The words aren’t out of her mouth very long at all when she begins to consider the fact that perhaps shouting out into a strange group of people she’s only briefly met and hoping for a good response might not be the best course of action. For the briefest moment, she wishes she could gobble the words back up, steal them back from the world and retreat back into her silence; but as the old adage goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Almost immediately, a sing-song voice trills back to her and Luthien swings her head toward the sound, her eyes falling on the daughter of Bob, the reason she’d found herself here in the first place.
’You mean the reason we’re stuck here? You don’t seem in any hurry to be leaving, and who were you hoping for, anyways? That bastard you followed here like a ninny? Pah!’
And so what if she had been hoping to see him again? He must’ve wondered where she’d gone off to, and even if he hadn’t, who else did she know here? Well, the girl wasn’t entirely unfamiliar, so at least there was that. ”Stormcloud friend? Oh.. Oh!” At first, she hadn’t realized that Talya had been calling her for her color. How embarrassing, she thinks, choosing instead to focus on the peculiar question Talya had presented, her eyes widening with curiosity and maybe a bit of concern. ”Hunting...dead leaves? I did not know that was a thing, to be perfectly honest.”
Of course, this only makes her feel rude - small talk has never been her strong suit and now she feels completely out of her element, a fish tossed to shore and flopping about, gills gasping for relief. In an attempt to salvage her composure and sweep any rudeness under the rug, she continues on, her voice climbing an octave as she struggles to quell the blooming anxiety that seemed to hang like a dark shadow over her head. ”Perhaps you can show me the best leaves for hunting, and we can make a sport of it?”
’A sport of it? What is wrong with you? We should be leaving and here you are, fraternizing with the enemy. What’s next, stupid girl? Are you trying to get us killed?’
It is very hard to keep her mouth shut as the parasite rears its ugly head, especially at its cruel words toward the cheerful, smiling girl who’d done nothing to deserve the title of enemy. Her lips purse tightly together and she tosses her head, trying her best to shake the sound from her mind. Go away, she wills it, teeth gritting tight as she struggles to assemble a barrier to block it out. It never works, but she tries, nonetheless. ”In fact, I think dead-leaf hunting is exactly what I need to cheer me up,” she muses, finally cracking a smile to the young girl, the daughter of Bob. ”I’m Luthien, though you can call me stormcloud, if you like.”