Curate, connect, and discover
Pearl is confused.
This is not a new thing: the hermits get up to bewildering shenanigans all the time, and with more people? It was only a recipe for disaster.
The new world was confusing too! With all the animals walking on two legs, the dodos and the goblins and all the other things in the new world, one was bound to get confused.
But Pearl knows how to go with the flow when weird things start happening, and she knows how to bounce off the confusion to create more chaos. She accepts the facts that there are rideable hogs and a llama barkeep and a toy sheriff with relative ease, and when hermitopia starts up she simply adds to the chaos.
This is a different kind of confused though. This one started off as a nagging worry that's only grown worse, and she can no longer ignore what's going on no matter how much she wants to. The problem is she can't figure out what's going on.
The God at stratos acted as if she belonged in the pantheon of the gods, the hero of the sanctuary greeted her by name with such reverence, and the bard called her a goddess and talked as if she had personally wronged him. She went through the weird rift in her cleaner lady getup and she came out wearing a dress, there was a statue of her and there were several murals.
But those things weren't the problem. The problem was that it felt right. She felt as if she belonged up in stratos, among the gods and the clouds. She felt right when she walked past the statues and the murals, and when she sat in the grass or walked in the stalks of wheat she felt stronger. And she met with Sausage and she felt far too much. She felt joy and sadness and hope and so much grief and laughter and she felt at home and she felt lost and she was so, so confused but he was a new person, a new face to meet and Keralis spoke well of him and first impressions matter and so at the time she had just shoved her emotions down to deal with later and greeted him as if she didn't already know him.
It was later now, and still nothing made sense and the wheat was still making her feel right strange and she was really regretting choosing to make the crop farms and she was couldn't figure out and she was so, so very confused.
But she was tired and the farm still had to be made, so she got up from the dirt and went to work.