Despite being freshly literate and having little grasp of life within the law, Rhea wasn’t an idiot. She was observant, and she could hear the laughter within her teacher’s coughing fit. It did little to settle her nerves. It was clear to her now that this person wasn’t the original fairy she was meant to be seeing, since Danny wasn’t doing the same greeting (unless the laughter had meant he’d been playing a practical joke on her). Plus, Danny called him Thoth. Now that she got a better look at him, the boy who’d emerged from the building seemed a bit young to be a super old scary giant god. He was like Danny’s age, which was certainly old, but not super old.
Dalai listened to Sol’s introduction of the vicious fish beast from the safety of his fairy’s shoulder, but he took the words with a grain of salt. Friendly and fun were all well and good, but when two big animals were having their fun around a smaller one, that smaller one tended to bear the brunt of the injuries. And the fish beast, Morv, seemed rambunctious enough not to notice if a linsang got under paw. Dalai’s ears twitched as Thoth spoke about his familiar’s diet, though what experience he had with marine flora and fauna was from the top of the wadi looking down at the sea.
It did, however, put him at ease, and allow him to free his claws from Rhea’s shoulder. Dalai, however, had paid zero attention to his fairy’s lessons with Danny, and for all he knew, the word being spelled was linsangs, or mammals or familiars or some such thing. However, the tone from the boy, and the calmness of his own fairy as she slowly put the letters together by drawing them with her finger on her hand eased the creature’s mind.
Rhea’s mind was still racing however, though it had calmed a little at the spelling practice Thoth had unwittingly given her. As she crossed the threshold of the cottage behind Thoth and Danny, she clutched at her bag and at her notebooks, repeating again in her head the advice Danny had given her (and then laughed at). She didn’t notice the attempted staring contest, or her familiar’s attempts to determine whether those yellow eyes of Morv’s were threatening him, eying him as a snack, or playing. He decided the best course of action was to puff out his chest, and fluff his fur to appear as big as his small body could, and stare back.
Rhea was staring too, though she was staring at Danny’s back, and counting steps to try to calm down. When they entered the room, she took a deep breath and stepped up next to her teacher. And then the man behind the desk looked right at her and her nerve vanished or shrunk or went into hiding as she ducked back behind Danny a bit. It was clear they’d interrupted him and when someone on the crew interrupted Mama, she got really angry, and she was just a captain. Imagine how angry a god would be!
“H-h-hello, Eddie, sir, captain,” she managed to squeak, using what Danny had told her to say, and adding what other titles of respect she could think of. “I’m Rhea, Eddie, and I, well, Danny said, um, uhh,” she fumbled for the words as she gripped the notebooks so tightly her knuckles turned white, and looked up to Danny in hopes of finding some help to explain why they were interrupting his very important god business.
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