[h3][u][b][color=fff200]Aerarius[/color][/b][/u][/h3]

"Your clothes appear to be the correct size, " Aerarius assessed.  "Although I suppose the best way to know is to simply wear them for a while."  Clothing wasn't really an issue for him anymore.  The closest thing the automaton had to such a thing nowadays was his exterior plating.  He didn't usually think to hard about it because when he did, he'd come to weird conclusions.  "However, depending on whether or not your new body will grow, you may eventually need to resize them regardless."

"As for the forest, yes, both Byron and myself seemed to pick up on that worrying detail," he answered her second question.  "It's possible to accelerate the growth of a forest using magic, but this place...it's too natural looking, too sparse of civilization.  If need be we could approximate the time elapsed by felling one of the trees and counting the rings in its trunk," he suggested, his Natural Philosophy courses finally paying off, "but Byron and the others have probably found more precise information about what the date is."  Aerarius' face was incapable of showing worry, but his movements and tone of his voice betrayed a concerned uncertainty.

"But from what we've seen already," he continued, "I think it's safe to say that we woke up far later than expected.  It'd also explain the degree of your transformation, if we were in there for centuries rather than merely years or decades."  There wasn't much else he could tell the sage, because there wasn't much else he knew.f  When the others returned from the town, they would be able to give a more comprehensive account of the group's- and the world's- situation.

[@Raineh Daze]