Gympie was surprisingly able to recover well on the rock; while he couldn’t sink his feet into the soil, he was getting lots of good sun. It wasn’t long before he had recovered enough that the old, scaled woman (he had kind of figured out genders of the creatures by this point, he was fairly certain) had let him go off the stone. After he got off the rock there was a mad scramble as the others tried to get up and claim the spot for their own.

After much snapping, the big one that he had thought of as the leader sat proudly atop the warm rock. The old woman didn’t compete, simply watching from where she was cooling off in the mud.

He headed off toward his host with a few of the locals tagging along to watch him. They all seemed endlessly fascinated with everything he did as if they had never seen something like him before. Which to be fair, he had never seen something like them before all of this either and was watching them right back trying to learn what the things they did meant.

He was having some luck with that though. The tails hanging high seemed to mean a sort of respect for themselves and a message for others to respect them too. He saw one earlier with a tail hanging lower than the others that was being chuffed at in a way that was reminiscent of laughter.

They seemed to try to make themselves look bigger when asserting dominance and smaller when conveying submission. They chuff out a sound similar to their laughter to show thanks and hiss when annoyed. He had tried to show thanks for their help, but he just couldn’t make his throat make the sounds they made. They were just too different. He also couldn’t show his thanks through body language as he didn’t have a tail and he didn’t actually want to show that he was ‘submissive’ or ‘dominant’ for wildly different reasons. It was really quite frustrating.

But in everything he saw, there was one outlier. The old woman didn’t even attempt to hold up her tail or make an effort to appear bigger or smaller, but she seemed to have more sway than the others. It made him wonder what she had done earlier in life and why she was the only elderly one. He wasn’t mistaken that there were other folks that were ‘old’ but she was the only one he could really describe as ‘elderly’.

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He thought about all of this as he made his way toward his host. When he arrived, he found his host happily sitting right where he left them as content as could be. He slung the breastplate that held his host over his shoulders and started the march back to the village. The locals seemed interested in his breastplate, which was fair as even he didn’t really know what it was made of and was given to him by a literal god. But the interest likely wasn’t that deep, he realized as he thought on the simple wooden and stone tools he had seen them using.

Nobody on his island really used metal all that much, but he at least knew what it was. But he got the sense that metal as a whole was a new concept for these people and thus interesting. The whole trip back was full of them trying to poke at his armor and him desperately trying to keep them from getting poked by his needles in return. It was a difficult dance, but he managed.

When the group got back there was a commotion between some of the villagers. It seemed like arguing but he couldn’t tell what about. The group he had gone with started barking between each other seeming to discuss whatever was going on, or maybe they were talking about something entirely different. He had no way of actually telling.

When it was over, neither side looked particularly happy, but it seemed like a decision was reached. They started to pick up their sparse belongings and tie them to their backs with twisted together vines. They slipped into the water and began to swim down the river going the same direction as the current.

He debated following them. He had nowhere else really to go and they were the only intelligent life he had found in this place. Before he could decide though one of them grunted at him, which he was pretty sure was an indication to follow them although again he couldn’t be sure.

Either way he rushed to follow the river as they swam ahead of him and soon out of sight. If they really wanted to ditch him, they could, and if they didn’t he guessed they would wait for him to catch up.