Honest, Reflection, Time

There was a lot going on in Shiro's head as she took a moment to relax.

The practical Aspen and the well traveled Ezma had gone off together to shop for the party as the Dwarven settlement slowly returned to life.

Lorna and Willow were seeking mounts for "With a fourth Champion freed and the scale of diaster that befell the Dwarves, it would be prudent to make all haste to the clear out the last four seals."

Leaving Shiro with not much to do today. Ostensibly she was supposed to be trying to determine the composition of each group for maximum spread, yet there was only some many times she could rearrange every body before it got frustrating.

They needed at least one champion on each team, which meant that Willow, Hassium, Granite and Shiro could not be in the same group.

BUT Hassium had admitted that they no longer had their powers as a Champion and Granite had an ever growing list of things to research so finding out if those powers could come back was not as high a priority as figuring out if Shiro had to be present to right the balance and break the crystal.

If she had to be there every time that changed the nature of the mission and it might be faster to drop down to just herself and one other, which had the same issue as Hassium having no powers:

Shiro would have to choose which people would be last on the list to get help, and they may be dead or worse by the time the party could get there.

She sighed, wondering if trading the weight of her parent's expectations for a literal world's worth of trouble.

Looking around at the beautiful grotto park she had wandered into she decided it had been worth it. Though with a chuckle she realized if she had still been playing at being the man everyone had thought she was, she would never have paused to consider the beauty of anything.

Especially not this park.

She had thought after the land of Slimes and the tunnels they had skulked about to find Granite that 'you seen one cave you have seen them all' was going to be the applicable rule.

Yet this cave had an elegant grace to it, just enough work had been done to 'tame and civilize' it without detracting from what naturally drew the eye. It did not have the riot of chemically induced colors that the land of Slime produced, but despite that simplicity the care and attention that went into it spoke volumes.

As Shiro relaxed to the sound and sight of trickling water she noticed something else that had been bothering her, pushed to the side because it was a familiar discomfort that some part of her had decided took a backseat to the press of world changing decisions she found herself having to make.

Her body was bothering her again. It was all well and good to talk things through with Hassium and reach a decent psychological place, but even in Japan her body had been fully female despite the lies and fraud her parents had committed to hide that fact.

Upon reincarnating the lies had become a reality, and now she did not know what to do about it. With her desire and the support of others to no longer play along with the lie it was harder and harder to ignore the discrepancy.

A soft humming brought her out of her thoughts as Granite paced a trail separated by some sort of hedge plant.

"Granite?' Shiro called out and the nine foot Champion paused in his walk and seemed to focus on the world around him.

He lit up at the sight of Shiro "Why hello miss Shiro." and started coming around the hedges to sit on the bench next to her.

" Aren't you supposed to be doing research right now?" Shiro asked, a bit put out by the feeling that Granite was already not pulling his weight.

He shrugged "In our schools it is highly stressed that one must take frequent breaks so the mind can process and the eyes can rest. Would you like a sandwich?"

He proffers said sandwich and as Shiro takes it out of politeness her stomach growls treasonously. Granite chuckles and then pulls a blue capsule from a small for Dwarves airtight container before popping it down followed by a bit of a sandwich.

Intrigued Shiro ponders if she should ask about it, after all what if it some medication to manage some particularly embarrassing condition.

Then again it is the first instances she has seen of anything remotely resembling pharmacology from her old world, with all the medicines she had been exposed to in this world being more akin to holistic traditional medicines beefed up with mage-craft and used in combat triage.

Curiosity won out, "Mr, Granite,' she asked and then continued when he turned his attention to her 'What was that you took just now?"

She is about to apologize when she sees him seem reluctant, "Well, did Willow or Hassium ever refer to me as Marble?" He inquires right as Shiro is about to apologize for asking such a forward question.

She nods and continues "Well, that was my name until quite recently, it took me a while to figure out and oddly that dream state the unbalance crystal put me in gave me more time to thing and was less tortuous than the other two have reported.

I suppose that is because I was already imbalanced when I went in."

Shiro leaned forward at that, as it described very closely the sense she had gotten when she entered the gender change barrier back in the land of Slimes.

"So.' Granite continued 'I realized that Marble was not who I was and now I take these little things to,' he brings the bottle out and rattles it 'to bring my physical reality into balance with the internal."

He looks at Shiro closely, "Hassium told me a bit about your plight, and I hope it is not too forward of me to suggest it since we are different people, or maybe you are content with how things are, but if you would like I can do introductions for you to the alchemist who makes these?"

Shiro almost burst with joy, gratitude, and fear that this was to good to be true.