"Still not keen on the involuntary shapeshifting but not dying of starvation is probably a superior alternative to doing it."

"Rather. You can focus on certain features - if you've always wanted, say, dog ears, you can think about them while eating a canine pepper and lo but they shall appear. In the same way, if you come to a set of features you particularly like, you can sort of - intend to keep them, and you will, as long as you eat a balanced diet of the appropriate items. I ended up with... bunny ears, a cat tail, bee wings, and a canine cock. And blonde hair, due to the intervention of a sand witch."

"—oh, right, do all of these peppers make my cock look like a dog's? I just got it, didn't wanna lose it so soon."

"The knot isn't so bad, but you can put it off if you intend for a different canine change. Extra nipples, say, or a different tail. But you can't just cycle between tails, like you're probably hoping; you'd end up overflowing unpredictably into other features. Four animal features is a safe minimum for a long-term Mareth diet, with not more than two from the same species."

"Mostly I wanted to try having two regular human dicks."

"Ah," Enserric says thoughtfully. "Hmm, how to accomplish that alchemically... you're right that you couldn't do it with a double pepper, it can't have the one effect without the other... Incubus draught will give you another but only after you go to truly absurd lengths, no pun intended... I know there's something that can do it simply, damn it all!"

He descends into muttering, then after a minute or so shouts "Eggs! You'd need an Oviposition Elixir and either access to Egglight Lake or willingness to lay several eggs until you get the one you want, but with a Neon Blue Egg you can grow supernumerary cocks. You'd also probably want a Pale Pink Egg in case you couldn't stand it later, of course; Succubus Draught would get rid of one the next time you changed, but only one."

"...I don't think I want it enough to actually go on a quest for it," he says after a moment of stunned silence—although the pressure in his trousers wants him to reconsider. "I suppose I should figure out a specific set of traits to have, then, and experiment after."

"Sounds like a plan. I'll help as much as you like with that, whether that means sharing my valuable expertise or shutting up while you think. That's a lie, I will never shut up, but I can mutter to myself instead of at you."

"Well if you have something like a list of what animals and traits I can acquire—I don't suppose those lists would be so convenient as to be independent of each other?"

"Certainly!"

Enserric goes into a very lengthy lecture on the various alchemical reagents that can be harvested from the land of Mareth. The long and short of it is that pretty much any reagent named after an animal can give its imbiber ears or a tail from the animal it comes from, or its fur or scales, but only a handful of them will change the imbiber's penis to an animal shape (canine peppers, whiskerfruit, and Equinuum, most notably). If the animal has horns, wings, fangs, or claws, the transformative can grant those as well.

"The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of animal transformatives, and that's not even getting into the more esoteric reagents, like dragonheart flowers or bimbo liqueur or the various demonic transformatives," Enserric concludes. "Perhaps it'd be best if you asked after specific animals whose features you'd find fetching."

At some point he sat down to listen.

"Well, I didn't know if I'd have to limit myself to mammals or if I'd be able to get butterfly wings—are the wings functional, for that matter, I thought for stuff as big as humans they wouldn't be, and if I get a bird's wings do I lose my arms?"

"You don't have to limit yourself to mammals - there are more mammalian transformatives, it's something of a bias that the mages of old seem to have had, but butterflowers do exist. You'd have to go pretty deep into the Deep Forest to find them, though, and I'm not sure you're ready for that yet. Insect wings don't work at humanoid scale, no, they're strictly decorative. You don't lose your arms for any type of wings unless you eat enough golden seeds to turn into a harpy, it's quite strange anatomically speaking but damnably convenient."

"I do want wings, then. And I suppose a dog tail wouldn't go amiss, the bunny's cute but way less expressive."

"If you just want bee wings for decoration you can get honey by chatting up bee handmaidens in the forest, they'll probably try to seduce you into bearing their eggs but if you refuse politely they'll usually give you some honey for being a good sport. If you want functional wings they'll probably have to wait until you have either a stockpile of incubus draught or enough combat experience to explore the mountains and get golden seeds."

"I'm not in a hurry for any specific body modification." Pause. "Except maybe some way to get back to being a girl, a girl day is as likely as a boy day."

"Ah, yes. A given imp or other demon is as likely to carry succubus draught as incubus draught, which has a similar effect in reverse; it's distilled from succubus milk, rather than incubus semen as with the incubus draught. We can simply hunt imps until you have a decent supply."

"...hunt imps. Oh, wait, you mentioned early you can't kill people here unless you mean it?"

"Yes, I did mention that. But you should kill demons. They are, to the last, devoted to rape and torment. Each demon made the conscious choice to give up its soul and dedicate its life to the demon queen."

"...irreversibly?"

Enserric would be grimacing if he had a mouth. "Not... strictly speaking. I believe that several years of research, and access to the Lethicite that is the byproduct of the demonic transformation, would allow a sufficiently clever mage to reverse the transformation of the demon from which that Lethicite came. Not that it would be likely to thank me, given that it made that choice in the first place."

"They made that choice while the queen was around, lots of people make bad choices when they have lots of bad options."

"...true," Enserric admits. "But the more pressing concern is that demons do not keep their lethicite. It is milled into fuel for the terrible machines that drive the demon empire."

"...what is lethicite?"

"It is what remains of someone's soul when they make the transformation into a demon. It contains all that demons do not have: the love and empathy that they gave up. It is also a source of tremendous magical power, moreso the more powerful the person was before their transformation. You can make quite a potent magical focus out of it, or any number of elixirs. The demonic empire runs on the stuff."

"Oh. And then it's just... gone?"