He gets through a preliminary pass that day, settles in to read things more thoroughly the day after, and then two days after experimenting with medication he goes into his mindscape to talk to the Nine Tails.

He heads over to Cam's interruptible clone afterwards, figuring Cam might want a report.

Cam's interruptible clone pauses his video game. "Hi!"

"Hey! I talked to the Nine Tails about the questions!"

"Oh yeah? What'd he say?"

"So he told me a lot of this out of order, since he was kind of refusing to answer any questions until I mentioned the space aliens?"

"So with the aliens - according to him Kaguya was the leader of the aliens who came here, and she married a mortal king, and had twin boys with him. Those kids were Hamura and Hagoromo. Hagoromo was the guy who later became the Sage of Six Paths. Kaguya was betrayed by her husband, though, I think in an 'assassin' way not a 'cheating' way, and she grew bitter about humans. There was a tree, that the Nine Tails called the God Tree, with a fruit, and the tree was sacred and no one could approach it. Kaguya killed the tree's guards and stole the fruit, and when she ate it she got amazing powers. She used those to unite the world and create an era of peace. But when her kids were grown they had the same powers, and she was suspicious of them, and then the kids somehow discovered she was doing evil stuff like feeding sacrifices to the tree? So they decided to stop her, and she got angry at them, and somehow merged with the tree? And became the Ten Tails."

"And then Hagoromo and Hamura fought the Ten Tails, and the fight rearranged the Earth, but they won, and they sealed Kaguya away - though the Nine Tails didn't know where - and split the Ten Tails into the nine Tailed Beasts. Apparently each tail up they're at least twice as powerful, so the Ten Tails was as strong as all of the Tailed Beasts combined."

"Well, this... pushes a lot of confusion back a step, to 'what's up with that tree'..."

"The Nine Tails didn't know. Can you conjure for it?"

"Let's see what I get." God Tree? Eensy little bonsai God Tree? "No bonsai God Tree is forthcoming."

"Huh. Wonder what that means..."

"I couldn't conjure the Nine-Tails, so it could be like that? Not a material enough object. I suppose I can't rule out magically-contained-somehow antimatter? I don't think it's the minds limitation, at least not by itself, the mind would still have some substrate which either would or would not be conjurable for whatever reason. Or it didn't exist and the fox was misinformed or shitting you."

"Can you conjure the air around it at a specific time with like non-God-Tree wood in the middle?"

"Maybe? I can probably at least do surroundings even if the replacement doesn't go." Surroundings of God Tree, the tree itself an attempted replacement with tasteful mahogany?

The tree dwarfs its surroundings, easily thrice the height of the nearby mountains. It also looks odd - the roots dig into the ground, with little pods or nubs on the exposed parts, but it doesn't branch or leaf until the very top, where there's a burst of thick leaves like a palm tree, though shorter and sharper.

"It's not the most attractive foliage ever."

"Huh. I guess if it turned into the Ten Tails it makes sense it's the same kind of unconjurable thing as the Nine Tails?"

"For some reason that seems weirder for a tree than for an animal, but yeah, I guess so."

He nods. "Oh! I also asked the Nine Tails why they're the specific animals they are. He doesn't know that or why the tails thing."

"So assuming that's true he didn't like, decide to be a fox and could not one day decide to be a secretary bird, okay."

"I think from what he said he can change the way he's shaped but he's fundamentally a fox in the same way some people are fundamentally a girl or a boy?"

"...huh, okay, his gender is 'fox'."

Shrug. "Don't know if it maps exactly onto gender since I don't really get the whole gender thing? But probably not a bad way to describe the whole 'having a preferred shape' thing?"

"- okay! It's probably not culturally competent or something to ask if you prefer different pronouns or anything."

"I'm fine with whatever. Don't really have a preferred shape or anything?"

"Well, that's at least straightforward. Does it come up a lot?"

"Sometimes I'll hang around as a girl? Or I'll turn into something for some reason and not bother changing back for a bit, I've been doing that some since I got better at the transform."