Welcome to Gaia! ::

Admittedly, she wasn't wrong, but the direct commentary on how many alien friends he kept making and inviting home did draw a smattering of laughter. "Alright, alright, I know my alien species is pretty high on the odd spectrum right now. Dagon and Roka might come close, but." Neither of them had anything like glowing skin and glowing eyes. None of them looked like they had stepped right out of a night storm themselves.

Still found himself missing them, an emotion that felt both like it came from himself and from that Ignatius part deep within.

Encke opened his mouth to start a reply, but it devolved into snickering when she insulted the King's sense of taste. Honestly, she wasn't wrong that most of what he found here was vegetarian in variety, and mostly vegetables at that. He had caught some other things growing, but he hadn't quite caught an equivalent to wheat yet.

There were alternate forms of crust, though. He knew about that whole gluten sensitivity thing. Maybe Luke could help him out-- "You know, that's not a terrible idea. I wonder if we have enough here to make a pizza of some variety. And hey, pizza is legally a vegetable."

One of his favorite silly facts to maintain, actually--

"Also, back to King Ignatius. I get the sense that the most important thing to them was the King titling. I tend to use he in reference to him a lot because if he's him, and I'm him, it makes sense to me. But he's also they, and they're part of how I started realizing that they sounded fine too. And they're also she. Enckeans had a looser relationship with gender than humans tend to, I think."

King Ignatius had definitely.

Encke couldn't help a smattering of snickers.

"Alright, alright. Maybe I'll see if there's a type of Earthan grain that's compatible with Enckean soil because I don't get the impression we ate much grains." He hummed quietly to himself. "A sourdough base might be workable. Don't need quite as much wheat with that..."

She was right; for being not a chef at all, Encke was putting a lot of thought into the possibilities of what he could make with what was available. The caveat, of course, was that it was space-related, so of course it was interesting here. Interesting to the same degree as space salsa had been, interesting to the same degree as the little peppers he saw in his mind were. This world was coming back to life with all of its familiarities and oddities and he loved it.

Nectaris ... maybe not so much, but they would work it out.

They had worked out much harder things, honestly--

"I don't actually know," Encke couldn't help a laugh. His gender seemed at least fairly consistent, though he didn't know how he felt yet about the fact that King Ignatius didn't seem to mind her either. Their most important spectra of identity was the fact that they were the King of the Greatest People in the cosmos, or something like that-- "Probably not? It's fairly consistent for me, but we are technically different people than we were."

Sometimes, Encke had trouble believing that, but he understood his experience with past life had not necessarily been universal.

He stuck his tongue out at her giggles to not overthink it. She was probably right, and he was probably overthinking it, but-- "Imagine, though, if we could live here full time. I wonder what the people who lived here in the past ate?" He knew, loosely, what he saw himself eat in his memories, but it wasn't like it came up as a memory that often. He suspected Home Helper may have known more, especially since it seemed it was his own home helper--

Nevermind that.

Oh. Right. They were getting carried away on one aspect.

They had gotten here to get away from Faustite.

"I hope he'd be, at this point. We've been here for like what, an hour?" Encke summoned his phone mostly to take a look at the time, and then remembered that he didn't remember when he ran off to save Nectaris in the first place. "Two hours? A lot has happened and I'm bad at time."

And if he understood time-space correctly, it probably didn't even pass at the same speed on Encke's Comet as it did on Earth, considering gravity seemed to influence those atomic clocks--

"It'd be a little obsessive for him to still be standing there. Imagine he has more starseeds to pursue." Encke knit his brows, but held out his hand to Nectaris, anyway. "Wanna get to bed? I can get here about once every three days, so it's not like I can't just show you more later."