Aadhya sticks a nice big umbrella shield to her shield-holder for them and they continue booking it.

They probably aren't going to start a large-scale forest fire, it looks like. The panicking tree-mimic is accidentally doing its best to send flammable seed-pods left and right but most of the rest of the forest is covered in snow and far less flammable. 

Nothing appears to follow them. 

"Bella -"

"Yeah-huh - uh, one sec, the comedown on the -" She shudders as one of the potions wears off. That was supposed to happen in New Orleans. Well! It's not! Too bad! When she catches her breath she mutters her quick homebrew spell for detecting magic and mals in the area, echolocation-style. Any magical pingbacks within thirty yards?

There's a LOT of ambient magic around here! Nearly everything is at least a bit magical. Those five trees are more magical than that! There is a weird...fungus? growing in the crook between two branches, which is even more magical than that! (And also faintly glowing to the naked eye.) There is some kind of small animal curled up in a knot-hollow in one of the less magical trees which is also magical, though it seems to be asleep or at least not moving. 

...There's also a...river...of mana...? Or something? Maybe more a creek than a river, it's not huge. It's underground, but within the thirty yard range of the spell. 

"I hate this forest," Bella mutters. "Aadhya, can you stab -" She points out the extra-magic trees. "Caio, peek in there -" She points at the small animal. "And I'm going to see what the fuck that is -" She whispers one of her experimental freeform-metamagic poems, the alliterative one that will let her handle magic to see what it feels like and make little tweaks - it was her junior year final project - reaching for the magic stream beneath her.

The trees are apparently not mimics. They are stabbable but, like, to about the same extent that normal trees are stabbable. (Except for one, which has...metallic??...bark? and is less stabbable than that.) 

The small magic animal is furry - its fur is sparkly - and cute, and asleep. It does not obviously have scary teeth or claws. It looks sort of like a cat, but more spherical. 

The 'what the fuck that is' underground river of apparently-free-mana does seem to be...actually basically that? It's - differently-flavored, or something - than mana drawn from a power-sharer. ....The best way to describe it is wilder, maybe. Like fast-moving water in a silty river that might or might not be downstream of a sewage plant, not safe chlorinated drinking water from a mundie tap. There's some turbulence there, too, it looks like it might hurt to try to touch it. 

It does feel like she could touch it and take that random free mana, if she wanted to risk it. 

"Is there a rule that mals aren't allowed to be adorable?"

"I suppose I'd be really surprised if one stayed that way but it could be cute till it turns itself inside out or something."

"Good point. I hate to kill it while we're low on mana and it's asleep though..."

"I guess it could be a familiar, that would probably show up to her spell?"

"Yeah. I'm going to just spritz it to keep it asleep since we've already spent mana on scouting this area."

"Hold off, I found a - thing - that I might be able to get mana out of - and we will have to apologize to whoever it belongs to if they come knocking, but I can beg Aunt Evelyn about it as long as I'm alive to do that, you know -"

She dips a metaphorical finger in the stream of mana.

It feels cold!!! ...metaphorically cold. It also, separately, metaphorically tastes like it might have a lot of heavy metal contaminants in it. There is a deep sense of Something Is Wrong with this mana. 

It's totally mana, though, a lot of it, and in an ongoing moving stream so she could just sit here and slurp it up as long as she wants. 

"Okay, if we have to run again, we're going that way," she points upstream, "but let's sit here for now, do stretches, I might have a clever hack."

"I spritzed either a very cute mal or a very weird familiar," Caio reports, coming back to the center of her search radius to squat beside her.

"Trees don't bite but one does have armor all over it."

"This forest is very weird and that might be the best we can do."

The forest continues to be very weird and apparently disinclined to bite them! 

It also continues to be the middle of winter and super cold. 

Bella slurps up some icky-yet-free mana. Just a sip, just to see if it's immediately going to cause a Problem.

Not immediately! Aside from the ickiness-feeling now being inside her, but it's not having any obvious effects other than that.

Okay, now she is going to spend that mana on a spirit cleanse with a couple words replaced.

It....sort of works? It feels like the most obtrusive parts of the ick - the parts closest to her...core sense of herself - are cleared out.

There's still some leftover ick. It feels more like the way one might feel after having lived off dubious McDonalds meals for a couple of days and now one's entire lower intestine is unhappy with these life choices but it's not an urgent problem or anything. ....Metaphorically speaking. 

...okay. As survival in the woods options goes, she will take it.

She slurps up more, enough to comfortably cast any half a dozen spells - since she's not giving any of this stuff to the others till she knows what regretting metaphorical McDonalds looks like after a day or two - and cleanses again, then starts gathering firewood. The others help. She lights it up with a whisper of magic and reports on her findings.

Bella takes first watch, since she's the one with the mana. Aadhya and Caio curl up by the fire and try to sleep.

Everything is quiet for an hour or so. 

...And then there are footsteps, the soft squish-crunch of snow. It basically just sounds like human footsteps, of someone being moderately careful not to make noise.