See! Such a cute reaction!!

She will give him an apologetic nose boop on his cheek, though.

"I look forward to the day when your nose is not so damp," he says, but he's also still petting her.

Her, too!

Also oh goodness he's flirting back, that's exciting and also furthermore eep. Happy eep, but! She will nestle her head into his shoulder and totally not think about what precisely they will be doing once she's human shaped again.

Many soft pets for the soft friend.

And here they are at the tower again. "Where to?" he asks his passenger as he starts up the stairs. "Sitting room, your room, somewhere else?"

Hmmmm. She thinks she'd like some variety in scenery, spending too much time in her room is going to make her feel like a shut in.

One yip!

Sitting room it is! A cozy little one with a red-grey colour scheme.

Excellent! Then she can snuggle him and get scritches and presumably he can work on making her not fox shaped anymore!

He does indeed work on that. With scritches. They're very important scritches.

Sometime in late afternoon, he exclaims "ah—ha!" and flops delightedly into a new bizarre configuration on the sitting room's very comfy couch. "All right, I have, so to speak, found the end of the rope. It would be faster to flip it than pull it off entirely, but it's looking to be a difference of hours or days and not many days if any, so I presume you'd still rather be completely defoxed?"

Astea has, by this point in time, had a nap, some snacks, and has solicited a chew toy to nibble on while snuggling and getting scritched. She looks up from her mangled curtain tassle and gives an affirmative bark.

"Understood." Scritch scritch. "I'm off to disappear completely under a pile of ritual magic books; I will be returning at unpredictable intervals to check my work against the reality it is meant to affect."

Affirmative yip! Then she pauses and jumps down from the couch to tap the floor twice with a front paw. Sort of how she points to the letters.

"Hm? Aha—" He flicks his fingers and conjures a letter-set for her.

Food and sleep reminder?

She looks very wry, for a fox.

"...I would like to say I won't need them, but, alas, you know me too well for that. Yes please."

Affirmative (and amused) yip! Then she bounces back onto the couch to give him an affectionate noseboop, grabs her chew toy, and waves a front paw before heading off. Probably to investigate his library some more, but she hasn’t decided yet.

Isfain, as promised, vanishes upstairs to make a huge mess among his books on ritual design.

He is very cute.

But she should leave him to be a nerd in peace, with only minimal interruptions to remind him that he has a mortal form that needs some kind of care. And also for snuggles, because he does actually need to check his work, and snuggles and scritches are great. They still sleep snuggled together, because that's just nice, and it seems obvious for them to fall asleep together when she's the one reminding him to sleep at all. She hangs around him and occasionally points her adorable fluffy charm at him, but she is actually perfectly comfortable giving him space to work.

What she is less comfortable with is still being a fox.

It was kind of nice at first, being a fox in his tower, because it was rather like a forced break. She couldn't do anything of real substance, so there was no pressure to do anything at all. Instead she could goof off and follow whatever whims took her. Which was nice! It's not a thing she's had for literal years, probably since she was a child. Being free to do whatever she wanted was novel, even if she lacked opposable thumbs during this freedom. Now, though... well, she wants her opposable thumbs back. She wants to be able to hold a proper conversation without painstakingly pointing to each and every letter that, despite how good she's gotten at pointing quickly, still feels like it takes forever. She wants to be able to look for and retrieve books without either requesting assistance or having an absurd fox adventure in order to safely retrieve them from the shelf without damaging the books themselves. She wants to read without having to carefully use her lower jaw to turn pages, because her nose is cold and wet (and therefore damaging to books) and her paws are, well, fox paws. She wants to garden, wants to learn ritual magic so she can make a billion healing artifacts, wants to get home before someone decides her cottage is going spare and dumps or sells all of her stuff.

Quite frankly, she's more than a little sick of this. Capable of distracting herself, sure, but quietly unhappy and dissatisfied and admittedly a little bit lonely, because there's only one person she can interact with and he's busy. But bothering him wouldn't fix her fundamental problem, it'd just draw this out longer, and she'd really rather not. So instead, she kills time. She works on her silly little town made of twigs and stones and other stolen items. She runs around outside and sniffs things, from creatures to herbs to interesting rocks. She jumps on the bed, she flounces around the tower because moving around is kind of mechanically fun. The adorable wizard gets fox snuggles and gentle reminders to eat and sleep. She gets scritches and books and ignores the growing urge to go outside and scream as loud as she can because this is such a stupid thing to have done with magic what an absolute waste of everyone's time and energy and it's not fair.

But none of it has ever been fair, and throwing a temper tantrum about it won't help anything, so. She keeps distracting herself, and tries very hard to be patient and supportive. Eventually, she will get to stop being a fox. What an exciting time that will be.