"It depends on what Agrippa wanted to talk about. I suspect he needs people to help him with his plans for the new woodshed." 

"Oh-er that is a bit surreal." she mutters, more or less to herself. 

It sure is. In some ways more so to someone who's accustomed to Marcus being alone, and who has never so much as met a pair of twin-souled (at least not knowingly).

He nods.

"Yeah, that's fair. I guess we'd better go check in with him, then, and meet back later?"

"Okay! Talk to you later!" 

"I look forward to it!"

(He is a bit nervous that some important subtext may have flown over his head and is not exactly looking forward to that aspect of having another conversation, but learning about local fibrecrafting sounds like fun, and he will feel somewhat better once he's gotten a mask or two sorted out. And he's going to have to practise navigating local communication customs as best he can, in any case.)

Marcus will take them off to go find Agrippa; it seems that he's outside, discussing something with another woman and engaging in the fiddly practice of sharpening the blades of a saw with a file in the clarity of the morning light. 

"Ah, Marcus, there you are! I was hoping you'd be able to join us for a bit of logging. I have my eye on a couple of nice trees that will make for the last major timbers for my woodshed." 

He hums noncommittally.  

:Well, that will certainly take all the daylight we allow it. I'd do it without a second thought, but.: 

:There will be things to learn from logging, too.:

:If we're heading out into the forest for the day, I assume we had better eat first? Or are we packing something instead?:

(He wonders if you can read a book if you lean in right next to a glowworm basket. He doesn't think he dares to ask Grandfather to borrow the magic lightbulb.

Maybe cookfire light? But people might be nervous about having an expensive book close to the fire, and for that matter close to the snow.)

:Excellent. Yes, we had better get some breakfast, and also pack something for lunch. These two won't have.: 

"I can do that!" He says brightly out loud. 

"But I should go get breakfast first. Do you two want anything?" 

They both respond enthusiastically. 

So he will go off to find where the stale black bread and honey are being kept, and also fill a bundle for his backpack. 

Minaiyu valiantly attempts not to think about how Marcus is touching the bread with unwashed hands.

:Maybe you should eat the breakfast and I should eat the lunch? And I will try to pay closer attention to the motions involved than I did during yesterday's breakfast, and see if having an example of the proper form helps my subconscious adapt to the new teeth faster.:

:Sure, that works for me.: 

He will deliver the other two their meals, and eat sitting with them on a log bench in the snow, while they have a friendly argument about the best way to impregnate wood with a wax finish. 

Minaiyu stays quiet, observing both the motions of a fluent operator of this body and the woodworking discussion.

(He wonders if the bees understand, when they touch or perhaps sniff a piece of waxed wood, that this is something they helped with.)

And then they can head off up into the hills. The weather remains fairly clear, but there are a few clouds in the sky and it's noticeably colder. They're gaining altitude and moving over broken terrain that's a little bit troublesome to march, following Agrippa's memorisation of the locations of quality trees. It's not the longest hike in the world, but it's not a trivial one either. 

Minaiyu wonders what it's like, to be someone for whom this is home.

Oh, he tried travelling a bit in his late teens, like you're supposed to, but in the end he always returned. It made him uncomfortably aware that if he'd grown up somewhere else he'd probably have loved it just as much, but the fact was that he hadn't.

(It could be a coincidence; it could be that he was always naturally suited to Bluecoral Bay's climate and environment. You do get people who try living in a new place and are like "where have you been all my life" (which is a big part of why it's encouraged to try). But not as many as if it were purely random.)

He doesn't even know this place as well as the back of his hand, and frankly that's a pretty low bar at the moment.

(They're leaving in a few months, anyway. It's said a walk-in needs to bloom where they're planted, and he thinks that in time he could learn to love somewhere new (even if it would never be the same as his first love), but under the circumstances maybe he should be actively trying not to put down too many roots. They will camp here for a while, and then they will camp somewhere else, and eventually, hopefully, they will find someplace to call home.

like heaven, probably)

He avoids distracting Marcus while Marcus is dealing with the terrain.

Minaiyu waits for a natural pause or natural easy section of the hike, then says:

:Would you say this is a normal temperature for winter, or unusually warm or cold?:

:The last few days have been pretty nice weather. This hasn't been an atypical winter but we've had some good days for doing things that involve leaving the house.:

:All the more reason to do the logging today, then, while we can. Reading and fibrecrafts are more flexible.:

(Would it be harder to bear the winter chill if he were in his own body, adapted as it was to cusp-of-autumn temperatures in a warmer climate? He knows altitude adaptation is purely physical (and good thing, too), but he's not sure about temperature adaptation: it seems like something that would have a larger subjective component.)

:Your cooking infrastructure is all outdoors, right? What do you eat during storms? Foods that are edible off-the-shelf?:

:Pretty much. Stale bread, pickles, cheese or whatever we still have stockpiled from the good seasons, and if it's a really long storm then we might just eat honey, or try and go out to light a fire even during the storm; the firepit spot is somewhat protected from the wind. But we try not to light the cookfire every day even normally.:

And they'll be out of a lot more things than just amaranth by the end of the winter, by the sound of it.

:I hope we all have better options someday.:

:So do I. But boring food isn't the worst thing to happen to a person.:

:Depends on how bad the food tastes, and also on whether the food has *so* little variety as to give you malnutrition. It's a common problem even in places with strong trade networks and greenhouses, since--when left to their natural devices--people tend to wear the grooves of their diet a little too deep and end up deficient in something their preferred foods don't have enough of.

(And some deficiencies kick in quickly enough for even a five-day to be a problem: fibre's a common one, though to be fair it's also not very subtle.)

Or, well, I suppose it's still true that there are even worse things, regardless.:

He's not sure whether that thought makes him feel better or worse.

He quietly increments the priority level on building a headspace: if they do find themselves having to live off of terrible-tasting food, better to at least take turns rather than both having to experience it every time.

:You could be eaten by a Wolf.* I'm surprised that your people are that happy with boring diets, since around here it feels like people are desperate to escape the monotony of our ordinary diets, but it's the sort of thing I'm not surprised there's variation on between types of people. Or maybe you just have much better food, if you're that much richer.:

*A nation, not wildlife. The phrase has the air of almost an idiom; a stock standard awful fate. 

:Quite possibly. Even some imported spices can be pretty affordable (though not all of them), and there are some ways of preserving food that aren't really feasible for lone households to do but don't add all that much to the cost when preparing harvests to sell. And other ways of preserving food where it's not really feasible for a lone household to build the *equipment* for it, but once you've bought the equipment you can do the rest yourself.

And with more variety *available*, people can gravitate towards repetitive diets of what they like, and not just of what they were able to get. It's comfortable and steadying. Until you get anemia because it so happened that none of your customary foods were high in iron, or something more subtle that an elder or doctor *can't* see coming a mile off and warn you about.

I think most people back home eventually end up with some foods that they...don't *hate*, but are eating primarily because those foods balance out the rest of their diet well. Plus there's some tricks you can do with powdering dried vegetables and mixing them into things to mask the flavour, though this only goes so far.: