ORIGIN

Kai studied the herd for a moment. They seemed amiable enough. Had she been more of an animal-sort (ironically) she might have instinctively behaved in a way that'd have soothed them further--slowly moving up alongside them while also grazing, for example, as she'd been doing prior.

Hell, maybe that was why they were all right with her this close, so far; she'd been doing just that for awhile before Eleanora had shown up. Just... farther out. Maybe they'd seen her.

But as it was, her attempt to simply talk to them was understandably questionable.

When she saw what Eleanora was doing, she herself waded a little closer through the grasses and leaned toward what the witch had grown.

Further food sprouted up, with long grasses and grains and flowers, and Kai reached out to delicately nibble a piece herself. She watched as one or two deer hesitated before coming a step or two closer, snorting, to eat.

Kai turned to Eleanora, peering. "There. Can you get the milk, now?" she asked. Really, she had no idea how this was supposed to work.

Kai remained quietly thoughtful for a time, studying the herd. At length she looked to Eleanora.

"Why did you want milk from them?" she asked, curious. "-And what is milk?" She looked to the Meadow Deer again, trying to imagine it. Part of their wool, maybe? she wondered.

"I'm not sure they need anyone to take care of them," she added, thinking back to Eleanora's description of the exchange. "But they do seem to like the plants." She bent delicately, snapping up a stem with leaves, chewing it. Her expression was thoughtful as she swallowed.

"They are good plants," she decided.

"...Oh," Kai replied, blinking owlish eyes into the middle distance as she tried to think this over. And then, belatedly: "I don't know what any of those things are." It wasn't said rudely, or dismissively. If anything it was oddly conversational, a matter-of-fact thinking-aloud sort of thing. And it was a hard paradox to address: she didn't know what cheese or butter were, but she didn't know what milk was either, so explaining them as something made of milk didn't enlighten her any.

Kai stepped a little closer to the deer, lowering her own head and flicking ear-tufts as she plucked at the grass with her beak. "They seem okay," she added, glancing to the Meadow Deer. "I didn't really have a mother." That delightful conversational bomb abruptly dropped, Kai looked to Eleanora. "Did you?" Was it normal to have one? Her own lifegiver had given her a few vague impressions of the world early on, after her hatching, but had since wandered off entirely. She'd been left to forge her own way, which had been... awkward. Was that not how others grew..? Kai felt suddenly worried at the prospect.

What if she was weird?

Kai was distracted from the concept of mothers and families for a moment by, instead, the idea of cheese. She pondered, ear-tufts flicking back in thought, the strangeness of consuming something made from another creature's udders.

It seemed... odd.

But she was hardly the one to say so.

Kai had spent much of her life alone; any socialization that she did now was a deliberate choice, an attempt to learn how to do something so simple as hold a conversation. Much of that was awkward and stilted, as Eleanora had likely found; whether it was or it was not, she had no idea whether things like drinking animals' milk (or making things from it to eat) was odd or not. It struck her as sort of gross, but she didn't say that. "I would... try it," she said instead, struggling with the idea. New experiences, and all that; they were good for her, right? "Maybe if you pretended to be a baby deer, it would be easier to get the milk." She said this as the thought occurred to her, but the moment it was out of her mouth she recognized that it wasn't a stroke of genius so much as rather silly. Eleanora looked nothing like a deer.

And suddenly she feared that she, who did look very much like a deer, might accidentally be volunteering. Mild alarm showed on her face as she looked sharply to the witch. "...Or maybe that wouldn't work."

Crisis averted..? She sure hoped so.

"I can help you with the flowers, though. Do we have the same magic? That's cool." She meant it, too. She didn't often run across others who could make flowers grow and bloom. She pressed one hoof forward, and from it a carpet of lush green rose and grew, unfurling into multicolored, sweet-scented blossoms.

"What was having a mother like? I--did have one but only for a very short time. I think she had other things to do," she added, and kept her tone perfectly neutral. She'd never really known why Isi had left. And... "...She didn't speak much." Isi had been kind, but had barely spoken: rarely more than a word or two at a stretch. She peered sidelong at Eleanora then, realization clicking into place. "Your 'people' aren't Gembounds?" she asked, wondering if she'd understood that right.