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"Wait!" Taji squeaked, immediately scrambling after the stone after Zee threw it aside. This street was one of the clean ones, unfortunately -- there were never any interesting clumps of grass growing between the cracks of the sidewalk to pick at, or puddles of mud to stamp in, or patches of bare dirt to dig in. Neither were there stones just randomly lying willy-nilly about; this one she had to import from her mother's own rock garden.

It took her a moment but finally she located it in a patch of pansies, crushing and muddifying a few of the flower heads. Touching her thumb to her tongue, she very delicately tried to wipe some of the encruing dirt from their faces before pocketing the stone and returning to Uziri and their dinosaur conversation.

"We can keep it in the garage, if you have one, or else the backyard," Taji suggested, eager to appear helpful and maybe even a little wise to this girl of Knowing Many Neat Things. "An' it can.. help tip the cows."

It didn't seem like a bad thing, this cow-tipping. Wasn't it uncomfortable to sleep standing up on one's feet anyway? Rolling them over onto their sides was probably a favor they appreciated! Giraffes too. "As long as they don't roll down a hill an'.. run over people on the way." She nodded.

Taji watched Zee out of the corners of her eyes, taught that it was impolite to stare but simply unable to look away. She was getting herself dirty and on purpose! Plus she was picking other people's flowers! If Taji's mother knew about this, she would...

Then again, she wasn't actually here. Still determined to learn as much from Zee as she could, the star spirit crouched down and pulled a whole clump of pansy flowers from the dirt bed and very carefully arranged it onto the top of her head, crumbs of dirt spilling into her hair and onto her shoulders. She looked like a very unflattering flower pot when she had finished. There, she beamed at the other girl, they were FLOWER FRIENDS.

"Eat people?" She echoed worriedly, not liking the sound of that at all. Cows were -- well, as long as cows were safe, that was good too, but... "M-maybe only lawyers? I seen on TV that they be bad people." Even this made her feel vaguely guilty though, to sentence people she had never met to be eaten by a pet dinosaur that didn't exist. ...Oh well!

"Ok!" Taji agreed congenially, pulling strands of hair away from her face and looking them over critically. Purple hair. Purple hair? Hunh. She would have to ask her mother about this -- she didn't know anyone with purple hair yet herself, but that would just mean that she'd be the only one!

Thankfully she had enough sense to not to continue to mimic Uziri's actions after seeing the other girl's reaction to eating the pansy. She only arranged her own dirty crown of pansies some more, making sure that every part of her head was equally dusty and covered by flowers when she was finished.

"I guess so," she admitted, thinking about the logic of this as she played with her own hair, "S'like... The Lion King. The Circle of Life! Dinosaurs gotta eat too, or else they would die, and that would be no better." This made her feel much better, and the uneasiness faded from her expression. "Tho', maybe if we fed him hamburgers, he wouldn't hafta eat people either."

"Hamburgers have families?" She guessed this made sense -- her mother grew things in the garden that they sometimes pulled up and ate in salads, so it stood to reason that all the hamburgers that grew on one hamburger tree were siblings of a sort.

"I don't think they feel," she said waveringly, now beginning to feel bad even for carrots, which were disgusting when cooked. "They don't say anything when we eat them... Do they?"

But garbage! That was tons better. "There's tons of garbage everywhere so he'd never go hungry. Then everybody would love him! Instead of having to take the garbage out--" a chore her brothers always loathed, and often tried to bribe one of the maids to do it for them, "--They just toss it into his dinner dish. And then," she added, the idea striking her, "In the summer, his water dish can be like a pool."

"Meat?" What did that have to do with anything? As far as Taji was concerned, food should have been grouped according to colors instead -- the chewy stuff, meat, in various shades of brown that went on hamburgers or served as the primary course; the icky green stuff, vegetables, that ALWAYS tasted gross; the yellow and red things, fruit, that were ok to eat most of the time, and everything ELSE was candy and candy was awesome.

Rur-vinge, admittedly, did not seem like a welcoming prospect though. Especially because she liked hamburgers, with cheese and pickles...

Shaking her head clear of the off-topic thoughts, Taji blinked at Uziri and grinned at the thought of moo-tant dinosaur children. "And then they can take trips to the moon and get a-duck-ted too!"

She glanced down at the chalk at her feet then, rubbing the back of her neck with dirty fingers. She felt as if she were forgetting something, something important...

Oh! "Oh, I have to go soon, I told my mum I'd only be out for an hour..." Taji half-whined, hopping from one foot to the other. "She is probably looking for me. But!" She turned and pointed down the street. "My house is down that way, you cross two streets and then turn to the left, an' it has a flamingo on the lawn, I made it myself and I put it there." She beamed proudly at the thought. "You can come visit me sometime, and then we can go to the moon someday!"