"I'm mostly aiming to avoid maiming anybody if I trip. Maybe I should take a bowl instead and then worst result is some shards and splashes."

"Everyone here can dodge, or it's their own fault." Karis gathers up the bowls impatiently. "Let me go first, then you won't stab me."

She could still stab herself but she'll just prop it on her shoulder and be really really careful.

The tavern has a kind of mezzanine arrangement, a wooden corridor with room doors on one side, overlooking the main room (and benefitting from the roaring fire) on the other.

Karis sets the bowls down in a corner, takes the spear back and props it somewhat precariously against the railings, and sits down on the floor to attend to the stew hungrily.

Oh good they are done dwelling on how inconvenient Pelape's disability is. She eats up.

The food here is actually pretty good, especially for the tech level - the pottage is smooth, with rosemary, black pepper, olive oil, onion, wild garlic and carrot as well as pulses, and the bread is soft under its crunchy toasted-cheese exterior, with various seeds and extra little bits of cheese in.

Yum.

Karis doesn't seem to be in the mood for mealtime chat and that suits Pelape all right.

Once they're done, Karis looks skeptically at the floor. "Normally what I'd do about now is go make friends with a Striding and wheedle a spare bedroll out of them," she explains. "They're likely to ask where you're from, your clothes are weird and that's how we'd usually tell."

"Is that bad?"

"Depends how much you like drunken religious arguments and people trying to get you to draw maps."

"...maps are fine."

"We could probably rent a bedroll from the bar instead?"

"I'm also willing to try religious arguments, I just don't have much experience with those."

"Oh, if it doesn't bother you it should be fine, nobody expects a foreigner to be orthodox and you're clearly a foreigner dressed like that."

Karis gets up and picks up her spear.

"Let's go socialise."

Pelape follows gamely enough.

There is a room full of loud groups of people! It is moderately difficult to navigate as they keep moving around, dancing, going to get drinks, returning from the bar laden with too many drinks, and so on.

Karis moves gracefully through the room until she spots a group with a lot of very large rucksacks strewn around their table, who look like a likely target for extra bedding.

"Nice camp you've got here," she opens with.

"Fuck off, bark bleeder," they reply.

"Rude??"

"Where's yours, then?" asks the loud guy with the antlers who insulted Karis. "Hiding it under your weird clothes, huh, briar-lover?"

"Where I'm from people just say 'hey hot stuff, flash me' and I still don't."

Karis can't help but smile at that - she probably should be removing Pelape from the situation, but on the other hand it's genuinely funny.

"Keevan, behave," says one of the other group members, who doesn't appear to have any interesting extra appendages.

"So, uh, where are you from?" asks another, who has a faint dusting of blue scales along her cheekbones. Keevan rolls his eyes, but she stands her ground and says to him, "Look, those clothes really are weird, maybe she doesn't know about briars."

"I'm from a place called Anitam on another planet and got here by magic earlier today."

"See?" the blue-scaled one says to Keevan. "Right," she addresses Pelape again, "the thing is, briars are dangerous. And flighty, and generally not to be trusted. I don't know where you ended up landing, but it's just as well you've found us instead."

Karis has put the hand not holding the spear on her hip, but seems to be interested in how this plays out, rather than about to intervene.

"Well, this one in particular carried me all the way here from a dangerous situation."

"Oh! Yes, I suppose they're - sometimes good for that - well away from a Vallorn..."

"I've never heard of an Anitam," complained another plain human in the group, "and, another planet? I think she's pulling our legs."

"I'm at least as confused about this event as you are, I assure you."