There are very few things in Phaendar that remind Shiru of the closest thing to those places that she has called<em>home</em>in the past. It was a small and sleepy town that hardly had any people in it. It was strange for her in a way; she was used to being lost in the crowds of Katheer and later Absalom. After all: what is one more Keleshite urchin when you have fascinating traders with their wondrous wares? Or one more Keleshite student of the arcane when you have adventurers with all their glorious tales of derring-do, ready to leap the chasm and brave the Test of the Starstone? When the competition to catch the eyes of people is that high, it is nearly impossible to stand out.<br/><br/>In rustic, provincial Phaendar though? Two foreign-born and comely scholars were bound to catch more than a few gazes. Two foreign-born and comely scholars brought back clearly somewhat traumatized by their failures by the Chernasardo Rangers only drew attention all the more so. Their recovery in town went well enough and while their mission of exploring ruins in the Fangwood went decidedly unaccomplished, the Shiru at least found herself growing quite comfortable in Phaendar. With her careful deflections, she even managed to mostly hide that seed of helplessness that was sown inside of her.<br/><br/>The day of the festival marked an escape to all of this. The bright colored streamers and fluttering flags caught her eyes with all the delight that she had always had as a children for such things that had always seemed out of her grasp. Music and ballads that she had never been able to hear fills her ears with a new sense of wonder. It marked a rejuvenation that she had desperately needed in a way and with the large crowds, she no longer had to be worried that she was constantly being pointed out as the “woman who was rescued by the rangers.” So Shiru was all too happy to drown herself in the sound of music and a bustling crowd, to lose herself in the smells of fresh bread and carefully crafted leathers, to  briefly revel in the tastes of sweet honey mead and jerky made from local game. She smiles again, truly, allowing the failures of Shiru Tasmi to fade away.<br/><br/>She almost felt a little guilty that she had snuck out before Ayanah could follow in the morning.<em>Surely Ayanah will catch up with me if she really wishes</em>, Shiru thinks to herself. It proves not to be true, until the evening where the masses converge to the Taproot Inn. She lies to herself about how much of this is not wanting to think of the fact that she is a Tasmi right now.<br/><br/>The Taproot Inn has had more than enough honey mead flowing for Shiru to have had more drinks than her rather petite frame would be particularly good at handling. If she had been more careful, she likely would have refused more of the lovely drink... but she had never been one for refusing something so wonderfully sweet, so wonderfully different than the bitter food and dirty wander that was her childhood. So she maintains a not-so-subtle sway upon the top of a bar stool with the beat of the music outside, a smile that is broader than normal upon her face, the lightly tanned skin having long since taken a slight flush to it.<br/><br/>“A story you say? Let me tell you the story about how Shiru Tasmi decided to take the Test of the Starstone!” The Keleshite woman proceeds to weave a tail from her childhood of a mistake made when they had received a Christmas gift of allowance from their patron and she had spend the entirety of it on a bottle of elven wine out of insatiable curiosity. The tale continues with how she made the decision that this was clearly her lucky day and she was meant to take the Test of the Starstone, managed to confuse a nobleman's manor for the Starstone Cathedral after getting lost in the streets no less than three times on actual way, ended up working herself up into such a fervor that she didn't think about how said Cathderal did not have a large iron fence around it, and scaled said large fence in her inebriated state only to tumble off and right into the fountain that the nobles had put together. The thing to finally piece together to the girl that this was not the Starstone Cathedral? When an irate noble decided that the best thing to deal with a pesky intruder was to let his pack of angered hunting poodles chase the girl off. Shiru even feigns a little wince at that part, kicking up one of her feet and lifting up the cloth legs of her pants to show a scar from a decidedly canine bite on her leg. “Still have the marks from that one... of course, I suppose it is better than falling into a bottomless pit. Guess I should be glad my sense of direction was so awful back then.”