Margaret was pretty sure the bookshop shared a wall with the sports equipment store, and is curious to see how they've remodeled. She goes inside and takes a look around.

Clean, and very modern, and a bit bigger than it looked from the outside but not mind bendingly so. There's posters on the wall, showing science fiction and fantasy creatures. The closest to human baseline is a catgirl. Most are much farther. There's comfortable benches, and the floor is soft but doesn't seem carpeted, and there's a corner with pillows. A desk cuts across one wall, next to a door. A bored-looking girl sits behind the desk, flipping through a book. Her hair's green and spiked, and she's covered in some serious tattoos. Some of them look like they incorporate piercings. A few lights shine from her forearm - there's no real line indicating she has a latex prosthetic on holding an LED in place, but it's not impossible.

She glances up when Margaret enters, revealing eyes with little dots in them, and hums. "You been here before?" she asks, sounding distracted.

This place looks cool. Most makeover places that she's passed in malls just have pictures of nail polish bottles and closeups of eyeballs and ads implying that a slight change in skin texture is the difference between pretty and ugly.

That girl looks really cool. Her parents would say "unprofessional", but that's just a stereotype, for all they or Margaret know she went to Harvard or something. 

"I have not! Hello! So, tell me a bit about this place?" Anybody wearing LEDs as jewelry can give her thirty seconds of sales pitch; it's not like she's in that much of a hurry to get to the library.

"Rebirth Beauty Salon," the girl says. "We do makeovers. Everything from minor modifications to full-blown overhauls. Transhumanism central. We have a tattoo artist, a piercing artist, a cybernetics specialist, and a bio-modder in today. Who we have different days changes. Shop doesn't always stick around, though. Might not be here when you come back, though we can, like, give you a number and try to arrange stuff."

"That sounds awesome. Wait, are these posters examples?"

"Yup." She pops the 'p'. "Mostly boss's work."

"Wow. Definitely awesome. . . . Also probably expensive and like you have to be eighteen."

The girl shrugs. "Yeah, 's costly. Boss lets people work it off though. Taking something experimental, testing bodies, gathering stuff. Ey likes the challenge more than anything, sometimes lets weird stuff slide for cost of materials."

That gets an interested "Hmm." Even if this doesn't go anywhere, fantasizing about it seems like a reasonable use of a Saturday. "How much for a consultation?"

"Eh. Boss's weird about those. Ey doesn't charge. Thinks it's fun. You'll have to work into eir schedule..."

"Did I hear someone talking about me?" a cheery voice asks, as the door to the back opens. "Shura, you know to tell me about customers."

"You'd scare them off," the girl says, absently.

"Nonsense," the boss says, waving eir hand. Ey turns to Margaret, then. "And who do I have the pleasure of talking to? I'm Marel, the boss and head bio-modder of Rebirth."

Ey has faint scales that form a shimmering effect over eir skin, and golden eyes with a not quite human pupil, long shiny black hair, and nails that go too far up eir fingers.

That is a promising level of using one's own product. "My name's Margaret. Pleased to meet you."

"Pleasure is all mine. Are you interested in a consult?"

"I am, yes. About both biomods and cybernetics."

"Biomodification is my specialty, though I know enough about what's incompatible or synergistic with cybernetics for a basic consult."

"Fair enough. So, uh, how does this work, do I just start listing things I think would be cool or what?"

"I can provide you with a catalog of examples, if you need inspiration, but if you already have an idea what you want, that is helpful, yes. Why don't we go back to my office?"

"I have a couple ideas, but I'll definitely want to look at the catalogue. Your office sounds good." She follows em back there.

And ey provides the catalog. It's thick, with far more detail shots than the posters, and notes on anatomy and physiology - does this modification improve grip strength, are these wings usable for flight...

This is unquestionably the best book Margaret has ever read, and she has read a lot of books. She dives in. On her first pass, she has two questions: is there anything in here about stopping her aging, and what are her options for totally replacing her skin?

The book recommends talking to Marel for aging, who supplies that stopping aging is hard, especially in complex organisms! Some simple organisms are essentially immortal, but you need a process of constant renewal and a robust repair system to manage without bringing in serious magic -

Marel appears to have been nerd-sniped. Margaret is going to learn a good bit about the science of aging! That boils down to 'it's possible but expensive and needs to be built into a shape, which should be designed around 'will not die of old age''.

Skin options are easier. Scales, feathers, fur, spines, simple. Chitin you might have to rework your joints. Plant material, slightly complicated to interface with an animal body (and bark and wood require special consideration to have working joints), but also possible. Crystal and stone, difficult, and like wood require special consideration. Metal, fabric, and plastic vary depending on how organic you want your main body and how much you care about having your skin function as a sensory organ. An amorphous blob-person, difficult (the main problem seems to be neurology; the book notes that if you want a slime pet that's cheaper). Fancy options like 'lava contained within forcefields' and 'never-melting ice' are expensive but possible.

The science of aging is fascinating! She is highly in favor of designing a shape around not being the sort of thing that ages, and of being designed from the ground up in general. Her impression is that ceasing to be made of biology would help there? If she's correct on that score, the ideal surface would be metal; if biology is in fact more robust, she'll go for scales. 

The main issue is repair. Everything wears down over time. A robot can self-maintain using tools given a simple enough design, or can be maintained by nano machines serving the same function as cells, but while metal will overall last longer than organic molecules, organics are hard to beat at intelligent self-repair. A simple chassis which she must repair herself is easy, then next is biology, then after than nano machines.

Something she can repair herself sounds reassuring, at least if this place sells education as well as mods. She has ever built and maintained robots, but presumably the body she's looking at getting will be more complicated than all of them put together.

They can include a very detailed guide, yes, though they don't have classes per se.

Well, the important thing is that she learns how to do it, and she can learn from a guide just fine. Especially if she'll be able to come back here if she develops a fault she can't fix herself. So now the question is, how many cool features can she afford to pack into a new body? Any sort of mental boosts would of course be the best thing, but extra strength, speed, and dexterity wouldn't go amiss either, nor the ability to survive various sorts of extreme conditions.

'Afford' is mostly a question of what kind of contract she's willing to take.

"Well, what kinds of contract are on offer? And do you also sell help keeping my legal identity, or am I going to have to also pass for human if I want to stay in school?"

"The standard, especially for unusual bodies, is that you will assist in field-testing them, and that you will gather materials for my work. There's a few others - simple modifications can be worked off like Shura is doing. Some people work security."

"That sounds pretty doable, so long as 'gathering materials' doesn't mean 'lots of theft'. So how about we design something ambitious?"

She probably would commit theft, for this, and "field testing" sounds like something she'd do anyway, but no need to mention that. Somewhere in the last few minutes this went from "interesting hypothetical" to "tantalizingly plausible".

"More of a sword-and-sorcery fetch quest than anything. Might be some tomb robbing, but not stealing from the living. And 'ambition' is what I live for."

"I have fewer than zero problems with tomb robbing. So, blueprints time?" She might be bouncing in her seat a bit. Okay, more than a bit.

Blueprints time! Marel can make suggestions to start, or tweak Margeret's vision?

Marel making suggestions would be good to start; she has more sense of the possibility space.

First idea, since Margaret seems to like the concept of scales: assorted robotic lizards. Can have the appearance of scales made out of metal pretty easily. A dragon is easier to work digits capable of manipulation into, but the standard Western fantasy dragon actually has a slightly awkward mechanical design...

If she wants to be able to change shape easily, a large primary chassis would also allow her to have a secondary body stored inside. The secondary body could easily be human-passable, and her primary cognition would be kept in it for simplicity's sake, though she could have a backup in the larger chassis in case the smaller one is destroyed or damaged. This would be more costly than a single body, but less so than nanomachines capable of changing shape and density. (More cost effective would be keeping her current body and just interfacing it with the machines, but a robotic duplicate is also possible, and the robotic duplicate could have a 'skin' capable of changing texture and color fairly easily...)

Here's a quick sketch of a draconic robot with a chest cavity for a human form...

Dragons and opposable thumbs are both very good things! So are metal scales. Maybe if they do a two arms, four legs, two wings type of deal, like a centaur where both halves are dragons, that would be less mechanically awkward? And wings are nice to have but only if she'd actually be able to fly with them, if that's not workable or would involve the wings being impractically enormous then forget it.

Human-passing robotic duplicate that looks like her with the option to change colors is good; less chance of ending up as a vagrant. 

Both chassis should be designed with a focus on survivability--fireproof, waterproof, vacuum-proof, and EMP-proof. Since she's going to be software she wants root access on herself, not that she knows how to use it yet but someday she will. Various clever tools built into her limbs like a living Swiss army knife would also be pretty sweet.

Survivability is easy enough with this design.

Flight can be accomplished a few ways - wings capable of independently lifting her would in fact be enormous and costly; Marel would lean towards an internal lift system, with optional wings for balance, steering, and aesthetic. If the wings don't need much support they can make the basic dragon shape easier - wing attachment sites near the forelimbs risks interfering with range of motion, but if the torso is bulky enough and Margaret isn't attached to reaching behind herself it could work, or positioned more towards the middle of the back...

Root access is doable, and swiss army limbs is exactly the beauty of a robotic design.

Internal lift system is better, yeah. If the wings are neither necessary nor sufficient, she'll skip them and have one less part to repair. Or at least make them foldable and maybe retractable so she can steer with them but they won't get in the way. Middle of the back is better than near the forelimbs, both for range of motion reasons and because having too much stuff up front is unbalanced. Sketch sketch.

In her Swiss army limbs she wants a straight knife and a serrated knife and pliers and these kinds of screwdriver and tweezers and a soldering iron and a blowtorch and a file and a coil of wire with one end anchored to something structural via a retractable winch. Actually the blowtorch should be in her mouth unless there's a good reason not to, because a lot of the time you want two hands for holding the thing you're blowtorching and also fire-breathing dragon, duh.

Retractable sounds like a fun challenge! Just steering ones can be smaller and flimsier, too...

Blowtorch is a good option, and yes, should definitely go in the mouth.

There's some more options for Swiss army limbs, but most of the technologically advanced solutions are highly specific, fragile and difficult to make rad-hard, and/or expensive. The benefit to analog options: they are really easy to make durable in space.

She'll go with the simple, durable ones, that's most of what she knows how to use anyway. Also everything should be modular enough that when technology has advanced some more a few hundred years from now, she can swap stuff out for better stuff. Or if that's too hard then forget it, she can just buy an entire new chassis in a few hundred years and upgrade by cut and paste.

Very sensible of her! Marel quite approves of wanting to have control of your own body.

These tweaks make modularity easier... These will refine her own access for repairs...

What excellent tweaks those are. Slowly a set of blueprints takes shape on the table between them.

Marel's experience in this shines through. The blueprints are thorough enough, with enough annotations, Margeret shouldn't have too much trouble figuring out how things are supposed to work when something breaks.

Yup. Margaret is just enough of an engineer herself to be able to read the blueprints and be impressed. She takes lots of pictures on her phone and emails them to herself in case something happens to the hard copies.

Smart. She'll have her own backups of the hard copies, and can provide more free of charge, but Margaret might not always be able to get back here quickly.

Yeah, this place does seem like it moves around a lot. Which is itself pretty awesome--more things in heaven and on Earth, etc.

"So," she says when she's got all the images neatly filed away, "What sort of payment plan would I be looking at for this setup as-is?"

"Hm..." She outlines some details: if Margaret throws herself full-time into testing and resource gathering (under the standard work-trade contract), it'll take her probably between one and two years, going by averages, to pay off the entire set. If she, for instance, takes one weekend a month, it'll take her much longer. If she wants to pay straight money... That depends on her finances. The dollar sign is very, very large, but Marel doesn't charge interest on payments, so paying it over a longer period won't hurt her. (She'll probably be able to pay it off faster with the work-trade; Marel does comment she doesn't really need money and values the help more.) It's possible to switch between contract types even partway through - some people have their finances fall through, or manage to separately get rich while adventuring - and the conversion seems to bear out 'Marel is willing to pay well for fetch quests.'

Her parents will definitely insist that she keep going to school, and she agrees with them, but she can do fetch quests every weekend and most evenings and all summer and have it paid off in four years or so. And she sees no reason not to start now, since it's Saturday morning--okay, it's probably Saturday afternoon by now, they spent a while designing.

Luckily there's a lot of things that can be done in a day or two!

Marel will have to look up what exactly is available or needed today, if Margaret wants to have an idea of specifics before finalizing the contract?

Margaret would love to know what sort of thing is available or needed today. She also wants to be clear, is this a case where she does the stuff and gets the body when she's paid off, or where she gets the body and then uses it to do stuff, or does she get it when she's half paid off, or what?

She'll get the body, then work it off. The contract is mostly enforced by 'people who wouldn't fulfill it don't get a chance to walk in the door,' and 'Marel won't work with people not continuing to make sincere-faith efforts to pay off their contracts.'

Today... One of Marel's other contractees put in a request for an assistant, who'll be harvesting materials while they manage the wildlife or vice versa - world isn't a death world but it's not the type of place you want to be alone and distracted. There's a volcano that's currently erupting, and while it's doing so rare minerals are exposed. With Margaret's radiation-hard mods, she could also gather materials from a dying star, or from this one massive dead creature currently floating in space. There's also this one world that seems to be an infinite flat plane covered in an ocean, one section of which contains the remains of something powerful and magical. Fetch quest to a library-world that requires you to answer a riddle to get in and do business; Marel would provide local currency and a shopping list. Marel also has a variety of trades going on at any given time, and many of her intermediaries for those could use someone sturdy in the escort.

All of those things sound great! In particular, visiting a dying star sounds super awesome wow, but she should probably do one other thing first to get used to her body before also trying to get used to space space she's gonna go to space. Which of the riddle library and the infinite ocean does Marel want done more, she'll do as many of those things as fit in a weekend but that might end up only being a few of them.

The riddle library. Most people seem to find the sphinxes off-putting and the riddles annoying, unfortunately, and the trade deals are usually worth more than explorations tend to be.

"Maybe it's just my general good mood, but riddles and sphinxes both sound awesome right now. So how does getting the new body work, is there an operating room or something?"

"Yes. You'll be sedated for the procedure. We'll need a list of medications, allergens, and known medical conditions - we do a full-body scan that should catch all that, but it doesn't hurt to double check.

She would certainly hope she's going to get sedated; any procedure that involves removing her mind from her brain is not the sort of thing she wants to be awake and watching. "Uh, I'm on the birth control pill and I'm allergic to pineapples, no medical conditions other than that."

"Those should be just fine, then. We'll avoid pineapple-based medication." It's hard to tell if she's being sarcastic, but she is smiling.

Heh. "And presumably the robot body won't be allergic to anything, on account of not having an immune system or the ability to eat."

"Exactly. Do you have any other questions? A desire to contact someone, or to take time to think it over? - Leaving the shop without a tie to it is risky, but if you back out and stare at it while making a phone call it won't run away on you. Though doing that sometimes annoys it."

"Nope." This is definitely a case of "better to ask forgiveness than permission" as far as her parents are concerned. "Let's do it!" Also what does it mean for the building to be annoyed, but she can sit on that question until after she has her shiny new body.

"Alright. This way, then."

Excited following! Fiddling with her hair and bouncing a bit!

There's a good bit of lead-up to the actual anesthetic, but nothing out of the norm for a hospital before a major surgery. They're very meticulous, at least, especially with scanning her, and Marel's explaining every step like she's teaching a student.

And then she's given a skin patch, a pre-anesthetic, which'll make her floaty and happy, and then her consciousness sort of drifts off, and it's like a wall comes down over her memory. (Marel had explained this would happen. Records are available of the entire procedure, if Margaret finds herself curious about what happened between the anesthetic amnesia and falling properly unconscious.)

Margaret appreciates the explanations, both for peace of mind and because learning useful things is always nice. She drifts off contentedly, expecting to wake up in what feels like only a moment.

Her senses are a bit scrambled when she does awake. Distant, not really connected to her conscious mind - 

And then they slowly, one by one, snap fully online.

The first obvious thing: her body plan is quite different.

This is gonna take some getting used to, in a totally awesome way. She starts moving each available limb one at a time, combining sight and proprioception to figure out which mental action goes with what motion.

She is, fortunately, currently in a large indoor space with nothing delicate to bump into if she decides to push the testing.

Then, over a speaker system: "Does everything feel alright?"

"I feel fantastic!" She has never felt as good as how she does right now. And she's rapidly becoming less clumsy as she gets a feel for the strength of her motors and the range of motion of her hydraulics. Margaret unfolds and examines her various tools, though she holds off on testing the blowtorch.

"Good! Once you've gotten a sense of yourself I'll want to more systemically test ranges of motion and such, make sure everything's connected right."

The tools seem all where they should be, and are all of high quality.

Balance: excellent. Wings: extendable and retractable as expected. Flight: yes! Not much flight, she's large and indoors, but she can get off the ground and demonstrate to herself that she could maneuver if she had more space to.

"Is it alright if I try out the blowtorch in here? Not on anything, just in the air."

"That's fine."

In that case, blowtorch! Awwww yeeeeaaaah. In fact: "Awwww, yeeeeaaaah."

"Okay, I think that's everything, we can do those tests now if you like." She is so pretty, wow, she can see most of herself by craning her delightfully long neck around but she still wants to look in a mirror.

Marel will give her a list of exercises, accompanied by videos if Margaret needs the visual aid. Nothing needs adjusting from these, and once they're done Marel comments, "I'd like to test flying next, since the ground-work checks out. Do you want to take a break before that?"

"Nope, still having too much fun. Also I don't feel tired yet. Oh, I should have asked, how much if at all will I need to sleep now?"

"You don't need sleep like biologicals do. You can still go into an idle phase, possibly including dreams, if you're bored, or in a situation where continuing to operate might be dangerous - you produce less heat when idling, for one, and while you're as heat-resistant as I could make you without expensive magic, the external shielding trades off against efficient heat sinks, and you won't always be able to safely open your vents." Venting had been one of the many exercises. 

"That is the best answer. This is the best day. So, flying test?" Flying test flying test! Also she can do a lot more missions for Marel per year if she's not spending an entire third of her life alseep, so she'll be paid off sooner than she was expecting, but right now, flying test!

Flying test! (Her excitement's apparently contagious.)

The entire roof can retract!

Nice! Someday she wants to learn the techniques involved in attaching this place to the storefront it was parked behind.

Flying!!!

The store appears to currently be a sprawling set of cottages in the woods, in a valley cradled by mountains. There's little lights floating under the trees, clearly visible in the dusk.

Marel switches to a radio channel, walks her through her flying paces once she's had a chance to stretch her wings a bit.

Wa-hoo! Flying!

"What planet am I even above right now?" She asks once the initial rush has worn off a bit.

Marel gives a name; it's not one Margaret will recognize. "Low population density, weak magic that's mostly apparent in magical creatures. No one will be particularly surprised to see something large flying in the distance. Apparently the shop was in the mood for being a witch's cabin in the woods."

"Mood? Is that a figure of speech, or is the building a person?" She could in theory have gotten a building for a body; it's hardly implausible.

"It's unclear. My predecessor spoke of the building as a person, but the building doesn't tend to communicate much beyond a fondness for certain places or people."

"Huh. Maybe they're just really private." 

Whoosh! Swoop!

"Perhaps. Fits, with being a building, at least."

And then some tests of assorted abilities while flying. Does the flamethrower work during different aerial maneuvers, is there any heat build up problems from higher exertion...

Everything seems to be in order, once Margaret stops worrying about frying her own limbs and actually activates the flamethrower while going upside down. It's a silly worry, but all her self-preservation instincts are still used to a much more fragile setup.

Re-training your own instincts is one of the major stumbling blocks with a mod this large, unfortunately...

Everything seems to be in working order so far.

Eh, her instincts are strictly wrong in the paranoid direction rather than the reckless one, even if it takes a while she'll be fine. Her biggest problem is more likely to be something like trying to fit through small doorways.

"So, how about that library you wanted me to visit?"

She'll set out a map on Margaret's visual display (having already explained how to manipulate it), and assorted details on how to approach, where to go within it, and so on.

"Do you also want to practice switching your consciousness to the smaller chassis? You should be able to stay in the dragon chassis throughout this mission, but sometimes emergencies happen."

Having a heads-up display is yet another separate piece of awesomeness.

"Ah, yeah, I should do that. Better to know how and not need it than need it and not know how." She pokes around for a mental action that feels like switching over, just in case it's obvious.

There's something like that, and both Marian and the owner's manual accessible through her HUD have more detailed instructions than vague instincts can account for.

Then it shouldn't be too hard to swap over, and open up the main chassis so the smaller one can climb out. It feels extremely weird.

The smaller one, at least, is still to Margaret clearly a robot, even if you'd need specialized tools to pick up on that from outside her. The HUD still works, and there's a note that the on-board processing power is weaker and the memory smaller compared to the dragon form. ('Weaker' and 'smaller' still both put her at better than anything else commercially available her civilization has produced.) She can optionally maintain a linkage to the dragon form (the toggle is located here), if she wants to remotely access its software, but it's not set up to allow her to control both bodies at once right now. (It can be, that's mostly programming and the code's already there, but most people find that sort of thing intensely disorienting, especially when getting used to a new body.)

This definitely isn't as awesome as being the dragon (Where did all her limbs go? Was she really used to four limbs just yesterday?) but it's still pretty excellent. Knowing that she's not full of cartilage and organs and fluids is nice, and she can tell by feel that she isn't.

The tests for this body are simpler, at least, and soon enough she'll be done with them.

It's a good body! Durable and flexible and easy to operate. She's still happy to climb back into her main one when she's finished. Now she's ready for that library errand, and she already has this handy map. "Time for me to head out, yeah?" she says, unfolding and refolding her wings.

"Everything seems good to go, yes."

"Great! I'll see you later!" Then she's off to the library, as guided by her new best friend the heads-up display.

There's interdimensional portals involved first, but the building is currently very accommodating about where it opens its doors. It lets her out on a moon, the building now metallic, small, flashing lights providing advertisement. Who it's supposed to be advertising to is a bit of a mystery. The gravity here is low, the soil a dusty yellow, the stars beautifully clear without an atmosphere in the way. And, peeking over the horizon is a massive planet apparently covered in a mixture of city, park, and rooftop park, with only thin veins of water visible.

Oh wow, those are some amazing stars.

Wheeee, low gravity! Boing boing flying stunts oh wow stars boing. "I'm in spaaaace!" She squees to nobody in particular. 

Okay, back to work. Onward!

There's a special area of the city for landing in, but fortunately her instructions and papers are all very thorough, so she's waved through.

The library-city can in fact accommodate a dragon between buildings, and inside many of them (and she's not the only being of her size), but she might want to switch to the smaller chassis for exploring some of them. Fortunately, her contact will be in a rather large and sparsely treed park. She has a bit of time until her appointment.

There's no way she can explore everywhere, so she sticks to the streets and buildings where her dragon form will fit. She likes it, and anyway, she doesn't have anywhere to stash it where it would be sure not to get in anyone's way. She sightsees for a bit, but aims to get to the park several minutes early so as to be sure she isn't late.

That seems wise, as the park is decently crowded - though her contact is exactly where the briefing said he'd be, and he stands out quite a bit even in this crowd. He looks like someone had a very odd, cubist dream about a butterfly-themed fairy, and then decided to render that dream in stained glass. His voice doesn't match his body at all, deep and rumbling as he laughs and waves Margaret over.

"You must be Marel's new girl!" he declares, crystalline wings fluttering.

"Not how I'd've put it but you're totally right. You look pretty awesome, did she work on you too?"

He smiles and makes a so-so gesture. "Only a bit of color switching. Which, well, plenty hard with how my wings do colors, but my species looks like this normally. Your form is quite lovely, though."

"Thanks! It's all new from the ground up." She swishes her new tail happily. "So, we have a library run to make?"

"Yes indeed! I'll introduce you to the library staff in charge of this sector, too, help you find your way around for future visits - though they'll have riddles for you to get you in."

"Sounds good! I'm looking forward to hearing one of these riddles, I actually have no idea if I'm good at riddles or not."

He chuckles. "I think they sometimes adjust for the person's ability, but, yes."

And he leads the way. The main dragon-compatible entrance is enormous, stone mosaics drawing the eye to it, depicting odd and fantastical beings reading scrolls and books and tablets. A six-legged being approximately the size of a large lion sprawls across the walkway. Their sleek fur shimmers in the light, tawny with a red and orange iridescence. Their eyes seem outsized for their face, their muzzle flat, and when they speak their voice is light and melodious.

"Welcome," they say, rising to sketch a long bow. "Do you seek entrance?"

Everyone is so pretty! She would have felt distinctly insecure before, but now she's pretty too. "Yes." Wait, was that the riddle, was she supposed to say "I've found the entrance, it's right here?" Eh, too late, she'll see how they answer.

"Then you must answer my riddle:

"To have me is freedom; to speak me is war; to hear me is death; to know me is everything. No law may bind me, but any may hold me. What am I?"

Margaret generates a bunch of ideas, discards them all as blatantly incompatible with one or another clause, then settles on one to try.

"A belief," she says. "The most fundamental freedom is freedom of thought, which belongs to everyone and is beyond the reach of law. And when someone hears someone else's beliefs and changes their mind, it's like they're replaced by a slightly different person--that's why the war and death parts."

"A good answer," they say, stepping aside.

Phew. Onward and inward!

The library is massive, and was clearly designed to be a place to savor books. Widely spaced shelves soar to the ceiling high above and march into the distance, and the sitting areas between them look cozy. Despite the size, it's quiet, sounds fading out rapidly. Everything's well-lit by heatless motes of light, and there's little sprites that can retrieve books. The ceiling bears scenes ranging from domestic to epic; animals and people and unusual beings decorate every carved column and support. 

This is exactly what libraries ought to look like. She hopes she can find her way back here when she has more time to linger. She starts searching for the books she needs, walking the stacks to read section names and bask in the ambiance rather than looking immediately for a directory.

They definitely don't use the Dewey Decimal System, and indeed apparently group 'fiction about X' next to 'fictionalized nonfiction about X' next to 'nonfiction about X', though each sub-group is clearly labeled. Sections range from 'science' (including math) to 'history' (organized by time, and place within that) to 'culture' (organized by group, not by geography) to 'atlases and charts' to 'psychology' (which seems to include the romance genre of fiction, and is not counted within the sciences, though neurology is)... Many of the sections are very large, sprawling over multiple shelves with finely grained sub-sections - but there's enough of an organization system Margaret should be able to tell where to go when she reaches an intersection in the main path.

She doesn't dawdle, though she's tempted to by book spine after book spine hinting at nonfiction from worlds with more technology than her own. Okay, she stops once. Okay, twice. Okay, a few more times than that. Eventually she has all the books she came for and another pile of the same size for herself. It ought to be possible to make sure hers get returned when the others do, no harm no foul.

This adds up to quite a lot of books.

She's given a reminder of when the books will be due back, and a firm sheet of something that looks and feels like paper but won't tear with the date on it.

She will bring the books back, definitely. Paper goes in one of the compartments she now has instead of pockets (or, for that matter, pants); books go under her arm and under her arm and under her arm and under her arm and in more compartments. And now she can start back the way she came. How is her contact doing? She rather lost track of him in favor of all the books.

He has his own stack of books, though notably more modest than hers. He waves when he sees her.

Is it obvious how she's supposed to get back to Marel from here? She still isn't used to the newly expanded set of ways she can get from one place to another.

Her guide can help with that! Usually Marel's people are picked up by the building itself, though this planet dislikes it, or it dislikes this planet, he's really unclear. Still, it should be wherever she left it?

Well then, she won't make the building hang out on this planet any more than she already has. She thanks her guide for all his help and heads back the way she came.

He welcomes her and wishes her well, and tells her how to contact him if she's ever in the area again.

The building is still where she left it.

In she goes! She expects Marel will not be hard to find either.

Marel is in fact quite easy to find.

"Everything go well, I hope?" she asks.

"It did! They had everything on your list. I checked out some books for myself too, I hope that's okay. I figure I can return them at the same time as the rest." She starts stacking Marel's books on the nearest table.

"That's just fine. This can be one of your more routine tasks, if you'd prefer."

"I'm always in favor of more trips to the library! Though I recall there were also a dying star and an erupting volcano you wanted someone to visit, and now that I'm not tripping over my feet anymore I'm pretty excited for those too."

"There's always much of interest to do, yes. Do you want another assignment now?"

"Yes, but I should probably check what time it is outside first; my parents will worry if I'm out much past dinnertime."

"Sensible. The building might provide you the relevant clock; we have a room for labeled clocks just for that reason... Or we could check the internet where you're from."

"Whatever is more convenient, though the room full of labeled clocks sounds neat."

"The clock room, in fact. I can give you directions easily enough."

"Sounds good!" She can follow directions! To, presumably, a room full of clocks.

The room is massive, an enormous number of styles of clocks - and means of marking time. Some have twelve hours, some eight and some ten and some twenty... And that's only the ones at all familiar in style. Some are spinning symbols, some are digital displays with a rapidly changing sequence of ten numbers, some have multiple interlocking wheels...

Ooooooh, neat!

Whoops, she just spent multiple minutes staring at the gears on that one. Now she's going to find the one she needs to care about. What time is it in Framingham, Massachusetts, Earth?

Not quite dinner time yet, but it's getting close.

She reports this back to Marel. "I probably don't have time for another trip out today, but I can be back tomorrow morning. Really early, even, since I don't have to sleep. Do you have specific hours, or is it more 'if the building is here it's open and if it's not I should come back later'?"

"More the latter, unfortunately."

"Well, I'll do my level best to come in to work tomorrow, then. Before I leave, can you help me understand how I'll know how much of my debt is paid off at any given time? I know it's not exact, but some way to tell when I'm halfway done, or whatever, would be nice."

"Of course."

She explains the local value system, and how much value each task is worth - the library trip is a decent amount but not much, because there's a lot of people who like doing that and the riddles can be hard but not dangerous. Things that someone without Margaret's modifications couldn't do will pay better. Of course, there's also 'how much does Marel want this done'...

Margaret can access her records through this room over here, if she wants either an update on her current debt or to reacquire her blueprints or similar.

That's all very excellent and orderly and she thinks she's getting "paid" a totally reasonable amount. And now she needs to go home if she's going to have time to stash her main body in a bush and show up in the human-passing one.

She's back the next morning, before dawn so nobody's alarmed by a robot-dragon landing on the sidewalk.

"Good morning, Margaret," Marel says, once the girl at the front desk has directed her back. "Here for more work?"

"Yup!" She says with a swish of her tail. "Today I'm ready for jobs that take advantage of my sturdiness." Space space she's going to go to space!

She laughs. "Want to survey a star, then?"

"I absolutely want to survey a star."

"Let me explain the sensory array for this, then, and I'll start you off with something interesting but not dangerous, how about? You can work your way up to active super novas and star nurseries."

"Sounds good to me!" New senses, nice!

New senses: fairly straightforward! There's however a lot of things to fiddle with to get different readings. Like focusing a camera lens in and out.

This is fun and bizarre and unhooking from all of it later might feel like going blind and deaf and numb, but that's a problem for the future. Margaret diligently practices with the equipment until she's got the hang of all the fiddly bits.

"You'll have farther to fly, this time. Should also put your movement systems through their paces."

"Sounds good." She stretches her wings out and folds them back up again. It has none of the limbering-up benefits of stretching a muscle, but it's a good way to fidget.

She explains navigation in space - how to orient yourself by the local stars (and what those even will be), how to balance acceleration and deceleration...

Clearly she should have played more video games as a kid. Still,she remains a quick study.

Good!

And then soon enough Margaret will be up to speed for this and similar missions.

(She's going to go to space repeatedly!)

Alright! How does she get out of the building this time, and what's outside it?

Same general way she did last time, and - 

This time she's fairly far from her destination. Well, relatively. The sun still looms large, but the innermost planet orbiting it is of course much farther than a moon. 

Time to be a spaceship dragon flying through outer space! Space can't transmit sound, but in her imagination there is epic background music.

And: a sun! It is doing sun stuff. Little arcs of plasma are splitting off. But she can get really close - even if not close enough to be anywhere near the plasma arcs - and take measurements. (The measurements part is actually pretty tedious, but.)

It can hardly be more tedious than doing homework, and she likes homework. The difference is that this time the results are for someone's direct benefit rather than for practicing something, and also there are plasma arcs. She does all the measurements carefully and records the results.

As long as she stays at the distances she was told to, nothing actually dangerous will happen - the sun's in a fairly even period of activity right now. 

There is, still, a wealth of results to be recorded.

Nothing dangerous happening is good. Getting to see a star as a big complex thing with parts and motion instead of just a painfully bright disk is great. Soon she will have all the data she needs, recorded and double-checked for completeness.

The data behaves! 

She could head back to the shop, which is presumably where she left it, but there are a lot of very pretty planets in this solar system - none inhabited, but one of the inner ones has some brilliantly saturated colors.

That really is pretty. And here she is with all these lovely temporary senses that she isn't quite ready to turn back in yet. And presumably she can keep the driver software and thus the amazing memories. Time for some space tourism in space!

What's making those colors, are they clouds or rocks or something else?

Seems to be rocks and lakes, mostly, though the clouds are yellow instead of white. The lakes have the most vibrant, poisonous-looking colors.

It reminds her of the pictures she's seen of Yellowstone, with hot springs full of exotic minerals and even more exotic microorganisms. A human probably wouldn't even be able to breathe this atmosphere, wow. She flies around a bit, doing something between taking photos and memorizing things, before rocketing back up and looking over the rest of the system.

That gas giant has sheets of lightning constantly racing across the entire surface, against dark blue clouds slashed through with red.

This rocky planet seems to be made of diamond, and the dawn side casts prisms into its thin atmosphere.

This other gas giant has a moon with a constantly erupting geyser.

This one planet's on a different plane than the others, and has a massive trail of asteroids as moons.

Wooooow. Photography photography photography she is the luckiest Earthling ever. How late is she running, she should get back before Marel decides she somehow messed up and got herself vaporized.

The building is waiting for her!

Oh good, she'd have quite a bit of trouble if it wasn't. In she goes, looking for Marel to drop off her equipment.

Marel is flitting between labs at the moment, but does stop to smile at Margaret. "Go well, I hope?"

"It sure did! Where do you want the data and the equipment put?"

She gives instructions for how to transfer the data over and where to leave the equipment.

Then they will be put where they belong, neatly labeled in the former case and neatly stacked in the latter. Then she goes looking for the clock room to check the time again.

It's starting to get late! Exploring space can take a while, apparently.

And she has school tomorrow, drat. She didn't used to think "drat" about school very often, but that was before she had alternatives like "being a robot dragon exploring outer space". She promises to be back on Saturday at the latest, and is in fact back on Wednesday because she managed to get ahead on her homework. Her parents have been told she is "helping a friend out with a project".

"Margaret! Hello. It's good you're back so soon - I have a bit of a request for you, in fact."

"Yeah, I got lucky with my schedule. What's the job?" she asks eagerly, swishing her tail.

"Depends. There's someone who could use a partner on their own job. Do you mind working with them?"

"Not at all! I'm always happy to meet new people."

"Good! I'll lead you to them, then, and let them explain the mission."

Follow follow, happy tailswish.

There's a werewolf-shaped person waiting for them. They have wolf ears instead of human ones, bright golden eyes, a spill of fur down their back, an odd posture, and a big fluffy tail. Their clothes are dark greens and browns, tailored specifically around the wolf parts. Their shape's moderately but not extremely feminine - mostly apparent around the face.

"Hello!" they say, voice husky and androgynous. "You must be my new teammate. I'm Silv. Gender neutral pronouns, unless I say otherwise, please."

Margaret smiles at them. "Hi Silv! My name's Margaret." Her voice is feminine, and with her lack of flesh and clothes that's about the only gender cue she's giving off.

"Good to meet you. - Oh, Marel, I think we're good, though I'll send you a message if something comes up, okay?"

"Alright. Have fun, you two."

And she's off.

"So, how long have you been doing this work? I just started last week."

"A few months! I got shapeshifting, the proper magic kind, so my debt's pretty big. Still, it's fun work."

"It's so much fun-- I got to go to outer space! I don't have any magic, but I have some really cool technology."

"Yeah. I love the whole robot dragon thing! That's super neat. I haven't been to proper space-space yet, except, like, inside a spaceship, since my mods aren't the best for that."

"Being a robot dragon is the best. But I bet shapeshifting is amazing too. Do you know what our job for today is?"

"Yeah! Collecting rare materials from this one magic mountain forest. Some of the sites are pretty far apart, and I can't carry a ton, so a big flier's gonna help reduce the number of loads, pretty much, and I bet you have senses I can't manage biologically."

"Ooh, that does sound pretty. And yeah, I can definitely fly stuff from A to B while you tell me what's useful and what isn't. I can probably carry you around too if you want."

"We'll have to have a race to figure out which of us is faster! To see if that's economical, you know."

"You're on. I don't even know my top speed yet!" She knows her humanoid form no longer has to put in much effort in gym class, but she hasn't had a chance to push the limits of the dragon form's abilities in atmosphere.

"Head over to the planet, then?"

"Yup!" And off they go.

The planet: is mountainous and forested, with forests of dark blue-purple leaves and grey trunks that fade to a dusky blue in the distance, and wide streams that run over glittering pebbles, and outcroppings of crystal that glows with a soft inner light. It's night now, the sky awash with more stars than visible anywhere on Earth, auroras dancing over past the mountains, and soft glowing flowers unfurl in the shadows of the trees, like distant fireflies.

"Oh," she mumurs. "What a lovely planet."

"It is, isn't it? This is one of my favorites to come to..."

A few more seconds of giddy staring, then, "So, race you to that peak?"

"You're on! Let me transform, then you can count to three?"

And they're a medium-small hawk, built entirely for speed, appearing at the height of their head and dropping a bit before starting to climb and circle.

"Alright--one, two, three!" She opens up her internal throttle all the way and takes off with a sound like an extremely expensive car.

Swoosh!

Not as swoosh-y as Margaret, though - Margaret's slower in atmosphere than in space, but Silv's top speed's currently around two hundred miles an hour.

Margaret will definitely beat Silv by a fairly wide margin.

She's faster in space, yes, but space doesn't have nearly as many cues of just how fast she's going--no wind across her wings, no scenery blurring as even her cameras can barely keep up. It feels amazing. Winning is a nice bonus, but it's not what she's whooping joyfully about when she lands.

Silv's laughing too, when they land and turn back to a form more compatible with vocal chords. "It's been a while since I got to stretch myself like that!"

"Flying in atmosphere is great! So, what stuff are we looking for?"

"There's a few types of rock and crystal, but mostly growing things - some mosses, some leaves, some flowers - these night-blooms for instance - and some mushrooms..." They list the most notable characteristics. "There's actually a bit down at the tree line I can see, and I think some good mineral deposits up here."

"Cool. Want to search together for a bit, then split up once I've seen a couple of everything?"

"That's fine by me!"

"Great!" She proceeds to look for the requested plants.

The plants are findable, though a bit spread out, and Silv's pretty good at pointing things out and describing the little differences between what they're looking for and what's a clever mimic for what they're looking for.

Margaret can take photos directly into her memories now, so she doesn't make any of the same mistakes twice. She does mash some foliage when she forgets how heavy her body is and how it extends all the way over there.

Then pretty quickly they'll be able to split up to cover more ground. Silv takes the things likely to be in more dense foliage, or areas less amenable to dragon bodies, and leaves things like collecting mosses and rocks off the exposed parts of the mountain to Margaret, alongside more dragon-friendly flower picking.

Margaret cheerfully gathers flowers and rocks and mosses, winging her way from one part of the mountain to the next. It's almost meditative. She won't get tired, or bored, or loaded to carrying capacity any time soon.

Then they can get quite the impressive haul!

"Alright," Silv says, when they've gotten plenty enough of each ingredient. "There's a few things that're only in one or two small areas on this planet, too - wouldn't mind a lift."

"Sure thing," she says, shifting her load to make room on her back. "Climb on." 

They climb up and start giving directions.

Physical contact with another person is so much less unpleasant now that she isn't a squashable bag of skin and organs. Off they go! Not quite as much nyoom this time, since she needs to keep both cargo and passenger comfortable, but still enjoyably fast.

Silv laughs the whole way.

They'll very quickly see some gorgeous sprawling valleys, lit by the slowly rising sun, and some more interesting plants and even a few colorful bird-like beings. Gathering the rest of the materials isn't hard at all.

"What's your home world like?" Silv asks during a more tedious part of this.

"That's a hard question to answer when I don't know how different yours is. Hmm, we have humans but no magic that I know of, and we have airplanes and the internet, and we've been to the moon and sent probes to other planets. We have a lot of social problems but lots of places are pretty decent to live in. Is that the sort of answer you were looking for, or part of it at least?"

"Pretty much? Mine had humans, but no airplanes or the internet or anything, and the only magic was pretty weak and rare. This place is actually in line with it - vanishing witch's shops that sell you potions that transform you, except not cursed."

"Huh! It was a total shocker for me, both the magic and the technology. What's your home country like?"

"No electric lights or anything. Pretty low population density, lots of moorlands, lots of goat herds. The mountains were gorgeous, and the water always ran clean, and the forests were still wild. Our rulers weren't too distant or anything - they lived in a castle, but it was the sort designed to shelter the entire capital town - and they'd come to the yearly games and everything. We had a market every ten-day, where you could sometimes buy things from really far off, especially if you went to the capital market. Turquoise beads and gold thread and obsidian knives..."

"That sounds nice, though if I visited I would miss a lot of stuff from home that you presumably didn't know about."

"I think that goes every direction! Most people miss at least some things."

"Yeah. I'm glad I can stay in my original world, even though hiding the changes has been pretty inconvenient. --I have a human-passing second body I've been going to school and stuff in." Using the humanoid feels a bit like driving an RC car compared to living in her main body--fewer moving parts and a sense of operating at one remove, even though the interface is objectively speaking just as good.

"I mostly don't go home? But I don't have as many ties as most people. It's good you can stay where you want to, though."

"And I'm glad you found somewhere that's a solid improvement on where you started."

"Yeah! Opportunities are pretty good in general, it turns out."

"Yup! Marel's whole thing kind of sounds like the setup for a cautionary tale, in my cultural context, but as far as I can tell it's actually just awesome."

"Heh, yeah. No randomly disappearing after cryptically cursing your entire family!"

"I was thinking more like 'transformation has a horrible secret drawback' or 'the things she wants you to do to pay it off are all evil' but I'm glad she didn't do that either!"

"Yeah. Cautionary tales where I'm from are more about - being careful what you wish for, and also exact wording?"

"We've got some of those. Also 'don't trust offers that seem too good'. And 'don't trust strangers in general', but that's a bit silly now that we live in cities of tens of thousands of people and rely on strangers every day."

"Wow! I'd probably find that stressful, honestly..."

"Plenty of people do, yeah. I like it, it means there's always new people to meet. And of course I do see some people often enough to know them pretty well."

"Heh. To each their own! It's good you live somewhere you like, though."

"Yeah. I wonder how many of the people who find Marel's place end up moving to another planet."

"I wouldn't be surprised if it was 'a lot,' honestly, Marel's - the place feels like somewhere that only shows up when you're lost, you know? People who need something."

Serious nodding. "Yeah. I needed a different body. There was nothing wrong with the old one, objectively speaking, but it wasn't good, and this one is."

"Yeah. I was like that, too - it's more the changeability I'd wanted, you know? Lots of bodies feel like they could be a body for me, just... They can start to itch."

"That makes sense. I think I've managed to cram everything I want in a body into this one, but I guess you'd have to ask me again in a year to be sure."

"Heh. It's faster than that for me - but everyone's different, which's pretty good, all things considered. A world of just clones of me would get boring."

"Yeah, me too. I'm not sure anyone wants a world of just clones of them; they'd have to do all the jobs they didn't like."

"That'd be another problem with it, too."

Nod. Gathering useful inventory.

They're a pretty efficient team!

Once they've gotten what they came for: "Wanna head back, or explore some more? We've got spare time, I think."

"Let's go exploring, then! I think I saw a waterfall earlier."

"Sounds fun!"

Waterfall: is massive, spilling down over rocks embedded with little crystals, catching the light perfectly.

"Wow, shiny!" She flies around admiring it from several angles. There's a space behind it she can't quite fit in, but Silv could if they wanted.

Silv does, in fact, squeeze back there, laughing.

"There's some cool rocks in here, want me to bring out samples?" they call.

"Ooh, sure!"

Rocks! They've got interesting bands and colors and little flecks of something glimmering.

"These are pretty. Maybe when I'm not in debt I should look into getting a cool paint job."

"You'd be extra pretty with something like that, yeah!"

"How much does your shapeshifting let you change that sort of thing? Like, when you're a bird, can you be any kind of bird? Or a kind that doesn't exist, like a blue cardinal or something?"

"Yes to both! There's some stuff I can't do - gotta be organic basically? As far as I can tell."

"That's really cool." Being inorganic is so much better, honestly, but de gustibus non est disputandum.

"Could you be a dragon?"

"I can be dragon-shaped! Breathing fire's hard, and I need to pay attention to being actually aerodynamic if I want to fly - the forms themselves aren't magic - but, yeah. I usually like having fur a bit more than scales, but the variety's nice. Probably could be a furry dragon actually..."

"That sounds bizzare but also adorable. I like being armor-plated, it feels so safe and clean."

"I can see that! I like being soft. I think we have a bit of time, wanna see me play around with my shapeshifting?"

"Definitely!"

They morph into a fluffy wolf with fluffy feathered wings, fur in grey, wings shading from grey to green.

"Ohhhhh my gosh that's adorable. And super cool." She does not ask to pet them because that would be impolite but she definitely has to decide not to ask.

"I know! I'm fluffy!" They flutter their wings, bouncing a little.

"You are fluffy! Can you fly like that? It looks a bit unbalanced."

"Not really efficiently! Body plan's pretty similar to a vulture in terms of weight to wingspan, so taking off's hard, but it's possible."

"That's honestly really impressive in, like, a constrained-optimization way."

They laugh. "Thanks! And, yeah, had to get a real sense of air stuff before I could fly effectively..."

"That makes sense. One day I'm going to know enough engineering to be able to design and build a body like the one I've got."

"Neat. That sounds like an awesome ambition."

"It might well take me more than a human lifetime to get that good. So, good thing I'm not human."

"Heh. Definitely."

"Um, I assume you don't age either, right? What with the shapeshifting?"

"Not that I've noticed, no."

"Oh good, I'd feel like a real jerk bragging about it otherwise. Though now I'm curious whether you could shapeshift into a kid or an old person if you wanted to."

They ripple -

And they're in a new form. "Yeah, though I generally like being this age, and would rather look old than like a kid. Still, different faces are fun sometimes."

The second, very different humanoid face throws Margaret for a momentary loop, then she says, "Yeah, it's a good age to look. Or at least I think so, but then I've never looked any older than sixteen."

"Maybe you can try looking like an ancient dragon sometime."

"Heh. Maybe if I have another space job and get hit by a bunch of meteoroids and scratch up my paint."

"Always good to have an excuse for a new paint job."

"I'm so not surprised that you would say that. I'm boring, I like being blue."

"It's a good color!"

"Thanks!" She flares and refolds her wings exuberantly. "Do you know when we should be getting back?"

"We're not in a rush, but probably soon-ish, yeah..."

"Hmm, better early than late, I think--it's easy to lose track of time when I'm having fun."

"Yeah, definitely. Head back, then?"

"Yes, let's. This was great though, way more fun than it would have been alone."

"Yeah! Race you back to the building?"

"You're on!" Any excuse to go zoom!

Silv turns into a long, snakey flying being, with numerous wings along their length and a frilled back. They're quite fast in this shape, and don't tire easily.

That is a really excellent number of wings to have. What an elegant form. "Did you design that yourself?" She calls over the wind. "It's neat!"

They trill back: "Yeah! Took some time, but it's fun!"

"I'm really impressed! How much biology detail work did you have to do?"

"A good bit - not on, like, a sub-cellular level, but I was messing around with bone densities and tendon attachment points and nerve networking a lot."

"Wow. That's awesome!"

Heeeeeeeeeee. "It's fun! Took me a pretty long while, though... Worked half by trial and error and a third by just feel, since books weren't really explaining things the way I needed."

"Do you have, like, extra awesome proprioception that tells you where all your organs and nerves and stuff are and what they're doing?"

"Yeah - some of that's part of the shapeshifting package, some of that's trial and error sticking new nerves in places."

"That's really cool. I'd be so nervous about doing trial and error on myself that way. When I learn enough engineering I'll probably make a new body and test it a lot until I'm sure it's better than my current one and then move myself over."

They both seem to have forgotten to race, and reach the facility about the same time. Silv lands and transforms back into their earlier face.

"I'm used to healing magic existing might be a big difference, and as long as I don't touch my brain I can change out of a form pretty easy. A more top-down design sounds like it'd be its own kind of fun, though."

"That makes a lot of sense! My world has pretty good medicine but probably a lot worse than your healing magic for that sort of thing. And definitely worse than having an undo option in the shapeshifting." She's very glad Silv is not going to get hurt more than temporarily.

"Yeah. It's - pretty important, I think, to have good healing."

"My world will get there eventually, I think--we keep inventing new things, in medicine and everything else. It's harder without magic but a lot of stuff we haven't figured out yet ought to be possible in principle."

"That's good."

"Is your world's magic the kind where you can invent new things, or is there a fixed set of things it does and all you can invent is new ways to use them?"

"Second, unfortunately. Far as I know, at least."

"Oh well, it's still cool. And presumably you can invent new technological things just the same, so you come out ahead in the end."

"Probably! We have less pressure to, though, I think, or have just had less luck with discoveries than most worlds with like robots..."

"Maybe. I don't really know what makes societies invent things more or less quickly. Maybe Marel does; I'll ask her when we drop off our stuff."

"Yeah. That sounds like her wheelhouse."

Then they can go do that, since they needed to anyway! Presumably Marel is as findable as she usually is.

Exactly as such.

"I trust everything's gone well?"

"Yup! Silv's an awesome co-worker." They show her their haul of this, that, and the other.

"It's good you two got along."

"Margaret's really nice to work with."

Totally internal eeeeee. "So there's something we were curious about. You've heard about a lot of worlds, right? Do you have a sense for what a world having magic does to how technology gets developed there?"

"Some of one, though there's a lot of confounding variables."

"Yeah, I guess the first question is how similar worlds without magic end up. If everyone invents things at a different speed in a different order even when they're working from the same physics, it would be harder to tell whether magic affected it."

She nods. "Even worlds with very similar species and starting conditions can end up very dissimilar - small changes in what bacteria evolve, in people's actions in response to crises, even in things like metal deposits... It all makes a fairly large difference. There are quite a few worlds that end up nearly identical despite radically different magic and physics systems - but they're identical on the level of the same people existing with the same DNA and similar circumstances. It's a bit too much to be coincidence, so I tend to disregard worlds that have what can only be called fate governing them when considering how worlds naturally evolve. Or, at least, consider them in another category."

"Wow. Fate sounds bizzare. Does my world have that, do you know?"

"It's hard to say - I think there's a good chance not, though, but that rather your world provides the template for a few other worlds - there's a good number of Earths with masquerades that somehow don't diverge strongly from your world."

"What, like Harry Potter or something? Worlds with secret magic where everything that makes the history books goes the same even though it's all different underneath?"

"Yes. It's very strange!"

"Yeah. Speaking of masquerades, why isn't the multiverse and stuff common knowledge back home? I've been keeping everything secret out of, like, general worry about disrupting the status quo, but unless I'm somehow the first person from my world to find out that doesn't explain much."

"For why I haven't broken it - I generally try to avoid being too open when visiting a world without apparent magic, because some places with masquerades have laws against breaking said masquerades - at the nicest - or even have some sort of automatic magical enforcement, and some places are subtly anti-magic, and it isn't always easy for me to tell what's going on right away. You actually might be the first person from your world to interact with an actual vanishing store or some other method of inter-dimensional travel, at least in a situation where you could record it and not have it taken as a myth."

"There aren't many proprietors of vanishing stores willing to visit magic-less places, too, and most of my sort have some kind of personal investment in not being broadly known about."

"That makes sense. I'll probably keep on saying nothing; too many unknown unknowns to want to get into as a random high school student, and I don't want to cause someone to come bother you."

"It's possible there's advances you could move more subtly to your world, too, especially once out of high school."

"Yeah, I'm going to be reverse-engineering myself anyway, I guess it makes sense to patent anything patent-worthy if the original inventors aren't around to lose any revenue from it."

"I think your world also has something about things getting into the public domain eventually?"

"Public domain is definitely a thing but I don't remember if it's about patents or copyright. I'll look it up when I need to know it. Oh, speaking of needing to do things, I might need to go home soon; let me check the time."

"Clock room hasn't moved since last time you were here, thankfully..."

And how about time back home, has that moved? One of these days she's going to get unlucky with the time difference and have to do a lot of explaining to her parents. She should probably tell them before that happens, really, but between the debt and the technically not being human anymore she's not sure how well they'll take it.

It hasn't moved as much as she's been here, but she should probably start heading home soon.

She says her goodbyes, goes home--and then, as soon as it's too late to turn back, kicks herself for not getting Silv's contact information. She's going to have to hope they're there at the same time again, or get Marel to pass a message.

She tries out some partial truths on her parents; they end up believing she's a human with a very cool dragon-shaped vehicle, doing an unpaid internship at a store they're willing to believe is at least science-fictionally weird. Now at least if she stays out too long she can say she got held up at work.

Work continues being available, at least. The store seems fond of her.

Margaret does, soon enough, get another partnered mission - with Silv again.

"Silv! Hi! I was hoping we'd run into each other again."

"Hey Margaret!" they call. "And yeah, same."

"We should ask Marel if there's a way to send each other email or something."

"Yeah! Email's that computer letter thing, right?"

"Yeah! It's great, the messages go through instantly and it's much harder to lose them than paper letters. At least within a single planet's internet, anyway, I have no idea if there's a way to make it work between worlds."

"Maybe the building could - I don't know, hold the emails and then send them all out when it connects to a world? Like a post master."

"Yeah, if you made an email server that could talk to various worlds' internet and put it in the building that would do it. Except your world doesn't have internet access yet, so it wouldn't work for emailing you in particular. We might just want to leave each other paper letters."

"I actually pretty much just hang out here or on missions or assorted other worlds. Would get anything sent to the building pretty soon after it arrives. Still, I don't really know a lot about email or internet stuff..."

"Then leaving notes is probably best. Though, I could show you the Internet if you wanted to visit my world sometime."

"I'd love that."

"I would too. But right now we're apparently supposed to be exploring a sunken ship, which should be pretty cool."

"Oo, sounds it!"

Marel gave them a distance and direction from shore, and the building lets them out onto a beach. Margaret can just stride into the surf and keep going; she does so, laughing as the waves start going above her head.

Silv laughs and dives into the water as a large seal.

"I wonder if we can hear each other alright," says Margaret.Her voice is distorted by the water but her speaker is of course the same as always. 

"I can hear you!" Silv calls back, though her voice is also distorted.

"Oh good, I can hear you too!" They swim out past the continental shelf and start angling deeper. A school of fish changes direction in unison to avoid them.

"Helpful!"

"Do we know the ship's location?"

"Marel gave me a compass heading and a distance. At this rate we should be there in, let me do some math . . . half an hour?"

"That works out fine for me."

They swim for a while, and eventually Margaret asks, "Can you do a form that has sonar? It's probably our best bet for finding the shipwreck in this murk."

She nods, shifting into a large dolphin. Squeak!

"Shipwreck's over there," she identifies after a bit, before giving more detailed information on distance and all.

"Awesome!" Then they can head over there and spot the remains of a three-masted sailing ship, crunched up somewhat by the storm that sank it and somewhat more by hitting the bottom.

She flits around, exploring, finding interesting items for Marel, memorizing things, keeping an eye out for any approaching sea life - generally having fun, though.

Margaret does likewise! There's lots of cool stuff, both from the ship's equipment and from its cargo.

There's also a giant squid! It thinks Silv is edible!

Silv turns into an even gianter squid! And waves her tentacles, agitated, doing the squid equivalent of cussing someone out for being rude.

Oh no! This is not at all what normally happens when this squid tries to grab a tasty dolphin. Nope nope nope goodbye, have this ink cloud as a Good Job Being Scary present.

Margaret started heading over from the other end of the ship as soon as she saw unexpected movement. "Silv? Are you okay?" She churns the water with her tail to disperse the ink cloud until she can see what's going on.

She laughs and turns back into a dolphin. "I'm fine. Just a hungry squid."

"Ah, and you were out-squidding it. Exciting."

"Sometimes needed. But being alarming's better than getting into a fight, with most things."

"Definitely. I suppose you could sort of make the case that it was minding its own squid business and we showed up and surprised it."

"Yeah. I don't mind giving big social predators a chance to play, but it's - rude, to hold an animal being itself against it, you know? And squid aren't wolves, they don't think romping around is great fun."

"Random wolves want to play with you when you're a wolf? I wouldn't have guessed that; it sounds adorable."

"It is! And it really depends on how well fed they are and how much I look like a threat; still, I get any chances to play."

"Do you have any magic advantages at understanding animals, or is it just practice and being a thoughtful person?"

"Some of both? There's magic for it from my world, which I've got a knack for, but it takes practice and care to actually use."