Yuki can tell that they have started to cover some distance as Sulochana parts the curtains of the palanquin to receive the gift box from the artisan. The scent from outside the palanquin has changed, the whiff of air from the outside no longer smells of the scent of sand and stone that characterizes the looming Viperiat. Rather, they are closer to the market and she can smell the scent of baking dough on the air. The warm scent of cones, waffles, and fried sweets that characterizes the market at all times, multiplied in intensity when there’s a festival. The Nagi know how to make their food enticing. 

It makes her think of Hazel for a moment. She hopes he had a good ice cream and that he found something nice from the street vendors after that. She imagined he might have gotten caught up with any number of Nagi attractions, which was a fine enough way to enjoy the world. She figured he wouldn’t get too over his head and it wasn’t likely that any Nagi would do more than tease an unusual foreigner like him. Certainly not in public and at a festival! Even so, she would need to check on him soon.

Her attention is, of course, pulled back to the box before she has time to write out a proper message. She’ll for sure chat Hazel after this, but she can hardly ignore Sulochana presenting her a gift. And what a gift. She holds the box in her hands for a moment simply marveling at the gold and silver combined with the beautiful dark wood. Her father likes woodworking. At an amateur level, mind you, his day job was tax accounting. But on weekends, he’d often make things in his workshop. He had started with whittling, years and years ago, carving little pieces of wood with a knife. And when he’d gotten space, he’d built up some tools, a bigger saw for cutting larger things, and made some himself. Again, nothing this fancy, but he had made them a nice salad bowl, and he’d made Yuki a little treasure box for her room and carved her initials into it along with a little vine pattern around the outside. It had taken him two whole weekends to do that because he had gone slowly to make sure he didn’t make any mistakes. He would love this box though. The way the metal was inlaid into it and the deep color of the wood. He liked that, and he’d want to learn all about the inlaying process. It made her smile to think about it, and so for a moment, despite Sulochana’s obvious twitchy anticipation, she simply looked over the box, ran her hands across it, felt the way that the metal joined with the wood and tried to understand it. 

But she also didn’t want Sulochana to explode, and so she took out the necklace. Stared in jaw-dropping awe at the mother of pearl. This was surely too rich for her. She knew Sulochana was a princess, of course. And even that wealth was a little different in Thellamie. They didn’t have the same range of electronics as she had at home, the tablets were new and special, whereas she understood vaguely that precious metals were a bit less precious here and could be found more readily, particularly as people explored the outside and found new pockets of special materials. For that matter, she’d heard that sometimes Heron would just drop into a town with enough valuables to completely upend the economy while buying them out of all the useful trinkets and adventuring tools.

But even so, even so! This was incredible. She lets out a little squee as she looks it over, and happily goes to model for Sulochana. It’s only as the tablet is held up that she sees the eye. Her reaction is all instinct, and it is mainly bumping her head on the ceiling of the palanquin because the part of her that added the fluffy triangles wants to be up high and feel safe and trying to suddenly and instinctively stand up and jump away inside a palanquin just means bumping your noggin, shouting a sudden “ouch” and then rubbing her head sheepishly and settling back down as the eye fades. She quickly rubs her hand against the spot on the silver though, smudging it with a bit of the natural oil of her fingers as she looks down, then back up at Sulochana. 

“Did you see…um…is it safe to use her name? The um…the star who was here before, I saw her eye in the mirror. Is that um…normal? Do all the fallen stars stay here? It’s safe, right? Is it safe to use her name if I see her like that? It just startled me, but that must be why you have all the velvet in the Viperiat so intensely. How does that work now? Do people know why she doesn’t appear in the tablet screens?”

Yuki has a lot of questions, very quickly, and she’s also looking at Sulochana’s face, trying to quickly figure out if this is a special Yuki thing that she’s going to have to worry about now or if this is an Azaza thing and if so just how far it extends and what it means years after her defeat. Her mind is whirring and she’s realizing that there are a lot of questions she could have asked before coming back here and had never really thought about.