She goes right back to gardening, but more grumpily.

Probably she shouldn't have threatened to hit them with sticks, but in her defense, that's the only thing that got them to LEAVE. Ugh. She still probably shouldn't have threatened to hit them with sticks.

Nobody bothers her all the rest of the day.

Her mood improves as the interval since she last had to have an annoying conversation grows, and in the evening she gets to ✨sleep✨ and—

In the middle of the night a monster climbs out of the sea! She can sense it!

GRUMP.

...she'll fight the monster. GRUMPILY.

She is, objectively, unreasonably good at fighting monsters. Even with her crown half-crippled by the lack of Followers, unable to cast any ranged effects, it's still a better sword than it has any right to be, and she a better wielder. And it has more force behind it than any mundane length of metal—not physical force, but something deeper than that, a kind of raw ability to inflict damage irrespective of how much it 'physically' 'should' be able to hurt something.

The monster is pretty scary what with the constant shapeshifting for more reach than it had an instant ago and more limbs than it had before she chopped one off, but. She can also make the monster - not quite sleep, it's a thing that can't sleep much more emphatically than she is - but she can make it sort of drowsy. She makes pretty quick work of it and it dissolves into the sand on the beach.

Great. She is going STRAIGHT BACK TO SLEEP THANK YOU. In her COZY BED.

In the morning—assuming she reaches the morning without any more surprises—

Nothing else before dawn!

Grand. Then she will wake up in the morning, and she will lie cozily in her bed not needing to do anything because there's nothing she needs to do because she doesn't actually need to eat and is just growing this garden to make herself happy, and then she will get up and garden some more. Yesterday's berry bushes are already sprouting vigorously, though they're not growing nearly as fast as they did back in the compound. She consults her crown and learns that, as she suspected, it can make plants grow a lot faster if it has Followers and only a bit faster if it doesn't.

...she should really be thinking about that. About the thing where her crown kind of needs Followers, not just for practical purposes, also for its own—health? Happiness? Something along those lines.

She doesn't want to think about that, though, so she gardens instead.

A small band of monkeyfolk, or whatever you call them, show up the next day. Is the Lamb any good at telling monkeyfolk apart?

She's got a decent memory for their colour schemes (hair, skin, clothes but she's aware that people can change clothes), a solid memory for things like build and posture and the type of gender markers that parse across the cultural and biological gap here which is probably not all gender markers, a so-so memory for standout features like scars and huge noses, and not a ton of ability to distinguish fine detail although definitely more than none. She can tell two different ratfolk or shrewfolk or horsefolk apart by their features most of the time unless they're siblings; the weird enormous monkeyfolk have a smaller range of feature variation than she's used to among a single kind but not by that much. She will probably be able to tell 'this is either one of the people I met yesterday, or their similar-looking sibling/parent/cousin', but not be able to tell which of those it is, or whether it's just their friend who looks weirdly like them for no good reason.

She regards her visitors grumpily.

Well, in that case she might recognize Herbs and might not even notice that anything is different about her! The rest of the monkeyfolk are unfamiliar adult men.

"Suspect you might have something to do with this," says one of the men, jerking his thumb toward Herbs.

"...something to do with, uh, what, exactly?"

"- with her. Looking different."

Herbs is very quiet.

"She talked to you yesterday, her and her mother and sister."

"I can't actually tell the difference between this and whatever you looked like yesterday. I can make a guess about what might've happened, if you turned up looking different all of a sudden and nobody's sure why, but it'll sound really strange and you won't believe me and I'll be really grumpy about that."

"You're already really strange," says the most talkative of the men.

"All right, suit yourself. So yesterday when I showed up, I saw a weird field of stars and," glossing over some details not relevant to this conversation, "some really strange people told me—sort of like they were yelling across a really long distance, they didn't personally show up—that they were having a war with the slug monsters and if I wanted I could join up and get magic powers for fighting slug monsters with. The strange people are obsessed with being pretty, so the prettier you make yourself using the stars thing, the better your magic powers for fighting slug monsters get. But if you make yourself too weird, like to the point where it gets hard to even recognize that you used to be a proper monkeyfolk, then you come over all obsessed with being pretty just like they are, because they think it's nice when people are like that, and they think if you change yourself a lot then you must want to be different and you might as well be different in a way they like. I think that's stupid and awful of them but I can't argue them out of it, they can only barely talk to me at all in the first place and only because I'm from so far away myself, and apparently now that they've made whatever thing they made to give out the magic powers it works all by itself and they can't change it anymore. So—assuming that's what happened to you, I don't actually know—congratulations, try not to turn into a crazy person who can hardly think about anything that's not how pretty things are and how to make them prettier, let me know if you need help fighting slug monsters, will you all go away now?"

The monkeyfolk men are all pretty pissed off with Herbs now, who does not appear to have disclosed this element of her experience to them.

The Lamb valiantly resists the urge to make this her problem.

Well, they don't seem to be able to coordinate on leaving her environs while they are having this argument!

...what... is the actual argument they're having? Like, what are they so mad about?

They appear to be mad that Herbs did not disclose to them that actually she had more than any idea of what was going on and had chosen to look different and they are now interrogating her about whether she knew anything about the slug monsters which she is disclaiming with increasing alarm.

"Is it necessary to be having this argument in my garden?" she asks, mostly rhetorically.

(They could recruit Herbs as a Follower! That would protect her from these people!)

(There are as many as several problems with that idea, but noted.)