It was hard but Gympie had managed to mostly keep up with the scaled locals as they swam ahead of him. They moved so fast in the water that he had almost lost them several times. It was especially bad around points where the river forked, but in the end he had managed to catch up with a combination of his water magic and a need not to lose the only intelligent life he had managed to find so far, but it was no easy thing.
They went for hours, and it was only when the sun had started to set that they finally stopped, they didn’t even seem tired! As soon as they stopped Gympie collapsed from the effort it had taken just to keep up, meanwhile they started to form a hunting party. The area where they stopped was pretty similar to the area they had left behind just a few hours earlier. It had an undergrowth, but the vegetation wasn’t as thick as a lot of the area he had to run and cut through to follow them. You could almost see the sky through the trees here.
It wasn’t long before the hunters came back with a fresh kill hung between them. Whatever it had been, it was dead now with a massive gouge in its neck being the most likely culprit of its demise. Gympie doesn’t think he will ever get used to that weird red water that fills these things.
It was several minutes until he could actually pull himself up and help out. He watched them and tried to get an idea of what they were doing and if he could help but he couldn’t make much sense of it. They were taking the scaly outside off of the creature and stretching it out between some trees. The red insides however were being separated and put on sticks to be spun above a fire, although some of the more impatient ones seemed to not mind eating it without the fire, so he didn’t really see the point of the fire. Maybe it tasted better?
He knew what they were doing afterwards of course, he personally didn’t need to eat but it wasn’t like he had never seen anything eaten before. It just seemed unnecessarily complicated to him, what were they even going to do with all that stuff they put to the side? He couldn’t think of anything that could be done with it, but he didn’t really see the purpose of preparing food at all so what did he know.
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Eventually he got fed up with trying to dissect the meaning behind their actions and turned to trying to figure out what else the weapons gifted to him by gods could do, but frustratingly nothing new came about from his poking around. It felt like he just wasn’t making any progress in anything he did here. He didn’t even know why he had been picked up by beings beyond his comprehension in the first place. It wasn’t like he had been living a particularly exciting life before all this, nothing that would draw the attention of gods at least in his opinion.
Thinking about it, he didn’t even know if he wanted to go back, it wasn’t like he had anything there anyways to return to. His only purpose in life was to protect his host and his host was here with him now happier than it had ever been before. He somewhat missed the dryads that had been close enough for him to visit but he didn’t really interact with them all that much because of his needles anyways. He definitely didn’t miss the twigs though, If he never saw one of those fire starters again it will be too soon.
For over a week now he hadn’t even heard anything from the gods either, which may be a good thing actually. Maybe he could figure out these people's way of life, help them out, grow with them. Perhaps just being boring and living an idyllic life here would make the people who sent him here forget about him and he could just start anew.
He looked around waiting for something to break him out of his happy thoughts, but the locals seemed to be content enough to let him sit and think at the edge of their camp. Not that there weren’t any watching him, but he seemed to have lost his novelty to them already and they had just accepted his presence even though it had only been a few days since his arrival among them.
They seemed to be far more accepting than the people on his island, although maybe that was because he had managed to avoid stinging any of them so far. He didn’t know if they would become aggressive if they were to experience his sting and he was determined not to find out.
Hopefully in the future he could learn from these people, maybe finally communicate with them properly. If the gods were ignoring him than he was fine with that, if they wanted nothing to do with him all the better. This could be his opportunity to start anew, for that at least he could be thankful.
He no longer had to put out fires, he had people who were willing to allow his presence, his host was happy. Everything was frankly almost perfect here despite all the odd creatures and their weird anatomy. He just really hopes that it is able to last.