"That's good. Silliness has its place but the obstruction of magical progress is not it."
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?"
"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's the firebird?" asks Ren.
"Yeah. But since critters might all be created by magic it could also have to do with cognitive accessibility - people think about birds more than reptiles? And definitely think about wings more than other aspects of birds, so winged-thises-and-thats are common."