Worm took another long moment without saying much, and Larkspur started to worry again—until he reached out and bumped his bouncy ball again. Larkspur relaxed and made a little chirrup of amusement. "Or we can play with that! Hm... I can throw it for you to chase?" It was pretty big relative to the baby tree swallow's size, but Larkspur had CONFIDENCE in herself.

"Orrrr. Hm. Spells—ah, do you have anything pretty to show off? Or anything you personally like? I don't even know the full range of what's out there." she admitted. Really, bubbles (even failed sticky ones) and flowers were not too bad for someone who had literally come out of a rock twenty minutes ago. "Or! Maybe we can go find someone who knows really interesting magic. And learn it together!" That sounded like a fun group bonding activity, right?

@Worm

"I know interesting magic!" Worm blurted out without much forethought. Still, tinged with the embarrassment of failing before. He just had to prove it, surely the second time would be the charm...

Once more, he touched his forehead to the ball, and this time it began to glow! A soft, not particularly bright glow, but at least it illuminated this time. "Ah ha!" Worm leaned back to admire his work, though admittedly it was the bright colours of the ball that were doing most of the work, casting fun colours within the glow.

"Is that interesting?" Worm asks his companion, perhaps sounding more than a little self-conscious as he does so. "I-- Can anyone do better? Are there people out there that know that much magic?" He asks his twenty-minute-old companion, as if she knew.

@Larkspur

Larkspur leaned in close as Worm touched the ball again. And... it began to glow! "Whoa!" she gasped, passing a claw through the multicolored light that came off it. "This is pretty." She spun the ball around, watching the glow shift.

She glanced up quizzically at the big bald cat's questions. "I don't know. Maybe? I don't know how many people are out there." The insecurity bit of it flew completely over her head—it would have seemed to her a superfluous feeling to have. Why worry about that when you could focus on the beautiful thing you just created? "You're the only person I've met. Have you met people that know a lot of magic?"

Like her companion, she was also finding it hard to resist the tempting distraction of the ball. She poked it with her bill, staring at the world through the halo of its glow, and then pulled away and kicked it with her foot. She followed it in a combination of hops and wing-beats, looking back at the cat expectantly for him to join in too.

@Worm

Did he know anyone good at magic? Worm sat back as he considered the question. Imp had been rather good at magic, he'd made food for Worm during an extremely formative time in his life. Then there was Miss Aethril, she seemed like she was good at everything, but he'd never seen her use magic. Who else had he met? Obieth, but he wasn't sure what Obieth did... There was that no-good Ruse, but Worm couldn't recall hym using magic either.

Was Mimosa good at magic? He huffed; this was a tough question.

"I stay in Cetu-- No! Cepheus, it's called Cepheus! And there are a lot of people there." He tilted his head once more. "Mh. There's a big palace and pretty gardens, and cool people like Imp and Miss Aethril and Obieth. I think they're pretty magic." There was something he was forgetting... Something important. Ah!

"But you have to be the good-est and on your bestest behaviour! But there's a big library too! I'm still learning to read big words, but they must have books about magic!" Worm announced this all very proudly, he seemed to genuinely enjoy being in Cepheus.

@Larkspur

Cepheus! A place with a lot of people. Larkspur eagerly followed up: "How do you get to it? Is it far? Are there even more people than here?" For her, the carnies were already a lot of people.

"Oh," she suddenly realized. "I wonder if the carnies know magic too. Should we ask?" It seemed likely. If they were in charge of running this whole carnival, they had to know some crazy magic too, right?

Wait, wait, back to Cepheus. "And a palace? What do you do with one of those?" Gardens she had a concept of. Places full of plants, but tended to and not wild. The word palace conjured up an image of some kind of building, but what did one actually do inside? Apart from be on the bestest of behaviors, which she always was. Oh, and a lie-brar-ee? Reading? "Is it hard?" she wondered. "I mean, since we already know the words. Is it really hard to learn to read them?" I

@Worm

Worm made a vague gesture with one paw, back towards the route back into Tunnel F. Though it seemed lost on the cat that the entrance had ominously been shifting places. "It's just out there--" He started, then pulled a face at imagining asking the carnies to do magic for them.

"Are they even nice?" The cat's face scrunched with doubt, no doubt speaking of the carnies. They'd given them a not-dog, but that didn't mean anything!

"A palace is a big, big, big, cave that's all colourful and the furniture is nice, and they tell you off for using it as a scratching post! And it has art too! Imp makes it all, and it's cool!" He paused for a beat, apparently having forgotten to breathe during his excited rambling. "And they feed you there; sometimes Miss Aethril puts me in the clothes there. And there's um... big tables."

Worm faltered; what were people supposed to do in a palace? Did it have a purpose? Truthfully, he didn't know. "It's really hard to read the words!" He continued without missing a beat. "They don't look like the things that they are. They're all... squiggles that are called 'letters' and the letters are what make words, and the words all mean different things. But you have to know which words it is, because if you put the letters in the wrong order, you didn't make a word!" Worm gasps for oxygen once again. He'd spoken so animatedly about it, so excitedly that he'd forgotten to take breaths.

He really did seem to love this place.

@Larkspur

Were the carnies nice?

"Umm... probably! Why not!" Larkspur decided cheerfully. The Carnival was such a fun, happy place, so why wouldn't they be nice?

The palace sounded really pretty. Whatever 'furniture' and 'art' were (colorful? Yes, they were colorful. That was good; colors were fun!), Larkspur wanted to see those pretty things in person. AND it had food and 'clothes' and... a lot of other things! "That's so much stuff," Larkspur breathed in wonder. "Is there as much food there as here? As good as the not dogs!?" It was hard to believe anything could beat the fried, processed, condiment-covered fare at every other stall here. Larkspur tried to imagine what the palace must be like to have all that and failed.

And squiggles that made letters that made words? Worm was right; now that he explained it it sounded really hard. "Why make it that confusing when we already know how to say words that aren't confusing?" Larkspur lamented. "Um.... can you show me a 'word'? Like draw the squiggles and stuff?" Maybe there was a sense to the seeming madness that she just needed to see to understand.

@Worm

Worm considered that for a moment. "There are kitchens that make all sorts of food, I think. I'm not allowed to go in there because I'll get under everyone's feet." Worm murmured, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "But it's okay because they bring the food out of the kitchen too."

He extended one claw from his paw and turned it to the dirt below. After choosing a decently flat spot, he began carving letters.

'WE O R M' was carved into the soil, Worm dutifully sounding out each letter as he did so (seemingly for his own benefit, as opposed to Larkspur's). He quickly patted the soil back flat over the mistakenly added 'E' with a huff, before he continued his work. "Worm! That's Worm! That's me!" He announced proudly. The whole process had been slow, as if it'd taken all of Worm's brain power to write the four-letter word.

"I think the food is good, but not-dogs are my favourite!" Worm continued, now that all his brainpower wasn't solely concentrated on writing letters.

@Larkspur

Worm would get under other people's feet? Larkspur was barely taller than his feet. "Does that mean everyone there is bigger than you? Whoa." She hadn't expected that. She'd thought maybe she was normal size, or at least common, and Worm was actually on the larger side of average. But looking around, she supposed that all the carnies were bigger too.

She watched carefully as Worm scratched out the letters and sounded out each one. Wuh. Oh. Ur. Muh. Worm. Then she compared those sounds carefully with the shapes he made in the soil, doing her best to commit them to memory. It didn't make very much sense, though.

"But this writing system's design is confusing," Larkspur objected after careful observation. "The squiggles don't look like what they sound like at all." She thought for a moment, trying to imagine how squiggles could represent specific sounds better, but couldn't come up with anything, so instead she scratched a simpler squiggle into the soil. Like S but lopsided. A Worm.

"See, if that meant Worm, that would make much more sense. It actually looks like a worm."

@Worm