[To her credit… Hayame does listen. Even though a part of her almost wants to interrupt, the hurt child she’d once been raging that whatever suffering a half-breed human might undergo was nothing compared to that of a jinba… she stays silent and she just listens.

It is not so easy for her to imagine, not based in her own reality. She comes from a land where almost all humans looked the same, and the ones that did have slightly different cultures… well, they’d been largely subsumed by now beneath the crush of “humans”. Just the one race, who looked the same and thought mostly the same… and then jinba, who were easy targets for hatred and discrimination.

There was no hiding what she was. No human who could not look upon her and know instantly more than she wished about herself and her background and her status. Here… it was different in some ways, but-

She finally looks at him. Just a little. Perhaps it would be hard, in a different world.]

No, not everyone does.

[But he sounded… sincere, for once, in contrast to his usual flippant demeanor. And she finds, as angry as she had been… that she shifts slightly beneath him, loosening up the tight cross of her arms just slightly as she… seems to make herself comfortable (or as comfortable as one could be) back in the bed of hay leaning against the wall of the stall.

Abandoning a fellow outsider… Hah.]

… You are warm, at the very least. Continue to make yourself useful in that way and I will not throw you out.