He hadn't really expected to find Lina in Nohao; it took too long to get there even at his best traveling speed, and she was undoubtedly somewhere else by now. But he found a few young people along the way who were thirsting to get away from home even if it did mean cleaning or grooming animals or spending all day up to their shins in laundry soap. These he sent back to Sailoon for evaluation.

Anyway, it didn't take him so long to get there that he couldn't still follow her tracks. In fact, although the dust of her passage had long settled, the new ruts in the road where she and her companion had built up speed before tearing away had yet to be filled in. They had headed back east. Zel sighed, bought lunch at the most promising-looking restaurant, and promptly headed back without inquiring after the name of the chef.

He traced them to the foothills of the Kataart Mountains, near where Filia had set up shop, and noticed that their tracks went up the mountain, but not down. Good. He left a note for them at the bottom of the trail, telling Lina to meet him at Filia's house without failure on pain of wanting to die of regret when she found out about the missed opportunity, and headed into the village.

Filia and her sons (he hadn't met them in person, but he and Filia had been sending occasional letters back and forth for years) weren't home, but her slaveringly loyal henchtroll and foxminion still recognized him (his face not being forgettable), and let him in. He told them that hopefully Lina was on her way, and after a brief wince they put his things in the boys' room instead of the guest room. Knowing from painful experience that he didn't want to eat anything they prepared, he asked them to recommend somewhere.

The place they recommended was actually one he had seen coming in, although he hadn't thought much of it. It was varnished instead of painted, and so palely that its walls looked like raw wood. The sign had a fizzing test tube painted on it, held over a candle by a rubber-gloved hand in a white sleeve. He frowned at it quizzically, shrugged, and went in. At least there were plenty of people inside.

The moment he stepped inside, it was as though someone had unstrapped a large boulder from his shoulders. He'd learned, over the years, to take people's reactions to his appearance more of less in stride, but in here no one so much as blinked, probably because at every third table or so sat at a traveler or two who looked, in their own ways, stranger than him. The waitstaff was unhesitatingly polite in such an offhand and casual manner that he almost felt at ease, the smells all around made his lizard brain sit up and whimper, and the overall cleanliness of the place was the final blow. He'd never seen anyplace but a magic lab or his own bedroom look quite so scrubbed, and it managed to be, unlike his bedroom, more airy than sterile.

It was all very informal. The waiters were all wearing identical tan aprons, but they were wearing them over street clothes, and the unframed pictures on the wall looked like they'd probably been done by local schoolchildren. It appeared that the place had been deliberately built to have acoustics that ate noise for lunch.

There wasn't any menu that he could hold in his hands; it was scrawled on a blackboard with colored chalk and happy flourishes. As he was scanning it, someone in an apron came out of the kitchen and bellowed, "Now hear this! We are out of strawberries. There are no more. Stop asking! The fruit tart will be replaced by a berry flan. Look, I'm changing it on the menu now!"

Zel chewed on a smile and, out of curiosity ordered the 'weird egg and veggie rice dish from Ralteague, we don't know what it is but Sol was working on it all last week and we like it now.'

"Oh, excellent choice, sir!" his waiter enthused. It was different when she said 'sir' than when anyone from Sailoon said it, and he didn't mind as much. She was just being polite, not obsequious. "Will you be paying in money, labor, or recipes?"

This too was unoffensive; it appeared to be a routine question, and so when he inquired it was without an edge.

"Well, sir," she said, rocking back on her heels like it was a prepared speech, "as you've noticed, we're right on the highway, and we get all kinds of people passing though. Some of them can't afford much, but they have to eat, too, and since we all share the work we like to nab anyone else to do the more routine stuff whenever we can. So we give customers the option of paying with labor for part or all of their meal. Also, if you know any recipes we don't and you're willing to share, we'll give you a very reasonable credit account, enough for a couple of meals." She beamed happily, and he peered suspiciously at her roots, looking for purple that wasn't there. "We're the Experiment! And so far it works pretty well!"

"I see. I'll just pay. Who's Sol?"

"Oh, Solace? He's the chef. It's his place; it was his idea."

"Hm," he mused. "I might want to meet him."

"He's not here today… I'll go get your food!"

Even her walk bounced, and in here she fit right in. He took careful notice. It was unusual for people of her class to be that happy about their work without having a sadistic edge. Maybe it was an effect of proximity with one of the last of the dragons (a reasonable hypothesis, if Filia had, like Amelia, mostly grown out of being a melodramatic spazz, since proximity with the polar opposite of dragons was invariably stressful), or maybe the chef was worth stealing.

The egg dish came, he took a bite, and the next thing he knew he was coming back from a happy place to the identical wolfish grins of Lina Inverse and her buddy Naga, sitting right across from him.

"Good, huh?" said Lina.

"Gleep," he replied intelligently.

"Got your note, but we figured the troll would send you here," Lina explained while her friend opened her mouth and howled like a demonic hyena, possibly by way of greetings.

"That's nice," he said, and fell over, clutching his sensitive ears.

When it was over, he crawled back out from under the table to find that his food was gone. He looked at Lina blankly, and signaled the waitress. "She ate my dinner. Get me another one and put the first one on her tab."

The waitress immediately clonked Lina over the head with her tray in a familiar manner. "You can't get away with that just because Sol isn't here, Miss Inverse," she scolded. "And don't think we won't tell him when he gets back!"

"Yeah, yeah," Lina sighed, as though it were all to be expected, and tossed her a silver.

"I'll be right back with your dinner, sir," she placated Zel, and bounced off again.

"You know this Solace?" Zel asked, somewhat awed. If the man could keep Lina in check, he definitely wanted words with him.

"Gyih," Lina grimaced. "Filia's kid. The one who didn't used to be Valgaav. He's…"

"Yummy?" Naga suggested, leering.

"Weird," Lina finished. "Good shamanist. Great cook. I won't prejudice you. You gonna finish that?"

Zel looked at her cross-eyed. "It hasn't even gotten here yet."

"So?"

"So yes."

"Damn!" She snapped her fingers cheerfully. "So, what's this quest I can't miss?"

"Actually," he said, eyeing the waitress hungrily, "you may be too late already. Amelia needs a new cook."

"...Damn!"