She blushes and nods. "Yep," she replies, popping the p.

He smiles wistfully. "You're real cute, you know that?"

She blushes and snuggles into Torok's side as they walk.

"Cute cute cute!" Tiny squeeze. He should maybe try to find a solution to the thing where his armor makes him so much less cuddly.

This is not making her blush any less. That was probably Torok's plan, though. But she'll retaliate by kissing his cheek again.

One who kisses Torok's cheek must reckon with the consequences!

...the consequences are mostly adorable spluttering.

Adorable spluttering has terrible consequences of its own: sappy grins.

A terrible consequence indeed! Mostly because if the two of them keep gazing adoringly at each other on their way up Fortune Street, they're going to walk straight into a wall.

Sable very nearly does! "Whoop!"

She stumbles back from the wall a little bit and brushes herself off.

"Okay, we need to get ahold of ourselves." But first he kisses her on the forehead.

She blushes and smiles up at him. "Oops. Guess there are risks to spending too much time thinking about how cute you are rather than looking where I'm going."

"I can't complain, I was doing the same damn thing. C'mon, the orphanage is just up ahead."

She grins and follows along cozily beside him, doing a somewhat better job of paying attention to their surroundings.

The orphanage does indeed loom up ahead, just as haphazard a pile of attempted architecture as it was when they first saw it. Torok steps up to the door and pulls a sturdy chain attached to a fist-sized iron bell, which goes CLANG quite as though it's meant to cut through the din of countless children.

Heavy footsteps, and then the door swings open.

The woman answering it is heavyset, neither short nor tall, with a cow's face and a cow's ears and a cow's big brown eyes. Short, downy fur covers her body, patterned in big black-and-white splotches, and two pairs of big pink breasts are barely contained by her slightly ragged halter top. Her black-and-white hair is braided back in neat, tight rows, and her thick arms are currently full of a small ugly bundle of disheveled fluff that's trying to jump up and bite her ears.

"Torok!" she says, breaking into a relieved smile. "C'mon in. This your friend? Feather, down—" Feather disregards this instruction and stretches out gangly wing-arms in an attempt to capture the all-important ear.

"Yeah. Rose, this is Sable. Sable, Rose. And Feather, apparently." Feather screeches on cue.

"Pleasure to meet you, Rose!" And then she beams down at the fluffy bundle. "And you as well, Feather."

Sable looks back up at Rose, continuing to smile. "Yep, I'm the strange girl who lucked out and attached herself to this sweetheart," she continues, patting Torok's shoulder through the armor. "Is there still work to be done tonight, or did Torok handle everything already?"

"There's always work to be done." She shoves the door a little wider with her hip, grabbing Feather's wings and pulling them down. "Had dinner yet? Want to help serve it?"

"We ate on the way over, but I'd be glad to help serve dinner"

"Great! This way!" Feather tries to lunge for Sable's face; Rose pulls her back. "Feather! She'll settle down a bit once she's got a meal in her, I hope..."

Rose, still encumbered, leads the way through the orphanage's mazelike interior toward the dining hall.

"Excitable cutie."

Hailey may prefer not to front here for a bit, but that's okay.

They cheerfully follow to the dining hall, paying attention to the route and where anything important seems to be.

It's hard to discern which things are important in the general unlabeled chaos. At one point a half-dozen goblin toddlers burst out of a door up ahead and charge down the hall into the distance, and Rose just stops for a second to let them by and then keeps walking. Not long after that, they make it to the dining hall, which is a long narrow L-shaped room packed with rickety tables and wrapped around a bustling kitchen. Rose detaches Feather and passes her off to a teenage catgirl who gets her settled at a table, then grabs a bowl of stew from the kitchen and plonks it in front of the screeching toddler, explaining over her shoulder, "Get settled at the big pots, with either a ladle or a stack of bowls, serve the kids as they come up."

"Okay!"

She'll settle in front of this pot here, and start ladling up bowls of food. Eat up, kids!

Torok parks himself next to her to pass her the bowls and hand them back out.

And Rose double-checks that all three enormous cauldrons of stew have at least one pair stationed and waiting, then starts banging the big ugly bell in the middle of the dining hall.

Children stream in from every direction, some on their own, some herded by caretakers. They squabble and fight in the lines, but it isn't Sable or Torok's job to get them to settle down; that's the work of Rose and the other permanent staff, who roam the lines pulling apart any physical altercations and firmly reminding everyone to stay quiet and move slowly.