"I said seemingly!"

"Yes, yes."

"Deceptive creature that it is."

"It's a creature now?"

"It was created. I created it. Etymologically, it is a creature."

"Point to you."

"Between the horns and the claws, I have to catch up somehow!"

May cackles. "You don't know that you aren't a critter! You might be pointier than I am somehow!"

"Maybe I'm a...I have no idea what would be pointier. Are there any hedgehog-like critters?"

"Not that I know of, but maybe."

"Or...Echidna was the name of a legendary creature, and real life echidnas are pretty pointy..."

"Haven't come across critter echidnas either, but maybe they're just obscure."

"Yeah, I don't know. I might look it up at some point just out of curiosity..."

"Yeah. I did do some looking into what kinds of critter there are to see what I could most plausibly be and wyvern was as close as I got, there's barely any reptiles, I have no idea what governs which things there are."

"To be fair, wyvern is pretty much as close to dragon as you can get without actually being a dragon, I think some fictional worlds actually classify them as a kind of dragon."

"Yeah, but something with the same number of limbs or similar tails would have been better. There's a bunch of mammal/bird hybrids for some reason."

"Well, if messing up a spell can turn you into a new kind of critter...it's not implausible that it could take less to turn one into a mammal than a reptile. Although the bird part is confusing, birds split off from reptiles long after mammals did."

"I'm not aware of any invertebrates though, so there's that in your guess's favor."

"How sure are we that the bird hybrids are actually birds and not just a case of convergence, I wonder. I suppose Daphne would be gleeful to find out, eventually."

"Daphne has ambitions towards a Ph.D in biology. She thinks there's plentiful unconquered ground, scientifically, in critter biology. The cognitive accessibility notion is intriguing. I wonder...if crittering someone is something that happens by accident sometimes, if it's possible to do it on purpose? Once we have the medallions thing figured out, of course, and using consenting volunteers."

"She might have trouble submitting work on critter biology to any normal university, so she has her work cut out for her. But turning people into stuff on purpose sounds like an 'eventually', yeah."

"She has long-term ambitions to be the founder of a new sub-field once the masquerade has been peeled back enough that that's feasible and doesn't mind mooching off of Jaromira for things like living expenses until then."

"Ha. Jaromira has the financial discretion, or is planning to make a million bucks, or...?"

"We...have trust funds. And, you know, it used to be that one man's salary was supposed to be enough to feed him and his wife and kids, so."