“It’s surprising and not a little amusing how some of the cultures often derided as savage or barbaric by others ended up being the ones that showed the best hospitality to strangers. Just who are the savage and barbaric ones, here, really?” - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.

Unlike that time she saw villagers in the southern continent’s northern part where they used the fibrous insides of a tree as their staple food, the goblins did not ferment their version but instead dried and ground it further until it became a sort of flour. Most of the time, they simply mixed the resultant flour with some water, wild lizard or bird eggs, and herbs for flavoring and steamed the resultant dough until it formed a thick, dense sort of bread.

Though the goblins also made a different sort of dough using that flour, which they then rolled thinly and then filled with a mixture of roughly chopped game meat, some wild onions, and oddly enough fruits, before steaming the resultant dumplings together with the bread they were making. Aideen found it rather curious, but she also felt she’d know better whether it worked out or not when she tasted it later.

Other than the bread and dumplings being steamed, the crocodile caught on their way back was also roasting above an open fire in the middle of the village, with the meat of the reptile glistening from its own rendered fats. An old goblin woman knelt by the roasting meat and periodically basted it with a sauce of some sort even as it slowly rotated above the fire.

Instead of the food that were still cooking, the first thing served to the diners already seated in a circle around where the cooking took place was platters full of fruits that they harvested, as well as some of the youngest, most tender shoots that had been sliced up and served on a leaf. The village head, who was seated together with Aideen’s group and Wiro, invited them to partake of the appetizers while he personally opened up some of the fruits for them.

The slivers of young bamboo shoots had a delightfully crunchy texture like before, but this time their refreshing taste was mixed with some pleasant sweetness, courtesy from a drizzle of honey. The other fruits were juicy and refreshing, with varied flavors. The village head himself opened up one of the large fruits with somewhat spiky skin to reveal its sticky, fibrous insides and the ripe, sweet-smelling yellow pods it contained.

Those pods were fleshy and flexible, and once the seeds they contained had been removed, proved to be a truly delectable snack, with a mind sweetness and a subtle savoriness at the end, as well as a crunchy yet chewy texture to them. Curiously, though, the goblins also gathered the fibrous insides and the seeds and brought them to the cooks to be used as ingredients.

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To wash things off, Aideen also saw how the goblins juiced up whole piles of the green oranges they picked a couple baskets full of along the way. When they gave it a try back in the forest, the fruit tasted rather bad, dry and astringent, with barely any juice in them. The last of that statement seemed to ring true given how the goblins had to squeeze out around a dozen fruit for a single wooden bowl full of the juice.

Then one of the village’s Ice-affinity users went over to chill the resultant fruit juice. There were a few of them in the village, and given the hot climate the village was in, their services were much appreciated by the rest of the village. The strongest of them made large blocks of ice to be used for preservation purposes, while the weaker ones helped with cooling drinks like just then.

Surprisingly, when a bowl was given to her and Aideen took a sip of the cooled juice, she found that it was amazingly sweet, with a pleasant tartness and only a hint of astringency that lent it even more depth of flavor. It was nothing like what the fruit tasted like when eaten straight, at all, and the surprise was clearly reflected on her face.

“We call those fruits as bad for eating but made for good drinking,” said Seta, the village head, with a wide, toothy grin on his face, clearly familiar with the surprised expression Aideen – and everyone else in her group, now that she took a look around – showed. “Takes a bunch of them to get a bowlful, but it’s worth every bit, eh?”

“It sure is,” replied Aideen, rather impressed with the juice. She had drained a good half of the bowl’s content in one go herself, enthralled by the flavor. She even thought of maybe getting some of the seeds to grow back home in Ptolodecca as well. “Are the trees hard to grow or do they need some sort of special conditions for their environment?”

“If there’s some hot, humid areas with plenty of rain, they should go pretty decently, I think,” replied the goblin village head. “Our cousins tried growing some in the plains but it’s not hot or rainy enough there.”

“I should try growing some down south then, we have some regions that sound like a good fit,” noted Aideen with a smile on her face.

They enjoyed the multitude of fruit types served as the appetizer together with the chief introducing the ones they had never seen before at times. There were quite a few of those, like the ones with a bell-like shape that had what turned out to be a crescent-shaped nut hanging below the crunchy, spongy fruit with refreshing taste, or the long, oblong fruits with white, creamy interior that tasted sour and sweet, the flesh so soft it had to be scooped out directly with one’s hand to eat.

There were fruits that had cross-sections shaped like stars, which had flowers that the goblins like to use to brew tea and some sort of syrup, as well as an odd one with a hard shell that gave way to present pulpy white flesh that had fragrant aroma and a taste not unlike an apple or a pear, yet with a much softer texture.