"I think so," Rei said slowly, contemplatively. He tried to think about the things he got excited for-- food, water, sometimes a nice shiny thing he found. "Sometimes it feels like a lot, though."

As Hog started plodding forward, Rei let himself relax up there on the top of her head. He nestled down, firmly loafing. It wasn't often he got to be off his feet-- even when he slept, he often felt a little on edge. He liked to have the ability to start skittering and flapping away if he were in danger. He didn't feel very 'in danger' here, though. He trusted Hog to listen to him to run, if they had to.

But, surely, they wouldn't have to.

"Sometimes being excited for a really long time gets tiring," he elaborated over the sound of little pig steps. "And then when you try to nap, you feel all buzzy and awful and you don't sleep." He glanced down at her. "You should try napping sometime, it feels nice."

Rei supposed that was a good point-- he wasn't very tired when he'd first woken up, but he definitely didn't like the feeling of being drained and tired, either. "I nap whenever it goes dark," he said. "It gets hard to see, and you get sleepy."

What would they do, though? "We can try to find tasty things," he said. "Lots of people go through it and they eat, so they leave little bits we can eat without having to hunt. Hunting is hard because we're small and everything else is big. And if we can't find anything we can eat more crawlies."

He'd offer fish, but he didn't want to go near the river again.

"And then... I don't know," he said. "Whatever we want?" He didn't really do much other than wander, eat and sleep. "Sometimes I go walking around until I find something shiny and then I take it back to where I sleep."

"I've never spoken to them," Rei admitted. It seemed like a good idea to steer clear, actually, especially if they were taking down deer and eating them. He surmised that getting eaten would be bad. "But maybe we could try?"

It did seem like something that would be easier to do with a friend. The things that got hunted and eaten were usually alone, so maybe if they were together, other gembound would be less like to turn and try to eat them. It might also be a good idea to talk to them when they weren't eating or hunting, but Rei kept that particular thought to himself for now.

Hog's next question had pulled him out of that particular thought. He echoed a brief brr-like noise before answering, "shiny things are things that are shiny," very matter-of-factly. He turned on her head, feet tippy-tapping as he gestured vaguely towards Hog's shattered chrysalis. "The thing you were napping in was a shiny thing," he added, indicating to the smooth shards of golden pearl.

"I came out of a shiny thing, too," he said. "And the crawlies come out of a shiny thing. And the bigger things, too. I think everyone does, so there's lots of shiny things everywhere."

Rei shook his head, not that Hog could see it. "No, they're not all the same," he said. It was a short journey to flutter over and pick up a tiny little shard of golden pearl in his beak. He hopped back quickly and fluttered back up onto the helm of the SS Piglet and settled back down, angling his mouth downwards to hold the shard in his foot. "The things that we sleep in feel different from the things that are in us. The things that are in us are... cold. Mine is blue, yours is yellow."

He bent, then, tapping his beak against the little gemstone embedded into her ear. Tip, tip. "Yours is here, and mine is on my back. The skitter-thing had one, too, but it was probably really small and you didn't notice." He didn't seem bothered that she'd swallowed the gemstone, which was a good indicator that she shouldn't really be concerned about it, either. "The ones that are in us are kind of warm until they're off us," he went on. "When they're off us, they're really cold and it's kind of gross to touch them, so I don't keep those."

Settled, Rei was prepared for the trip to Polaris again. He hadn't realized there was something up with Hog until she stopped in her tracks again. He looked down quizzically, lifting himself back up onto his feet to tip his head upside down to look at her eye. "What's wrong?"

Honestly, Rei had never really thought about it that way. He often thought about little individual things about himself: if his feathers sat right, if his face was too scruffy, if he smelled bad-- but he'd never quite thought about himself in comparison to how big everything else was.

"Well, I am little," he said slowly. "I'm littler than you are." Though, he supposed that wasn't really the point.

Hiking himself back upright as Hog went trotting forward, he considered a little more. There was some deep-rooted feeling in his gut telling him he had to find a way to make Hog feel better. He knew she didn't have any friends other than him yet, and he sure didn't have any other friends yet, either.

His wings flapped once to keep himself centered as she picked up the pace. "No, I didn't know everything," he admitted quickly, his foot stumbling around the shard of gold pearl to stop it from falling overboard. "I knew some things, like... you can eat crawlies and my name is Rei. I had to figure out everything that I know, and I don't even know what I don't know. That makes me feel small."

"But," he went on. "What else can you do about it? I don't know everything. That's okay. One day I'll figure it out. One day, you'll figure out something I don't know, and you'll tell me about it. And because there's two of us, we'll figure things out twice as fast."

That's what friends are for, he was fairly certain.