He nods. "What if we explained just to the people in Innsmouth?"

"I don't think they would condone this. But I didn't think this would happen!" she looks close to tears. 

...He's not sure on the etiquette around asking upset strangers if they want a hug.

"Then we'll fix it without anyone knowing."

"I--I don't--I do think they wouldn't condone this--but would they believe us--" 

"I'm pretty persuasive. We could at least propose the test; if we're wrong, then a woman has her father back."

Nod nod. 

"They--they say he went insane before he died--I think that's when he--" 

"Yeah. Someone shoved into the wrong body - people looking in from outside might think they've gone insane..."

"She was only seven." 

"We'll get her back. We should - should also try to see if there's anything on de-aging her right body - "

"We don't have anything like that now--I have some names of other occultists to look into, maybe one of them will have something--" 

"There's gotta be something... How quickly can we contact them?"

"I'll start writing letters. --If someone could check the telegram office to see which off this list can be telegrammed--" 

"I'll go." She stands and takes a hastily-scrawled list of names and locations from him. 

"Do you know anything else bad Ephraim's doing?" he asks the still unnamed woman. "Especially that we can intervene in?"

"I don't know what he does when he leaves the house in Derby's body." 

"Do you think it'd be unsafe to follow him, even as an animal?"

"I...don't...know that it would be...but I wouldn't be surprised if it was?" 

"I'm just - worried there might be something we won't know about and he won't tell us, that'll go wrong if we just switch him and Asenath."

"We could ask him, once we have him." 

"But if he doesn't want to tell us - I'd rather go in with information. But that trades off against fixing this quickly..."

"Not necessarily--gathering information personally is not, I think, our current bottleneck; we're going to at the very least need to go to Innsmouth and retrieve Ephraim's bones and bring them back here and render them into powder before we can do any switching, and ideally--well. Asenath isn't going to get any more dead while we wait; it might be better to seek out answers to the problem of her adult body before reviving her." 

"Yeah. There's a chance other things might go wrong, but - I think trying to do this right is better than doing this fast?"

"I waited months to revive Eliza, no matter how much it hurt, because she was dead and there was nothing worse that could happen to her, it was so much more important to bring her back right than to see her again sooner. The dead can wait." 

He nods. "I'm probably best for following Ephraim around, because I can shapeshift?"