[He huffs out a breath at "calorically dense" that almost is the ghost of a dark laugh. Almost.]
[Boy, but she does have a point, though. With how much trouble he's caused, if they intended harm they'd just come over and grab him or stomp on him.]
[Branch wipes the blood of his now-empty vial of water with a piece of gauze and rolls it over to Dan. It goes mostly in a straight line.]
You can fill that and roll it back.
[He doesn't demand Dan drink the water first.]
[He's quiet for a little bit, looking at them both as if trying to judge from their expressions if they're lying. But he thinks...maybe they really aren't.]
[And that means if they're trying to de-escalate things and come to some kind of understanding, they need to know why he flipped out.]
The Bergens are the big people back home and they did put a lot of work into eating us. They built a cage around the tree the village lived in and built their entire town around it.
They used to mostly come for us once a year on a holiday they called Trollstice. But sometimes in between. The adults built tunnels for us to escape through when I was a kid.
But they still looked for us. They dug up the tunnels as we were escaping, and kept looking for us even after we escaped. For twenty years. And almost killed the whole village when they found and caught us. They only stopped because our queen convinced them to finally stop hunting us.
That was a little over a year ago.
[They need to understand why he was scared. And why he might make demands. And why there are places he needs to be met halfway.]
no subject
[Boy, but she does have a point, though. With how much trouble he's caused, if they intended harm they'd just come over and grab him or stomp on him.]
[Branch wipes the blood of his now-empty vial of water with a piece of gauze and rolls it over to Dan. It goes mostly in a straight line.]
You can fill that and roll it back.
[He doesn't demand Dan drink the water first.]
[He's quiet for a little bit, looking at them both as if trying to judge from their expressions if they're lying. But he thinks...maybe they really aren't.]
[And that means if they're trying to de-escalate things and come to some kind of understanding, they need to know why he flipped out.]
The Bergens are the big people back home and they did put a lot of work into eating us. They built a cage around the tree the village lived in and built their entire town around it.
They used to mostly come for us once a year on a holiday they called Trollstice. But sometimes in between. The adults built tunnels for us to escape through when I was a kid.
But they still looked for us. They dug up the tunnels as we were escaping, and kept looking for us even after we escaped. For twenty years. And almost killed the whole village when they found and caught us. They only stopped because our queen convinced them to finally stop hunting us.
That was a little over a year ago.
[They need to understand why he was scared. And why he might make demands. And why there are places he needs to be met halfway.]