many would try to exploit," he explains.

"Ah. Yeah, practice your defenses. I wonder if it'd be redundant with witch-type defenses." She eats the last bite of her neglected sandwich. Path takes off from her knee and up through the trees. "Are you ready to go?" she inquires, picking up her cloud-pine.

"You'd probably have trouble keeping up with a fast cloud-pine anyway even if you were a flying kind of bird. Just - Adarin, sit behind me, your bird can cling to the back of your shirt nice and safe." She sets her cloud-pine hovering in the air and takes up a seat towards the front of it.

"That sounds workable, thank you," says Adarin. He sits down behind her, helping his daemon up behind him. Once they're both situated, he nods to Isabella. "Ready."

"Uh... Reasonably fast, I've flown by my own power before, but please don't send me flying off?" he calls back.

Adarin doesn't ask her to slow down, and has no complaints. There's a faint smile on his face once they get to the fun speed of flying, though. His daemon, on the other hand, laughs with joy. It's fun for a flightless bird to fly! Wheee!

When they attain top speed without any complaints, Isabella hollers over the wind, "Couple hours to get there."

"Alright!" he yells back. He holds on and plans out how he's going to go about the spells she's asked him to cast. It's quite a good way to occupy several hours. They're very complicated spells.

After the promised couple hours - during which it gets dark enough that they can see the lights of civilization below them - they reach Isabella's teacher's house. Isabella slows and lands on the front walk.