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Earendil grinned. "It certainly does. And judging by the look on Shiro's face a moment ago, he's already planning on getting the recipe."

Shiro looked over at the group. "You know it," he winked at them. "But Earendil, if you're going to be using a roc to map the island, I would recommend that you take a flask or two of it every time you go out."

He was teasing of course, but Earendil also saw the wisdom in it.

"You can count on it," he grinned back at his cousin.

Shiro grinned, watching Senka.

"A lot of looking through scrolls," he replied. "Many of the scrolls are getting old, I'm copying them all into my journal and Alena is copying them onto new scrolls so that none of the information is lost in case they start to break apart. It seems they've not been introduced to books here."

Kaito turned towards the group. "And they're not very well organized," he added, in English so that the Sky Elves wouldn't be able to understand. "The scrolls aren't in any particular order ... it's hard to figure out which one should come next."

"By event," Kaito replied, looking back at the labels. "No dates, not in chronological order ... sure, if you take them out and look at them, they're dated, but the labels aren't dated ..."

"It's going to take a while," Shiro admitted. "But I won't give up until I have all of this recorded. And the other two archives, I'm told there are three of them."

And it being Shiro, he would never leave until he had learned all there was to know about the place.

"You would be amazed how much I took," Shiro chuckled. "I think I planned for about four years, at a rate of one hundred pages per day. Just in case. I haven't used as much as I thought I would, so I have loads of paper left. All I can say is, thank obaa-san for runing our bags."

"Amen," Kaito grinned. "If she hadn't, he would have stuffed my bag as well as his own."

"Not to mention, there's no way I would have been able to bring all of my tools and instruments," Shiro added, "and I wouldn't have dared bring my violin, I would have been too afraid of breaking it."

Shiro paused to think about that. "Well ... there's lots of time on the ship," he murmured, "and I think it would be safe to take it out here, as long as it's not rainy. Nauros was too hot and humid for it, that's why I didn't take it out there ..."

Besides, on Nauros he had spent his time with the Night Elves, he hadn't even thought about his violin then.

"Cold's not the best for it either," Shiro shrugged, "but indoors it isn't bad. Nothing like home, anyways, though home is warm indoors at least."

"It's warm here," Kaito put in.

Shiro glared at him. "That's because you have wings which add as an extra two or three blankets," he replied coolly. "I don't have that advantage."

Kaito shrugged. "You could always mention something. I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with giving you extra blankets."

"Violin's fine as long as it's in the bag, and really it's not that cold in there," Kaito insisted. "Shiro just likes being warm when he sleeps, that's all he's complaining about."

"Sadly, he's right," Shiro admitted. "To simply take out the violin and use it for a while if it's cold isn't bad, but to leave it out in the cold would be. The bag, since it has a rune on it, takes care of the storage problem nicely."

"I think it would be more handy to learn how to rune a room to make it warmer," Shiro shrugged, "but that's me. I don't even know if it's possible."

He looked thoughtful suddenly. "That's something to research when we get back home," he murmured. "If I could find a way to control the temperature of the library, or even the whole house, using runes ... we wouldn't have to pay as much on electricity."

Now there was a thought.