Welcome to Gaia! ::

Pendour had been being so careful.

She'd only been going powered up a few days a week, and then only to ease herself back into it, really. Any Chaos auras had been given a very wide berth, and yet something had still happened.

It wasn't that the place she'd found herself was terrible at first glance. She was used to dead worlds, and that was what this looked like if she didn't look too closely. The details were what made it send shivers down her back. The houses weren't modern, but they weren't quite ancient, either. They were crumbling but not ruined. The gardens were overgrown, but still there.

People must have been here, and then left or vanished or something not so long ago.

At least there were gardens. Of course that was where Pendour gravitated towards first. She stood by a fenced in plot behind one of the houses, trying to identify what was growing by their poor half-withered leaves.

When Pendour heard her name, she straightened. When she turned to see a familiar Mauvian padding towards her from across the dusty streets, a smile spread across her face, bright as bright. "Soleiyu," she called, and of course she knelt down right there, arms outstretched.

Both arms, he might be glad to see. There was a scar, still pink, wrapping around the back of one, but that was all.

Her smile faltered quickly as she realized that the fact that he was here meant that he would have to deal with whatever was going on, too.

"Magic, I think," she said, her voice quieter although not quite worried. "I was out walking. It was foggy, and then a little less foggy, and now I'm here." She looked him over, making sure he was still in one piece. You could never be sure, from one day to the next.

Her brows kit the tiniest bit as she asked, "Are you okay? Do you know what's going on?"

Pendour gave Soleiyu a tight squeeze and then pressed her forehead to his with a soft happy hum, enjoying the short moment enveloped in his fluff. Then, she let him go and sat up straighter again.

"I'm okay, too," she said, still smiling. "This is the worst that's happened since you came to visit, really." She knew her friends tended to worry for her, and she knew why, when her philosophies weren't the best for keeping her in one piece, but she did try to be as careful as she could for their sake.

For her own sake, too. She did want to be at this for as long as she could.

"I don't about that," she said when he asked if she knew anyone. "I stayed away from the big group when everyone arrived."The smile faltered. She leaned back in a little closer, voice lowering to a whisper. "There's a lot of agents here, Soleiyu." It was going to be hard to be careful, now.

"So far, I've just been looking around. I found a garden." The excitement that was usually there when she talked about plants seemed dampened a little by the state of things. She nodded at the fence behind her. "I was thinking we should maybe eat if we can't get back right away."

The petting paused. "You picked a fight?" Pendour wasn't the type to scold, not ever, but her brows furrowed deeper than usual, until a worry line formed between them. She still gave him one last scratch under the chin before she stood up, saying, "Don't get too comfortable. I've still got to look at them closer."

She hopped the low fence. It was only afterwards the she noticed the gate a few feet away, swinging loosely from one hinge. From this distance, the garden still looked rough but not quite hopeless.

"Okay, lovelies," she whispered to some leafy plants. "How are you doing?" A little louder, to Soleiyu, she added, "These are greens, I think. They're in season right now. They're supposed to be big like this. Um." She ran a soft finger over the smaller, sadder stalks. "It's a little late for some of the root vegetables, but they're maybe still edible. The ground helps keep them insulated."

"Not surprised," said Pendour as she finally dug down into the dirt, revealing something that might have been an oddly formed potato, or a turnip. It was lumpy, but that happened often enough with organic food, and she set it off to the side.

She stared a little more intently at the plants than she maybe needed to as she said, "I know it's a war, and that some of the agents are very broken. I know we all make decisions about how to respond to that, and that my decision is not the common one." She gave a small sigh as she added a few more root vegetables to the pile. "I just hate the idea of anyone fighting."

Then, she snapped off a leaf from one of the greens. It was a large thing, with a stalk as long as her arm, and she reached out with it to playfully brush against Soleiyu's nose. She wasn't angry. "This plant looks like the most trustworthy of them to me," she said. "Should I save some for you, or will you hold out to see what other food there is?"

Pendour narrowed her eyes at the tubers, deep in concentration. "I don't recognize this variety, either," she said, running her thumb over a particularly pronounced bump. "Everything else here is stuck back in time. Maybe there wasn't time to breed these into the seed catalog types, yet."

Right now, with the hunger building, she wasn't going to think about how this place being off and likely magical was going to affect the plants.

"We can cook the root vegetables. We can mash them, fry them, or put them with something else." They very versatile, really. It was a good find in a place like this. You can technically cook greens, too, but I like them better fresh."

She dropped the tuber in order to rip off a little of her giant leaf and eat it. There was a spice to it, as if it was from the mustard family, but it tasted fresh enough. She placed the leaf in front of him, gentler this time. "It's good," she said, and she was sincere if not quite enthusiastic.

The spice started out mild, barely there. Pendour didn't think much of it. All mustard greens had that. It was in the mustard family, after all. But as with other foods, the heat grew as the bite lingered in her mouth and even after she swallowed.

By the time Soleiyu was asking about why his bite was tasting like bubblegum, Pendour was fanning her mouth and blinking back tears. She didn't mind some spice to her food but this was intense, and she didn't think the term heat was completely metaphorical in this case. Her breath was feeling very warm.

"I don't know?" she choked out."Magic?" She knew plants, and this was not supposed to be happening.

"Um, Soleiyu? Did you see any water when you were walking around?" That would help with both their problems, maybe.

Pendour didn't think she'd ever seen Soleiyu upset before. "It's okay," she mumbled in between painfully hot breaths, putting almost all of her energy into keeping her voice calm. "We'll get you cleaned up."

Although she couldn't help but wonder what he'd been like against the Negaverse agent, if he was getting so worked up over food that had ended up stickier than expected.

She wiped the water from her good eye and followed him into the center of town, towards a well that she'd walked past before but hadn't really noticed. Now she rushed towards it as if it were an oasis and she'd been wandering in the desert. She did pause to glance down and make sure the water looked normal enough before she tossed the bucket in. It would be no use making this worse, but it seemed fine from what she could tell, and when she heard the splash, she started hauling it back up.

It was quick work with her Squire strength. Soon, the bucket was perched on the rim of the well, and Pendour was scooping out handfuls of water and letting them trickle, cool as cool, down her throat with an expression of bliss on her face. Some of the spicy taste was still there, but it was doing wonders for the heat.

She nudged the bucket over towards him. "Here," she said. "See if this helps."