They notice this, eventually, and look over with tired curiosity.

Embarrassed smile. "Um. Hi. I couldn't think what else to do so I'm making soup."

"Oh," says Catarina.

"It smells nice," offers Maria.

"I make pretty decent soup. You can have some when it's done, if you want."

"That sounds like - just the thing," says Catarina weakly.

"Oh. Well, good."

They are a snuggly pile of wings while the soup cooks.

They look cozy. It's nice. She's glad she could help.

Soon: soup!

They are grateful for soup. They have not really been eating enough, it took a long time to wrestle Catarina all the way here.

Then it's a good thing she forgot she wasn't cooking for twelve. There is so much soup.

They still don't finish it but they do both take seconds and Catarina takes thirds.

Oh good.

"...are you okay?" That was a dumb question but now it's out there and there's nothing she can do about it.

"I - guess? I think it was the neck - I had more feathers after too, but I think the neck was what pushed it over -"

"...that makes sense." She tries to think of how she could help. She can definitely un-Pretty her Followers, but even getting to the point of being Pretty and having to come back from it is fairly terrifying by itself. Could she check a Follower's changes before they made them? Prooobably. She's still hesitant to recommend Followerhood, though.

When they've finished their soup the sun is starting to go down.

"We should probably - get out of your way, take off, sleep in the woods tonight," says Maria. "Thank you - thank you so much."

"I'm really glad I could help," she says.

They smile at her and then squeeze each other's hands and fly off.

Wow. Helping people is so much nicer when you can succeed at it.

On that happy note, she can garden a little more and tidy up around her little house and try to figure out what to do with all this soup and eventually resort to having her crown pocket it. Who knows, maybe someday she will need half a pot of solidly decent vegetable soup on short notice. Though her crown cannot promise its soup-unpocketing aim will actually be good enough to get it into a bowl.

Heartened by this development, she takes to actively patrolling for sea monsters, usually a quick flight in the morning and another one around midafternoon, circling her little island.

With active patrols she can catch them when they are much newer and smaller and not moving around on their own much yet!

That's an improvement, for sure.

Okay. So.

The thing is.

With what they know now, they could go find some people who've gone Pretty, and the crown could take them, and tell them to spit their old selves back out, and then just keep the Pretty versions. There's a sense in which this would even be a good deed. The Pretty ones wouldn't mind.

Iris feels really weird about it.

Feeling really weird about something isn't actually a good reason not to do it, if it's important. Rescuing people who've gone Pretty seems important. Taking good care of her Crown is important.

But she doesn't want to get caught up again in forcing herself to do things she feels sick about because the alternative is terrifying. That seems like a bad move.

So... she needs to think her way around to it, and if she can't think her way around to it, she should hold off.

But in the meantime, she still wants to give her crown what it needs, and she still doesn't know how to make that happen.

The thought that keeps trying to sneak in around the edges of her mind is that she could make another Lamb. She doesn't need to go Pretty for it; her crown can hold her steady. She can do what the BSL did, and make a second Lamb, and then she can make that... other version of herself... into a Follower. And it would be fine, it would be the finest possible thing, if she agreed to it ahead of time; it's hard to even imagine a higher standard of consent than "decided to make a copy of yourself to do the thing to and then did that". Just so long as she does, actually, both before and after the duplication, agree to the whole arrangement.

The issue is that she doesn't know if she can agree to the whole arrangement. She doesn't want to be a Follower, and she doesn't want to be without the direct protection of her bond with her crown. Those each separately sound terrifying, and putting together does not improve matters. Maybe she could talk herself around to it, eventually? But not any faster than she's going to talk herself around to the other thing. And it's much... simpler to explain, if she does the other thing, compared to if she duplicates and then enslaves herself. Duplicating and then enslaving herself is a weird thing to do and will weird out anyone who notices, and her little island does not exactly have much space to hide such a situation in.

Oh, her crown tells her helpfully, if they gain enough Followers, their territory will begin to expand naturally under their influence.

It understands, though, and it can be patient. They can keep thinking about this and not do anything she isn't comfortable with.

...she'll at least start ranging a little farther on her patrols, maybe even deliberately going as far as the coast and a little ways up and down it, to see if she can meet any other monster-fighters and warn them about Prettiness and tell them they can bring her any friends of theirs who go Pretty.

There don't seem to be all that many monster-fighters, actually. She runs into Maria and Catarina sometimes, always together, and the BSL, who smiles at her, but there are... definitely more monsters than monsterfighters.

...in that case maybe she should start making duplicates of herself. She's the only person who can do that sort of thing systematically. For that matter there's a case to be made that she should be coming up with Pretties of herself, all different styles, to release into the wild, but that sounds way more horrifying than making five copies of herself and enslaving them all, actually, so never mind.

After she's been trying for a while to expand her patrol range, she notices that she's going to bed later every night and waking up earlier every morning. Still sleeping, but sleeping for less time overall. She... thinks she's okay with this. Sleep is very important to her but she no longer needs it, so it doesn't actually matter whether she sleeps for a full night or only half of one, or even only a quarter. She doesn't think she's ready to give up sleeping every night just yet, but she's fine with squishing the sleep down into a smaller span of time so she has more time for doing other things. And it lets her get pretty far up and down the coast, if she goes one direction in the mornings and the other direction in the evenings and spends a sollid few hours at it each time.

Are there any other monster-fighters out there, if she looks that hard?

Yep, hugging the coast and traveling far afield is a good way to spot more. There's another Pretty Person who looks like an iridescent orca who rips kaiju apart in her teeth. There's a non-Pretty who has ice powers and fights with polearms she conjures up, running on the ocean by freezing it under her feet.