Agreeable yip!

... Speaking of hands. Someone doesn't have any. Um. This is maybe a problem. Soaking in a tub is all well and good, but uh. She would like to be clean. Well. He did offer to help, earlier, and it's not like she's asking someone to help her bathe while she's human shaped.

She sniffs the available soaps, selects one that smells the nicest, places it on the edge of the tub, and yips, again. Giving him big sad fox eyes.

"Aww," he says. "Sure, all right."

And he picks up the soap and attempts to help. He has never washed a fox before, but hopefully it won't be too difficult.

It seems pretty straightforward! And probably way easier than washing an ordinary fox. This one is cooperative, instead of trying to escape.

She yips at him invitingly, ears perked up. He should talk more.

"Are you asking me to keep talking about magic? People don't usually do that."

Affirmative, happy yip!

"Well, all right. Let's see, where was I - oh, this all started with vanishment, didn't it? Would you like to hear me complain about how the standard wizard education teaches the subject completely wrong?"

Yip!

"Happy to oblige!" Scrub scrub. "So the thing you have to understand about wizards is that they are terrible at acknowledging any wizard has ever been wrong about anything. Which means that a lot of what gets taught in schools is just something someone came up with a hundred years ago and decided must be true because it sounded plausible and he couldn't prove it wrong, and now we're stuck with it. My favourite example is half-spaces. A half-space is a vanishing trick: instead of vanishing something to some specific place, you vanish it to - not exactly 'nowhere', but the next best thing - and then it stays exactly as it was the moment it vanished until you bring it back again. The not-exactly-nowhere place is called a half-space, because it's not completely real. And in wizard school they teach you that every person has exactly one half-space, which you can learn to access by doing thus-and-such. Then a little later they teach you how to make a duplication space - which is like a half-space except that once you've put something into it you can take it out again as many times as you want - by doing the exact same thing with a few extra steps. So of course I thought to myself, well, what happens if I do it again without the extra steps? And the answer is, I get another ordinary half-space. I asked my teacher why he was teaching something so obviously wrong, and he said that it was traditional and anyway most people would get hopelessly lost if they tried to use more than three or four different half-spaces because the only way to tell the difference between them is by the way it feels to think about them, which is nearly impossible to write down."

Pause.

"At last count I had two dozen. I don't believe I've ever lost track of one."

She makes such a face at the story about his teacher. Such a face. It doesn't fit into their traditional way of recording information, therefore it doesn't exist? That's not how information categorization is supposed to work. Revisionism for a tidy explanation only looks tidy, while underneath it's a giant mess of lies and misinformation—

She does let out a little giggle at 'two dozen,' though.

"I could probably make do with fewer, but this way I can have, for example, a duplication space that has nothing in it but water, and then whenever I want to do magical plumbing I can link the pipes to that space without having to worry about exactly what will come out of it because there is only one thing. And another duplication space dedicated to interior decoration, and a half-space dedicated to garbage disposal - because just as it's impossible to make something out of nothing, it's impossible to make something truly disappear, it always has to go somewhere, and I don't want enormous piles of junk cluttering up the spaces I actually use for things."

This earns an approving little yip. Yes, excellent, organization. She approves.

"What I really wish I could do is subdivide them - there isn't really such a thing as parts of a half-space, you see, something is either in it or not in it and there's nothing more to be said about details of location, and I think I would probably not need quite so many half-spaces if I could for example have a space for crafting materials and then divide that into sections for textiles and pottery and so on. But I've been trying for years to figure out a way to do that and as far as I can tell it isn't possible."

Aww. Yes, that sounds like it would make organization harder. How does she do sympathy as a fox, uh...

... Hand nuzzle? That's comforting, right?

He grins at her. "Aww, thank you. Well, I think you're all clean, shall I fetch you a towel?"

Affirmative yip!

She patiently does not shake the water off of her. That would get it all over him. She will wait for the towel.

Towel! It's extremely soft and fluffy. The cuddliest towel.

The cuddliest towel bestows upon her its powers! Of being soft and fluffy. ... Possibly a bit too much of that second one. She is now very fluffy.

...Isfain giggles.

"My goodness," he says. "You've puffed up like a dandelion."

She looks at him imperiously, then down at herself. Then back up at him.

Then she barks once, hops out of the tub, steals a towel from the fox-friendly towel rack, and gleefully scampers out of the room to leap onto the bed at full speed. Where she proceeds to roll all over the towel.

She's cleeaaaaaan!

Well now he's giggling even harder!

She rolls around on the towel for a little while, then hops off the bed with it, and drags it to her fox box. Upon reflection, though, this is clearly not enough towel. Luckily, this is a solvable problem. In the interests of solving it, she scampers back to Isfain, barks again, steals the towel he was using, and drags it to her fox box as well, where she makes a more suitable towel nest. That she doesn't use, in favor of running a few laps around the room because wheeee she's clean shut up she's a fox she's allowed to act ridiculous every now and then!

This is just unbearably adorable.

Run run run run run wheeeee!!!

She decides that just running around the room is boring, and ventures into the bathroom. ... Too quickly. She loses balance, over corrects, and ends up sprawled on her back at Isfain's feet. She barks happily up at him, quite unharmed.

"You're incredibly charming, you know that?"

Happy bark!