Welcome to Gaia! ::

Wait. But-- What?

Onora remained silent during the entirety of the exchange, blinking up the length of the stairs of the little woman at the top landing. She offered a brief, half terrified smile at the woman that Onora rather got the impression she hadn't actually seen before the stranger disappeared back into the hallway they'd come from in the first place.

At which point Onora waited until Amitai broke the silence from under the stairs. "She's smaller than me," Onora pointed out abruptly. "And you're hiding under the stairs from her." Maybe she was a terrifying mother or an evil step aunt or some such. Onora was the first to admit that her own parental figure wasn't exactly the model example of what a parent should probably be. She was fairly sure most father and mothers didn't act like children to their own children, but... Well, Onora hadn't ever had much reason to hide under a staircase from Morris either, so maybe that was a good thing.

Well, Morris was a bit irritable in the mornings, but... "My uncle shouts a lot," Onora offered tentatively and immediately wondered if it wasn't 'shouted.' It wasn't like the man was dead, but at the same time he might has well have been for all that she was going to see him again. "Not at me though. Morris and him-- nevermind. I'm from Roruel. You probably haven't heard of it. No one else has." And in some bizarre way, that was one of the strangest parts of this new world, the fact that no one here even knew that Roruel even existed. Not that she'd exactly known about Gaia either.

"Is Check-oh-slave-ahkio different? From here, I mean. Gaia isn't... it's not all different but not really..." Onora hesitated, grasping to make her point understandable despite Amitai's clearly fractured understanding of her language. "It's not really right either," she finally concluded with a slight shrug of the shoulders.

"Not really clumsy," she clarified, mostly because she didn't want it getting back to Morris that she was letting people call him clumsy and only partly because it wasn't true. "They're just different. They argued."

And that was the question, wasn't it? The one she'd been waiting for, consciously or not, since hitting the bottom of the stairs, maybe since both feet hit the ground Here in general. Onora bit the inside of her cheek and fidgeted, tugged at her sleeves absently. Better than Roruel?

"There a lot of grass," she said, answering the last question instead. "And it smells different, like it's been there longer. There's lots of cows too and big houses and my family. The doors are studier there too," Onora added, shooting him a swift but broad grin. "You wouldn't be able to pull them off the wall." Well, maybe he would, but it would take a bit more effort than simply opening and closing the door.

Onora blinked at him. "Cows are..." How did you explain a cow to someone who didn't know what they were in the first place. "Very big animals. Some have horns." She raised her hands to her head, using his fingers to mimic the horns on a bull. "They're brown? Sometimes with spots. Very big." Well. "Not as big as you." Onora shifted, adjusting so she could demonstrate the size of a cow with her hands. "Maybe this big." And the stripes...

"Oh, these?" She pushed up one of her sleeves and apparently those complicated designs ran there too, blanketing her arm from the elbow up and out of sight. "No, just me. I guess that makes me special. Or Fa'e. Is everyone in Czechoslowvikio a giant or very small?"

Cows...cows sounded like big, strange animals, but also interesting; Amitai had never seen an animal with things on its head before. He wondered if they lived on Gaia or if it was just a Ro-ru--Ro-rur--Onora's-home-place thing.

Apparently he wasn't the only one having pronunciation problems. "Czech-o-slo-va-ki-a," Amitai repeated slowly enough to make each syllable clear--rather, clear for him. "No, no peoples big like me," he continued almost absently, eyeing her tattoos with wide-eyed interest. "I's bigger. Biggest person I know. Most peoples people-sized. Some..." he trailed off at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, his interest in Onora's tattoos waning at the sight of an equally unfamiliar face. Wow, she looked different! Amitai had seen so many people-looking people since he had arrived in Gaia that he thought he'd be the most different person here, too.

"Some small peoples, too," he finished, pointing at the strange-looking newcomer. "Hi!"

Caoimhe wrinkled her nose instinctively at Amitai's pointed finger, as if he had somehow managed to flick her in the forehead from across the room. He certainly was charming. And from the looks of it, he seemed to be one giant... rock. Odd. There was likely some witticism to be made about that, but it escaped Caoimhe's grasp.

"Hey," she drawled slowly in response, finishing off what remained of her bagel. "Nice day to be trapped in the HQ, right?" Popping thumb and forefinger into her mouth, Caoi carefully sucked the excess cream cheese out from under her stubby nails.

Almost immediately, Caoimhe began to regret turning into this room. Perhaps she would have been better off just going to take another shower. No socialization to worry about up there in the sanctity of the bathroom. Still, after meeting only a handful of Fa'e, the selkie girl still felt like she only had half of the story on what she was, and even worse, no one seemed to be able to tell her why everyone else got to be born in Gaia while she came from some other world. Maybe these two characters could answer the questions that had been evading her?

Smiling haphazardly, the brunette decided to remain in the doorway, leaning casually against the frame to quiet the discomfort in her stomach. Being so terribly short, Caoimhe tried to avoid standing directly beside people most of the time. Back on Aranorn, the young girl had the bipedal advantage, and she had become accustomed to all the other creatures looking up to her. But here in Gaia, she seemed to be on the small side of the spectrum. It was yet another way in which Gaia sought to destroy her, she reasoned.

After giving the rock boy a good up-and-down for probably several moments past appropriate, she flickered her cool gaze to the red-head who occupied the other body in the room. Something about the girl appealed to Caoimhe, though she couldn't put her finger on it precisely. Perhaps further conversation might aid in that department. "I've just been wandering around the building, and I heard some voices. I thought I might try to kill my boredom," the selkie Fa'e ventured, letting her thick Celtic accent roll leisurely off her tongue.

Though she usually didn't feel very self-conscious, it suddenly occurred to Caoi that this situation might end up being a bit more awkward than it was worth. Was it still too late to run?

Easing slightly away from Amitai, Onora drifted a touch closer to the smaller Fa'e. It wasn't that she was exactly uncomfortable with Amitai (though, if she was being honest with herself, that probably had something to do with it), but this girl at least spoke in completely coherent sentences, seemed a little more... Onora couldn't pinpoint quite why, but she seemed a little more familiar than anything of Amitai - more familiar than most of the things in the whole headquarters, maybe. Onora self consciously smoothed the waist of her dress.

"You're a Fa'e." Not a question really; Onora had seen enough of them by now (seen, not really spoken to) to tell that much. Besides, the stranger didn't exactly look human, so it would have been a reasonable assumption besides. "Are you from, uh, here?"

She waved absently in the general area, the twitch of her hand encompassing more than just the room, more than just the headquarters. "Gaia? That's the name, right?" Onora glanced briefly back to Amitai for confirmation, shrugged. If she wasn't from here and he wasn't either, it was a good question to ask right?