The table was absolutely covered with food, more food than they could ever possibly hope to eat in one meal with ten of them there, much less only the five of them— and Janus’s parents were still scurrying through the kitchen with the last few dishes. It smelled heavenly. “Oh!” Janus’s mother spotted the two of them, then waved at Janus with a very recognizably come hither sort of gesture. “Help me with the roast duck, I need another pair of hands…”

Giving him a helpless look, Janus allowed himself to be dragged over to… whatever that was, leaving him alone for a moment in the whirling mess of things. Only for a moment though— it didn’t take long for his father to drift by and place a plate of dumplings on the table and strike up a conversation. “I haven’t met you yet. Mingtian, no?” He nodded, but the older man had already continued on without even glancing up at him. “You’ve a nice name. Meaning… something, something, luminous sky if I had to guess? It’s hard to tell, what with how often the language changes and then changes back on the whims of cultivators…”

“Bright sky,” he murmured in response, very deliberately leaving out the daoist part of the title. “It means bright sky.”

“A nice name indeed.” He gave him a shallow bow in belated greeting. “ I’m Starr, nice to meet you.”

“You too. If you don’t mind my curiosity, what do you do? Some sort of linguistics related thing?”

“No, that’s…” he sighed. “That’s just a hobby. There’s little place for Beixian-style linguistics study in East Saffron, these days…” for a long moment, he was quiet. “It was my grandfather’s great passion, to study the language of Beixian Port of Stars. We had— have— one of the most interesting languages on Aurelia, before…” the city had been utterly razed. “What with all the off-planet connections, you know? But! That’s too grim a topic for a festival day like today! Come, help me set the last little bit of stuff for the table and then we can talk on happier matters over a very happy feast.”

“Of course.” It didn’t take all that long— only a few amusing minutes, as Janus got pulled along by his mother and then his father fussed over the last few, smallest details. Then they called Aimi down and sat, and in silence for a moment looked out at the spread of delicious food before them, auras stained with an almost melancholy feel— if only just for a moment. Aimi didn’t understand, clearly, but Janus’s parents… clearly, they knew exactly what was going on.

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A brief moment for memory. Then, with a smile, Starr waved his hand towards the feast and bid everyone— “dig in! Food’s not going to eat itself!” Mingtian didn’t need to be told twice— everything looked incredible.

Janus picked out some sort of… breaded seafood dish, some dumplings, some… really just a whole bunch of food that Mingtian hadn’t seen in the city before. A bunch of really unhealthy

looking food at that. It was a feast though, so Mingtian supposed he could cut him some slack.

Tentatively, he reached out and grabbed some of the… calamari? It looked like calamari, which was pretty interesting. The last time he’d had that kind of food was back when he’d helped move the Order of the Fathomless Codex’s vault world when it’d come under attack from those squid things encroaching out of the Crystal Exclusion Zone…

In retrospect those couldn’t by any mortal standard be counted calamari, even if they had ended up eating a bunch of them. Fun times, though, even if it’d gotten a bit dicey once or twice.

This stuff was good, though. A perfect dichotomy between crunchy and chewy and buttery that he couldn’t help but appreciate. “What is this?” Maybe Lily would appreciate something like this come the end of the semester…

Janus grinned. “Beixian food! A bit of a pain to get seafood in East Saffron, but it’s totally worth it— this is the best stuff.” Even Aimi seemed to be loving the food, though she very particularly gave the mussels and clams a wide berth. Even Janus didn’t dare try and eat the raw oysters, which was a shame, because Mingtian thought they were rather high quality for seafood this far from the actual sea.

“I’m glad you like the food— you should have seen Janus earlier!” Starr laughed, and Janus blushed furiously. “He was so worried that you wouldn’t like seafood that he had us cook the duck— though maybe that was just an excuse to have one of his favorite foods, no?”

“It’s not that!” His mother raised an eyebrow his way, and he wilted. “Okay, well, it’s not totally that, alright? I just wanted to make sure that our guest would enjoy his night with us,” he transparently and obviously lied. Everyone else just laughed. Even Aimi, though Mingtian got the impression she didn’t really know what she was laughing at.

So it went.