Oh, gosh. Kids! Non-human kids, even! That rarest of rarities! Back home, it was always just her and Bella tearing around the place. There was an... understanding. Peers would introduce unacceptable variables into her education and development; Bella, lacking a familial agenda or contact with any of Nero’s courtiers, was the only one Nero could trust.

So you can imagine Redana’s nervous energy, much like a dog suddenly presented with a baby. If she’s Zeus’s hound, that’s a close comparison: all overly-exaggerated delicacy and care with how she handles them crawling on her, like she’s worried one will jump into her hands and poke their eyes on her fingers, or she’ll step on someone, and then she’ll be seized by the Alced and thrown in jail for the rest of her life, which is a very very long time indeed, which is why she needs to make sure absolutely no harm comes to these kids. If a constellated dragon burst through those vast gates, Redana would attempt to suplex it then and there to protect the children.

This is the sort of place you’d expect to fight a dragon. It has the spires for it; the thick, imposing walls; the sense of secret and important things being hidden here for a dragon’s claws to dig up. This is the sort of place that makes Redana tense up for heroic deeds. The Alced can tell, and that’s why they have weapons and give her looks, wondering if she intends to steal some treasure from them, or declare herself their new ruler, or even grab babies and start eating them, having been some sort of baby-eating jungle octopus all along[1]!

So when Lacedo gestures for her to duck through into what once was the central citadel, she does her best to disentangle herself from the crowd, and only looks a little sheepish as she repeatedly sets children down and tries to thank them for their hospitality and, wow, yes, that [i]is[/i] a rock, it’s a very nice rock, and, eeep, no, we don’t poke there, please, even if you think it’s simply hysterical, and okay, goodbye, goodbye, see you—

And then, somehow, miraculously, she’s inside, trying to adjust her eyes to a mixture of sunlight bursting through narrow slit-windows and mottled shadows. She reaches out for Lacedo’s hand on instinct.

***

[1]: being comprised mainly of carefully bundled tentacles to create the illusion of being humanoid. Your common-or-garden baby-eating jungle octopus isn’t nearly good enough at that to stand up to close inspection, though; even at a distance, you can tell something’s wrong, though you might assume it’s drunkenness or some sort of avant-garde body mod.