Common

A mischievous grin spread across Isla's lips as he referenced being too soft to be enjoyable, and she only narrowly avoided teasing him about the hard parts being the most delectable. That was a little forward, even for her.

His comeback earns another giggle and a tiny lash of her tail, almost as a reset before she got herself carried away on this intoxicating feeling she had in his presence. "'Tis only the height that makes ye think that," she answered confidently, her pale lips curled into a smirk. Her mother's voice rose in her mind, an echo of a warning about her face getting stuck like this if she kept grinning like a fool; instead of erasing her smile, however, it only widened it. "I'm tough as tree bark beneath the surface."

She trailed off for a moment and then completed the thought racing through her mind. "But I reckon I could take a wee bit o' biting if it'were someone like you nibblin' away."

She grinned at him, quiet for a moment as she imagined Ori meeting her mother. Grier was shorter than Isla even, but that wouldn't stop her from giving him a good tongue lashing if she saw fit. And Isla figured Grier would almost certainly be in the mood for a tongue lashing once she finally found her. Leaving home as a yearling with barely a goodbye would do that to a mother, or so she'd been scolded by nearly everyone she'd shared her past with since leaving. To hear the islands tell it, the red girl heartlessly abandoned her mother to a most likely cruel fate out of her own selfish want of adventure.

"It's tae the east of here, but ye'd have tae swim again to get there." The temptation rose again for her to invite him to come along with her, but she had a sneaking suspicion that if she spent too much longer in his company she would end up with a role she was not yet prepared to handle, handsome partner or no. "Once ye get the lay of the land, ye'll have tae come visit the Thicket."

Isla did not yet know that her mother no longer called the dense forest home, nor that her search would eventually lead her to the neighboring Prairie instead. "If you still feel up to it, I mean." Though Isla was rarely stricken by self-doubt, a subtle note of it had crept into her tone in that line, and would be easily spotted by those that knew her well by the reduction of her mother's accent. As much as the little roan mare was enjoying herself (very much so, in fact), she knew that she should attribute at least some of his interest to the season. When hormones weren't driving them together, she wasn't as sure he would find her as attractive as he implied.

Without skipping a beat, she moved on to explaining the islands to Ori, although she doubted that he would ever struggle to find a tour guide among the isles with a face like that. "Yer on the Crossing now, an' there's four islands that surround it... five, mebbe, if you count the ruins of an old island tae the northwest." Isla had not yet seen the ruins of Cimarron island herself, but some of the residents had been abuzz with their re-emergence from the ocean a few years ago.

Isla wasn't terrified by the ocean like her mother was, but she did have some reservations about vacationing on an island that was prone to being lost underwater.

"Tinuvel's tae the far north. Tundra-like, I'm told. Salem is it's opposite tae the far South, and desert-like." She nodded appropriately in each direction to illustrate, reciting the islands as if by rote. "Just above Salem and a little more east is Atlantis, where I was born. It's a very pretty jungle you should go see sometime," she smiled fondly at the memories she had. She had been so small then that the politics of why she had been born there and not on Tinuvel had largely gone over her head, and her mother had worked hard to ensure that she had plenty of time to play and grow with the other foals, despite Grier's reservations about Rougaru.

"Luthien is last, and straight east. Less jungle n' more forest. Not as pretty, but more livable, I think." Isla hadn't spent a true winter on Atlantis to know for sure whether it got bitterly cold there too, but she did remember how miserable her mother had been in the summer heat. She trailed off, lifting her gaze to read his expression to see if he had any questions so far. In a way, she was almost sad to move the conversation onto less... flirtatious topics, but then again, she wasn't sure how much longer her self control would have held up if they hadn't taken a breather.