"I'm plenty upset," she says disconsolately.

Path touches his beak to her nose again.

She sighs a very small sigh and nuzzles his beak.

"We'll help if we can," Path murmurs.

"Yeah, like how," she says.

"I don't know. If I knew I'd suggest something."

"It's cute. But something else could be cute too. You could always go with Stephirashal. It's gender-neutral."

"Stephirashal sounds like a demon sneezed," she says. "I guess I could go by Steph until I think of something I like better, though."

Path nuzzles her. "Okay."

She nuzzles back.

"I wonder why you're a genet," murmurs Path.

"Good question," says Steph. "I'm not sure I even know what a genet is."

"It's not a common daemon species or I'd have more to say about it. I think genets are related to mongooses," Path adds. "You could look yourself up. That's what everyone does when they settle in high school is look up their species. There are daemon specific books for the more common things that include statistics about the people they belong to. The Big Book Of Daemonic Mammals would be where you'd want to look first. I don't know if you'd be in those books or not. We've seen a fossa and a linsang but never exactly the species you are, and they don't cover everything."

"I'm probably too rare for the book," she says gloomily.

"I don't know, there were some remarkably specific shrews in there."

Steph giggles.

"We didn't read the whole thing because we knew I'd be a bird," says Path, with the winged equivalent of a shrug.

"That makes sense," says Steph.

"I tried every single thing in the bird book, though, seeing how they all felt."

"Of course you did," says Steph.

"Ironically, despite Charlie's last name, swans didn't suit me at all."

"I think you'd look very dashing with a neck as long as my tail," giggles Steph.

"And twice as flexible. But no, it was all wrong. I could be anything and feel all right when we were little but by the time I was close to settling some things were definitely not me. I mostly liked nocturnal things, especially when I was restricting myself to birds so we could be a witch properly."

"Is it really that species-restricted?"