The sentiment is sweet, though. As was the … calming spell? Whatever that was. Now, how to restart the interaction… a bit of honesty probably won't hurt. "Wow, this is a lot to take in. Quite something."

"Yeah, that makes sense given your background. Do you want to go get closer to anything or not yet?"

"I think I should get used to seeing it first?"

And eventually Griffie shows Ibrahim around the backyard! Unfortunately, he isn't up for being flown around by a gigantic vulture today, that would have been fun if it had been a good idea.

Yeah, being high above the ground in the claws of a flying monster is going to be a no for Ibrahim for a while. It might be marketable to other people though?

Maybe.

And they head back in, ey doesn't really feel like flying on eir own right now.

Ibrahim is heading in without having eaten the marshmallows or the cracker bits. It might even be the case that nobody ends up eating them and they end up in the trash. This is fine. He is okay with this. It is a thing he can do. It's barely a drain on mental resources at all. He's going to eat a good meal soonish and then he will stop thinking about this.

Which he can do whenever, because Saira's good about paying him on time.

And time passes. Saira and Cinlirina continue getting a steady flow of customers.

Cinlirina decides to use some of his newfound wealth to hire Ibrahim to handle laundry and human-majority cultural advice and such for him as well.

Ibrahim, unbeknownst to his employers who might pay less for laundry if they realized this, has been repeatedly borrowing a portable washing machine from Bar that's compatible with the bathroom setup, which is a real energy-saver. He's been buying good food several times a day from Bar, and her recommendations have been stuff like meaty stews and sandwiches well-suited to multitasking and vegetable platters with a few carved vegetables, about which he was told that frivolous beauty is also at least sort of a nutrient he needs more of and this isn't a very expensive format for it. He's gaining weight, which is comforting, and makes going to the backyard easier. And he isn't building mana, because that doesn't really work here and his spells don't really work either, which is also a quality of life increase because he isn't constantly forcing himself to do miserable things.

On the whole, he's alive and likely to stay that way for a long while and to have the option to have kids with similar life expectancies, and really, isn't that the pinnacle of any mage's existence? Maybe he'll feel appropriately ecstatic about it soon and the thing where he has even more nightmares than he did in the Scholomance will go away. That'd be nice.

Jim, meanwhile, picks out a nice fern species, deliberately avoiding species that might come across as threatening, and with an actual attempt at subtlety this time he asks Griffie what they think.

It’s a lovely fern.

"I don't know if you'd remember well enough to know if you feel the same way but when I'm designing another body I end up thinking about what I want to be able to do next, what kind of life I expect to have..."

"I have my design notes, I had some aesthetic preferences and I thought a bit more pest resistance would be nice because I was thinking of leaving the village more. …I thought thorns might be helpful and look neat, this was a mistake, I wear armor these days and thorns mostly get in the way of things and I have to trim them. What considerations are you thinking of with the fern?"

"It's chill. Have you ever found a clump of ferns in a shadowed wood and had a problem with it, any problem, ever?"

Griffie makes a few clicky noises. "I don't see ferns much at all, but there are ferns that ambush small animals with razor-sharp fronds and might attack larger targets if they're sleeping, and ferns that sometimes hit animals but only really as a threat response, and there's a plant with remarkably poisonous spores that, admittedly, does not look all that much like a regular fern even though it is at least arguably a fern. Also there's a fern useful for poisoning spellcasters you want to interrogate in a way that leaves them with spellcasting difficulties but lucid, which would be fine to encounter in the wild but some people might dislike due to bad personal experiences … I'm not one of those, just, it does exist. But ferns are a pretty broad category, I can't think of a comparably broad category not associated with problems so this isn't particularly a strike on ferns."

"I think your carnivorous plants might go after bigger prey than ours."

"I mean, some of them? We have smaller ones too, and there's actually an interesting… so, does your world have any 'carnivorous' plants that instead ended up in a sewage-processing niche, because we do, and some bioengineers managed to scale this up and so my world's tree cities have indoor self-draining toilets, which is apparently notable given the rest of our technological state. Anyway. They're not bad even if they're bad neighbors?"

"That's very cool. It might be doable with our plants? Some of them can grow in sewage... I really want to see the blueprints for your tree cities, if they're public... I don't think we could make exactly that work, though."

"Druids skew private about spells but I think less private about bioengineering and I don't know if it was all druids? There might be something."

"I hope so! I've never actually done that kind of infrastructure project before, personally, but I can hardly just not try to one-up them."

Griffie laughs quietly.

"I honestly like sundews better but I think if I want a sundew form I'll make it myself. Have you got that kind? With the little tentacles?"

Griffie pokes the tablet. "Not called sundews, but yes."