Private Finished Appreciation

"This will be fine. I ate before coming out here," Regina assured him. Mostly, she just didn't want to make him pay for her food.

"My instincts tell me she won't care, and she'll keep trying to eat me. Especially me. I'm... probably the tastiest. Most of my siblings want to eat me too, and they've been eating each other too. There's only a couple dozen of us left."

Finally, the real reason why she wanted Jackal to like her. Or one of a handful of reasons, anyway.

There was an incredibly hopeful look on Regina's face. A sweet-smelling yellowish fluid pooled in the corner of her eye. She was having a lot of feelings right now - she could kiss him right now!

But a thought occurred to her, adding anxiety to this already volatile mix of emotions. "W-what if I don't... get the chance to let you know? Centipedes are ambush predators. I looked it up. She might just..." Regina took a deep breath and a long sip of her too-sweet tea. She was much more afraid of her mother than any of her other siblings. Nasci might just... snatch her up, just like that. And she'd be gone, and that shop she wanted to open one day would never exist. But she wasn't sure what she was trying to ask for, or what she even should ask for.

Regina could tell she was making him uncomfortable. She was being so stupid, she was ruining this! She took another long sip of her tea to calm down. She had to keep cool.

"...Sorry I'm being... weird about this. It's just that my whole family is really weird and dangerous to me, and most of them live at the school too."

When Jackal's meat came, Regina stared at it for a little bit. "... Is it dumb that I thought it would literally be blue?"

She was going to drop the whole thing about her family, for now. She had gotten a lot more than she could have hoped for already.

Regina nodded, interested to learn something new about food. She found herself wondering if she would be able to cook meat like that. Would she even enjoy it? She knew Jackal would, at least, because of how his diet seemed to work.

Maybe she could make this less weird by trying to make more normal conversation. Asking about blue meat was a good first step. She wiped the sweet tears from her eyes and thought of something interesting to say. "Well... I have to eat mostly sugar. and sweet things. I think it took too long to convince my caregivers I wasn't just picky. And... I'm mostly made of honey, I think. Look." She showed him the paper napkin she used to wipe her eyes - it just had some kind of honey on it.

"Did you go to school here?"

"Maybe I can convince them to let me quit school early," she said. "I just kind of know a lot of stuff, too."

They continued small talk for a little while. Mostly, Regina talked about things of no real consequence while Jackal ate. She talked a little bit about her powers, a little bit about classes, some less-terrifying stories about her life so far.

Eventually she decided that she had to drop this on him too: "So... I also have a confession to make. When I was a lot younger, and like half as tall as I am now, I did something kind of weird. They asked me for a last name on a form, and I didn't know what to do, so... I started putting my last name down as 'Jackal.'"

Hopefully this wouldn't go over too poorly. She knew it was weird now, at least.