Silsana Loves Stew!

The place that Silsana had surfaced after the storm was… unfamiliar to her, to say the least.

She was fascinated by all the strange green things and the sounds she heard as she walked. It was completely different from anything she knew in the depths where she lived, and wildly diverged from the little experience that she had of land within the Blighted Wilds.

At least she was still the same, or she might have suspected she was hallucinating or dreaming. But all four arms was there and she was still very blue, so that was good!

…she was also very hungry, and not sure what to eat here.

Especially after a weird furry thing ran away when she tried to catch it.

To her relief, though, she soon saw a building in the distance. It looked kind of like the castle that loomed over Conquest, but a bit less ominous. It also had distinct smells of food coming from near it, and following her nose, Silsana found what seemed to be the trash room - or scullery, or… something. She didn’t know how castles worked, really, and she didn’t know. At the least, though, there was definitely food here, and trashed food was free. (Sure, she’d had to climb a wall to get to it, but who cared about that?)

The workers seemed to be headed off to sleep as daytime approached, so it didn’t take long for her to be able to slip in undetected. They all had weird white eyes, something she usually only saw in dreams - well, minus a few weird dextroluma she’d caught before. Didn’t matter to her, though - no one had crystal horns or halos or growths, so she didn’t really care what they looked like.

A lot of the food in the trash didn’t appeal to her. Mostly boring vegetable cuttings and such. A spoiled egg…

And then, a rare exciting delight! Bowls upon bowls of a mushroom stew! All perfectly untouched!

She gasped in delight as she uncovered them from a tray that had been hidden in a corner of the room. Five whole bowls? The dextroluma who lived here must be stupidly rich to throw out something this good! Hurriedly, she began to shovel the stew into her mouth with her hands, uncaring about getting at all dirty. Food was food.

Sure, the color of the stew was a bit… odd, and the taste was kind of weird too… but Silsana didn’t care in the slightest. It was tasty to her, and nearly a decadent feast - it wasn’t even that cold!

In the evening, when the workers returned to find that five bowls of Queen Iola’s infamously terrible stew had somehow been consumed overnight, they would agree that they needed to keep a watch out for sick wildlife, although the lack of any signs of actual wildlife and cleanliness with which the ‘food’ had vanished seemed to concern them privately. Still, it had to have been a wild animal, right…? If an intruder was going to break into the castle to steal food, surely they would steal something worth eating… right… ?

Of course, Silsana, resting in a stream she had found nearby, was busy hoping there would be more that night. She could just treat this as a nice vacation, right? Right!