A fox briskly trots down an empty road, looking to all the world like it knows precisely where it's going.
The fox's ears perk up, and it looks at him with a pair of intelligent hazel eyes. Do foxes typically have eyes of that color? It's very striking.
Its tail lashes, and the fox turns and hops ever-so-gracefully into the bushes by the road. Apparently it's not feeling very social. Perhaps it's afraid of him.
He is not a very fearsome person, to all appearances. Well-dressed but unarmed, without a wizard's gem-studded rings or even a hedge-wizard's hodgepodge of silver. In some places it wouldn't be wise to walk around looking so invitingly harmless - his clothes don't speak of outrageous wealth, but they do speak of some - but around here, people tend to be kind to strangers.
When the fox jumps off the road, he pauses and gazes thoughtfully into the bushes after it.
A pair of eyes look back at him. They flick towards his hands, his neck, and his hip, as if the fox knows where possible signs of danger might be located. As if it's assessing him.
After a moment's study, it cautiously pokes its head out from the bushes it hides in. The fox isn't particularly well hidden, but one gets the impression it's not trying to be. It'd be awfully inconvenient to grab at it through the bushes.
"You're obviously not an ordinary fox," he says reasonably. "I can't imagine why someone would have turned a person into a fox or given a fox the mind - and eyes - of a person, but those are the obvious possibilities. Either way, it seems only polite to offer, since we're going the same way. I can take you as far as Tumbledown Pond, maybe farther if you turn out to be an agreeable travelling companion."
And in this way they end up at Tumbledown Pond not too much later.
As depicted on local maps, the road touches the side of the pond and then curves to the west rather than continue northwest into the rocky hills of which Tumbledown Hill is the most friendly and hospitable. The traveller stops at the bend.
"Well, here we are," he says. "And which way are you going?"
He strolls between the hills, along a trail that is only occasionally visible, until they come around a particularly tall and rocky cliff to find themselves almost at the foot of his tower.
It's a pretty impressive tower. Tall, fancy, lots of quality stonework. The rather large and imposing doors open silently at their approach.
Into the spacious and tastefully decorated front hall they go, then.
When the doors close behind him, he stretches, runs his hands through his hair, and smiles to himself, very much with the air of someone coming home after a long and stressful day. A shrug dislodges his bag from his shoulder; it vanishes on its way to the floor. He rubs his hands together, strides out into the middle of the mostly-empty room, and starts conjuring things out of thin air—small squares of pale wood, and a pen to mark them with. In only a few seconds, he's sitting on the floor in an awkward-looking sprawl which he seems to find very comfortable, writing all the letters of the alphabet onto wooden squares one by one.
Well. Well. Good!
... The fox definitely finds it difficult to stay annoyed at him when he's laboriously writing out every single letter of the alphabet onto wooden squares, just so it can maybe communicate with someone. There is a brief pause as it tries to keep hold of its annoyance, and then fails. With a slightly annoyed huff, the fox strides over to sit next to him and watch him work.
As he finishes each square, he blows on it gently to encourage the ink to dry and then sets it down on the floor letter side up. When he puts the last one down (and vanishes his pen), they form a neat half-circle all together, in alphabetical order. He scoots out of the middle of the circle and sits where he can see all the letters clearly, then gestures invitingly at them. "My memory's good enough that I think I can tell what you're saying if you just point to the letters," he says. "I'll let you know if it turns out I've overestimated myself."
"I meant as opposed to having started out as a fox and got the eyes and the mind later," he clarifies. "I suppose in a sense this way is more promising. It would take a truly bizarre level of dedication to learn how to turn people into foxes, but whoever did it was almost certainly a classically educated wizard using ordinary life magic. Turning a fox into a fox-shaped person is the sort of thing you can't do without first learning an obscure branch of necromancy."
"Sure."
He makes a gesture as though spreading an invisible tablecloth over the floor, and a tablecloth appears in his hands and unrolls neatly; the draft as it settles down pushes the last few letters of the alphabet out of place, and he absently taps them back into their neat half-circle, then starts pulling plates of food out of thin air. Bread, sausages, grilled fish - things one might reasonably guess a fox could eat, but nevertheless definitely human food.
She's a little surprised that he finds her this charming, but okay.
Soon enough, she eats her fill. She's a fox, it's not like she has a very large stomach. And, well, she's. Not been eating well for a while. She doesn't want to push it.
When she's finished, she asks, Now what?
It's closer to five minutes before he reappears.
"You have a box!" he says brightly. "And all the doors in the house will open and close if you tap them with your paw. Your room's this way, if you'd like to see it."
(He flutters his fingers at the remaining dishes of food, and they disappear.)
On their way out of the front hall, he flicks his fingers at the alphabet and vanishes it; when they arrive in her room, he flicks his fingers at the floor and the alphabet appears there.
It's a nice room. Obviously meant for human guests, but he's put in a cozy little blanket-lined box, with a pile of small pillows next to it in case she turns out to prefer that. There's a little water fountain on the floor in case she gets thirsty. The box and pillows and blankets and fountain all match the blue-and-silver theme of the room's other decor.
It's a very nice room. Isfain is apparently a talented interior decorator, in addition to a decent singer and a frighteningly powerful wizard. One wonders what unexpected skill he'll turn out to have next.
After about ten minutes, there's a strange noise from behind a tapestry hanging on the wall, and around the edges of the tapestry she can see the stone wall rippling like water and a wooden door appearing as though floating to the surface. The door opens, the tapestry vanishes, and Isfain steps through.
"There, all set," he says, theatrically dusting off his hands. "Do you need help with the bath or should I leave you to it?"
"Well, I didn't have a fox-sized bathroom," he says reasonably. "So if I had to make one anyway, I thought I might as well put it here."
The bathroom is small and cozy and has a fox-sized bath with what are probably magical fixtures, and pleasantly bland soaps, and soft fluffy towels stored at fox-reachable heights. The decor and the towels match the theme of her bedroom.
"...hmm? Oh," he says. "Nothing at all. If you left the room and went around to where the other side of that wall is, there wouldn't be a fox bathroom there. I think it's a linen closet but I might be misremembering the layout. I didn't replace anything to make the room, I just - made an extra bit of space and attached it here."
"Well, all right."
He sits down on the floor.
"Vanishing is probably the world's most neglected magical discipline; wizards look down on it because you don't need four years of study to get any good at it, and hardly anyone else knows how it works. But I like it. It's useful. And one of the first things you learn how to do with vanishing is - I suppose you could call it 'folding space'."
He pulls a small wooden hoop out of thin air, big enough for Aysilvetea to step through. Then he pulls another, identical hoop out of thin air. Then he puts the two hoops together, and spins them around to show her what they look like from all angles - just a perfectly ordinary pair of wooden hoops held together so they behave like one.
Then he pulls them apart, and turns them both so that what was the outward-facing side of each is now facing toward the fox. And... it's like he turned them into a pair of linked magical portals: when you look into one, you see out of the other. It's a little unsettling. Especially with how he did it so casually. Powerful magic is supposed to be more difficult than that.
"So that's how you make a door that leads to somewhere other than the other side of the wall it's in. With me so far?"
He taps one of the hoops to break the connection between them, then taps it again to vanish it, leaving him with only the first hoop; then he vanishes that too.
"And then you can also fold space in a different way, so that instead of making two places behave like they're the same place, you're making one place behave like it's bigger or smaller than it really is. The simplest trick is a box that's bigger on the inside."
He pulls a shallow wooden box out of thin air, opening the large square lid to show her that it's only a few inches deep; then he closes it, and runs his finger along the diagonal of the lid in an oddly precise movement, and opens it again, and now instead of being a few inches deep it's big enough for Aysilvetea to sit inside. The box doesn't seem to mind that in order to have that much space inside it, it would have to extend down into the floor. He picks it up and knocks on the bottom to demonstrate that it hasn't changed shape, then sticks his hand in to demonstrate that it really does have more space inside it than it used to.
He laughs. "Caught that, did you? Yes, they are. The way you do vanishing magic is by - thinking of what you want to do in a certain way, and linking it to a gesture or motion you intend to make, and then completing the gesture exactly as planned. The more difficult the magic you're trying to do, the more precisely you have to plan and execute the gesture. Which is why I think all wizards who are serious about the craft should learn sleight of hand, and probably also some acrobatics, but for some reason they consider that sort of thing beneath them. Even more so than alchemy, which I also think all serious wizards should learn."
"Because I don't think it's a coincidence that the seven alchemic metals are exactly the same as the seven metals of magical amplification. There's all sorts of interesting correspondences that alchemists have known about for centuries that wizards either don't believe in or don't think are important. Did you know true healing magic is easier on the full moon? Because the moon is the celestial guardian of silver, which is the amplification metal for healing. Oh, but I shouldn't start talking about healing magic or we'll be here all week."
He laughs. "Sure. The celestial guardians affect all the other elements too - life magic is easier under the sun, air magic under the Quiet Star, earth magic under the Crown Star and so on. But the difference is mostly subtle enough that you wouldn't notice it unless you were looking for it, so I can forgive them for not paying attention. What I find inexcusably silly is the way everyone uses life magic for healing, even though healing magic is better at it, which they'll give all kinds of excuses for but I'm pretty sure traces back to the fact that gold is a more prestigious metal than silver, which it owes to the alchemical hierarchy. It's ridiculous!"
"Magic makes so much more sense when you look at the elements through the lens of alchemic correspondences. Light and life are the elements of the sun, linked to gold, sunstone, citrine, and the colour yellow. Water and healing are the elements of the moon, linked to silver, moonstone, sapphire, and the colour blue. Lightning and mind are the elements of the Dawn Star, linked to copper, garnet, topaz, and the colour orange. Last I heard, wizards hadn't even figured out that garnet was the other amplification gemstone for lightning! Fire and ice are the elements of the Blood Star, linked to iron, carnelian, ruby, and the colour red; earth and poison are the elements of the Crown Star, linked to tin, jade, emerald, and the colour green; shadow and death are the elements of the Dark Star, linked to lead, obsidian, onyx, and the colour black; and air and song are the elements of the Quiet Star, linked to mercury, pearl, diamond, and the colour white. By the way, d'you remember when I said that giving a fox the mind of a person would require an obscure branch of necromancy? That's because what we call necromancy is actually just the use of the elements death and mind. They go together like that because most of what you can do with both of them is horrible, so they have a bad reputation and are mostly only studied by people who intend to do horrible things, which contributes further to the reputation, and around it goes."
She's going to want to make a chart of this later, isn't she. Of course she is. It's a pity she doesn't have any opposable thumbs, otherwise she might be tempted to do that now. It's also a pity that her father never got the chance to talk to Isfain; she expects they would have gotten along like a house on fire. At least while discussing alchemy, anyway.
Oh no, she made herself sad. Luckily, she's figured out how to make there be water, which is quite distracting enough to keep her from being randomly sad. There's even a way to fiddle with the temperature, which she figures out through experimentation. Soon enough, she hops into the little fox-sized tub to soak and listen to his lecture.
"Please complain if I start to bore you, by the way. Anyway, so that's why I think anyone who's serious about magic should learn alchemy. And sleight of hand. And music - song is a tragically underused element. Probably most reasonable people would stop there, but I'm not a very reasonable person, so I also learned knitting and weaving and sewing and pottery and stonecarving and really any other interesting-looking craft I can get my hands on. I start to get restless if I go a few months without learning a new skill. Most of it turns out to be useful for something - magic can't ever conjure something from nothing, even the things I can pull out of thin air in arbitrary quantities have to come from somewhere to start with, so the more things I know how to make, the more things I can have. Stonecarving was almost pure self-indulgence, though, I can use magic to reshape stone however I like, I just wanted to find out how it works when you can't do that."
Agreeable yip!
... Speaking of hands. Someone doesn't have any. Um. This is maybe a problem. Soaking in a tub is all well and good, but uh. She would like to be clean. Well. He did offer to help, earlier, and it's not like she's asking someone to help her bathe while she's human shaped.
She sniffs the available soaps, selects one that smells the nicest, places it on the edge of the tub, and yips, again. Giving him big sad fox eyes.
"Happy to oblige!" Scrub scrub. "So the thing you have to understand about wizards is that they are terrible at acknowledging any wizard has ever been wrong about anything. Which means that a lot of what gets taught in schools is just something someone came up with a hundred years ago and decided must be true because it sounded plausible and he couldn't prove it wrong, and now we're stuck with it. My favourite example is half-spaces. A half-space is a vanishing trick: instead of vanishing something to some specific place, you vanish it to - not exactly 'nowhere', but the next best thing - and then it stays exactly as it was the moment it vanished until you bring it back again. The not-exactly-nowhere place is called a half-space, because it's not completely real. And in wizard school they teach you that every person has exactly one half-space, which you can learn to access by doing thus-and-such. Then a little later they teach you how to make a duplication space - which is like a half-space except that once you've put something into it you can take it out again as many times as you want - by doing the exact same thing with a few extra steps. So of course I thought to myself, well, what happens if I do it again without the extra steps? And the answer is, I get another ordinary half-space. I asked my teacher why he was teaching something so obviously wrong, and he said that it was traditional and anyway most people would get hopelessly lost if they tried to use more than three or four different half-spaces because the only way to tell the difference between them is by the way it feels to think about them, which is nearly impossible to write down."
Pause.
"At last count I had two dozen. I don't believe I've ever lost track of one."
She makes such a face at the story about his teacher. Such a face. It doesn't fit into their traditional way of recording information, therefore it doesn't exist? That's not how information categorization is supposed to work. Revisionism for a tidy explanation only looks tidy, while underneath it's a giant mess of lies and misinformation—
She does let out a little giggle at 'two dozen,' though.
"I could probably make do with fewer, but this way I can have, for example, a duplication space that has nothing in it but water, and then whenever I want to do magical plumbing I can link the pipes to that space without having to worry about exactly what will come out of it because there is only one thing. And another duplication space dedicated to interior decoration, and a half-space dedicated to garbage disposal - because just as it's impossible to make something out of nothing, it's impossible to make something truly disappear, it always has to go somewhere, and I don't want enormous piles of junk cluttering up the spaces I actually use for things."
"What I really wish I could do is subdivide them - there isn't really such a thing as parts of a half-space, you see, something is either in it or not in it and there's nothing more to be said about details of location, and I think I would probably not need quite so many half-spaces if I could for example have a space for crafting materials and then divide that into sections for textiles and pottery and so on. But I've been trying for years to figure out a way to do that and as far as I can tell it isn't possible."
She looks at him imperiously, then down at herself. Then back up at him.
Then she barks once, hops out of the tub, steals a towel from the fox-friendly towel rack, and gleefully scampers out of the room to leap onto the bed at full speed. Where she proceeds to roll all over the towel.
She's cleeaaaaaan!
She rolls around on the towel for a little while, then hops off the bed with it, and drags it to her fox box. Upon reflection, though, this is clearly not enough towel. Luckily, this is a solvable problem. In the interests of solving it, she scampers back to Isfain, barks again, steals the towel he was using, and drags it to her fox box as well, where she makes a more suitable towel nest. That she doesn't use, in favor of running a few laps around the room because wheeee she's clean shut up she's a fox she's allowed to act ridiculous every now and then!
Sounds good to her.
She twitches awake several hours later. For a brief moment, she doesn't know where she is, or why she's so comfortable and full and warm, and the first thing she thinks is, If this is an afterlife I'm very disappointed. Then a second later she remembers, and relaxes again. She snuggles closer to Isfain.
Food!
She doesn't eat as much this time; she's still digesting from earlier, and also maybe recovering a little from malnutrition. Best not to push it. Lots of little meals are the way to go, she thinks.
When she's done, she returns to snuggling him. Hey, it's nice, she's had a tough time of it, why not?
His small soft friend is so affectionate!
... She wishes she could ask questions, though. Technically she could, but she doesn't really want to slow down his research just for her own curiosity, and hopping over to her letters to spell out what she wants to say takes a while. She'll just - wonder about the foundations of the concepts this book speaks of, tail twitching thoughtfully. (Safely away from Isfain, she will not be tickling him.)
She's so happy!
This nap is much shorter than the last two though; more of a catnap. She stirs awake and yawns, stretching. Then she gives him a little affectionate nose (carefully aimed to prevent cold nose) and gently disentangles herself so she can go take care of Foxly Business. That being, drinking some water, and also going outside to handle, uh. Foxly business.
She returns soon after, to resume cuddles.
Snuggles and reading! An excellent combination.
When he finishes the book, he puts it down and stretches out and pets Aysilvetea some more.
"I'm going to guess you didn't have the background to follow most of that," he says. "Wizards like making their writing intentionally obscure, it makes them feel important."
"Well. The relevant part is that there's approximately two ways the creator of that music box could've set his trap," he says. "One of them would take him years of study to figure out how to do and would take me only slightly fewer years of study to figure out how to reverse, unless I'm a lot smarter than he is, which I very well might be. The other one is a little more work for him and a lot less work for me. It depends on whether he intended for you to ever stop being a fox or not. If he meant to be able to reverse it - say, if he was thinking ahead and realized he might get caught in his own trap, or if he was feeling generous and only wanted the transformation to last for a year or two before wearing off - then he would've done it the second way and thereby made my life a whole lot easier. If he was lazy and shortsighted and did it the first way, then instead of figuring out how to lift a fox-transformation spell I have to figure out how to turn a fox into a human, which is much more difficult, especially because I assume you would rather end up looking more or less the same way you did before all this nonsense, which means I'd need to find some way to turn you into a specific human."
"It might. Or it might turn me into a fox, and then I'd need to figure out how to do magic as a fox, which would be a bit of a hassle. I think for now I'll try to distinguish the two cases just by examining you for traces of magic and seeing what sort of a picture they make. Hopefully you're not rigged to turn people into foxes when tampered with."
All of those things, yep! Snugglesnugglesnuggle.
She finally has a respectable amount of calories in her, and consequently she's energetic, and feeling so affectionate towards him, and she's not allowed to nibble him, not even a little bit, or steal his shoes and bury them in the yard or anything. So she has to channel all of that energy into snuggling, and so she's gonna.
Eee.
It's kind of cute how charmed he is by her adorable fox form. Is he going to be terribly disappointed when she's human again and he doesn't have an adorable fox around for snuggles? Is she going to be terribly disappointed when she can no longer snuggle people adorably? She doesn't know. But at least she has adorable snuggles now. Snuggle snuggle.
The adorable fox certainly thinks so!
Poetry usually isn't her kind of thing, but there's something sort of charming about reading humorous poems right now? It invites her into a place of otherworldly silliness, or something. Where all the troubles in the world are either far away or can be carefully nestled into stanzas where they won't hurt anyone. Maybe she's just so starved for reading that she'd read literally anything put in front of her. Either way, this is nice.
She wakes up warm and dry and safe and it's glorious. She takes a little while to sprawl out and think about this. While she hadn't precisely taken any of them for granted when she was a human, nothing quite introduces someone to how nice their life was like, well. Suddenly being a very fragile fox that has to scrape and hunt to survive.
Eventually she decides that even if she's not super hungry, she should eat something, so she gets to her feet and goes looking for Isfain.
Yes. Though, to be fair, she does have a massive advantage of intelligence and human context. So. It'd be kind of pathetic if she lost out to a completely ordinary fox.
She finishes eating, then hops back over to the Optimal Snuggling Position, where she can snuggle him and read.
She hops back onto the couch and gives him yet another affectionate nose, because it's not like she has a large set of communcation options here. Then she carefully opens the book (so as not to damage it) and begins reading.
Snuggles can resume! And she is not bored, hooray!
Pet pet.
"Okay. So the first thing you need to know about ritual magic is that it's pretty much exactly as difficult and intricate as it sounds like, and a lot of very smart people have been trying for a very long time to come up with shortcuts, so if you think of a clever way to skip a lot of the work you're probably just wasting your own time trying it. But the second thing you need to know about ritual magic is that sometimes wizards are idiots, so once you've put in the time to understand the basics, one of the most useful things you can do is learn all you can about one of the advanced specialties and then sit down and go through it all experimenting to see what they got wrong. That's most of the proper wizarding research I've ever done, although of course I can't get it published anywhere because real wizards think I'm a disreputable lunatic and writing books about how dumb they are is hardly going to help."
"So! The basic idea of ritual magic is that it's... rigid, structured, stable, where raw manipulation of the elements is more freeform and immediate. If someone shows up on your doorstep with a broken leg, you can use life or healing to fix the immediate problem; if you want to make a wand that fixes broken legs at a touch, you need to use a ritual to bind and stabilize the magic into a more permanent form. And because it's more rigid and less freeform, it has to be much more complicated to account for all the things that you'd be adjusting for in the moment if you were doing the magic yourself every time. That's why lights are just about the cheapest artifact - they glow, and that's it. The fancier ones glow sometimes and stop glowing other times, which adds about five minutes to a two-minute ritual, and more than that if you want the light to do anything more interesting than start and stop at a specific signal. That kind of complexity is why ritual magic is such a tough subject. It's like... to make a wand that fixes broken legs, you have to make a sort of - guide to fixing broken legs, which the wand carries out as automatically as clockwork every time you use it. And doing that with life instead of healing is about a hundred times harder, which is why healing artifacts are so stupidly expensive. There are artifacts that can react more fluidly, but they are outrageously difficult to make, I can barely do it myself and I'm probably one of the ten most accomplished artificers in the world."
D'aw. He may have another affectionate nose for his trouble. Yeah, that's shaping up to a hell of an understanding of how absurd it is for someone to bother to make an artifact that can turn someone into a fox. Wow. That's. That's insane, is what that is.
But what's also insane is—don't they just then make artifacts with healing instead? Surely someone does that, don't they? That's just—that's just practical. Sure it makes some sense to learn life over healing in school, even if it's harder, because it's more adaptable. There are more things that can be done with life than healing, objectively. However, it doesn't make more sense to fight a system just to use life when someone's making something specifically geared towards healing anyway, and an insistence on sticking to life is wasting valuable time and energy. She needs to verify that these idiots don't actually do that. They don't actually do that, right? No one could be that stupid. ... Right? Right?
She hops down to her letters and says, Do they actually insist on making all of their healing artifacts with life?
"Oh, of course. Conventional wisdom is that life is just strictly better than healing. Most wizards, if you asked, would say healing is about as useful as poison - it only does one thing, and it's a thing you can almost always get more conveniently elsewhere if you need it at all. Using healing to heal is looked down on in sort of the same way you'd look down on someone for using substandard materials in a craft."
"Yes, but by the point where they're in a position to notice that sort of thing, everyone who might try it has already had the experience of the first ten clever ideas they came up with for making ritual magic work better being wrong and counterproductive, usually in ways that hundreds of other clever students had been wrong and counterproductive before them. It takes exceptional stubbornness or exceptional arrogance to make it all the way through the first three years of education in ritual magic and still feel like you probably know better than the accepted wizarding authorities."
She considers this. It sounds like the wizarding community is not conducting itself in the most efficient manner of discovering how magic works.
She decides, very resolutely, that she will not stand for it.
Will you teach me ritual magic, so that I can churn out hundreds of healing based healing artifacts, sell them to the populace, and aggressively flout everything wizards think is good and decent?
He can pet her and eat lunch at the same time! He has this power.
"And I think that was about as much introductory lecture as I can give you without getting into the specifics of how rituals are done, and I think I'd be much more effective at teaching that if I could show you, so it will have to wait until after lunch at the very least. And you might prefer that I focus on finding your cure before I start seriously trying to teach you."
Cozy reading!
She has to turn the pages with her nose and be very careful about not hurting the pages, but just getting to read at all is, well. Still pretty novel. Nevermind on wandering off to explore the tower some more, they can just snuggle and read. For the second day in a row.
Excellent! Then she's going to go be an energetic little floof and bounce around the room. Then out of the room. Then back into the room, onto the couch for a very brief boop with her nose, then out of the room again.
Once she has been sufficiently exhausted, then yes, absolutely, snuggles.
She hums a little contented sigh. It's a pity she probably won't get to just - shapeshift into a fox whenever she wants. ... That's not a thing she can get, right? Because if it is a thing she can get due to that stupid music box, she wants it.
.... She does not want to interrupt snuggles to ask, though. That can be a tomorrow question.
She is!
... And she maybe has a crush on him. Or. Well. Probably. She probably has a crush on him. Whoops. That was fast.
A lot of it could be that she has had kind of a terrible time as a fox. Then he scooped her up and invited her to his tower, where he took care of her and treated her well and made sure she was safe and well fed and happy. Those things have turned out to be pretty damn important to have, and he's just. Casually given them to her. This accounts for some of her general warm fuzzies towards him, but not all of it. He's smart and funny and sweet and cute and explains magic so well and, uh, admittedly is nice to look at. She thinks that she'd have liked him even without the whole fox business. Well, once he stopped lying to her by omission about who he was, anyway.
Musing over what-ifs won't get her very much, though. She tries to be a bit more practical. Unfortunately for her, she's a fox. This makes romantic entanglements a little bit trickier. Putting aside the obvious issues inherent in one member of a romantic duo being a fox, she is not a magic talking fox. Even with the letters, her ability to communicate is handicapped, and it's kind of easy to get along with an adorable soft cuddly fox. She'd probably like him a lot less if it turned out they had zero conversational chemistry. She doesn't think that'll happen—he was too delighted to hear her idea about the rituals, and her general way of doing things—but it's possible. It's annoying, that she doesn't have confirmation that they will be able to get along when she's human, but, well. She has now, and now's pretty great.
Paradoxically, it's also a bit fortunate that she's a fox. Since doing anything about... anything.... would be logistically difficult, there's no real rush on figuring things out. She can take her time and sort out her feelings.
In the meantime, she's got snuggles.
Ooo! Usually history books are much less charmingly written. Insidious little book; it'll persuade her to go look up corroborating evidence to fact check some of the more notable parts in it. Not that she minds.
Though it'll be kind of tricky to look up corroborating evidence while she's a fox. She'll uh. Probably bother Isfain about that. After she's done with this book. Which will probably take a while.
Hm?
Oh. Right. Sleep. Is it late enough for that? ... Uh, judging by her own level of tiredness, yes. Yes it is. Uh. Oops.
She affectionately noses him and yips her little 'Good night' facsimile, then looks critically at her book. ... How the heck is she going to bookmark this.
They're all lovely and she likes looking at them! Learning the layout of this place is nice, too. Though, if she were an all powerful magic user, she'd probably live somewhere a bit smaller. She supposes that since he can teleport it probably doesn't matter much to him if it's enormous. Admittedly, it's very impressive and was probably fun to make.
She explores until her sense of time makes her suspect it's around dinner, and then she goes back to the sitting room with Isfain for dinner and snuggles.
They could! For days, even. He has a pretty nice collection of books, and she enjoys reading them. Though she does need breaks to do other things. Snuggles are great and all, but she's a fox, she gets antsy.
One day she decides to take advantage of her acute sense of smell and go exploring in the area around his tower.
When she returns, she looks very pleased with herself, and also more than a little covered in dirt.
"I think most of the reason why I've been so snuggly with you is because you're small and cute and soft and - not complicatedly human-shaped - but you are very charming and I do like you very much and I think even when you are complicatedly human-shaped I will still want to pet you and hug you and read with you and kiss you."
Oh goodness.
She needs a few seconds to figure out what to compose because goodness—spelling out her sentences is the exact wrong intersection of 'unable to immediately say the first thing that occurs to her' and 'requiring a level of pre-planning she's doomed to overthink'—but she eventually collects herself well enough to manage a reply.
I have a giant crush on you that I've been ignoring because I'm a fox, she painstakingly writes. And it's not like you know what I look like or what it's like to properly speak to me, or anything.
"All right. A bath you shall have."
And he teleports them both to her fox-sized bathroom. It's a very neat transition; one moment they're on the floor of the front hall, and then the world seems to slide smoothly in some unspecified direction, and they arrive in the bathroom without any overt sense of movement at all.
"Hmm... so, at this point I think I'm probably going to have a solution to your problem in a few months, sooner if I am very clever and make an unprecedented breakthrough, which I have been known to do on occasion. And then I think I'm going to adapt my defoxing ritual into something I could cast while transformed, just in case, and then ask you to fetch your music box so I can try to reverse-engineer the fox curse and turn it into something voluntary for you."
She tries her best!
Soon enough, she's about as dry as a towel can make her. She yips affectionately at him and then gently extracts herself from his arms to go find her letters in the next room over.
My turn to shower you in compliments, or should I wait until I'm human and more eloquent?
"Well, let's see what I've got..."
He trails off, goes quiet for a few seconds, and then produces a length of braided rope. The rope is thick and soft and white, arranged into a complicated twisting pattern with a loop at each end.
"I apologize if you're too dignified to chew on last year's curtain stays. It was the first thing I thought of."
It's her contractual obligation as a fox! Or, well. No, it isn't, she doesn't have the necessary digit dexterity for signing anything, but it sure is fun to be adorable.
Speaking of how fun it is to be adorable, how does he react if she mysteriously baps his hand with the other end of the rope? Followed by a little playful yip and pulling the rope away again, just out of his reach. She swishes her tail again. Swish, swish. One might get the impression that somebody wants to play.
"Are you sure you want to play this game with me?" he asks, raising his eyebrows at her with just a hint of a smile as he reaches for the rope. "I cheat."
He hasn't actually touched the rope by the end of this sentence, but suddenly it's in his other hand, halfway across the bed.
!!!
He is incredibly charming, and she is incredibly charmed.
She makes a show of thinking about it, drooping her ears and tail like she's unsure of what to do. Then, without warning, she hops towards his other hand and the rope contained therein, face first. Her jaws open to snatch it.
She giggles even as her fluffy face collides with the bed, but recovers quickly. She glances up at the toy as it sails through the air, judges its trajectory, and promptly sits on top of the hand that threw it, waiting for her perfect moment to strike. It'll come back down.
She looks at the wall with the rope, then at Isfain. Then at the wall again. Then at Isfain, perhaps belaboring her point a bit too much.
Clearly the thing to do instead is to climb up onto his shoulders, carefully balanced like she is attempting to become a fox scarf again, and then introduce his face to her fluffy, fluffy tail.
It is so tempting to nibble upon him. So tempting. She'd be very gentle about it, but that's probably weird, even with a license to fox. Especially with an acknowledged mutual crush. So she will not be doing that.
Instead she yips invitingly, and motions with her tail towards the wall where he threw her rope chewtoy.
She is so tempted to immediately run off with it and hide under the bed or bury it outside somewhere. This is not a great thing to do for long term incentives, though. She doesn't want to confuse him and make him hesitant to give her things she asks for because she might immediately and craftily run off with them; there should be a measure of trust between them, even as they play. Therefore: no running off with the toy. Even if it'd be hilarious.
Instead she nuzzles him to say 'thank you,' and settles down to nibble upon her toy. And receive pets. Pets are important.
She iiiiis! And she's so glad he's noticed.
....
Wait, why is she hungry. Did she forget to have breakfast. Did they forget to have breakfast? Her ears perk up and she reviews the time since she woke up. Yep. They forgot to have breakfast.
She gives a little yip and noses her stomach, then aims her Sad Fox Eyes at him. Look at them! So cute! So sad!
Both the breakfast and the means by which he conjures it are pretty impressive. She wonders if he cooked all of the conjurable food himself, or if he put a lot of work into searching out places to buy food from to place in the duplication space. It probably doesn't matter; either way, it's tricky to pull off. She gives him an affectionate little nose, and then begins eating.
She is so good. A good soft fox. The best.
After breakfast, he yawns and pets her and then says, "I think I'm going to disappear into a pile of books for the day, I'll leave you some more food in case I forget that time keeps moving even when you're not looking at it and miss coming back for lunch."
Okay, being a fox is sometimes pretty great, but it comes with the weirdest urges. Not only does she still very intensely want to steal something of his and go bury it outside so she can have it available later, she also wants to roll around in the place he was sleeping so she can smell like him. That's. That's more than a little bit weird.
...
That doesn't mean she doesn't do it, but it's really, really weird. If he questions her about it later, she might not actually admit to it. Also, she steals his pillow. Hey, her fox box could use a pillow, right? This is very reasonable of her. Yep. Totally reasonable. Not crazy at all.
This bizarre set of vulpine tasks completed, she goes exploring outside. She can avoid getting messy if she doesn't go digging or running in mud or anything, and she didn't smell any traces of predators in the area that could kill a fox. It's fun and safe to just sniff around the immediate area. She will know this place so well.
How responsible of him!
There are plenty of things outside for her to sniff to keep from getting bored. That and fuzzy crush related feelings. (He likes her!! He likes her! He thinks she's charming and he snuggled her all day yesterday and he thinks she's interesting and clever and endearing and he's still going to teach her magic and aaaaa she feels a little like she could float off into the sky if she's not careful!) She appreciates space to sort through/bask in her fuzzy crush related feelings on her own.
She doesn't really miss him until bedtime, when the lack of a snuggling companion sort of - tugs at her. He is snuggly and warm and sweet and likes her so much and she feels very safe when snuggled next to him and he's terribly cute in the mornings. And he's not here. She has a brief debate over going to find him to snuggle, and decides that the pillow in her snug little fox box is good enough for her purposes. The fox box is warm and snuggly, too. She'd rather not get clingy. Even if she's totally being weird about stealing his pillow.
Eventually, she falls asleep.
Hm. She considers her food supplies, and whether she wants to go find him or not. It's fine if he wants to spend another day buried in books, but while she has enough supplies leftover for breakfast, she doesn't think she could comfortably make it all the way to dinner on them. In order to avoid having to hunt for her meals, she'll need to find him sometime today, and she'd really rather not have to do that again. This decided, she'd rather find him early, so she doesn't have to go anywhere near food insecurity.
So she goes looking, nose to the ground and ears perked up and listening for signs of a wayward wizard.
Well, that's a charming sight. He's very cute when he's surrounded by books and clearly in the middle of something. Also, wow, that is a lot of books. That is enough books that there is no clear path out of the books. Has he been reading all of those? She has a pretty good idea of his reading speed by now, even if he's just finding the chapters or passages he needs, that has to have taken him quite a while.
... Hold on. Has he slept? She is not sure he has slept. That is a lot of books that he went through if he slept.
He's clearly in the middle of something, so she doesn't want to interrupt him with a yip. But on the other hand, she's not sure when he'd finish on his own, and he maybe needs some kind of reminder that his body actually exists. Hm. She eyes the piles of books critically, figures out a navigable path for a small fox, and weaves accordingly. Avoiding knocking any over is tricky, but not impossible, and soon enough she's next to him and can curl up at his feet and wait for him to be cognizant of his non-book surroundings on his own.
He leans down and pets her. "Right. Just a moment," he says, and he writes another sentence, bookmarks several books, and then teleports himself and Astea down to her room and conjures some breakfast, of which he has about two bites before flopping into her bed and going to sleep.
So cute.
She has breakfast, then takes a couple of minutes to carefully tuck him in as best as she can. Then she goes outside to investigate the state of the weasel. ... Without getting herself messy. No mess allowed, this time, she is not going to be having another bath.
Several hours later, after the Crooked Hills have been thoroughly sniffed, she returns to finish the remaining leftovers, then nestles beside him in bed for a quick nap. She did a lot of running in her investigation! And she's a fox, she can indulge in a... foxnap? Hm. Doesn't have the same ring to it as catnap. Oh well. Point being: Isfain now has a snugglesome companion keeping him company as he sleeps. She's careful not to disturb him.
She has a light lunch, and then snuggles up again. It was more important that he be reminded of lunch's existence than for her to actually eat; she sort of suspects that if he forgot to sleep, he might have also forgotten to eat. Now that there is food in front of him he probably remembers that it's a thing. Sure, he's an all powerful wizard who maybe doesn't need to eat to sustain himself, but she's allowed to care about his welfare. She noses him affectionately, just because.
This is an adorable book. She loves it very much. While she's not that interested in cooking or its history, it's still nice to watch someone else care very much about it, and write their passion. And maybe she can try out some cooking ideas once she's got opposable thumbs again.
She snuggles her snugglebuddy happily, and settles in to read.
She yips an affectionate farewell, then goes back to reading.
Eventually she finishes her book, has dinner, and then promptly has no idea what to do before bed. Isfain's busy, she already did a lot of sniffing around outside, she doesn't particularly want to read any more, she's explored most of the tower, and she already had a nap. As far as fox activities go, there's not really a lot else. For a little while she nibbles upon her chewtoy, but eventually she gets bored of that too. Hm. This is a problem.
Clearly, she needs a project of some kind. The only question is: what kind of project can a fox actually do? ... No, fox instincts, 'pee all over everything in the tower to claim it as her own' is not a valid project. Go back to the corner of shame, she would like to go back to ignoring those urges. Instead, she wants an actual project, that can amuse her very human mind.
... Hm. She thinks she has an idea. But she'll need supplies and a place to work. The place to work is easy enough; there are a number of rooms that look like they haven't been used for a while. The materials are a bit trickier, she has to put time and effort into collecting them, but there are plenty outside. She spends the next several hours collecting small rocks and twigs; the twigs she carefully trims down to straight sections with her jaws. It doesn't taste very good, but hey, she's eaten rats. It's all uphill from there. Once she has a suitable set of supplies, she carefully transports them to her chosen workspace, and organizes them by type and size. Then she begins carefully constructing a little city made out of twigs and stones; the stones arranged to make cobblestone paths, the twigs stacked on top of each other to make little twig houses. It's incredibly difficult to do without any fingers, but, well. She was looking for a way to waste time. This will certainly do.
Eventually, she finally notices she's tired and goes to sleep in her foxbox, too exhausted to even really miss the snuggly embrace of her wizard companion.
D'aww! What a sweetie. She is charmed by the picnic basket. Also by Isfain. She is admittedly super biased on this front.
The adorable picnic basket gets dragged to her twig and stone city workspace, so she can eat while she works. She adds a little town hall, a town square, a blacksmith, then a couple little houses, and then she's entirely out of building materials and needs to go collect more. First she has lunch, then: yep, time to go collect more. Once she has enough, it's back to building. Her tiny twig and stone city will be glorious one day.
She spends the day like this, then drags the picnic basket back to her room and curls up to sleep.
Giggle. Clearly, this deserves some kind of response. She considers, then goes and steals enough letters from the set in her room and the one in the entrance hall to spell out, 'Adorable' next to the picnic-basket's location.
Then she decides she doesn't want to work on her twig and stone project just yet, in favor of wandering around outside and sniffing everything some more. Can she identify useful herbs by smell? Even though it's cold outside and they're all either dead or in hibernation? Can she remember their locations so she can swing by when she's human and collect them for a possible garden, later? As she finds out: yes! Her nose is excellent, and if she pays close attention, she can identify some plants by smell. Whether or not she'll remember where they are when she's human is another matter entirely.
She heads back inside, decides that she wants to soak in a bath, because that seems novel, and then does that. Once that's done, she rolls around in towels, and then indulges in a case of the zoomies. When she calms down, she spends a little while nibbling her chewtoy, then begins tossing it in the air and chasing after it. When that gets boring (and it gets boring pretty quickly) she goes back to working on Twigtown. Which she labels as such, since she already broke up the letter sets to declare that Isfain is adorable. She has just about figured out Twigtown's economy. Because it amuses her, they are a logging village, and rely on lumber exports down the river (represented by a stolen towel, since it's so helpfully blue to match the blue and silver theme of her room) that cuts through the middle of the town itself. She even adds a little twiggy dock, with a little boat, connected by carefully positioned tufts of grass to represent the boat's mooring.
Eventually: bed.
The next morning's note reads, I don't think I realized just how long I can spend buried in books at a stretch until I had to step out daily to keep my fox friend fed.
The picnic basket is accompanied by a neatly organized assortment of letter tiles, with what looks like about a hundred of each letter available. A tedious but highly effective way for her to leave more messages.
It's getting kind of annoying that her only method of communication involves tedium, but she is building a little village out of twigs. Tedium for something actually useful sounds acceptable, if kind of annoying.
Don't worry, I'm amusing myself well enough while you're swimming in books. Take as long as you need. I also don't mind if you leave me more than a day's supply of food so you can cut back on interruptions. I'll remind you if I get low, she spells. Then she considers, and adds another line. I do miss snuggling you, though. If you go to bed at a time that I'm asleep, feel free to steal me from my fox box for snuggles.
This message written, she goes and continues Twigtown construction. Then, she wanders around outside exploring and gathering more materials, and then she goes back inside, cleans her paws of dirt, and spends half an hour jumping on the bed. Because she's an adult, and she's allowed to do that. This important task completed, she settles in to nibble on her chewtoy, and eventually goes to sleep.
He is deft at stealing foxes, because this one does not wake up from her relocation! The teleportation probably helps.
Predictably, she wakes up snuggled, and is summarily delighted. She nestles closer and makes a pleased (and quiet) little chirp, careful not to disturb the sleeping wizard.
Oh, good! This is important to communicate. His presence has been missed, because he's very great. While she was fine without him and perfectly capable of amusing herself, he's a positive in her life, and she noticed his absence. It's good to see him again. She indulges in more happy wiggles and happy tail fwishes, because aaa he's so great.
Then she carefully inspects him now that he's awake. Being buried in books has not been bad for him, right? He has not shrunken to skin and bones or shriveled up into a raisin or collected strange fungal growths or anything? He's probably fine, he has successfully made it this far in life without anyone to remind him that time passes and he should maybe eat something, but she's invested in his welfare because she cares about him.
Amused huff. She nudges his hand affectionately, then hops down to her letters. He fixed them at some point, probably when he got her the hundreds of letters for tedious messages.
Not worried, exactly. I don't think you'll burst into flames if I look away. Amused tail swish. But I care about you, and want to make sure you're taking care of yourself.
She should probably ask him how long he expects he'll be buried in books, or about his progress, or for breakfast, or about something else while he's actually here, but gosh scritches are so compelling. Especially when he pets her ears. He should pet her ears, they are very soft.
Excellent. Then all is right in the world.
Unfortunately, she cannot indulge in the hedonistic pleasure of ear scritches forever.
...
Ahem. She said, she cannot indulge in the hedonistic pleasure of ear scritches forever.
...
She cannot indulge in the—
—Oh, fine, she'll embrace hedonism for a little while. Ear scritches are compelling.
Yip-yip!
... She tried to make that sound like 'talk more,' but it probably wasn't very communicative. Damn. Does she have to get up and go to her letters to say anything? She likes being a foxpuddle so much. Let's see if leaning up and bapping his mouth with her nose will communicate the thing.
"Hmmm, let's see, what magical theory shall I discuss... ooh, I know! Dragons! Dragons are a fascinating example of something everyone thought was true for a really long time and then fairly recently someone put together a sufficiently compelling case to overturn the consensus. First of all that's fascinating because hardly anyone ever manages that, and second of all it's fascinating because I have no idea if they were right or not. No one's found any evidence of them in the last hundred years, and in most cases if you can't dig up any conclusive signs that something exists, that in itself is a fairly conclusive sign that it doesn't, particularly when the thing in question is the size of a house and breathes fire. But eight or nine hundred years ago when everyone was pretty sure that dragons existed, all the accounts of what they were like were remarkably consistent - and included details implying alchemic correspondences that hadn't yet been discovered at the time! Poison is such a little-used element that its association with the Crown Star was only proven a couple of centuries ago, but green dragons are reliably depicted with poison breath. On the other hand, if dragons do exist, then where in the world have they all run off to?"
... Gosh. Yes, that's an interesting question. Just from Isfain's explanation, she's inclined to think they do exist, but something happened to them to cause them all to disappear. That seems like a sensible compromise that follows both sets of evidence. On the other hand, though, she hasn't personally read either case, and is hesitant to weigh in so soon. Hm.
She gives a little thoughtful whumpf, and noses Isfain affectionately. He is a good wizard, and she likes him.
He grins and pets her soft ears.
"For a while when I was fresh out of school I toyed with the idea of setting off on a quest to find the dragons, but then I decided there were plenty of interesting questions to answer a little closer to home, and I'm much more of a theorist than an adventurer."
She's certainly glad he didn't run off to find dragons, even if the answers would be fascinating. How would she have shown up on his doorstep to be defoxed? Clearly it would have been much more difficult, which sounds terrible. She would have been wandering in the woods as a fox even longer. Instead, she can giggle a little fox giggle, then nuzzle him affectionately, in this nice comfy bed with this nice wonderful wizard.
"Sure. Healing magic."
He drums his fingers together consideringly.
"The thing about healing magic... well, there are several things. I've already had my little rant about how it's short-sighted for everyone to think life magic is better at healing than healing is just because gold is more glamorous than silver. That's the most infuriating thing about healing magic but it's not really the most interesting, it's not even really about healing magic, it's about wizards being idiots. The most interesting thing about healing magic, I think, is that it understands how a body is supposed to be shaped."
He pulls a bit of string out of thin air to fidget with as he talks, for no apparent reason other than that he wanted something to fidget with.
"Now, on the face of it, 'healing magic knows how to heal things' seems obvious and straightforward, right? You don't look at a fact like that and go 'what a surprise, my world is crumbling before my eyes'. But to a wizard trained in life magic healing it actually seems kind of insane! You mean I've been going around all this time learning anatomy painstakingly by staring at gruesome drawings of dissected dead bodies and occasionally at actual dead bodies, and meanwhile there's a kind of magic that just knows how many layers a person's skin is supposed to have and what order they go in? All right, that's not entirely fair, life magic is overall pretty good about skin, the real troubles start when you get to the fiddlier bits, but I've used healing magic to regrow a person's entire foot and not once did I have to consult a textbook about where all the bones should go. The magic just knew. On the other hand, I tried the same thing on someone born without a foot and it was useless, the poor man's leg just sat there with the stump glowing white, I had to wait until the next morning and get out my textbook and do it the stupid way with life. On the other other hand, once the foot was there, I asked him if I could test something and I tried the healing magic again and it didn't make the whole thing wither back away or anything of that nature—it even healed him normally when I poked him with a pin. I probably should not have asked if I could poke him with a pin."
That is very interesting!! She gives a little excited yip and everything! And also an affectionate nose at 'I probably should not have asked if I could poke him with a pin.'
Then she goes over to her letters, her tail swishing:
Following pattern? Life changes pattern itself? Poke me with a pin let's see!
He flexes his fingers; a silver ring appears. He gently applies pin to paw, and then immediately applies healing magic to the resulting pinhole; there's a brief sensation of soothing coolness, and no more pinhole.
"Yes, that's about what I'd expect. As you said, life changes the pattern."
"I'd expect that you're a female fox because you were a female human, but I can't be sure without looking at the source to see how the creator of the music box arranged things. He could have been lazy and decided to make everyone female foxes. Hmm, actually, there's another way to achieve a slightly better guess - when you were human, did your eyes look like they do now? If so, probably they carried over directly, so the magic was responding to the properties of your existing body in constructing your new one. If not, it's more likely that your fox body was constructed without reference to the human original."
"Hmm—might be nothing, might be something, I'll let you know when I find out, feel free to drag me out of my pile of books if you get curious—I've forgotten what time of day it is already—" he kisses the top of her head and conjures a picnic basket in case of foxly hunger and vanishes.
She giggles. He is a very cute nerd, and it's a pity that she can't properly nerd with him because she's stuck as a fox. Fortunately, he's trying to fix that, so.
Hmmmmm she would like to spend her day investigating his library and reading! She bets he has some very nice books.
Why didn't she investigate the library sooner? This is a treasure trove! Oh, right, it's because she's a fox and reaching shelves is difficult, leaving books intact is difficult, and turning pages while a quadruped is a chore. Regardless, though, she has some practice reading as a fox, so she's going to use it. And very very carefully not damage any of these precious books.
Isfain is not the only one that forgets what time is, today.
She does remember to sleep in this time, and similarly remembers that Isfain exists and is squirrelled away when she does that. The lack of warm snuggles gives it away. She's curious about what he's figuring out, but she expects that explaining everything to her would make everything take twice as long.
... But she does decide to keep him company, since she's reading, too. Books get carefully bundled in a sheet so she can drag them to him, and she flops at his feet with one of them, leaning against his leg fondly.
"Oh! You still exist! Hello." He reaches down to apply scritches to the fluffy friend. "I've been," yawn, "at it again, haven't I. But this time I have good news, I think! I still have to double-check, er, a few things..." he glances sheepishly at the enormous stacks of books scattered around the room. "Maybe more than a few."
Astea is skeptical that 'too many books' is a thing. Plausibly there's 'not enough space for books,' but that's not the fault of the books.
When Isfain stirs, she's nestled beside him, reading one of the excellent books. Two modest stacks are neatly arranged nearby, respectively 'to read' and 'have finished.' She didn't want to make multiple trips.
Her ears perk up and she gives a little greeting chirp.
"Oh, good, I see you found reading material." He finishes stretching, snuggles back down amid the blankets, rests his hand on Astea and gives her gentle scritches. "I think I've untangled part of the puzzle—I realized that the fact that it's an incomplete transformation has implications I wasn't considering." He wiggles his fingers and a gold ring appears on one of them. "Now that I've worked out the theoretical side, I should spend some time confirming that the picture in my head matches the reality, which, happily for you, means snuggling you while you read all my books. And then either I'll have you turned back within a few days, or this will be a dead end and I'll have to find another avenue."
"Your curiosity is fair and reasonable but it's hard to multitask explaining and information-gathering! All right, all right... this gets into some obscure ritual magic concepts so I'll have to simplify a bit, which I hate doing, but in brief: you were transformed imperfectly, leaving you with your original eyes. That has numerous implications but the most relevant is that the transformation is likely to be... wrapped around you, like a blanket or a coil of rope? Enclosing and veiling the true shape of your body, rather than altering or replacing it. Which means that it should be possible to, hmm, unwind the rope. Of course it's not nearly as simple as just taking the fox off you like a very inconvenient fur coat—physically speaking you are a fox, all this talk of veiling deals strictly with the abstract magical structures of the thing—but if I can find, so to speak, the end of the rope, I should be able to get the whole thing loose. This also bodes well for the question of turning back and forth from fox to human, although it will still be a separate project I'll have to undertake afterward, unless—depending on the details, I might be able to invert your, er, level of foxiness—leaving you mostly human with, say, a small patch of fur somewhere. A fetching pair of fluffy ears, perhaps." (He gently pets the ears in question.) "And then you'd be able to switch back and forth between the mostly-human and mostly-fox states, although at that point the major obstacle would be the time it took to teach you how... I suspect you'd pick it up quickly, though. Assuming, again, that I'm not haring off on an utterly misguided adventure. Which I still might be."
Eeee scritches are great, cuddling with Isfain is great, hearing about magical theory is great, reading is great, she wants to stay like this forever…
Wait. They’ve been here before. Last time they did this, they forgot to eat. She doesn’t have to worry about that problem, because she fed herself while he was sleeping, but! He could not do that. She will attempt to not make the same mistakes she made like, a day ago? Maybe two? Because she tries to consistently grow as a person.
She perks up and boops his stomach with her nose, then gives a little yip. That is to say: Eat something, adorable cuddly wizard.
In that case, she may need to remind him to conjure meals a few more times, and perhaps to replace her book when she gets to the end of it; but that evening he remembers about bedtime all by himself, and announces, "As far as I can tell my theory was perfectly accurate, and all that remains is to locate the end of the figurative magical rope," yaaaawn, "tomorrow, because being well-rested is important when dealing with delicate magical phenomena. It may be another day or so past that before I actually have you out of there one way or another. Do you have a preferred option, between 'disentangle the whole thing and get rid of it' or 'figure out how to make your foxiness level invertable'? I don't yet know which will be easier, but if they're similar levels of tricksome I might as well try for the one you'd rather."
She does remember to feed and water her cuddling companion, though she has a brief nap midway through. When she finishes her book, she requests a few on herbs and their properties; she knows a lot already, but she’d like to know more, and she wants to see how her own hedge witch knowledge compares to Isfain’s gigantic library.
Upon being addressed, she tilts her head thoughtfully, then barks once. Specifically, they will be able to reproduce the fox thing whenever they get around to digging up the damn thing that did it in the first place, and she’d hate to have to deal with anything really obviously weird out of the gate. She does, after all, want to go home and collect her things, at the very least. Maybe let her village know she’s not dead.
Not that she explains this; jumping down to spell out her reasoning would be tiresome.
He's such a cute wizard.
She gets bored of sorting through herbs soon enough. Well, out of books, anyway. What she'd really like to do is go outside and find some, there are a couple varieties in the Crooked Hills that don't grow where she's from. Her earlier investigations only included what she already knew, not anything from these delightful books. Not that looking is all she wants to do anymore. Unfortunately, she is a little bit handicapped in getting any cuttings or transplanting entire plants by how she is, well, a fox. And the current weather. Also she's a little curious about the soil composition of the area, it seemed rather rocky to her? It would be an interesting puzzle to see if she could get anything to grow here. Probably she'll want to figure out a clever duplicate space for loam. ... Maybe a couple other varieties of soil? Hmmm.
Her tail swishes thoughtfully, then she gives Isfain a goodbye boop and heads outside to investigate the local foliage. She won't pick anything, but! She will know where things are for later! Even the ones she hadn’t know the existence of before!
The local foliage is available to be investigated! The soil is indeed very rocky in most places, but here or there in the low spots between the hills there's enough fertile soil to support some wild berry bushes or a small flowery meadow.
Isfain leaves her to it for an hour or so, then comes outside looking for her.
Hmmmmm she thinks her map of the surrounding area is accurate enough to be getting along with, and she has a few ideas of things to go running off to look up in the library. Probably best to go back inside before she starts digging things up and needs another bath, which she was... definitely thinking about doing. Ahem.
She stands on her hind legs to put her paws on his leg and give a yip that's probably asking to be picked up. Then her nose points tower-wards.
Being scooped is great fun! Especially by a cute wizard she has a crush on. This is a happy fox! Who is on her way to not being a fox, so that she might perhaps do something about the aforementioned crush!
As it is, though, she just gives him a friendly boop. On his ear. Because she's aware her nose is cold, and his reaction will probably be funny.
He does indeed work on that. With scritches. They're very important scritches.
Sometime in late afternoon, he exclaims "ah—ha!" and flops delightedly into a new bizarre configuration on the sitting room's very comfy couch. "All right, I have, so to speak, found the end of the rope. It would be faster to flip it than pull it off entirely, but it's looking to be a difference of hours or days and not many days if any, so I presume you'd still rather be completely defoxed?"
He is very cute.
But she should leave him to be a nerd in peace, with only minimal interruptions to remind him that he has a mortal form that needs some kind of care. And also for snuggles, because he does actually need to check his work, and snuggles and scritches are great. They still sleep snuggled together, because that's just nice, and it seems obvious for them to fall asleep together when she's the one reminding him to sleep at all. She hangs around him and occasionally points her adorable fluffy charm at him, but she is actually perfectly comfortable giving him space to work.
What she is less comfortable with is still being a fox.
It was kind of nice at first, being a fox in his tower, because it was rather like a forced break. She couldn't do anything of real substance, so there was no pressure to do anything at all. Instead she could goof off and follow whatever whims took her. Which was nice! It's not a thing she's had for literal years, probably since she was a child. Being free to do whatever she wanted was novel, even if she lacked opposable thumbs during this freedom. Now, though... well, she wants her opposable thumbs back. She wants to be able to hold a proper conversation without painstakingly pointing to each and every letter that, despite how good she's gotten at pointing quickly, still feels like it takes forever. She wants to be able to look for and retrieve books without either requesting assistance or having an absurd fox adventure in order to safely retrieve them from the shelf without damaging the books themselves. She wants to read without having to carefully use her lower jaw to turn pages, because her nose is cold and wet (and therefore damaging to books) and her paws are, well, fox paws. She wants to garden, wants to learn ritual magic so she can make a billion healing artifacts, wants to get home before someone decides her cottage is going spare and dumps or sells all of her stuff.
Quite frankly, she's more than a little sick of this. Capable of distracting herself, sure, but quietly unhappy and dissatisfied and admittedly a little bit lonely, because there's only one person she can interact with and he's busy. But bothering him wouldn't fix her fundamental problem, it'd just draw this out longer, and she'd really rather not. So instead, she kills time. She works on her silly little town made of twigs and stones and other stolen items. She runs around outside and sniffs things, from creatures to herbs to interesting rocks. She jumps on the bed, she flounces around the tower because moving around is kind of mechanically fun. The adorable wizard gets fox snuggles and gentle reminders to eat and sleep. She gets scritches and books and ignores the growing urge to go outside and scream as loud as she can because this is such a stupid thing to have done with magic what an absolute waste of everyone's time and energy and it's not fair.
But none of it has ever been fair, and throwing a temper tantrum about it won't help anything, so. She keeps distracting herself, and tries very hard to be patient and supportive. Eventually, she will get to stop being a fox. What an exciting time that will be.