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This is exactly what Slide has wanted to hear. Not one syllable of the acha's description gets past him; he stands still, ears perked forward, and does not even lash his tail against the sudden sting of a horsefly, drawn to his dirt and sand smell. Nor does he seem to realize that Meets-the-Sea has walked up beside him, her flanks warm against his own, at least not immediately. It is not the slow caress of a loved one lending comfort: it is the sudden clustering of acha in a sandstorm, heads down, long eyelashes pressed tightly together to try and fend off the whirling sand.

Finally, when Bald Bottom quiets, Slide tips his head, and his long hair falls across his blue-on-blue eyes; a sudden flick of the head clears his vision. His expression is appropriately intense, perhaps a bit off-putting, but what would anyone do when confronted with concrete evidence that the whaleback dunes of their Dream exist? "I do not know if I could make it to your desert, but I would like to see it." He mulls over the next thought, "Have you ever seen what sleeps beneath the sand? Are they large?"

Nothing could compare to the unseen threat of his dream: something so unimaginably large it could swallow a kimeti like a morsel, something that stretched so far back it was nearly too big to be alive. His hide ripples over his back, even in the muggy heat of the afternoon.

Meets knew this was, again, not the answer that Slide wished for. The creatures of his dream -- although she could not quite understand them from his descriptions -- were certainly much, much larger than Bald Bottom's head, and quite different from spiders. The doe couldn't say she was much surprised that the acha didn't know of them -- she was, indeed, not convinced that the terrible things existed at all, despite Slide's unshakable belief in his dream. She flicked her tail against his, concerned.

"Perhaps the creatures in your dream aren't of this world," Meets suggested, searching Slide's blue-on-blue eyes intently. "The motherfather doesn't always gift us with absolute truth in our dreams...perhaps yours is not trying to tell you something literal about these animals, but instead has some deeper meaning."

"Oh," he answers cheerily, "I don't really plan. I just got here but I don't know whether I'll stay or go. I just sort of do things one right after another as they occur to me until I run out of things, you know?" He absently scratches his chin on his shoulder. He'd remained silent during Meets' and Slide's little conversation, oblivious to the true nature of it. The Dreams are not to most of the Acha what they are to Kimeti; he does not understand the strange and unreasonable yearning they can plant in a creature; doesn't understand that to the Kimeti dreams are places of vast unreachable strangeness, hinting at horizons the Kimeti, in all probability, will never see. They are merely the place one finds a name, a useful thing that can be used or substituted as required.

"I have made friends," he acknowledges, and it's hard to say whether he is including Meets and Slide in that number. "But then I've got friends back home, too. Maybe it'll boil down to what you have to eat here. More than what we have I think. I am going to get as fat as a cloud before a rainstorm! I don't know how you guys stay so... athletic-looking and attractive." Well then. Laying it on thick.

"Speaking of the borderlands," the buck says, in a voice pleasant enough on the surface but raw and irritated underneath, like a bug bite scratched one too many times, "we should be returning." He finally seems to remember that his tortoise exists; it stands stupidly crunching a watery mouthful of leaves, gazing at the acha with no more fascination than it would give any other kin. Perhaps it's just not interested, or impressed. "I brought the tortoise--" not his tortoise, the tortoise-- "out so that it would eat." There was nothing left in the cave when they returned from the games. And Pillar, who did not venture out with them, has likely cleaned the cave of every lingering crumb of anything edible.

"I doubt sincerely you will get fat," he says, perhaps still thinking of the tortoise. "Your kind seem suited to activity. The other acha I met never stopped moving."

As if thinking on this, he lifts a hoof and then turns a shoulder, preparing to simply just walk away. Living alone has left Walks Without Rhythm with a proclivity towards what could be thought of rudeness -- but after a moment he adds, "If you see any others of your kind, tell them to visit the cave near the borderlands. I would hear their stories."

Meets-the-Sea stares after the acha that has disappeared as quickly and unexpectedly as it appeared. "Well. That was...interesting," she remarks, turning to follow after Slide. "Don't fret," she continues as she comes up alongside him, almost seeming psychic in her ability to read the stoic buck through his hardened demeanor. Her tail swishes over and twines gently around his for a moment before breaking away again -- a comforting motion, made all the more significant by its apparent insignificance. "We'll find the dunes of your dream someday, Slide."

She pauses, searching the buck's deep blue-on-blue eyes for something, her face impassive. "For now, home." The word holds a meaning that it never has before for the doe, and her tone is telling. "Come along, tortoise." The creature looks up at her, munching on a mouthful of swamp-weed, and plods after them.