Melanie's stronger than she looks, and Niko lighter, so he's no burden. He is a bit overlarge for his current perch, though. He's wary of changing his shape - he really does feel as if he's in some sort of stand-off with this horse - but he does shrink just a little, subtly, to make them both more comfortable. Given how closely he's huddled to Melanie, anyway, it might just look as if he's flattening his feathers.

Melanie, for her part, is instantly fascinated by Mal. A ship's captain. It's only since she came through the rift that she's begun to truly appreciate how many interesting jobs people had before the Breakdown. She knows little about ships of any kind - in retrospect, it doesn't really surprise her that the hungry children's education was a bit thin when it came to methods of long-distance travel. For their teachers, long-distance travel wasn't a thing that happened much, and if it did, it was by helicopter or heavily armored vehicles. She imagines a 'Firefly' as some sort of oceangoing vessel, the sort of thing that disappeared after the Breakdown. And while she's aware that she's probably not picturing the right thing, her face lights up at the prospect of learning something new - not out of a book, but straight from someone who knows.

"Never," she says, shaking her head. "We don't have ships anymore, where I'm from. What does Serenity look like?"