Welcome to Gaia! ::

There was only so much Pendour could do with the gardens. She'd spent time looking for things to harvest with Soleiyu, and then she'd spent longer pulling weeds on her own. By the end of it, the plot she had been working on looked a little cleaner, but all the crops were either terribly leggy or half-withered and sad.

Satisfied that she'd done the best that she could, she left the little area through the gate and made her way out towards the woods. In the town, she could constantly feel auras drifting in and out of her consciousness. Maybe out here she could find a moment of silence, or maybe even some clue as to where they were.

So far, what she was mostly finding was trees. She still wasn't far from town, and she didn't seem to be getting far from town, in a way that she was beginning to realize might not be normal. She wasn't sure, though. She'd never been in a place like this where all the trees were dead, spindly things that didn't hide much of anything.

The most interesting thing she'd found was a berry, and she was standing there, rolling it around in her hand and trying to figure out if it looked like it was from Earth or not.

Order auras were fine. They didn't feel like cold spiders walking up and down Pendour's back, and they didn't send her skittering deeper into the woods, either. She turned towards them, instead.

It wasn't hard to tell who the auras were coming from. Pendour might have been half blind, but her ears were still sharp as sharp and the two men were not quite quiet. A glimpse of familiar forest green, Jupiter green, caught her eye and brought a soft smile to her face. She raised her free hand in greeting as the knight got closer. "Sessrumnir. Hi," she said.

Her eyes narrowed the tiniest bit as she nodded to the senshi beside him, and she spent several long moments glancing from one of their faces to the other. "You look very similar," she murmured at last, half under her breath. Seemingly satisfied, her gaze turned back to the berry in her hand, and she asked, "Do either of you know anything about wild plant species?" By their outfits, they would both be woodsy types, but that didn't always mean anything.

Pendour hesitated, then, glancing away. "Oh, um, only if you don't mind looking at this. I don't want to get in you way. Truly." She had heard. There was no bitterness or accusation in her voice, only a hint of genuine worry. She had a feeling it was maybe just an offhand comment, but she was also very aware of the first time they'd met when he'd had to spend his time holding her up and getting her to help instead of getting away, himself.

The disagreement about whether or not the two men were brothers was not something that she'd been expecting. Pendour blinked twice, nodded, and decided not to press the issue.

She of all people should have known that you couldn't tell family by what people looked like.

"Oh, um, I'm Pendour," she said, looking over the granola bar that had been thrust into her hands. Real, trustworthy food from home. Her mouth watered, but she shook her head, bit her lip, and handed it back. Something like that had to be worth its weight in gold, here.

"It's okay," she said. "You should save that. There's some vegetables in town that I know I can eat." The bush it had come off of was just a few feet away, and she stepped over to point to it. "Here. It looks almost like a raspberry family, but not quite, the same as everything else. The vegetables, they were vegetables, but um-" she paused, glancing to the ground. "I know a lot about carrot varieties, and some other crops too, and nothing in the garden quite matched up with anything I'd seen. Not space plants, either, they're not exotic enough for that."

Her voice went even softer. "I just want to know where we are. I thought the native plants might help." Plants could tell you a lot about a place, and it was what she tended to turn to first.

She had to turn to look at Sessrumnir, and to turn further to show her back where the wound had been. There was a wicked scar, still pink, that vanished under the back of her dress, but that was all. She rolled her shoulder and wiggled her fingers. "The doctors say it's healing, um, unexpectedly well," she said. She was still supposed to go to one more check up at her family's insistence, but she could move now without it hurting.

There was a drawn out pause before she asked, "Do you think you're cranky? Um, worried, or irritable or something? Don't worry, you're still very sweet, but if you feel that way," she summoned her ocarina to her hand, "I can maybe help."

Hopefully that wasn't rude. She never knew where the line was.

Pendour blinked, and then blinked again. She'd thought the squire's aura and the scars would tell her story well enough. She wasn't new. Well, not new to the war, not new to the Negaverse. Shenanigans must mean something different, must mean whatever flavor of magic this was instead of what had happened that night at the training event.

As she thought about it, she realized it wasn't her first time seeing shenanigans, either. "Well, I went to a spirits' wedding once," she said, brows drawing together in thought, "And then to this awful, um, TV world? But I wasn't in either of those places for long enough to really think about it."

She stared for a moment at the not-quite-raspberry bush. "My best guess now is that we're either on a tiny asteroid or in some-" she pursed her lips, looking for the right word, "Pocket universe?" It couldn't be anywhere that big, with all the paths leading back to the village.

The granola bar was eventually sent off to her subspace pocket. She still thought someone else might need it more than she did, but she wasn't going to argue against insistence. "I'll show you the garden," she said, "And you can take what you need. It's not mine." They were going to have to share, here. If someone started hoarding, things were going to get worse quick as quick.

She didn't push the issue any further with Sess, and Oberon's responses went ignored. It wasn't any good to speak for other people, even maybe-brothers. She nodded when he gave his consent, and then held out the ocarina, letting him take a look. "It's my magic," she said. "I can't feel it, but I've heard lots of good things about it helping with nerves."

Then, she brought the ocarina to her lips and began to play.

A joke. Oh. That made so much more sense.

"It's okay," said Pendour, her smile still soft as soft. "I've talked to enough people to know that there are plenty of things that happened that I wasn't there for." Even with what she'd seen of the universe, she was sure there was plenty of deeper magic that didn't fit neatly into the boxes of what they understood.

At least her magic did seem to calm down Sessrumnir for the moment. She knew it was just a temporary thing, but it was something, and she smiled over at him when it was done. She hadn't used the whole pool of magic, she did know better than that, and she nodded at his comment. "I've still got a little left if we meet anyone else," she said. She was hesitant about talking to people on her own, knowing that there were agents around, but she did want to help anyone that she could.

Pendour glanced around the woods one more time, then looked back to the town. "Should we go back?" she asked. "I can show you the garden, and maybe we can see if the house next to it is free?" It would be nice to be close to the plants, even sad and unfamiliar as they were. "I did run into a friend earlier. Soleiyu. He's a Mauvian, and now you." Her head tilted ever so slightly, and her eyes asked the question.

She would like to be friends.

"But I didn't look in any of the houses, yet. I was hoping I could find a way home before dark," she said. That was looking less and less likely as the hours passed.