Shem had been doing his best to ignore...well, everything really. It had been easier than he had expected, at least in the long-term. Initially, he'd been plagued with rumination; each night, he'd been unable to sleep due to the thoughts of Midna, Zelda, Moteuh...Everything, really. Eventually though, he'd learned to cast those thoughts away. He liked to imagine they were like stray stones or branches, and he'd simply throw them into the flood waters and watch them drift away into a world too far away for him to care about. Of course, that had been made easier by Tikal. It was easier to say he didn't care about things when he could spend his time caring about her, after all.

The floods had cut him off from Taviora, and they'd trickled down into Glorall too, but Shem had found himself thankful for them in a way. He'd stuck close to Tikal, and he quickly found himself invested in her interests over her own. Though he'd likely never understand her fascination with the flowers, the birds, or any single part of what made her her...He could at least understand that they were important to her, and so they became important to him. Whenever she slept in beyond sunrise, whenever she rested, basked in the sun, frolicked by the water's edge...Shem would start hunting. Meticulously, he picked through the brambles. Slowly, he sniffed along the dunes. Dutifully, he waited for flood waters to recede with the tide so he could search the riverbanks and temporary marshes. Shem had a mission, after all.

The sun had started to rise. Summer's days were long, and Shem intended to use every hour of sunlight now that he finally felt that he'd achieved at least some small part of that grand mission. He rose before the sun, crept down the shoreline and collected several eggs from the gull nests and then returned to the den he shared with Tikal. Gently, he placed the eggs by the wayside atop a small pile of fresh leaves - ones he knew smelled nice, especially with the morning dew. Then, he called down to her in an efort to coax her out. "Tikal, come on out. We've got places to go today." He waited, adept at hiding his impatience. He'd spent weeks finding the locations of what he had come to understand were quite special flowers, one's he'd seldom seen elsewhere or in large numbers, and he didn't want to waste any time at all. As far as Shem was concerned, every minute spent waiting was a minute the flowers could spend wilting or being nibbled away at by some ungrateful hare or deer. Sure, he'd done his best to keep them safe and hidden but...He wouldn't forgive himself for quite some time if he couldn't treat Tikal to something special after so long.