"References to secrets that nobody will get if they don't already know it are fun."

"Extremely. And lovely, too, if your midform is anything to go by."

"I haven't really found a midform I like that will go with the chair comfortably. I do the cheek scales thing just to avoid questions inside the Avalon."

"I meant that, and when you showed me your foot earlier."

"Figured. But the feet don't sit on the footrests that well, etcetera, etcetera."

"Yes...I wonder if it would be possible to make custom footrests that would work with them. Or--what is it exactly that's uncomfortable, is it the claws and not being shaped like a human foot, is the leg too long..?"

"The legs bend wrong. If I only do below the ankle the claws have no support or the heel doesn't. But I don't consider it a priority to work around," she shrugs.

"As an intellectual exercise or a practical challenge it could be interesting. But I'm not a craftsman, personally, and I'm not strongly acquainted with one such that I would be likely to bring it up, so I suppose it doesn't matter right now."

"And it'd look weird when I was back to wearing shoes."

"Aren't footrests usually removable? I was thinking interchanging the sets based on circumstances."

"Sure, they come off. What a hassle, though! I'm at the Avalon every day."

"True enough." He jots down the idea anyway, just in case it ever becomes more relevant.

"How's Daphne been adjusting?"

"Better. She said I could tell you what precisely was so melodramatic about her finding out her species if you were curious, since it would be impractical to keep it from you given that the two of you are likely to interact a non-negligible amount over a long period of time and she's willing to trust my judgement that you won't react in a way she would dislike."

"...Okay, go ahead. I will try not to be awful about it in some way."

"After the initial shock of 'by the way mythical creatures exist and you are one of them' wore off, both of her parents tried a firebird amulet. Neither of them transformed."

"Apparently her mother was taken advantage of at a party while intoxicated, once. She hadn't been sure, up until that point, that Daphne wasn't biologically her husband's, so she didn't tell her. Most of how she expects people to react that she dislikes--that several people have reacted--is considering the firebird who took advantage of her mother her 'real' father as opposed to the good man who raised her."

"That just seems like arguing semantics about what 'real' means, but I'll be sure not to slip into the phrasing around her."

"Yes, there's definitely a case to be made either way, but I don't blame her at all for being offended when strangers decide to apply their own assumptions and opinions to her situation without consulting her on how she feels about it. It isn't the word she objects to so much as the implication that she must automatically care about him at all as a person."

"Oh, certainly she needn't do that. I'd expect some amount of curiosity, but that's in the anticipatory not normative sense of 'expect'."

"She's actively decided against any form of caring about him she can possibly avoid in response to a bugbear she met early on who implied that her biological father had a greater claim on her than her social father on the grounds that the former was the same kind of critter as her."

"There is... definitely some politics around critter species that I don't know how to navigate yet. But you'd think they'd know that some people don't find out until later in life. That does seem like a... questionable reason to use for making that decision, though."

"I'm not sure she won't change her mind later on, but she really doesn't consider herself to have any reason to want to know anything about him except for possibly things like family medical history. It would be different, I expect, if she had been conceived as a result of--an open relationship between her parents, or a fertility issue that called for a sperm donor, or some other thing that did not cast aspersions on her biological father's character."

"Yeah, that makes sense."