"Uh!  Ari.  Ariel Parker.  Nice to meet you.  ...Are you a dog who got person'd or a person who got dog'd?"

“I’m a person who got resleeved! And I liked the name Spot, so it’s mine now. Do you feel like throwing that stick to your left.”

Ari is sad for a moment since someone who started out human probably does not want to be petted, but updates this to hopeful as they convey increasingly doggy preferences.  Also okay yes 'spot of white' she gets it now.

"I do!"  Hwup goes the stick, as far as she can manage in this dense of a forest.

And so does an elegant whoosh of floof! It whooshes, floofily.

Spot deposits the stick in front of her, having retrieved it from the ligneous clutches of its shrubby captors, and stares at her expectantly. Wag wag wag.

"Thank you!"  She picks it up and hefts it again.

In fact, she's probably willing to do that more times than they want to chase after it, unless they have rather more energy than most dogs she's encountered.

“You’re welcome!” 

Spot seems content to play fetch for a reasonably dog-shaped amount of time in a reasonably dog-shaped sort of way, and then -

“Do you, you know, have a reason for being in the forest, or do you just wander around in search of dogs who need of a throwing arm. If it’s the later I appreciate you on behalf of all of my canine brethren but that doesn’t seem incredibly likely.”

"I'm very lost."

Spot lays down and rests his head against his paws; his fur continues to be unnaturally pristine, in spite of his assorted interactions with lush underbrush and foliage in the process of playing fetch. Wag wag wag.

”This seems like the part where I’m supposed to ask you cryptic questions, but I’m new to being an animal and I’d do it wrong. Could you ask me a cryptic question, instead? It’s okay if you’re bad at it, I’m not, like, judgey.”

"Is asking cryptic questions like, a thing, for animal-shaped people?  - That wasn't my question, just something I wanted to know."

“It’s not not a thing. And I want to fit in at the meetings.”

".....The meetings?  Do you mean like, parties - er, balls, that is - or a different, more-organized-and-less-fancy thing."

“Whenever a second full moon appears, everyone hangs out at the lake and eats magic mushrooms! The magic mushrooms are nice. Sometimes the animals are, too. I still think that one dove did a flyby on me deliberately.”

" - About how many people is 'everyone'?"

Spot rolls over - incidentally flattening a poor little petunia that’d never hurt anyone in its life - and stares at her; he doesn’t have especially human facial expressions, but there’s still a certain air of puzzlement around him - like someone took the feeling of watching a hamster wearing a tuxedo juggle three oblong blue spheres and turned it into a perfume.

“... no?”

"Is that as in 'no, I'm not going to tell you', or did that count as my cryptic question?  - Or is it just that I forgot to specify people as anything that's a certain amount of smart, instead of meaning like, human-shaped."

“That last one! I used to be a person, but that’s what falling stars take away. Now I’m a dog. And I’m a very good dog, but if I was still people then I wouldn’t need a quest to turn back into one, see.”

".........Oh.  So you aren't - you have - hm.  Uh, explain more about falling stars, maybe?"

Spot rolls over again; another innocent flower is unjustly imprisoned under the weight of an incarceration system know only as ‘the floof’.

“Sometimes, you know, your betrothed gets engaged to someone else and your best friend ditches you and a ton of other things happen that you don’t want to talk about! And then you’re hit by a meteor. And then you’re a dog. Sometimes when you lose enough - pieces - the stars take away the rest, and when you aren’t a person anymore there isn’t anything else to do but be an animal. But I like being a dog! I’m super good at it and I’ll get to stop eventually.”

"And this is a thing that people generally know can happen?"

“Yeah.”

"I think I'm much more lost than I thought."

“That’s not something I hear every day! I only hear it every week and twice daily on Saturdays. Do you much remember whatever dumb coincidence brought you to the forest and then to me, I’ve interacted with a lot of weird backstories and I’m, you know, prepared for you to do your worst.”

"I was out for a hike and then I fell in a pond, and then when I got out of the pond it was a totally different one.  And then I walked for a while and then gave up and sat for a bit, and there were fireflies, and someone playing music, so I went towards it, and they told me to chill for the night and then walk towards the sun, which I did, and to follow the spot of white, which," she gestures at him and then to the rest of him.  "Also they said to go down the next river we find.  - And to not take advice from strangers, but I've been assuming that was a joke or something."

“They might be doing a thing where they layer metaphors dishonestly and you’ll actually end up falling to your death down a waterfall. But it mostly doesn’t sound like they’re doing a thing with layered metaphors, it mostly sounds pretty straightforward! Also, were they a jumping spider with a tiny violin, I know them, they’re really good at pond ping pong.”

"I didn't see them!  It was violin music though, yeah."