They dwarfs did not even have to be a few days old to start reeking; they already stank terribly of sweat and shit. Valerian sucked in a breath and held it before he was quick to pull out the arrow in one, smooth go. In the background, he heard Mela’s continued twittering. Had humans always been this chatty? The last time he had graced the company of a human had been more than a century ago, and the woman he had met then had been of a much more quite nature. This fair-haired lady though, seemed to be cut from a very different cloth. 

Of course, any requests for his name were deliberately ignored. The third and last arrow was just by the blonde, which stopped him from going forward briefly. She may look petit and rather harmless in her elaborate clothing, but a woman would always be a woman, and he did not wish to have her little toothpick to sword slicing him up because of a carefree approach. Naturally, it was the paranoid part of his brain that did most of the irrational thinking by now. Nothing could stop the suspicion though, as he had learned that he would rather take it slow and be careful than to rush in and get hurt. Becoming wounded while on the road was always a hassle, and always a balance between life and death when treatment was so far away. 

Valerian studied Mela from afar with care and reconsidered the approach for one moment until he finally made up his mind and he slowly strode toward her to retrieve the arrow. He took it without uttering a word of gratitude. Instead he decided to be generous enough to bless her with an answer to her growing magnitude of questions. 

“Both, I assume.” He replied lowly, dodging the need of giving up his intended destination. As surely noticed, he wasn’t all too good with people. Whatever social skills he once had possessed were gone with the wind; leaving only an angry, paranoid traveller behind after all those years of sheer solitude. 

“What about you, are you going or coming from somewhere?” He shoved back the question to her direction. Suddenly, a small object flew through the air and he was quick to catch it with surprising ease. And as he opened his clothed hand around it, the sight surprised him somewhat. A half carrot that did not look like a whole lot and it would certainly not satisfy the painful starvation, but it would keep death at bay for a little longer. The small piece of orange could be viewed as two things; either as a token for gratitude for the spectacle that had gone down, or it was currency for something else. 

”[i]Saesa omentien lle?[/i]” At the glimpse of her pointy ears, the old elven words jumped swiftly from his tongue with the strong undertone of surprise. The phrase was hard to translate to the common language, but he was basically asking if he knew her; vaguely questioning if they were of the same kind. As elves, they were far beyond their protected realm and to stumble upon a friend so far away from home was a rare occurrence. And with such a sudden and unexpected discovery, the piece of carrot and the nagging hunger was momentarily forgotten as he almost impatiently awaited a response.