Spirits of the Earth

Mei probably would have made it to Zantaric before nightfall, if the forest around it hadn't distracted her so much. Old and decrepit and full of dead trees, it had instantly attracted her attention, and she'd spent the better part of the day wandering through it, scribbling notes and theories on the back of her map. There were several species of tree she hadn't seen before! Perhaps an extinct species, and preserved over time. She drew a couple rough sketches for reference, noting the leaf shapes and patterns--indicative of a deciduous species--And then there was the mystery of why the forest was so sparse and dead, when it appeared to have once been a thriving ecosystem.

It was all so exciting!

So exciting, she wound up not paying attention to where she was stepping, and stepped right into a patch of some kind of poisonous, leafy plant.

Which was also a variety she'd never seen before!

As the angry rash spread up her right leg and over her foot (sandals were a bad idea; also, short pants were a bad idea), Mei crouched down and scribbled another charcoal drawing, this time of the poisonous plant. It took some time, because it was hard to draw when she was fidgeting and trying not to scratch at herself, but eventually she got an accurate picture down, and by then the rash was really red and starting to grow a little purple in the middle.

Jeez. She hoped she wasn't dying or something!

In any case, that concluded her dead forest adventure. With her drawing in hand, her traveling satchel over her shoulder, and her leg turning interesting colors, Mei grit her teeth and marched into Zantaric, which was difficult to do with her leg an itchy ball of misery. She knew nothing about the city, except that it was on her map and was in the area, but they must have people there that specialized in this...issue. Unless she was dying, in which case, she hoped she'd get there before the poison spread through her bloodstream and closed her throat, so she could at least request all her valuable research be sent home!

Fortunately, nothing so dramatic happened. She didn't die, she just got a lot of strange looks as she limped through the town, which smelled funny and seemed rather dirty, but she'd come to expect that of the Continentals.

Marching up to the first person she saw, an older, scruffy man that was picking the few teeth he had left with a knife (gross!), Mei squared her shoulders and tried not to dance in place, though she kept twitching as her leg screamed SCRATCH ME!

"If there anyone here that deals with poultices and potions?" she asked, voice strained. "Healing, perhaps?"

The man flicked a chunk of something out from between his teeth, grunted, and jerked his head toward a building just behind him. Then he continued to stare at her, eyes drifting slowly to her satchel. Mei made a face, but quickly smoothed out her expression, smiled, and made a quick bow.

"Thank you! Oh! And you should try swishing with salt water, sir. That will help with your--" She made a motion toward her mouth. "--condition. Helps the gums! Bye!"

And then she was off, practically jogging toward that building, and by the time she got there she didn't even care, she was dancing in place as she banged repeatedly on the door.

OOC: @nephero BEHOLD MY ROBES RAMBLY MESS.

If Mei hadn't asked for direction, it would have been easy to overlook the building in question. It was no less dirty than any other along the battered dirt road that cut through the edge of Zantaric, nor any less smelly-- in fact, the potency seemed increased the closer she got to the door. It was only up close, and with the assistance of a small, sputtering lamp, that the sign beside the door became visible enough to read: Herbalist's Bones; healing, potion making, general thaumaturgy.

The only visible window was wide open, the dingy glass pushed aside to allow some kind of ventilation-- and judging by the plumes of pungent purple smoke, the place badly needed it. Almost invisible against the snaking pine-scented fog, a cat (if such a decrepit creature could be called that) lay sprawled across the windowsill. It looked dead; at least, it did until Mei began her knocking. Its tail swished, its eyes opened, and every bony joint movement dripped malice as it turned to look at the source of such an ungodly amount of noise. It only looked more indignant the longer it was ignored-- as if a baleful glare alone should have been enough to cause her to cease and dissist this instant.

Luckily, for either one of them take your pick, the building's proprietor chose that very moment to answer the door. It swung open, alleviating the steady thud thud thud that had surpassed ninety nine other things on the cat's List of Things I Hate Most. For half a moment, the proprietor seemed unsure; his single eye flicked to the cat and then back to Mei, as if he wasn't quite up to speed on what should be done. Which was rare but fair, as a man could hardly be expected to... well, expect a tiny hopping girl on his doorstep.

Shea Ru was used to far bloodier work.

Her oddness notwithstanding, he allowed the door to finish its rotation. It swung against the adjoining wall, and Shea Ru kicked a heavy stone over to keep it that way. Another, thicker cloud of smoke escaped as a rsult, carrying a subtle if strange combination of pine, mint and... something else, something juicy that lingered at the back of one's throat yet had no name.

With a quick sort of courtesy smile, the alleged potion maker gestured inside, or more specifically, to the high set bench at the furthest wall.

"Have a seat, prop your leg up, and don't scratch."

"Oh...hello."

Mei stared up at the man. And by "up", she had to crane her neck. He was a good foot taller than her and shockingly, sickly pale, and it took her aback for a second. She still couldn't get used to how tall people were in these parts! Giants, the lot of them! But despite his paleness and the lack of an eye, he wasn't unattractive. Quite the opposite.

Then again, Mei had always been attracted to the unconventional, and for several miserable seconds, she was seized with how horrifying this was. How embarrassing. Of course it couldn't have been an old, wrinkly man! No, it had to be someone like this, and already she could feel the curiosity bubbling up as her mind ran a mental tally of questions.

She broke her trance just long enough to catch what he was saying--and to remember her misery.

"Right! Thank you!" With a quick bow, she rushed inside to a face full of the interesting smoke she'd seen wafting out. Wrinkling her nose, she waved it away as she went, coughing as it tickled her throat. She plopped down onto the bench, dropped her bag at her feet, and stretched her leg out on it.

It took all of her effort not to scratch. Instead, she rubbed her leg against the edge of the bench in a vain effort to relieve it, and thrust her drawing out at the man, tapping the specific plant with her finger. "This is what did it!" she said with a nod.

"Are you familiar with it? Because I've never encountered it before! How it thrives in a dead forest is quite interesting! Perhaps it is parasitic, feeding off the rot in the wood. Or perhaps it's predatory, choking other plants. I didn't get a chance to get a good look, but the effects at least seem somewhat similar to poison ivy--which, by the way, isn't actual ivy!--though I'd say a little more potent. But I only speak from subjective experience on that matter. By the way, what's that smell? It smells like a mix of pine and mint, but it's got a note of something that's...hmm...thick. I'm not quite sure how to describe it. Oh, by the way, I'm Mei!"

If Shea Ru was aware of the effect he had, he was polite enough not to show it. He kept the door open for breathing's sake-- while he was used to such smoky conditions, his clients rarely were, and it was always so difficult to pry information out of people who insisted on coughing so much.

As soon as the girl was seated, he returned to his place at the hearth, and gave the pot there a good stir before replacing a heavy lid atop it. That task dealt with, at least for the time being, he was able to devote his attention to this latest-- if atypical-- client.

She was small, smaller than he was used to without dealing with some kind of child's pox, but that was certainly not a bad thing. He wasn't quite sure what to make of all the metal jewelry in her face, but that wasn't so bad-- it actually accentuated her natural features quite nicely, and really, who was he to judge personal modification?

He glanced down at her mouth, at the twin hoops there, and he silently admired the way the symmetrical bow of her lips was broken by the very asymmetrically placed piercing. It was unsettling on some bizarre, irrational level, and Shea Ru had always liked unsettling.

And then the talking started.

He took the offered drawing from her, though the motion was largely automatic-- every bit of his attention was thrown into overdrive in order to absorb everything the girl was saying. Or, failing that, the important bits. Still, by some miracle, he was able to school his face into something resembling polite interest, rather than his first instinct to place his hand over her mouth and just... make it stop.

It also kind of helped that his hands were currently occupied. Reminded of what he was holding, he broke his nearly stunned trance and looked down and-- well.

This was actually good. Very, very good. The scratched shape of the leaves was nearly perfect, as faithful a representation as any other he'd seen, even in some of his books. He noted the points where the strokes seemed smudged, rushed, and he wondered if Mei had stepped in the plant before attempting to draw it. That was almost admirable, considering she had no idea what the plant was, and for a moment his previous repulsion was again replaced by interest.

He gave a distant nod to whatever it was she was (still) saying, before he realized that it had all ended in a paused prompt for him to reply. Well, that was embarrassing, and he mentally chastised himself for not paying attention. He hummed, as if he had simply been lost in thought (not untrue), and tapped the paper with one knuckle.

"Never encountered it, no, nor would you. It's called Persu's Touch, or occasionally simply the Crimson Death." He paused to let that take effect, always enjoying it when a malady had a grossly disproportionate name. "Not many are familiar with this nasty little weed, and believe me when I say, you don't necessarily want to be involved with anyone who is."

Shea handed the drawing back to her, and moved across the room to where a long counterspace was set up, various herbs hanging from drying racks on the cieling or otherwise stuffed into jars and glass-pane cabinets. He pulled a pair of thick leather gloves on, before setting to pulling out different jars and bowls from unlabelled shelves. He stuck a twig of an herb in his mouth to better free his hands, and brought the lot of it back to the bench where Mei still sat.

After the various ingredients were set down on the creaking wooden floor, he dropped to one knee by the bench, and carefully lifted Mei's afflicted leg up to better inspect it.

"I take it you've done nothing against the rash, yet-- which is good, don't worry. With water, the lot of it just becomes easier to spread around. Just in case you decide to go back to... wherever it was you found it."

With that little tidbit of information, he pulled a tub out from beneath the bench, placed Mei's leg in it, and proceeded to pour vinegar all over the afflicted skin. After that, it was largely just automatic-- clean, rinse, dry, crush the herbs, mix them into a paste, and apply.

"Ah, that smell would be the marrow oil mixture on the fire. And I would be Shea Ru. By the by... where did you find the Touch...?"

Crimson Death? Mei paled at that and looked down at her very reddened leg and then back up at Shea's face. He didn't look concerned, though, so that was a good sign! Probably meant her leg wasn't going to go into necrosis and fall off.

Taking her drawing back and reaching into her pack to pull out a charcoal stick, she started to take notes near the drawing while Shea worked. Don't rinse with water, she wrote. Spreads rash.

"Ah!" Mei was snapped from her writing as vinegar went down her leg. Involuntarily, she jerked. "Oh, sorry! That's just cold! Anyway, duly noted, no water. Good thing I didn't try! See, once I stepped in that, I knew I had to find someone who knows what they're doing. I didn't tamper with it a bit! After my run in with poison ivy--Inima, I hate that name!--I learned the no touching rule fast, trust me. Oh, what's that you're using, by the way? Vinegar, obviously--who could miss the smell, and what doesn't it dilute? But what herbs?"

She tapped her stick against her page and smiled. "For my notes. You see, I'm cataloging my journey, noting interesting and important discoveries, and it's also just practical. If I'm out on my own with no potion-maker, what would I do if I stepped in more of the stuff? One can never be too prepared, I always say! Though I suppose it's unlikely, if it's so uncommon...ah! Right! Where I found it?"

She made a vague motion in the forest's general direction. "Off in the woods, of course! It was wrapped around a dead tree's base, sort of in a shadowy area, and bunched up a lot at the bottom. I don't think it likes the sun--but it's also not very sunny out, so it's hard to say."

Her leg certainly wasn't in any danger of something so severe as necrosis, not with how relatively immediately she had sought medical attention. Shea had heard of instances where the Touch was allowed to continue to fester, and while the constant layers of large and angry blisters were mightily painful, they were hardly fatal. Perhaps letting the rash open and get infected would lose someone their limb, but this was not one of those cases.

Though, Shea made a mental note to try that out sometime, see just what real damage the weed might be able to do. At best, he would have a very effective future deterrent at his disposal; at worst, he would manage to kill a few days time with something interesting.

Shea continued to smear the paste over Mei's leg, making sure to coat every individual bump and reddened inch, and coat it liberally. The effect was almost immediate-- the chalky looking aspects of the paste seemed to work as a sponge, soaking up the residual oils and keeping the skin from becoming further inflamed, while the other ingredients acted as a balm, cooling and soothing whatever it touched.

He cleared his throat a bit, figuring it wouldn't hurt to at least give the girl something of a chance against further encounters with the weed. Plus, his explanation might actually get her to be quiet for a few minutes, and he'd be lying if he said that he wasn't prepared to do anything to achieve that. While the paste worked its figurative magic, he sat back on his ankles, and lifted up the jug he had just emptied over her leg.

"Vinegar, obviously. Apple cider, to be precise, I find it's less caustic. It strips the oil without necessarily stripping everything else with it, though you need to rinse it afterwards. Water will be safe at this point."

He replaced the jug on the floor, instead lifting the large mortar and pestle, and pointing at the green stain still present inside.

"The paste is a combination of milkweed sap, mugwort, and jewelweed. You crush the lot of it, mixing it with water and clay, until you have a paste like so... the plants are meant to both soothe the heat and to ease the blistering, and require nothing by way of preparation, while the clay you'll want to have baked and crushed into a powder before reintroducing it to water."

He gave a small shrug, finally returning to his original task of keeping Mei's leg nice and coated, inspecting and reinspecting for any missed spots.

"It's much the same as any of the poison plants-- ivy, oak, you know. The only real difference lies in just how stubborn the oil is, and where the little devil grows. Which, as you have correctly guessed, is largely not in direct sunlight, and always in the presence of rot."

He seemed to consider her for a long moment, then, his hands stopping their rubbing motions and his single eye trained directly on her face. He was debating with himself, that much was obvious, and finally he took a little breath, finally prepared to continue.

"Not just any kind of rot, though. It has to be unnatural, forcibly made, in order to generate the necrotic energies required for the plant to grow. Whatever was in that little cluster of wood you found, it was not pleasant, and you are quite lucky to have only gotten a rash for finding it."

He stood up then, gathering his various jars and putting them back where they belonged, the tub taken just outside his front door to be emptied into the street before being replaced under the bench. The remainder of the paste he scraped out of his bowl and into a smaller, clay jar, and then promptly into Mei's hands.

"And that would be that. Keep your leg dry for a few hours, and then rinse it with warm water. I recommend washing it with oats for the next few days, but you should see significant reduction in redness and itching. Reapply the paste as needed, but you won't need much more than a small layer at a time."

Mei was running out of room on her page, so her notes began to circle the plant picture and cram so close together there was hardly any space between characters. She'd be able to make sense of it later, but gods help anyone else who tried to read it.

In any case, Shea got lucky for the few minutes he spoke. Mei was a blabbermouth, but she was also a good student; as long as he had interesting things to say, he had her full attention, and she absorbed and recorded everything he said. That, and she was also rather shamelessly enjoying having an attractive man rub stuff all over her leg. Even if that stuff was a gross-looking herb paste, and even if her leg was inflamed (but feeling drastically better as the paste did its job--and, you know, the doctor was his own sort of medicine).

She stole glances at him from over her notes, and couldn't help the disappointment when he finished up. She did her best to mask it as she accepted the jar and tucked it away in her pack. When Shea returned from dealing with the tub, she perked right back up again.

"Thanks!" she said with a smile. "It's already feeling a ton better! I swear you've got like magic hands." Her face warmed as soon as she said it. That...might have been an awkward thing to say. Subject change!

"So! Okay, backing up a little! You know that thing you said? About necrotic energies feeding the plant? I wanted to ask you about that. So you mean like, a murder, maybe? Some dark ritual? Oh, oh! Maybe a human sacrifice!" She tapped the charcoal to her chin, leaving behind a dark smudge.

"That could do it. The combination of death magic, life energy, and trauma would leave a powerful impression. Those sorts of impressions can be left even with a normal death, like an accident, so a combination like that? Goodness. That would leave quite the stain. But strong enough to kill a forest? Hmm. I'll have to go get a better look later." She glanced down at her bare legs. "After I invest in some breeches and boots. Oh! Speaking of necrotic energies and the like!"

Mei motioned to his hair. It had been bugging her ever since she'd first seen him, and now that her leg was no longer driving her crazy she felt it needed to be addressed. "Your hair...why is it half red? Is it naturally red or naturally dark, or does it grow half and half like that?" That didn't even make sense, but magic could be a funny thing.

"Either way, I'd cut the red if I were you. It's unlucky, and I doubt you want bad luck with a job like yours! Though it looks like you may already know that, considering..." She tapped beneath her eye. "Is that how you lost it? Some accident? Hm, no, that doesn't seem right. It looks a little too precise for a mere accident. The line's too clean!"

It was actually a rather amazing transformation, and one that Shea was not at all displeased to bear witness to. It had been a long time since he had bothered teaching anyone anything-- both for lack of interest on many an individual's part and his own apathy towards the idea. But Mei was that rare breed of student, both capable of absorbing what she was told and yet still actually processing it.

Again, it was as if he were perfectly oblivious to the fact that it wasn't just what was coming out of his mouth that had her attention. Which he was-- at this point he was actually finding himself invested in his teaching, even going so far to add little hand gestures for the proper technique for the herb grinding, before his hands returned to Mei's leg.

Well, perhaps she wasn't so bad after all. A little chatty, but give her something to study and that problem cleared right up. Everything had a cure, if one just applied the right remedy and enough force to it. He might have even ventured to think he was disappointed it was over so quickly, and that soon the girl would be out into the world and far away, stumbling into other rash-inducing plants.

And then the talking started again.

That residual feeling of disappointment completely obliterated, he again donned a look of polite interest, completely skipping past the semi-awkward moment and straight into 'let's try and filter some of this out, shall we?'

Well, it wasn't as if she was that far off. Human sacrifice would, in fact, be enough of an event to allow for the Touch to grow, and technically, human sacrifice involved a very wide amount of acts that may or may not have been exactly what he had done. The term, like 'necromancy', just seemed to sit on his tongue wrong, and he disliked seeing it used. It felt... superstitious. Unenlightened. Prone to getting one run out of an entire country by an angry mob.

He blinked a bit, roused out of that unpleasant memory by Mei's assertion of... wait, she was going to what?

"You're going back? I thought I told you--" his words seemed to fall on deaf ears, and really, what warning he might have been willing to reiterate died in his mouth faster than the forest did when she gestured to his person. He stiffened a bit when she asked about his hair, and every bit of his willpower was sunk into attempting to not look defensive.

Especially when she suggested he cut it off. Cut it off? Unlucky? What, no, he did not "accidentally" lose his eye because of hair color, what was she even--

No, Shea Ru, calm down. He chided himself for getting riled, and forced himself to loosen the fist he had been making. Not quite trusting himself regardless, he folded his arms across his chest in what he hoped was a perfectly casual and not at all threatening manner.

"I'm afraid, young miss, that we are not at all at a stage in our relationship to be asking personal questions of that sort." He had to bite his tongue to keep his tone light and not at all angry, not at all, though he found that even with his arms crossed his hands wanted to make fists. "Now, if I might again try to convince you to not go to the woods again, that might be a pertinent topic."

Mei gave a merry laugh, oblivious to his anger. "Oh, but we could get to that stage! If you've got any questions for me, any at all, I don't mind answering! Nothing's too personal!" For she liked to live life like an open book, and how else could one share knowledge but by being totally open?

Then she realized something and gave a little start, holding up her hands. "Goodness. I just realized how I might have sounded! I hope you aren't offended! I don't mean to imply there's anything wrong with you. The hair is risky, but red is a pretty color, both lucky and unlucky depending on how its worn. And scars are the imperfections that make us more interesting than statues. I wouldn't want to hang around statues, would you? No, there are stories and memories in scars, sir! I'm curious to hear yours."

She grinned. "Just as I'm interesting in learning of that forest's tale! You bet I'm going back there. Now that I've got a poultice and experience to arm me, I can't fathom what could go wrong."

For a moment, the notion that the girl wanted to get to another stage struck a chord with him. The very idea filled him with some vague sense of unease, which was rapidly becoming far less vague and far more intense the more their conversation continued. Shea Ru took deep breaths, more than a little anxious at how it didn't seem to be filling his lungs as fully as it should, which only compounded the growing sensation of having a thousand angry snakes fighting in his belly.

He couldn't believe just how rapidly he was losing control over this entire situation. It was embarrassing, and infuriating, and the more he stewed over it the angrier he became at himself, which did not help the snake-belly-situation at all. This was not how someone his age should be behaving, and it certainly was not something he should find this upsetting. There were far worse evils in the world, far greater terrors that lurked in the murkiest depths of the furthest planes of existence, and here he was having hysterics over informal interpersonal interaction.

Get a hold of yourself, man.

Another deep breath, and he let it out in a long sigh, relishing the bit of relief that gave him. It was enough, enough to keep him from spiraling further out of control, at the very least. And enough to respond like any human being theoretically should be able to.

"No, I don't have questions, I... no, it's fine, just..." he sighed again, though this was more of the long-suffering sort that one usually made when one was being forced to do something one really had no inclination for doing, "Suffice to say it is for religious reasons, let's just leave it at that and be done."

He touched at one temple, rubbing small circles there while he regarded the girl and just... the level to which she would go to sate curiousity. This was all beginning to give him a headache, and he actually marveled at the fact that he was still capable of getting headaches. Huh, that was actually interesting.

"Oh, I can name a few things," he muttered, amusing himself with mental projections of Just What Could Go Wrong?, all of them involving the complete loss of the ability to speak. That was mildly satisfying, if completely fantastical. "...I could actually use some samples of the weed for experimentation. If you don't mind the company."

"Not at all!" Mei said, a little too quickly. She hoped it wasn't too obvious that she was kind of starving for companionship. Traveling a foreign continent was fun, but it was also lonely.

And okay, so there was that part of her that was shamelessly excited at having an attractive guide. That was an added bonus.

"I would love the company! Why, you're so knowledgeable and familiar with this area, I'm sure you could answer a lot of my questions! And it's always wonderful to have someone you can bounce ideas off of. I'm sure I could help you with a lot of things, too! I may not look it, but I know a lot. Oh..." She winced. "That makes me sound full of myself, huh? I don't mean it like that, I just mean scholarship is kind of my thing! What kind of experiments were you thinking of doing, because I could probably--"

She cut off short, for it was only then that she noticed he was rubbing his temple. "Are you okay? If you've got a headache, I recommend feverfew!"

Under normal circumstances, Shea would never have described himself as an egotistical person. He was confident, to be certain, but that stemmed more from years of experience and learning versus some kind of inate self-assuredness. But for some reason, Mei's words puffed him up like a peacock, and he found his dislike for her verbosity lessened somewhat.

Alright, so maybe he liked the flattery. He was very knowlegeable of the subject at hand, so it wasn't like the flattery was ill-deserved. And he was firmly of the opinion that knowledge was not something to be ashamed of. Guarded, definitely guarded, but never out of shame.

He shook his head to dissipate his wandering thoughts, and hopefully any sign that he was overly pleased with Mei's words.

"Mm, it's minor, but yes. I'll make something for it later." His headache, however, was the very least of his concerns now-- his interest was thoroughly picqued, and while Mei was definitely overly chatty, a chatty scholar was not someone to brush off, ever.

"Actually... I think it would be unwise to go trampling in the dark for Persu's Touch, regardless of our preparedness. We should go when it's light again. Perhaps, in the meantime, I could bribe you into sharing some of your scholarship? Over dinner?"

"Yes, please!" Mei blurted, scarcely giving Shea a chance to finish his sentence. Her cheeks colored a after, for she hadn't meant to be quite that zealous, but Shea had just gone and suggested all of her favorite things. Food? And scholarly talk? With an attractive man in his home full of interesting things she couldn't wait to get her hands on? He didn't even need to ask.

She cleared her throat. "Ah, that is, yes. Please! That would be wonderful! I would love to stay for dinner! Actually, come to think of it, I think I forgot to eat today. Hmm...yes, I don't think I did." She laughed, scratching the side of her head. "You know how it is when you're researching. It's so easy to get lost in your work! But oh, I have so much to share! I don't what kinds of things you're interested in, but..."

Turning to her satchel, Mei opened it and tilted it so he could see inside. Various loose papers filled it, along with a large, bound book where she copied all her notes down when she had a spare moment, transcribing them into a more legible hand in a more logical order and expanding upon her thoughts and theories. "I've got quite a collection! We might have to make an all-nighter of it!"

It was hard to tell if Shea was put off by Mei's enthusiasm. Certainly, there seemed a momentary flash of discomfort on his face, but that passed as quickly as it had appeared.

He smiled down at her, though the gesture became far more genuine when Mei opened up her bag and displayed-- Azang within, were those all notes? Shea barely suppressed a shiver, and he reached out for the book before suddenly remembering himself.

"Ah, you might just be right," he said, near breathless in his excitement, "but let me get dinner started first. It'll be easier than trying to pry away in the middle of... all this."

He gave the bag one last look of longing-- all that information, all that learning, all that potential-- before he returned to the blazing hearth. The bubbling pot from earlier he removed, and instead placed a smaller, empty cauldron over the steady flames. He left it in favor of crossing the room, to a cupboard set just a small distance from where Mei herself sat. A gust of frozen air hit the both of them upon opening the wooden doors, though Shea was largely unaffected by it, even as he pulled out a small slab of frosted meat wrapped in parchment.

"I hope you don't protest the consumption of meat?" Shea gave the packet a little shake to dispell most of the ice, "I fear I'm not much of a cook otherwise."

"Ah..." Well this was awkward. Mei was aware that most people here ate meat, and for the most part, she had been able to politely avoid it. It was easy when she stayed at an inn, because she was paying for hospitality then and could be a little more picky, but to be a guest in someone's home? That was different, and she didn't want to be rude or difficult.

Wringing her hands together, Mei tried not to grimace. "I...don't actually eat meat?" she said, and quickly added, "Sorry! I don't mean to be difficult! It's just not something we do, where I'm from! Spiritual reasons and all, not wanting to take violence into ourselves. Oh! Not that I'm judging you or anything, we just consider it morbidly impure." Her eyes widened and she clamped her mouth shut as soon as the words escaped. She wanted to kick herself.

"Not that I mind if you do it!" she said, waving her hands. Though she totally minded if he did it; Shea was so pretty, she really didn't want to see him sticking that stuff in his mouth! "It's normal for your culture, after all, eating animals like animals, so you wouldn't know better if--"

She pressed her lips together. This was going bad fast. "I can help cook, if you want?" she suggested with a sheepish smile.

Shea laughed.

He just had to.

The look of growing horror on Mei's face was just too much for him, especially when her reasoning for abstaining were just so... spot on. He made a mental note to ask more about these bizarre practices, but for now, for now simply breathing was at the top of his list. He could scarcely catch his breath, and he pressed his hands-- meat and all-- to his sides in a vain attempt to alleviate the stitches there.

When had he last laughed like this? Genuinely?

The thought alone was sobering enough, which was good, because Mei had to have been fretting her way through the roof by the time he calmed down. He cleared his throat then, and gave a pacifying wave of his hand.

"My dear little inquisitor, it's fine. I would be happy to learn from you." With that, he replaced the packet into its cupboard, and instead started for the front door. "I have a modest garden out on the side, there should be something ready enough to eat... there should be some milk in that cupboard, too, I assure you that wasn't taken in violence."

Oh, Inima, he was laughing at her! Mei's face heated up with fast-building mortification and her mind scrambled for some way to fix what was turning into a disaster! She had just thoroughly insulted him! And his entire culture, for that matter! Goddess, he must be so pissed! She knew people that laughed when they were angry, that derisive, angry laugh that screamed, I'm so livid that laughing is the only way I can process this, and she expected that, at any minute, he'd throw her out on her ear.

Leave it to her to be culturally insensitive! And after she'd researched popular customs and everything...

Her hands were clammy by the time Shea wound down, but to her surprise, he just waved away the infraction.

And, once again, Mei could breathe. Shea hadn't been the only one rendered breathless.

"Oh." She pushed her hair back from her face and let out another relieved sigh. "Whew. Okay! Wonderful!" She wiped her palms off on her pants and rose to her feet--and tried not to cringe at the sensation of the caked on poultice. Shifting a little, she spaced her feet apart and followed after him, walking funny since she didn't really want to  touch her legs together and get goop on both legs.

"Though, ah, I'm not sure how you'd violently milk a cow. Is that something that's common here? Do you kill the cows you milk? That seems rather wasteful. Oh! Speaking of that cupboard, I wanted to ask about that! How does it work? Is it magic? Obviously, there has to be some magic to it, because where would you get ice here? I've heard of ice houses, but never seen something so small!"

That mildly sadistic moment of mirth over, Shea fell into what was rapidly becoming a familiar kind of silence. Rather than being overwhelmed by the amount Mei was throwing at him, he felt himself becoming used to it, and quickly. He kept his pace slow, to let the girl catch up and walk beside him, rather than having to awkwardly hobble after him.

He let her finish her string of questions, his arms casually folded as he led the way out and around to the small garden he had growing there. It, like the sign outside his shop, was barely lit by a single, fragile lantern, though the low light didn’t seem to bother him any. The same cat from his window hopped up onto the short fence that separated the garden from the rest of the dirt, and it scowled at the both of them from its perch.

“It was mostly a joke, but now that you mention it, I’m certain there are ways if one is sadistic enough. I doubt anyone has that kind of funding, though—and if they really could afford the time and money to torture cows for their milk, I somehow doubt they’d be satisfied for very long.” He gave Mei a very pointed look, complete with an exaggerated grimace that seemed more to drive his point home rather than out of disgust. “Those types rarely stick to animals.”

He bent down in front of a leafy patch, and sifted through the vegetation, plucking a few carrots up when he deemed them worthy of a meal. He lit up, however, when the topic turned to his cupboard.

“Ah, that is magic. Of the elemental family, I find myself particularly fond of water-based, specifically ice, magic. The trick of it, though, is less in the magic and more in the cupboard. You build it with hollow sides, you see, a layer of wood, pottery, straw stuffing, pottery and then wood again. And you do this for all six sides,” he was steadily becoming more and more animated, no longer focusing on his garden and more abstractly waving the few carrots he had unearthed around, as if in demonstration.

“It works much the same as say… a bed mat or something like that. It keeps warmth, or in this case, a severe lack of it, from leaving the cupboard. The magic portion is inside the cupboard. To one side, you build an iron box, and inside of the box, I blow a little frost into it—cold enough that it normally takes the better part of a sunny day to melt it—incidentally I highly advise against handling it with your bare hands, you will get one hell of a burn for it—but back to the topic at hand, slim iron rods fit into the box, and extend to the walls of the cupboard, and act as the shelves. And it all keeps it all… ah… quite… fresh.”

He seemed to realize then, just how much he had been talking this time, and his mouth snapped shut with thorough embarrassment. Well, that had all gotten far away from him, hadn’t it? He quickly moved to finish grabbing some vegetables, far less picky now that he was trying to hide his shame at just how damn excited he had gotten.

As Shea lost himself in the moment, Mei was enamored--that, and it was a nice change from the much darker topic before it. She watched him, transfixed by the change that came over him, how animated he was! Even gesturing with the carrots, which looked really silly on a man of his size who had, upon meeting him, seemed so serious. But she'd since seen him laugh, and now he was all excited, and dear Inima but there were few things so attractive as a man that was passionate about learning.

Her fingers twitched, itching for the parchment and charcoal she'd left behind in Shea's home. She would have to sit him down and get him to go over it again and do a detail sketch of his cupboard. It was brilliant!

When he trailed off, Mei didn't let the silence linger very long. If she had noticed his shame, she didn't show it.

"That. Is. AMAZING!" she gushed, hands clasped together as she gazed up at him. She followed after him, sticking close.

"Such wonderful technology! That's pure genius! Oh, you're going to have to go over it again, in detail, with me later! As you can imagine, keeping things cool in a tropical climate is tricky at best--only the rich can afford that sort of thing, everyone else has to preserve their foods the old fashioned way. Oh, unless they're an entropymancer, but as you can imagine, even that gets tricky! But this? This sounds so much more accessible. Granted, the magic is problematic..."

She rubbed her chin, smearing more charcoal from her fingers onto her skin. "Where I come from, elemental magic is...well, no offense intended, but it's not good, I'll put it that way! One shouldn't dabble in things we weren't meant to dabble in, natural order and all that--oh! But mind you, I'm not opposed to you doing that! A scholar must be open to observing the ways other people do things. And between you and me, I can see the practical uses of such an ability. It would certainly be useful! Just not a very good idea. If everyone started using ice magic in a tropical nation, what would that do to the land? I'm talking about Thanatos, of course. That's where I'm from, if you couldn't guess."

And maybe he couldn't, if he'd never met someone from there! And while she had a Thanati accent, her Common was rather flawless. She'd learned it from a young age.

Oh, oh, now she had him. It took him a moment to realize that the odd feeling in his chest was flushed pride, his prior embarrassment completely forgotten in the face of finally being appreciated for his work. Given, the icebox was merely a tool he had had to come up with some time ago just out of necessity, and it hardly counted as more than a side-project. But for once, it wasn't all about the devilry of magic and how it would doom them all.

Azang within, sometimes he felt like beating his head against the wall.

But here, here was a little delight who appreciated the endeavor, small thing that it was, and he found his fondness of her growing exponentially. It was like looking back through time, to what he had once hoped for-- a little imprint on the world that wasn't just the hoarding of knowledge but rather the imparting of it.

The tang of bitterness stronger than he had expected, he abandoned that train of thought. He frowned a bit, confused by just what she was trying to say. No elemental magic? No meat? What kind of bizarre culture was this? Had he let himself slip up on current events that badly?

This entire jump was just becoming one giant mess. A complete disaster. Good job, sir, you are proving yourself quite capable and not at all losing your mind.

"I don't... I'm sorry, I seem to be having difficulty wrapping my head around it all. You don't eat meat... and you don't study elemental magic? I mean, I suppose you could hire an iceman if you really wanted to avoid it, but... to openly reject the holiest of things, I just..."

This was all dizzying. Far more dizzying than the ban on magic altogether. At least that had a perceivable source-- fear was a powerful thing, that was easy enough to understand. Or maybe he was reading this all wrong. Maybe it wasn't rejection so much as overdone reverence? But even then, why wouldn't one want to take the divine into them as often as possible?

"Oh, no, no, no!" Mei said, waving her hands. "We don't reject it! That is, we reject the magic, yes, but not the elements! The earth is holy. Nature is holy. It is all Inima's creation. To tamper with that, to meddle with the forces Inima so perfectly set into motion..." She clicked her tongue. "That's like saying you don't trust Her to know what She's doing. That you can do better than Her. Pure hubris, basically."

She folded her arms over her chest and tilted her head, fingers tapping her arm. "Besides, from a practical outlook, it's dangerous. Mages throwing fire around and all that. That's just madness! It's really not a good idea to tamper with the natural order of things, even if it might have a positive short-term outcome. You just have no way of knowing what the long-term could be!"

And then, realizing how doom and gloom all that sounded--especially after he had told her how his ice box worked, and that it required water-based magic--she cleared her throat. "Um, I still think your ice box is amazing, though!"

Oh, well now that made far more sense. He pursed his lips together, still not quite sure about the sense involved in rejecting any kind of magic, but again, he followed quite a different sort of god. He gave a little snort, and smiled up at her from where he crouched.

"I think if I had to have a sin, pride would be it."

He rose to his feet after gathering a few more vegetables, those gathered up in the folds of the short apron he wore to work with. When he reached where Mei was standing, he lifted his hand to her face, and rubbed at the smudge of charcoal there to clean it off. The motion was such that it was like he didn't even know he was necessarily doing it, and he continued on his way back into the house with their (disappointingly) bloodless ingredients.

"I'll admit I don't have very much experience with someone admiring the work behind something that goes against their beliefs. So thank you for the kind words and not burning my house down." He laughed at the joke, morbid as it was, and set out the vegetables on his counterspace once they were back inside.

No meat. Excess of earth and water. It was okay, he could do this. He'd just have to up the spice this time. He looked over at Mei, and forced a smile.

"Alright, little inquisitor. What are we eating?"

Shea touched her chin, and Mei's heart fluttered. She wasn't aware of the smears on her skin, so to her, the action seemed extra random--and extra delightful. But then he was gone, heading past her and into the house, and after a moment's pause (because her brain may have just blanked out a little there) she trotted after him.

"You're...welcome? I think? Why would I burn your house down?" Mei asked, face scrunched up at the quip. She took her place at his side and looked the assortment of veggies over as she spoke.

"Is that...is that a thing that happens here? Burning the homes of people you disagree with? I suppose that's an excellent way to keep competition to a minimum and ignorance to a maximum, but hmm, no, considering your people chased my people off the continent and onto an island..."

Her head snapped up and her laugh was a bit too forced. "O-oh! Ahaha! Not literally your people! I don't blame you! And that was a long time ago, anyway! I just mean to say no! No burning! Except where it concerns food, and only if it needs to be burned, which...this doesn't! Speaking of which, here, allow me! Just stand pretty and I'll figure it out."

Scooting in, Mei hip-checked Shea out of the way and began to browse through his cupboards, pulling out items and looking them over. "I'm going to guess you don't keep rice? I swear, no one here does! Granted, it's so dry I don't think you could, but I could really use some now! Ah! It looks like you keep decent spices, at least! Do you mind spicy? In my experience the local palate is quite bland, and I like my food rather hot, but I can dull down your portion if that's an issue."

"Not here, here. This town is actually rather lovely. Perfectly keen to mind its own business. There are... places, though." His mouth turned down into a scowling "c" shape, lips curled to bare his teeth as he stared off at some point on the far wall. For a few excruciating moments, he was perfectly silent, until he seemed to come back to himself. He shook his head then, and pushed out a smile that didn't reach his eye. "Given, things might have changed since I last was in those places. It could be very tolerant, these days."

His smile became far easier and sincere, however, as Mei tried to backtrack in her words, and he gave another wave of his hand to dismiss the imagined slight. "I think I've come to understand that you don't mean to place blame on me, though we both must admit it not being specifically my fault,"

(unlike a lot of other things)

"doesn't negate the fact it happened. But duly noted, your people don't burn other people."

Shea wasn't expecting to be bumped out of the way, and had to grab onto the countertop to keep from toppling over, which was in and of itself hilarious considering their size difference. After the moment of startling passed, he just looked amused, and wholeheartedly accepted the invitation to slack off.  With a quick hop, he was up on the counter, sitting at the far corner so that he might be out of the way.

"I adore spicy. In fact, considering the base ingredients, I'd wager the hotter the better."

Mei couldn't help but laugh when Shea stumbled, surprised. He was so much taller, she hadn't expected him to be so light!

"Goodness. You need to eat more!" she said with a grin as she rummaged through his things in search of a pot. Finding one, she blew some dust out of it and then set it on the counter. "But duly noted, you like spicy food. Excellent! We should get along just splendidly, then!"

Turning to his ice box, she opened the cupboard and pulled out the milk, then gave it a sniff to make sure it was still good.

"Hm. Usually this dish uses coconut milk, but cow milk might be an okay substitute. I suppose we'll find out! Of course, it also requires a lot of other vegetables you don't have, so...this will be one big experiment! Hopefully I'm not about to embarrass myself. Oh, and as it turns out, before you get too comfy there," she said, looking up at him where he was perched on  the counter, "I'm going to need your assistance after all. I'll need some water to rinse the vegetables, unless you want the extra minerals and grit, and if you could get a fire going, that would be great! Sorry, I'm afraid I'm not quite used to your set-up here."

As she talked, she grabbed the spices she wanted. "It's probably too much to ask that you have ginger, too, isn't it?"

"I assure you I receive just the amount of nutrition I require," he spouted off almost instantly, as if he had heard much the same many times before. Still, he didn't seem insulted, and rather continued to grin from his perch.

"I'm not so sure," he teased, his amusement growing by the second, "how do I know this experiment of yours won't result in extra limbs, or something? Actually, that would be kind of funny."

Shea didn't have much more time to annoy her once she requested water and fire. For a moment, he looked unsure, before his inner debate was summarily decided and he hopped off of the counter again. He strode to the side and where his hearth stood, bent low, and breathed out onto the cold coals, sparking them to life with a low woosh.

The fire dealt with, he returned to the countertop and spread out the vegetables until there was as little overlap as possible. Once they were, he held them in place with one hand, and cupped his other. With just a blink of an eye, that was filled with water, which he turned and swept across the vegetables like a brush. With every pass the gathered water grew dirtier, and he flicked the ruined mud to the floor before continuing on.

"There's actually ginger on the top shelf, far right cupboard. Usually I end up handing it off for nausea."

As Shea quite literally worked his magic, Mei watched, enraptured. It was true that elemental magic was taboo where she came from, and in fact went against her very core beliefs, but that didn't mean she couldn't still find it fascinating, right? Kind of in the same way as how it was fascinating to watch a snake swallow a mouse. It was terrible, but it was also interesting. Though she supposed that wasn't a valid comparison; the snake was only doing what it was created to do, while tampering with nature went against nature.

And in watching the ease with which Shea stoked the fire and cleaned the veggies, she could see how tempting that kind of magic could be. How easy it would be to slip into it, to use it for such mundane purposes before it escalated.

But there was nothing wrong with observation, and--oh. Ew. Did he just...? He did. He just tossed all the mud to the floor.

Wrinkling her nose, Mei looked back up at Shea. "The door isn't very far, that could have gone outside," she pointed out before stepping over the mud and going to the cupboard. She found the ginger and set it on the counter, then took a knife and started to chop up the vegetables.

"So, how did you do that? The trick with the water and the fire? You just breathed and made fire! Does that hurt your lungs? Or does the fire form outside your mouth? For that matter--and I've been dying to ask someone about this, no one ever gives me a straight answers!--where does your magic even come from? Is it a spirit that grants you the power? A god? Your own will? Words of power? Do you just tap into the natural, grab it by the tail, and force it to do your bidding? I know there are a lot of theories about where magic comes from but elemental things...well, obviously, we don't really discuss that much! If someone can't do it, no one wants to be the one that accidentally teaches them! Not that I plan on learning! I don't think I have any gift for that at all, and for some people, it seems you can either do it or you can't, and I can't do any of that. Not for lack of trying! Though maybe I wasn't trying the right way--ow!"

Not paying attention to what she was doing and getting a little too excited in her chatting, she'd managed to nick her finger. With a frown, she stuck it in her mouth to stop the bleeding.

"Oops. Ah...well...it doesn't look like I got any blood on the carrots, at least..."

Really, Shea wasn't sure why he was so nervous about such minor magic. He'd done much more many times before, far more complicated variants with all manner of alternating variables to keep track of. And here he was, nervous about lighting a damn fire.

Maybe it was what Mei said about it being unnatural, against creation. Again, it wasn't like such accusations ever bothered him before, but for some inexplicable reason he found himself actually caring about what the girl thought of him. Which was just too weird, far too weird.

So caught up in the brewing storm that was his thoughts, he didn't even catch her comment about the mud, and rather continued to flick it off onto the floor. He came back to himself right around when she started chopping, the rhythmic cuts bringing him back to reality as only stable patterns could.

"It's all in understanding the elements present within one's own body. We're all made up of them, earth, fire, water, air; it's just a matter of favoring one over the others. Our breath is naturally hot, I just urged it a little hotter. Outside of my lungs, of course, you don't ever want to try breathing that back in. Your lungs will collapse in on themselves and you'll die."

As for where his magic came from... it was just too tempting. Shea simply couldn't resist, and he shot Mei a wicked grin.

"I'm actually possessed by the incredibly potent spirit of a long-dead sorcerer. Magic runs in the blood, and it's only after taking in his blood via a horrific body-swapping ritual that I'm capable of magic at all."

He let that sit still for a moment, before he burst into laughter, suddenly forced to stop in his kitchen duties to rest his head on the counter top while he had his little fit. He rubbed at his single eye to rid it of tears, gasping a bit for breath in between continued snorts.

"In all honesty... it really is in the blood. There's a natural sort of affinity present-- like being able to roll your tongue, it doesn't take much-- and then the careful application of years of study. Minor tricks are all well and good, and even a child can be capable of them if they're clever enough. But in order to understand it, in order to not, say, set an entire island on fire or freeze it solid, you need to study for... well, ages."

He reached over on instinct, plucked Mei's finger from her mouth and turned her hand over to inspect it. For half a moment, the cut seemed perfectly clean, all layers of pink skin. But then the moment passed, and crimson welled up into a thick droplet, and Shea was entranced by the color for perhaps far longer than he should have been. He pulled a bit of cloth from the pocket of his apron, and pressed it to her finger, holding it there and checking on the bleeding intermittently.

"But you'll always be long dead before you can even hope to scratch the surface of what there is to learn."

Mei stared at Shea, unblinking, her lips a thin line as she nursed her wound. Shea said it so deadpan, so seriously, that for a second, she didn't know what to think. But then he burst into laughter and Mei let out the breath she'd been holding, her shoulders sagging in relief. Not that...not that she'd actually believe something like that, of course! Not her! That was far too ridiculous! She was aware that darker magics existed, of course, but no healer she knew of ever dabbled in those things! Certainly not a man who'd patched up her leg, invited her to dinner, and planned on joining her excursion the next day!

Ridiculous!

Besides, evil people were never attractive. Probably because dark magic poisoned them or something. It was like a universal rule.

After a second's pause to process the joke, the humor finally hit, and Mei joined in his laughter. It was contagious when she wasn't being laughed at, and the only thing that cut hers short was the droplet of blood running down her finger. With a grimace, she popped it back in her mouth and nodded along as Shea explained the link between blood and magic. Ah, so it was intuitive, inherent. That made sense, and was kind of disappointing, knowing it was one area she'd never get to experiment with.

"Hmm. That makes sense that--oh!" She cut off when Shea took her hand and her cheeks warmed at the touch. She couldn't help it!

And as Shea examined her finger, she stole a look up at him, and didn't even notice how strange it was for him to be studying her wound so long.

He had really nice lips...

His voice brought her back.

"Hm? Oh, that's true! But don't say things like that! It's depressing!" Mei said, scrunching her face up in misery. "I don't want to think about dying and all the things I'll never know before I do! How horrible would it be to go right in the middle of a project, at the cusp of some great breakthrough that you'll never finish? Ugh! Those are the thoughts that keep me up at night, Shea. Life is so short! So I want to see and experience as much of everything as I can before I'm too old to remember what I've had for breakfast and before I'm born again as a mindless child. How frustrating, not to remember all your past accomplishments, to have to relearn such simple things such as how to use a chamber pot!"

She glanced down at the cloth he'd pressed to her finger. "Though maybe next time I'll be a mage of some sort. They say each time you're reborn, it's to learn the different things your soul needs in that life, so maybe that's not quite so terrible."

The look on Mei's face was almost enough to send Shea straight into another bout of laughter. It was a cruel joke, really, more private than one shared between two people, and he was fairly sure if she knew the half of it she wouldn't be joining in at all.

He wasn't sure if he felt bitter about that.

Still, the moment was nice enough, and he let himself enjoy it, the warmth of some company that was... well. Warm. It was pathetic, just how starved he seemed to be for it, and for a good moment he felt almost disgusted with himself. God within, hadn't he learned his lesson the last time? Was he really so dense these days? This was well beyond normal parameters of interaction, well beyond what he should be allowing himself to partake in, and well beyond what was necessary for the girl to just lead him to that spot of dead wood and let him be done with the whole affair.

Really, if it weren't for certain individual's apparent incompetence, he wouldn't have to be risking such interaction in the first place. Shea Ru resolved to find the coarsest sand he could find and just make the bastard eat it by the bucket. Not that Haskill would taste it, but the message would be loud and clear and maybe Shea would feel better about this whole mess.

It was a shame. He thought he could possibly like her. But the fact she had gone so silent was more than telling; it was damning.

Shea Ru took a deep breath, as if to settle himself down again, and let it out in a long sigh.

And then, damn all the gods, some perverse sort of hope was dangled right before him. Shea knew he shouldn't rise to the bait, could almost hear the snide, reedy way he'd be chastised for this--

what in the devil made him even think that a modicum of personality and free will was a good idea anyway

--but he just couldn't help himself. It was just too easy, she was just so small and full of a thirst for knowledge that he himself knew all too well, and for the barest moment he just wanted to immortalize the feeling of camaraderie.

Well, maybe he could.

But not in the way he necessarily wanted.

He chewed at the inside of his cheek, trying to separate his rationality from a very irrational pattern of thought, disturbed by how frequently those same threads of thought had been springing up lately.

"I could believe that... the whole, rebirth thing." He paused, considering her, and then pushed forward with a wild abandon that he hadn't dared allow in years, "but it's not... set in stone. There are enough stories of those who... shall we say, postpone their deaths and possible subsequent rebirths for centuries beyond their normal due. Usually for the very same reason you just mentioned-- to keep learning. To not just lose all that wealth of knowledge they'd acquired."

"Postpone their deaths...?" Mei blinked up at Shea and tilted her head to the side like a curious puppy.

"With magic, you mean? Ooh. Oh no. That doesn't sound like a very good idea. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's one of those things that goes against Inima. To be fair, I'm not sure, because I've never really read anything that addressed that, exactly, but that sure sounds like hubris, using unnatural means to extend the life Inima gave you, thus disturbing the cycle of death and rebirth..."

Mei pursed her lips in thought and checked on her cut to see if the bleeding had stopped. "No, no, that definitely sounds like something that would have dire consequences later. No one wants to die, of course, even if you know it's not the end--though granted, no one really knows that for sure, but...even so, even if you're doing it for learning...by extending this life, you'll be missing out on all the valuable lessons of your next life, and...ow."

She rubbed at her temples with her uninjured hand. "That's a real conundrum! See? You start to mess with the natural order of things, and who knows what will get disturbed in the process! It's like dropping a stone in a pond--it ripples out! No, playing with life and death is never a good idea! I'll just hope I turn into one of those old people that live like into their nineties! Hopefully I'm just as cute then."

And with a little grin up at Shea, she flipped her bangs out of her face, set the bloodied cloth aside, and resumed her chopping.

Shea raised his eyebrow at Mei, and it only pushed higher and higher the more she spoke of just how terrible the whole premise of unnatural life-span lengthening was-- without actually reading up on it first. Now, to be fair, there were plenty of actual texts out there that, in fact, did warn against the very subject, and actually did address just how much the action tore at a mortal soul.

Shea had personally read most of those same texts, and had summarily ignored them, but that was beside the point. It took a very large amount of effort not to just openly sigh and roll his eyes, but he figured doing so might just be this side of rude, his own home or not. At the very least, he expected there to be actual research behind an opinion. What a pity.

He had to snort in amusement, however, the little bit of ire that had been building summarily erased the very second Mei grinned up at him. The little imp, it was as if she knew it was impossible to be mad at her for long.

"Oh, I'm sure you will be. It would be a crime against nature itself if you weren't." He shook his head, and leaned on the counter, watching as the knife rose up and down to dice the various vegetables.

"What can I help with, next?"

"Hmm..." Mei pursed her lips and thought about his question, glancing down at the vegetables. "Well, actually, it would be a real big help if you happened to have coconut around! But I doubt that's the case, because I haven't seen any coconut in any of the markets I've been to, and the climate is certainly all wrong. Unless I've just been looking in the wrong places, but even then it'd be an import and probably faaar too expensive to consider. But see, the thing is, I just realized cow's milk actually won't work! It'll burn. And since there's no coconut milk, I need an alternative...this soup is supposed to be creamy...ah..."

She tapped her lips, then shrugged. "Oh well! We're just going to experiment today! Fill that pot with water, won't you, and toss the veggies in? We'll get them boiling a while, hopefully get them nice and soft. And if you have some flour and butter, fetch it! Uh, I hope you're feeling adventurous today?" she said with a sheepish smile. "Because this is going to be an adventure. But I'm confident it'll turn out!"

Deep inside, she was mildly horrified, and praying to Inima that this meal came out edible. It was fortunate she knew how to cook, but she'd always been a very "by the recipe" sort of person. Now that she was being forced to deviate, well...here's hoping!

She was trying to impress Shea here!

((Any interest in being joined by a necromancer?))

"I'm afraid I'm fresh out of coconut." Shea's mouth worked into a wry sort of smile, and he idly scratched at the side of his face, just around the stitches set in his cheek. "I've never really had the inclination to get some specially traded in, not in this part of the world. Even if there were a demand for it, it seems like they'd be long gone by the time they got here."

It was a shame, because several (decades?) ago, the milk had been a favourite of his for various lotions, back when he did reside in an area that was more capable of trading exotic foods and spices and herbs. He really missed those days, though the coinciding weather did very, very little to assist him in staying out of local curiousities. The smell alone had been damn near overwhelming. It honestly made him miss the mountains, and the chilling wind storms that sang through it, leaving one's joints aching and nose bitten pink. There were no coconuts, but there were also no visitors banging on the door demanding to know just what the hell he had going on to raise that foul a stench.

"Flour and butter should serve okay, if you're thinking of making them a thickening agent. It won't be the same, obviously, but..." he let his sentence fall away, even as he moved to do exactly as he was told, setting the full pot over the fire. "I've always been a fan of deviating."

He snorted a bit to himself, in a private joke, and threw Mei a wink that he knew would not be entirely understood. Or rather, it would be entirely misunderstood. But when had he ever operated in any other manner?

He coaxed the fire a little hotter, a little higher than it might have been if left to its natural devices.

That wink.

Mei felt her face heat and her eyes go wide, and for a second she forgot what she was doing, which could have ended badly considering she was chopping the last of the vegetables. Luckily for her, it just meant her blade slowed until it got stuck in the carrot's tougher inner core, where it remained. Deviating, eh?

Oh my...

It was the rising flames that snapped her out of her reverie, and she realized then that she had been staring, lost in her own flights of fancy. Shaking herself out of it and snapping her eyes back down to the carrot, she cleared her throat and pulled the blade back, then sliced down through it in one quick motion.

"If it weren't for deviants--ah, that is, creative people who broke the rules and experimented! Those sorts of deviants, not the other kind, and experimented as in, of course, things like crafting and other such practical things. Of course. Where was I going with this? Ah, yes! If it weren't for those sorts of people, none of the great inventions of the ages would have ever been created! And no great discoveries would be made. I'm also a fan of deviating. As in exploring. As in learning and books and knowledge and things. All things. Of the scholarly variety."

Dear Inima.

Chop, chop, chop. Mei kept her head down to hide her blush, and quickly finished up the vegetables. Why was everything coming out so wrong now? Or maybe that was all in her own head. Seeing the water was boiling now, she went about gathering ingredients and whipping up her experimental concoction.

Shea Ru watched with some very poorly hidden amusement as Mei babbled her way through whatever thought process she was trying to get around, his smile growing wider the more she flushed and chopped and bumbled through her words. He touched at his mouth, an unconscious maneuver done in thought rather than on purpose, and his lips curled and twisted against his knuckle.

That was just entirely too easy. He had suspected, of course, but there was the proof of it, solidly in the pudding, all scooped into a carefully labelled jar and set on a shelf with similarly categorized substances.

Where was he even going with that metaphor?

Anyway.

He looked as if he was about to speak, though whatever he might have said was summarily interrupted by what sounded like a loud thwump from the far back room. Shea's head immediately snapped to the side to regard the doorway that led away from the main room, and his smile evaporated as if it had never been.

Lord save him from imbeciles.

He forced a smile at Mei, though it wasn't nearly as warm as it had been a mere moment before, and he held up one slender finger.

"A moment, if you don't mind... I think the cat must have knocked something over."

He stepped away from his place by the hearth, his footsteps sharp and with purpose, sounding far more like suppressed anger than mere annoyance at the misbehaviour of a pet. He snapped the bedroom door shut behind himself, possibly with far more force than necessary, leaving Mei alone to chop the rest of the vegetables.

Well, not entirely alone, that same cat slinking its way back in through the open window at the front of the store, with a baleful look at Mei herself. The feline leapt onto the counter with a grace that didn't match its bony and decrepit appearance, and as it settled down, it reached out a slender paw as if to sneak a piece of vegetable that it didn't actually want but thought it deserved nonetheless.

"Oh! No worries!" Mei cheerfully said, not all that alarmed by his...briskness. Cats could be frustrating, after all!

Slam!

...Very, very frustrating. Always knocking things over and breaking things! With a shake of her head, Mei finished up her chopping.

Right as a cat slunk in through the window.

Wait. Cat?

The cat knocked something over, did it.

Mei stared at the skinny cat, and looked back toward where Shea had gone. Then she looked back at the cat and shooed away its reaching paw. "No! This isn't cat food. Ah, Shea?"

She started to go about combining ingredients into the pot, throwing glances now and then at her visitor. "Shea, do you own two cats? Because a cat just came in through the window!"

Despite not being that far away, Shea didn't respond immediately to Mei's calls. He didn't respond at all, in fact. Her only reply was the steady crackle of the fire, and the occasional chirping mews from the cat as it... somehow... attempted to charm its way into getting some of those vegetables that it wanted-but-not-really.

There was another thud, though a far more distant sounding one, and after several more minutes Shea emerged from the back room again. His mood seemingly had not improved, and his brows were knit tightly together as he shut the door to the room behind himself. For a moment it seemed like he had forgotten all about the girl in his abode-- he moved instead to one of the many cabinets that lined the walls, and checked on a few of the different jars and pots. Seemingly satisfied with what he found there, he turned back to where Mei Yi stood.

He blinked as if surprised, and then suddenly remembered himself.

"What was that? No, I don't--" he looked then, at the cat very clearly on the countertop, and the cat stared right back at him, its ratty tail swinging back and forth. The momentary pause broke when the cat leapt off the countertop, its tail held high as it twined through Shea's legs, rubbing up against his shins.

"Oh. Ah, no, I don't have two cats. Just... a few things overbalanced in the cellar. Nothing that can't be replaced--" his voice took on an annoyed sort of tinge "-- so it's fine. Likely I'll find what I need near the Touch tomorrow, anyway."

He leaned up against his countertop then, his arms folded. "How goes dinner?"

Shea returned just as Mei was pouring the finished soup into two bowls she'd managed to find via snooping. She perked at his return, ready to announce that dinner was served, but he wasn't looking at her. He seemed distracted--which didn't bother her so much, for Mei completely understood! It was an affliction she, too, suffered from because she only had one mind but information was infinite! No, what concerned her was his moodiness.

Hopefully nothing bad had happened! Or at least, nothing that would ruin dinner! She'd worked too hard on this soup with its improvised ingredients (thatshe'dtotallywhippedupjusttoimpresshim) to have all that ruined by some household disaster.

"Dinner's ready!" she piped up when he asked, eager to move onto happier things. Like what an awesome job she'd done, and please oh please let him like it! She'd taste-tested it and it was decent. Nowhere near the original, but he wasn't Thanati, so he'd have nothing to compare it to. She hoped.

She motioned to the bowls, steam rising and curling from the surface. "It's really hot though, so be careful. I think it turned out pretty good! It's not like the real thing, but now it's its own new invention and maybe if you do wind up getting coconuts sometime I could cook up the real thing!"

And then she paused, realizing she'd made that sound, you know, like this encounter was going to be a lot more meaningful than just a random one time thing, and she quickly picked up her bowl. "That is, if I ever happen to come through town again. And you happen to have coconuts. And these two events happen to coincide." She took an slow sip of her soup, drinking straight from the bowl.

Cool like ice.

Wherever Shea's mood had been, it lightened considerably the more Mei rambled on. It was astounding how much she could bumble a bad mood away, to the point where he wasn't entirely convinced there weren't some measure of witchcraft to her.

She almost made him forget about that whole mess in the basement.

He sat down on one stool, and pulled his bowl closer to himself. He still wasn't sure how this whole thing was meant to work without meat, or really any of the apparent necessary ingredients. It was a little... odd looking, to say the least. But nothing ever came from hesitation, and so with an internal shrug he took a swig.

The first thing he noted was the temperature. It might have done him better to blow on the soup beforehand, but it was always the little things he tended to forget. Not bothered in any regard, he took another, more careful sip, and that's when he was better able to taste the actual dish itself versus his own burnt tongue.

The second thing he noted was the heat. It was slow, at first, lingering, and then it built up to a veritable inferno. Involuntarily, his eyes watered, and he took a breath in through his mouth as if that would somehow aid him. Realizing this would do no such thing, he very casually and not at all hurriedly brought the milk back out from the ice box, poured out a glass, and slung it down.

He let out a breath once the glass was emptied, and laughed.

"Little inquisitor, if I get cooking like this out of it, I will make sure we run into one another again. What do you even call this? The, ah, non-deviant original, I mean? Lord, that has some heat to it."

Don't be creepy, don't be creepy, don't be creepy... Mei desperately thought as she took a seat on another stool, breath held as Shea pulled his bowl closer. But even with that thought running on a loop through her brain, she found herself leaning forward and watching Shea a bit too intensely when he took a sip of the soup, her own meal forgotten on the counter, her hands clasped together in her lap.

She was literally on the edge of her seat.

Please like it, please like it, please like it...

It was the moment of truth, and she practically squirmed in jittery anticipation. What if he hated it? What if it was totally gross and inedible to him and she'd just wasted a bunch of his ingredients and made a fool of herself? Then what?! She had no backup plan. She'd just thrown all her eggs into one basket and hoped none of them cracked upon landing.

First sip. Okay. Nothing yet. He wasn't spitting it out, there was no choking. That was good, right?

Yes! He was going back for another sip! Okay, this was good, this was--

Oh dear.

Mei saw the change in his face, saw the way his eyes grew glassy, heard his sharp inhalation, and her stomach dropped as he headed for the ice box. Oh goddess, had she made it too spicy? Had she just broke him? She'd forgotten how delicate these folk could be! Sure he'd said "the hotter the better", but she had learned that a Thanati's idea of hot was very different from someone from these parts and she should have taken that into consideration! She watched him chug the glass, her eyes wide and mouth open with all the apologies she wanted to babble--how rude of her to not have considered his sensitivities!--but then he laughed, and the tension eased.

He...he liked it? Was that what she was hearing?

And he liked her idea of meeting again?

Really?!

She let out a sharp breath of her own and grinned like a fool, her belly doing a flip-flop that she would have called nausea if she wasn't so excited. "I just call it coconut soup. The real thing, with the actual coconut and things that make it actual coconut soup, of course. I don't know what this would be, but that just means we'll have to give it its own unique name, liiiike...the Mei 'n' Shea Special! It rhymes, see?"

Too much? Maybe that was too much.

She cleared her throat and brought the bowl to her lips, taking a long sip to shut herself up for a hot second.

But only a second.

"I can cook breakfast, too!" she said. "Before we go tackle the Touch. Give you another taste of my cooking--I take it you don't get cooked for much? Cooking for other people tastes so much better than just cooking for yourself, true fact! And really, it's the least I can do for letting me stay here!"

Because she was obviously staying the night.

   "The Mei 'n' Shea special," Shea pondered the name as he returned to his own bowl, much more careful about how much soup he took in that time around. You live and learn, after all. "Now that's a name. Thank you, for this."

   Shea set the bottle of milk down on the countertop rather than putting it back into the icebox, having learned his lesson in regards to Thanati cooking. What a fascinating people they were, between Inima and their weird nonsense about magic and regularly ingesting what, to him, seemed like fire-soaked vegetables. Fire soaked vegetables in a fire broth, with a hint of fire aftertaste. And to think he'd been concerned about there being too much earth and water. That was laughable.

   Shea looked over at Mei, at how it seemed for every sip of soup she had an entire lungful of words to say, one question leading to two more and a thousand little facts in between. If such a place produced people like Mei, that might be worth a visit. It wasn't as if he really had anything planned, after all.

   The cat sat down beside his stool, peered up at him, and gave a soft, chirping meow as if in assent. Shea raised an eyebrow at the little creature, and watched it skulk off to some other portion of the house, tail raised and gently curved into a curious question mark.

   Well. That decided that.

   "Does it really?" He asked, turning back to the scholar dining with him. He had to admit, he didn't exactly have much experience in cooking for others. And being cooked for, that had been some years ago, now. For the life of him, however, he couldn't remember the taste of it. It hadn't seemed important at the time, but now...

   "Well, there's as good a basis for an experiment as any," he stated, pushing aside whatever pointless melancholy that had been. "The hypothesis is that food tastes better when you cook it for others and not just yourself. So, if you make breakfast, we'll each prepare lunches for ourselves, and then I'll take dinner, and we can compare notes after. Seems adequate, yes?"

   He gave Mei another wink over the rim of his own bowl, having found the proper ratio between Special Soup and soothing milk. But soon that small bottle was depleted, and there was still plenty of soup left. Shea hummed, got up, and rummaged through another cabinet for a moment before pulling out a tall, dark bottle whose label seemed to be well on its way out of being legible.

   "This is quite possibly the best to come out of Tirial, in my personal opinion. Certainly worth dragging all the way out here, anyway. It's very sweet."

   Shea set the bottle down on the counter, pulling out two more clean glasses soon after. He shot Mei a glance, before running one finger along the rim, lines of frost spreading in its wake until the whole of the glass was covered in the spiraling patterns. A quick uncork of the bottle, and the pale wine was poured out, the first frosted glass slid towards Mei before Shea finished pouring for himself.

   "To the Mei 'n' Shea special, may it have many returns."

   The sweetness did go well with the molten spice of the dish, though it was still a struggle not to just guzzle it all down. Because the last thing he needed was to lose complete control of his faculties. Maybe when he redressed. A little celebration of putting all this in storage. Getting back to how it all used to be, and so on and so forth.

   "Still, I think we might be getting ahead of ourselves. I believe the agreed-upon payment, if you recall, was you sharing notes over dinner." Shea took another sip of wine, before setting the glass down with a mischievous little tap. "Room and board, my little inquisitor, is going to require a tad bit more. Tell me about where you're from. You mentioned your island."

"Where...where I'm from...?"

Mei practically lit up at his question, eyes widening. He...he had asked...oh gosh! He asked to learn about where she was from! A topic she knew all about! A topic he was lacking knowledge in! A topic she could impress him with!

YES.

Straightening up and setting down her finished Mei 'n' Shea Special, she cleared her throat imperiously, fist in front of her mouth. This was going to be long, but luckily he had a whole bottle of wine there to keep her from growing parched. Good thinking, Shea!

"It's a long and tragic history," she began, shaking her head. "Thanatos, that is. Which is where I'm from, but that's not really where we're from. We're from what your people call the 'mainland'--a very egotistical thing to call something, really, as though it is the center of the world! Which it's not; there's no real center because as the Essyrni have pointed out, our land is a sphere, though we have yet to explore the entirety of it! Probably just a small fraction, actually. Maybe like 20%, some theorize. But that's beside the point!"

She took a another gulp of wine and swirled it as she spoke, needing to do something to occupy her hands, because she was practically vibrating with excitement. It was so rare that anyone asked her about these things! Most people thought it was dull for some reason! She never got to use this knowledge for much of anything!

Now she could unleash it all.

"We came from far, far away, somewhere on your--" She did one-handed finger quotes. "--'mainland', but far beyond it! Up past Serendipity and Connlaoth and all of that, a place that is long lost to history! We kept oral records back then, and when we made our home down in what's now Connlaoth, the people hated us and chased us out. So did Serendipity's people. We were fractured, and much was lost. They thought we were necromancers!" she scoffed, wrinkling her nose. "Just because some of us can speak to the dead! And sure, there were some necromancers. There's always bad eggs in any group, and unfortunately I get it, there's a societal trend of focusing on the loud, bad ones and forgetting about all the perfectly normal, quiet, average ones just going about their lives. But I'll point out necromancy isn't specific to any one population and there have been plenty of cases of it even today in places like Serendipity! They even have a whole organization dedicated to hunting creatures of the night! And yet they blame us!"

Another deep swig, draining the glass. She set it down and reached for the wine, flashing Shea an inquisitive look. A quick, "May I?" was her only warning before she topped off his glass and poured more for herself. It was only polite.

"They called us awful slurs and killed us and hurt us and excluded us, and we weren't safe anywhere. We couldn't integrate into society because, well--" She motioned at herself, forgetting the wine glass she held and sloshing a little onto her hand. She didn't seem to notice, except to take another sip. "Hard to blend in when your hair and skin and language gives you away. So eventually, my ancestors I suppose went--ahem, pardon my language--'sod the lot of you,' and took off. They took to the sea."

Oh, that wine was good, and Mei was starting to feel warm. Maybe that was just her blood pumping through her; this topic always got her worked up. "I don't know what their plan was if they didn't find land. That wasn't written down. But I suppose if you're so desperate and tired of being murdered, possible death by dehydration or drowning or sharks--though shark attacks aren't actually that common--doesn't sound half so bad. Especially if there's a chance you might actually get lucky and, you know, not die! And if there's one thing my people also have, it's a predisposition for luck. Well, some do. There's entropymancy, which can influence that. So perhaps the leader was just  particularly lucky and figured, why not? Anyway, our first Maharani was the brave leader of said expedition, and her name was Yindira, and she was beautiful and brave and--" She stopped to fan herself, letting out a sigh, and chased it with more wine.

"Sorry, she just gives me the tingles." She cleared her throat and sat back, smiling, her cheeks a little flushed. "I want to be like her. Discover a new land. That would be so amazing. Anyway, she and her people arrived onto what is now known as Thanatos, which is a frightening name that means 'death' to the people of Connlaoth and Serendipity. But Yindira was smartandbeautifulandamazing and she came up with the idea of naming it something awful to keep other people away. Because she had found paradise, a new fruitful home, and it was unclaimed by man and thus all ours. But she knew others might try to take it away if it had a pretty name, so...let them think we had exiled ourselves to some barren wasteland! It worked for a while. And it stuck."

Mei paused then, raising her eyebrows at Shea. "You're getting all this, right? Tell me if I'm going too fast and feel free to take notes. There'll be a quiz at the midway point, and a test at the end. Just to make sure there's no gaps in your knowledge. Anyway...where was I...?"

She tapped her lips and cocked her head. Mm. Maybe that was the wine, after all. Her head felt a little fuzzy. Too much, too fast, it seemed. No matter! She just had to push along, as was her duty as an educator and scholar!

"Ah, yes. The formation of our great country, Thanatos! Well, as I said, it all began with Yindira, and..."

It was going to be a long night.