Isabella wraps her arms around Sherlock and hugs him tight; Path trills unhappily.

Sherlock hugs her back.

"I don't think Kas and Petaal are discernibly more comfortable around people with daemons than people without. Maybe Petaal would be a better how-to-be-a-daemon tutor," says Isabella. "If Steph's ever going to come out and want lessons again, I mean, if she's not I guess it doesn't matter."

"I'm honestly not sure if that would help," says Sherlock, "but I suppose it can hardly make things any worse."

"Petaal's pretty unconventional about it, though, and not in any of the ways I'd expect you and Steph to be, especially since she's not settled."

"For curiosity's sake: in what ways is she unconventional, and in what ways do you expect us to be, and how do they differ?"

"Petaal is unsettled - more unsettled than the average toddler's daemon, and those can change too quick to identify all the species sometimes, she doesn't even have a fixed sex. She spends a lot of time in human - or witch or angel - forms, talks to non-daemon people a lot more than even the chattiest daemons usually do, and is dramatically touchier than any other daemon I've ever heard of. And her personality is just about identical to Kas's modulo the practical matters. You on the other hand - I'd be pretty surprised if you wanted to let Juliet or your Tony touch Steph, anytime soon anyway, let alone me or Kas or your alts. She's settled, or at least it sure looks like it, and while she evidently doesn't refuse to talk to any non-daemons besides you like some do, she seemed within normal range on attention paid to Path versus to me."

"Is a daemon's personality not usually identical to their - person's?"

"It's usually close, except for some division of labor in interpersonal interaction. There are - moods, circumstances, when they won't match. Back when I was worried about going all crazy-possessive-witch on my sweeties I told them I wouldn't kill somebody I loved in front of Path. In that eventuality, which is not going to happen, we'd feel differently about it, and I'd have to leave Path home. You and Steph already observed that you don't act just alike."

"True. Well. Perhaps we should talk to Kas."

"Do you want me to go wake him?"

"I think we can wait. No rush."

"Yes," says Sherlock. "I expected that she would be unhappy, and look how right I was."

"I am sufficiently unhappy about being trapped here that it's hard to tell how I would feel without it, and then of course even before I came here I was not short on things to be unhappy about."

"Yes. Well, we can ask."

"Yeah."

[Morning, sweeties,] says Isabella. [Sherlock's no-daemon wish unexpectedly wore off.]

Sherlock hugs back.

"She's a genet," Path reports to Petaal. "And she's sad."

"Why's she sad?" says Petaal, hopping up onto the bed as a small grey cat and nuzzling Path's feathers.