She didn't look up at Shango just yet, but her ear twitched with interest. The word sky didn't bring up anything she could understand. She didn't know what that was - nobody had mentioned it before, nobody had ever told her about a "sky". After a moment, her eyes drifted back up to the hybrid. "Really? The caves are small? I thought they'd be huge. And what's a 'sky'?"

Having a pet? She'd never heard of that. She wondered if it was even possible, to get a lesser gembound to hang around her for long enough. It might be possible through magic but she didn't know any spells that would work like that. "I didn't know that was possible. I want to make my magic stronger so I can read minds and see other things I couldn't normally see. Maybe I'll figure out how to do that too."

It sounded like it could be, maybe not a solution, but something that could help ease the boredom. Having a companion that would never leave her. She'd have to think about that.

Her whiskers twitched. "Help?" She paused for a long moment before sighing softly. "I don't know. I don't think anyone could help. I just like...to hear stories. If you have any you want to tell."

All the interesting things Shango had to tell her about had Seshat's ears perking again, pulling herself out of her depressive episode, or at least distracting her from it. "Wow, you must have done a lot of really amazing things!" Nobody she'd met, yet, had so many interesting stories to potentially tell and Seshat went quiet for a moment, trying to decide which one she wanted to hear.

"What does a Champion mean? I'd like to hear about that one - are you someone really important? Like, famous? I'm Seshat," she added on the end.

Seshat listened, trying to tie visualization into Shango's fairly broken storytelling. He was right - he wasn't very good at this, but Seshat did not say that out loud, nor did she try to even think about it, convincing herself, for Shango's sake, that he was doing an excellent job telling the story and her inability to visualize it properly was her own faults. It took a while for her to convince herself of this, but she was able to and did her best to come up with mental images to follow along.

Sand brought to mind tiny granules that sparkled under the lights. Swamps made her think of heavy mud and water, mist, and rot. She tried to imagine creatures sinking into mud, but she could not because she'd never seen a swamp before and the creatures had no faces, no bodies - they were phantoms with legs falling into solid stone. She could, at least, visualize the river of Polaris rising and flooding the cave. It gave her sudden anxiety to wonder what would happen if the water covered the whole cave - she couldn't swim and she certainly wouldn't float. Would she be drowned, then, without any hope to escape?

"That sounds terrifying," she spoke up when he paused. "Why did you go in if it was so dangerous?" She didn't notice the frustration, taking it more as him trying to dig up the details on these memories of his. When he mentioned the salt flats, she remembered something from a long time ago that Xevir had said to her. That she'd left to go graze on the salt flats. "Oh wait! I know someone that went to Hydra! She just went to go on the salt flats for some reason." Her expression twisted with confusion. "I...I don't know why you'd go in there just to eat salt. That's a little strange."

She shook her head - or tried to at least, which ended up being just contracting muscles in her neck that could not hope to move anything at all. "No, no, it's okay. It was very interesting, thank you. I...I want to see it, if that's okay. I think I know how to...to reach into minds and see memories. Will you let me see?" She reached forward with her magic tentatively, opening a link, but not forcing anything from Shango. If he wanted to show her his memories of Hydra, all he had to do was think about them, which was a thought she allowed to pass from her to him.

Seshat was not quite prepared for what it was like to connect to a mind like this. She didn't realize what it would be like to see through another's memories, exactly what they'd seen. She didn't know she would be able to see things like this and gasped softly as images poured into her mind of the hot desert sand, the great crucible, the swamps and the flats. They were so vastly different from Polaris, so alien and dangerous that it made Seshat's heart flutter. To think that places like this existed in the caves, to think birds that giant existed. And that white creature battling the giant vulture, all the others fighting below...it was incredible to see and she found herself tearing up...again.

"Wow," she gasped softly. "I see it. It's so bright and hot...I had no idea places like this existed in the caves." She felt the link fading from her mind, but the memories of what she'd seen stayed. She remembered Hydra now, one of many caves that she would never see with her eyes. "Thank you for that, Shango. Thank you. How did you use your storms to survive? Did it make it easier to get through while it was storming?" But hadn't he been almost swept away by the flood? Hadn't they all suffered because of the storms?

Seshat blinked, a little confused. That really wasn't much of an explanation, but perhaps she'd probed a little too deep. Maybe he was sensitive to that question? Maybe he was getting tired of answering all her questions? She didn't know and it gave her anxiety just to think about what the answers to these questions could be. She flinched again when the thunder echoed through the cave, but calmed down quicker this time, growing a little more used to the storm that Shango loved so much.

And now there were questions about her - perhaps a fair trade after she'd asked so much about him. "Oh, me? I use magic. I figured out how to...absorb the energy I need from around me. Sometimes I have a friend that brings me food. And my magic is...well, uh, moving things with my mind. Mind things like that. And, yeah, getting what I need to survive from the air and stuff. Water too." She hesitated at the last bit. She'd lost track of time in all the boring staring ahead at the Spire. "I don't know how old I am. I don't know if I'm young or old or what. It's hard to tell time when it's all you have."

She tried to do the same thing as before, connect her mind to Shango's, but as she tried, a lash of pain raced through her head. She snapped her eyes shut and tried not to let it show on her face as a dreadful migraine consumed her thoughts for a moment, but she didn't want to show that off. She didn't want people to worry about her and, worse, she didn't want to see Shango not worrying about her, since he seemed so indifferent this whole time. "O-oh yeah, I see the resemblance. Shida's very nice looking." Was that a self-compliment? Well, it didn't matter, since she wasn't actually seeing the one he was talking about. She opened her eyes and offered a smile, still trying to push that headache from her thoughts, but it was hard to ignore.