"Oh, you mean at some point you'd tell him. You didn't say."

"If I was no longer human and couldn't hide this, I couldn't keep it from him forever if I wanted to. He doesn't really care what's going on with my life, but every now and then he feels the obligation to check up on me, and he would notice eventually if I moved out and attempted to cut off contact."

"For some reason my brain jumps automatically to 'fake your death' in this situation but that's probably just me being weird."

"Being legally dead would be more inconvenient than telling my father, and if I weren't legally dead he would find out I was faking."

"A lot of people who are stuck in Avalaons don't legally exist. They have setups to handle it. My parents are fine and I told Ren everything and will tell Charlie once I can prove it instead of just making bizarre statements of reptilianhood over the phone, but if I didn't and my medallion stopped working..."

"Given that I already legally exist, I suspect it would be more convenient to continue to do so and claim to have a rare, debilitating and contagious illness that means I can't show up in person to things. Also, if my father believes I'm dead, it would be harder to access his money than if he wants to ensure I'm not tempted to let anyone he knows know what happened to me."

"Fair enough."

"And given that real estate in Avalons is expensive, that would be more of a concern than it currently is. What would you do if you became a kind of critter with no medallion?"

"If I sprout six extra legs or something and have to go around like that all the time... well, it might depend on whether any of them have properly opposable thumbs, since that would be important for most of my runecasting-related ambitions. The nice bugbear lady might help me get my excess feet under me, I could try teaching adorable monster children school or something."

"...Oh, I hadn't even considered the possibility of lacking opposable thumbs. That would be terrible."

"I have claws. They're pretty dextrous for claws, and one of them per foot could be described as a thumb, but holding a pen would be hard."

"If it came to that I'm sure Jaromira would be willing to take dictation, so it's not like it would put an end to ambitions, but that would...slow it down, yes. Even if one's feet were as dexterous as one's hands, it would surely be harder to see the paper to write on."

May points her left foot at him. It turns shoeless and blue and clawed and scaly.

"Not as dexterous as a hand," he concludes.

"Yep." She puts it back. "But at least I am a lovely shade of blue."

"That you are."

"In any case, mistakes are as likely to end up with us dead as transformed. So we had better avoid it regardless."

"Yes, it'd kind of counter the project of becoming immortal. Extreme caution's the word."

"If we figured out medallions and resurrection that would make the rest of spell development go a lot faster," Kanimir muses.

"If we knew who to resurrect, it would, anyway. And we'd have to do it without reigniting the extinction war. ...Or do you mean because then we could be irresponsible with our spellchecking?"

"The latter."

"I guess. Although I have no idea how uncomfortable turning into a kind of critter you wouldn't have been before, or dying of botched spell, might be."

"I'd be willing to try, if the obvious problems could be reliably patched. It really would make spell development easier, and if it's prohibitively unpleasant, well, I don't try that again. Although it wouldn't surprise me if it was possible to hire people who wouldn't mind acquiring the ability to turn into an interesting and novel kind of magical creature to test spells for us; some people have high pain tolerances or unusual reactions."

"Possible. But we're kind of limited in our ability to advertise and it's academic until we have a working resurrection."