"Okay. Luckily, I have a device that should help with that." He pulls the suitcase-sized device out of a drawer. "Plus, highly energy efficient food to get from Bar."

"What in the world is that?"

"Replicator, it takes things apart and makes new things with the bits. It's a simple model, but portable. I am also gonna bring a hoverbike, because, why would I not bring a hoverbike?"

"Why not indeed. Shall we, then?"

We shall. He grabs the last of his things and takes Enserric to the door.

Enserric begins to glow, and the doorknob turns, and the door opens to reveal the interior of a humble little cottage. There's a bed, a full-length mirror, and a dresser on which sits a small wicker basket full of fruit and vegetables. (There's some knobby red peppers, peaches with odd whisker-like hairs on the sides, orange-and-white berries, and carrots with puffy cotton balls on top.)

Teo takes a deep breath and goes through the Milliways door, on his hoverbike. "Is this place immediately safe?"

"Yes. Well, it isn't warded, or anything, but it's in the middle of nowhere and no one has a reason to harass you here."

"Good enough. I am gonna assume these are tainted fruits?"

"Yes. There's canine peppers, whiskerfruit, foxberries, and bunnycarrots - the whiskerfruit turn you catlike, the rest correspond to their respective animals."

He eyes the things. "How much of change eating one of these will cause? And do they come with mental effects?"

"No mental effects, thank Marae - unless you get a corrupted one, but that's visually obvious, they're black and they look wrong. If you eat one reagent and you're currently a blank slate, one of your body parts will change - typically starting with facial features, tail, or genitals. If you eat one while already morphed a few times by that reagent, you open the door to more extreme changes. I wouldn't recommend eating more than four of anything in that basket at a time."

"Why four? Do you have magic to check if a byproduct of one of those has been purified?"

"Four is a general guideline that'll keep you from transforming too heavily. And no, the only way to determine the alchemical effect of something from first principles is to eat it."

"Okay, I am gonna feed some to my replicator. After a while it should pop out a purified food bar which will taste horrible, but hopefully be 99% less... that. Suggestions about which one is the least awful?"

"Depends on what kind of animals you like. If you don't know what they are, I'll go ahead and recommend the canine peppers, those are the red ones."

"Why that?" He asks, though he does feed them to the replicator.

"They were the first thing I ate in Mareth, and I liked them well enough to keep eating them. As part of a balanced diet, of course - I didn't want to become a full-on dog-morph - but I did still eat them intermittently up until my untimely death."

He picks up the other vegetables (why the fuck does the fruit has whiskers? How does it have whiskers? Whatever). "What should be our next step then?"

"I teach you magic; you use said magic, and my blade, to fight demons and sundry; eventually, you become powerful enough to challenge Lethice in whichever of her tacky fortresses she currently calls home; the demon queen slain, we find a way to send you home; everything is wonderful forever, tra la la?"

"Tra la la." Teo says in his least enthusiastic tone of voice. "Well, anything to do before the teaching magic step?"

"Not particularly."

This said, Enserric launches directly into a lecture on the art and nature of white magic, which as it turns out is quite powerful but requires a good deal of specificity and focused willpower. The lecture is pretty well-made, though he has a tendency to forget that he's lecturing to someone who first heard of white and black magic half an hour ago, rather than an apprentice mage.

It only takes a few hours for the preliminaries to give way to an explanation of how to cast the foundational spell of white magic, Blind. "Keep what I've told you in mind, and create a flash of light in the space between your hands," Enserric lectures. "And for love's sake don't look directly at it yourself, you're not ready to learn healing magic yet and we need your eyes in good working order if you're to stab things."

Teo can stir Enserric back in the right track, and he can diligent an attentive about it. "Alright. I am gonna assume that you have your own means to look away."

He does as Enserric instructed, practice that magic, practice that magic, pretty light will come out? Teo won't be looking at you directly, so no need to be shy.

The cottage is suddenly very bright!

"Excellent," Enserric says smugly. "Onto black magic."

Black magic, as it turns out, is kind of the exact opposite of white magic; it's very malleable and handles a lot of the informational side of things itself, but its power varies based on how strongly the caster feels about the effect, and it usually underperforms white magic unless the caster is under a great deal of emotional stress. Enough of the principles are shared with white magic that it only takes another hour or so for Enserric to impart the details of the fundamental black magic spell, Arouse.

"This spell, unfortunately, requires a living target. So you can either go out and wait for some goblin or another to assault you, which will probably happen within minutes, or you can cast it on yourself and I'll find some way to amuse myself while you, ah, amuse yourself."

"Could you stop me from going outside if it turns out that I will start thinking that fucking a goblin is a good idea?"