When Aiko asked why the groups were arguing, the girl looked like she had won a major fight. The Councilman looked outraged that Aiko would go over his head that way as the teen replied. “We all knew that you were going out to trade for things by bartering off the vegetables and nuts that you had gathered but they were going to take all of them. “We didn’t want them to just take everything if that’s not what you had agreed to. We were just trying to make them wait until you got here to confirm that you had made the deal that they claimed you made!”

The two older rabbit people got indignant looks and immediately started yelling accusatorially at the youths and calling them liars. The youth On the other hand began yelling insults and saying things like we knew you were trying to cheat and steal.

Eventually, Brimit and the other guard stepped in after hearing the shouting all the way out to the exit and got between both groups. After things calmed down a bit Aiko realized that the youths were telling the truth and the adults were trying to swindle her.

It came to light that their plan was for a few of the quickest to claim that she had bartered all of her goods to them. When the rest of the people she had bartered with showed up there would be nothing for them to take and they would either take their goods back from her or she would have to provide them more goods.

When Aiko found out their real goal she stated for all to hear that she would have no more dealings with the older culprits that were trying to swindle her. When she took the side of the youths the older Councilman seemed rather indignant but couldn’t argue because they had been caught clearly trying to steal for all to see.

Aiko realized at some point that the Councilman was most likely aware of this gambit and might even have stood to profit from it and she was livid.

After making sure to distribute the fruit, vegetables, and nuts in the exact proportions to the exact people that she had made deals with she asked everybody to leave.

When some of them acted like they wanted to protest her temper flared and she used chaos grasp to pick them up and move them away from her temporary dwelling. This show of force was more than enough to intimidate them and they hurried along away from her.

That night Aiko sat in her room and cried herself to sleep. At some point during the night, she woke up after having a long and terrifying nightmare where she was chased through the warrens by a bunch of rabbit-men yelling at her and claiming that she stole from them.

Taking long breaths to calm down from the nightmare, she got up and began pacing but this did little to alleviate her fears. She decided that she would be better off taking a stroll through the now mostly silent and almost deserted thoroughfare of the warrens.

As she walked along the thoroughfare Aiko couldn’t help but note that the boy she had met earlier was still sitting in the same spot. When she walked over she was surprised to find that he was still awake but with mostly the same vacant expression on his face. When she knelt down the boy took immediate notice of her and his face brightened including a smile that rather terrified her.

One side of his face was swollen and his teeth were bloody. It looked as though somebody must have kicked him in the face and probably several times. When she asked him what had happened he acted like he didn’t want to tell her but she insisted. It turned out that he had only gotten to take a couple bites of the food that she left him before somebody took it from him and began kicking him.

Aiko was beginning to despise the rabbit people but decided to forestall judging all of them based on the actions of a few.

She tried to get the boy to follow her to her room. Even though he acted like he wanted to he didn’t seem to have enough strength to move from the spot. Aiko made a quick prayer to Kaori and all of the other gods that she wouldn’t do any damage before activating her chaos grasp spell and picking the boy up.

At first, the boy yelled but when he realized that it was her doing it, he quieted down as though it were the most natural thing ever.

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She quickly brought him to her room and set about cleaning up his matted fur which she found to be full of blood and old scabs. She then made a trip to the back of the warrens to get a jug of water before returning to finish the job of cleaning the boy up.

After she had given him some water to drink she fed him another one of the dried berries and a couple of big chunks from one of the nuts that she had set aside. The boy laid into the food with such fervor that she knew that he hadn’t had anything to eat in a long while.

She remembered the feeling of hunger and vowed silently that he wouldn’t feel it again. She did ask him to slow down so he wouldn’t make himself sick. He didn’t want to slow down until she promised that nobody would take his food while she was there. That made him calm down and actually chew his food at least.

After he had finished his meal Aiko laid down and covered them both with her blanket. She had a hard time going to sleep because despite her best efforts the boy still stank horribly. At some point, she did manage to drift off the sleep.

When Aiko awoke the next day she went out and found a high tree that had been in bloom for a bit and already had the beginnings of some type of nuts growing there. She used her green thumb ability and forced a little bit of her mana into them to hurry them along.

She was slightly surprised when the little bit of Mana that she fed them was enough to bring them to full maturity. She was a tad leery of the flavor but found that the nuts that she had discovered had a mild flavor that didn’t suffer in the least from being rushed in their growth.

Also surprising was the size of these nuts. Each one of them in this cluster of over a dozen was easily the size of her entire torso.

The nuts had a grass-thin shell and the meat of the nuts was somewhat spongy in texture. Both of these were things that Aiko knew that her magic could cause to happen when something was rushed to grow too fast. Somehow it all worked in her favor with this particular batch of nuts.

Thanking the gods in a silent prayer Aiko used a few points of her Mana. She manifested her Chaos knife spell and began chopping all of the nuts loose from this cluster. Then carefully let them rain down to the forest floor below.

She gathered them all up into one spot and then tried her chaos grasp spell. To her utter delight, she found that as long as she recognized the pile as one thing she was able to grasp all of the nuts in that pile as one and lift them all at once.

She brought a pile of nuts to sit in front of the entrance to the warrants closest to her temporary home just as the two guards were walking out of the hollow. The guards looked dubiously at the pile of nuts that she had placed in front of the door until she offered them one of them. Brimit was the one who stepped up and thanked her for the offer and split the nut with his fellow guard while she made herself busy carrying the rest of the pile to her home one by one.

Upon entry, the noise of her approach woke the boy up. He looked at her wide-eyed and in complete fear for a moment before recognition dawned on his face.

Through the whole process of bringing in the ten remaining nuts the boy just looked at her starry-eyed and stayed out of the way. She sat all of the nuts on the opposite side of her small home away from him.

It was only once she was finished bringing the last of them in that she turned to regard him fully. “Would you care to share some breakfast?”

The boys seem to regard her in disbelief for a moment as though the idea that someone would share their food with him was ridiculous. Suddenly he began crying and nodding his head up and down vigorously. The two of them shared a meal before Aiko took her leave to go back to the surface and harvest the last of the vegetables that she had grown.

Today she had a clear goal. She was going to outfit the boy for travel. If they wanted him to leave so badly then the least they could do would be to outfit him so that he would be able to make it in the world once he did leave. If they weren’t willing to do that then she would.

Getting the few vegetables that were left into the warrens didn’t take her nearly as long as she thought it might. Having seen the youth bringing the vegetables in she had already figured out the proper method.

Aiko simply piled the last few of them up in front of the entrance to the warrens first. After that, it was simply a matter of grabbing one end of the long green vegetables and pulling them inside and into her temporary home.

After she had all of the vegetables stored in her home she split one open and pulled all of the seeds out of it. She then stuck all the gelatinous-coated seeds to the inside walls of her dwelling.

The boy watched on with curiosity as she worked so she explained it to him. “I grow these vegetables from these seeds but I can’t carry them around the way that they are right now. I need them to dry out first.”

“So I am putting them in the air as much as possible and letting them shrivel up. Once they are dry they will fall off of the wall or off of whatever I stick them to. When they do that I don’t suppose you would be willing to go around in here and pick them all up for me would you?”

The boy nodded vigorously before croaking out a very meek yes.