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"Here's the game..."

Eralgais straddled the top rung of the wherry pen with a bucket tucked against his leg, half full of food for the hungry birds who watched him, expectantly, waiting for the first handful of the stuff to rain down on them from the heavens above.

He held up a particularly large pellet of the feed. "I'm going to toss this at you, and you're going to try to catch it." That was a reasonable ask, wasn't it? He said it like it was a perfectly normal thing to do. "If you don't think you can catch it, move out of the way so it doesn't hit you. If you get hit three times, then we switch sides and you can have a turn throwing feed at me." He grinned brilliantly. "It's like practice for the future. If you can dodge or catch wherry feed, there's nothing to worry about when it comes to Thread. And if you can't do either," he shrugged. "The wherries still get fed. Ready?"

Oof. He thought he'd been pretty clear. Hadn't he? But she was staring at him like he'd sprouted a second head and spoken gibberish. Ah well. Time to try again.

He slowed down a little, but kept smiling as he said, "It's a game, You know games, right? So I'm going to toss this at you..." He bounced the pellet lightly on his palm. "And you're going to dodge. Or catch it. Like Thread." Wait, maybe that was the problem. "I mean, you don't want to catch Thread, but you get what I mean." He was sure he was making sense.

"And if you get hit three times, then it's your turn to throw. I'm just trying to make feeding wherries a little more fun."

He dropped the pellet in his hand. It was immediately swarmed by the birds, which probably looked a little more like danger than fun.

"Ready?"

Blink. Blink blink.

Whoa.

To his credit, Eralgais didn't pick another pellet out of the bucket. He certainly didn't throw anything at her. If she wasn't in the mood to play, he wasn't going to get himself in trouble trying to snap her out of her Mood.

He did swing his leg over the fence and hop down into the pen with her, nudging wherries -- who still hadn't been fed and were still watching the dimglow with the pail with bird-brained levels of anticipation -- out of the way as he got closer.

"It wasn';t going to hurt or anything," he reassured the girl. "I mean, if I wanted to hurt you or something. I would have just bounced one off your head and not warned you." He grinned. See, he was being thoughtful. "Don't have to snap at me before I've even done anything snapworthy."