Shade Touched

32. Food

They were at it for a few hours before Shadow had to stop to deal with some of her bodily needs. She was both hungry and in need of relieving herself. Normally she would just run off into the woods for a while to address both of those issues, but that wasn't really possible here in the village. Luckily, over the course of her questioning, she'd learned a whole slew of new things, and one of them was definitely relevant.

So, I'm hungry, and I need to poop, should I use that? She asked, pointing at the chamber pot under the bed.

Annie laughed and showed her how to use the device, and after a little finagling, her business was done. Next was food.

How do we get food here? Shadow asked. Annie was already getting ready to leave and she wanted to know before getting cut off from her ability to write.

"Well, for you, we'll be heading to a butcher. They butcher animals, which is a way of saying they cut animals apart into different specific parts and sell them."

Annie's face fell a little as she explained.

"Not my favorite place to visit, but it's where we need to go to get you a good meal, my little carnivore." She said it with a smile despite her dislike of the place, giving Shadow a quick rub on the head.

Shadow had learned about the term carnivore over the course of their travels. Apparently, her theory about the non-meat being bad for her was true. Shadelings were "obligate carnivores" which meant she ate meat, and only meat. She could handle eating plants a little bit, but too much would make her sick.

Apparently for shadelings (or maybe just her, it was hard to check), 'too much' was really not much at all. She'd tried to eat a little bit of Annie's or Jonas's meal a couple of times, because they smelled so interesting, but she would always end up with an upset stomach. One bite was all it took to make her ill.

She'd decided to restrict herself to just licking their food if it smelled good after that, but Annie had politely told her that humans found eating licked food gross, and she didn't want to waste food just because Shadow wanted to lick it. That had been the end of her forays in human plant-based foodstuffs.

Instead, when Shadow was curious about how a meal smelled, Annie would cook up whatever meat Shadow had managed to find for herself and season it the same way as the human meals. That was basically the best of both worlds. She really loved eating seasoned meat. It didn't necessarily taste better than it did raw, but it was a great way to mix things up. After eating the same kind of rabbit for a few days in a row it was nice to change up the flavors a bit.

She was a little concerned with all the coins Annie was using for her though. Annie had paid for the room, and now she was going to pay for her food. She appreciated it but wondered how she could pay her back. She hoped the coins weren't too hard to get.

Over the course of the journey, she'd made herself useful scavenging up herbs and berries for the humans, and could feed herself just fine, but if everything in the village worked off these coins...

She would need to come up with a new way to help if this was going to be a regular thing.

"Let's go." Annie said, after getting her clothing adjusted to her satisfaction.

Shadow would have to ask about it later.

Annie opened the door and just about ran into Jonas.

"Oh! You're back! We were just heading out to grab some food for this one." She mentioned, gesturing toward Shadow.

"Good. Mind if I join ya? Just let me drop this off first." He said, tapping his much fuller-looking backpack. "Should have enough to last us till we get to Leeside." He glanced around for a second, checking to see if anyone was nearby before looking at Shadow. "Even got some salted meat for you. You may not be able to hunt as freely now that we're leaving the forest."