He is in a large pond, swimming!

She--stops. And stares. And turns bright scarlet. Apparently he sensibly didn't want to go around in wet trousers, after.

Well, all the parts of him that would normally be covered by shorts are underwater and therefore somewhat obscured. But, uh, yep.

He hasn't spotted her yet. She has a chance to flee in embarrassment if she likes!

Nnnnnope, she is way too frozen in place to do that.

He turns and sees her and starts giggling and ends up briefly underwater as a result. There is some undignified splashing before his head pops back up again. "Hello!"

She makes a similarly undignified squeaking noise before managing "Hello!"

"Should I go put some pants on and come back?"

What she fully intends to say is "yes." What actually comes out of her mouth is "How accurate was the book about the slave girl?"

She immediately claps her hands over her mouth with a horrified shriek.

...he giggles his way underwater again.

She hides her face with her hands and decides that the fact that she hasn't died of embarrassment is weak evidence in favor of the Valley having made her immortal.

After several more seconds, he surfaces.

"It got most of the details wrong, and I'm not sure any people with Nimire's attitude to torture actually exist and if they do I certainly never met one, but it had the general idea."

She does not ask any more stupid questions like what kind of details. Instead she just says. "Okay."

"Sorry," he adds, "I probably shouldn't laugh."

"I did not mean to ask that question out loud," she says, flustered. "...But I can see why you would find it funny."

He grins wryly.

"Answers the question of why you would torture people to death," she mumbles.

"Yeah, it does."

"Whatever else those books were, they were not uneducational. ...Pretty sure I'm not a honeybee."

He giggles again, but this time manages to stay afloat.

"Do people really get that flexible?"

"Not usually. And depends which book you mean. But I picked all those ones because they were mostly not wrong about that sort of thing."

"Oh. Okay, thank you."

And now he sort of doesn't know what to say. He treads water and looks at her.

"...I kind of want to come over and hug you, but you're mostly underwater and not wearing pants," she observes.

"...I can solve one or both of these problems," he says, grinning.