:...It seems possible the lifebond-compatibility would, er, make you - fall in love - in the relevant way anyway. Um. Not that I'm sure that would be any less awkward. Probably better to avoid having to learn the answer to that question: 

:I'm willing to try having a tail and I would like wings if there's some way to glom an eagle on there without it being a bad tradeoff in some way but yeah, would rather be a horse than dead but would rather not get to that point:

:Huh. Gryphons got made - I think, if they're not just a legend - so that must've involved smushing together a bird and a mammal somehow. Weird thought: 

:Maybe Leareth knows how to do it. I should read this book:

:You'll have to tell me about it, I'm very curious! How's Leareth doing, by the way, he sounds more lively if he's bringing this up: 

:The thing Nayoki did helped. And you can read through my eyes, right, if I let you -:

:Yes. I don't want to intrude on your life any more than you actually want, though: 

:I don't want you to know what I'm thinking if I don't tell you, but what I'm looking at isn't sensitive information the same way as I see it:

:Mmm. I do like it when you tell me what you're thinking, but - only because you wanted to tell me, you know?: 

:Yeah. Conversations are great! Mindreading is different:

:I think some Heralds like the passive mindreading because it's convenient and saves time, but it's also very reasonable not to like it! And I would honestly find it pretty weird. I like communicating in words, it's good: 

:Is it usually bidirectional, with Heralds and Companions?:

:It varies? Certainly there are Companions who don't particularly shield and share most of what they're thinking. I do think it's usually the Herald sharing more; it seems like Companions have a bit more attentional capacity, and usually the Heralds are the ones busy out doing things and we're the ones offering helpful advice over their shoulder. Attempting to be helpful, anyway. I think I'd find trying to do that very distracting: 

:Distracting from? What are you up to when I'm not paying attention?:

:Thinking about things? Gossip, lots of. Giving advice to younger Companions - I'm not even very old! They still seem to think I'm rather wise and ask me. Looking at cute foals being cute. Mostly, I don't know, my thoughts at least are all sorts of weird and go off on side tangents, it just seems - harder to follow - than Mindspeech: 

:Are you really bored up here - I should be bringing you more books -:

:I'm a little bored. I started talking to his staff a while back, though, Companions don't usually but we can. One of the Healers is very nice and reads books out loud to me: 

:Aw, which one?:

:Adari. She's lovely. Likes poetry. Also gory books about battlefield Healing, but I don't mind that either: 

:A strong stomach is handy in the discipline:

:Oh, definitely! I suppose a little less in your sub-field. If you do end up researching animal-modifying, I'm very curious to hear all about it!:

:Go ahead and read along, then! Let me know if I should go slower or back over a section:

Notebook at the ready, she has at the book.

The book seems to skip some steps and assume background she doesn't necessarily have, but is mostly comprehensible anyway with some rereads, and it cites the other books it's drawing on. It describes how a skilled Healer and a mage (or a single person who has both Gifts, very strong, but that's extremely rare outside the Tayledras) can work together, the Healer providing a detailed view of an animal's insides while the mage uses some sort of specialized mage-technique to - shift them, wiggle them into the new formation wanted. And then the Healer has to use sustained, generic healing-energy while the new configuration is held exactly in place; it has to be 'focused' in the right way, it's apparently tricky to learn by any method other than trial and error, and it has to be focused on the whole animal.

If it's focused in the right way, though, the new body layout is now what the animal's body considers its Healed state, and if it's done very skillfully - again, the book doesn't manage to convey exactly what the difference is - the animal's offspring will inherit the changes. 

Different species of animals can also be combined, though this is fiddly and fraught and the experimental process usually kills a lot of the test subjects. And it's harder to get it to stick deeply enough to become heritable, sometimes it just makes the animal infertile, sometimes the offspring are deformed, or themselves infertile like a mule. Nobody seems to really understand why, or what makes a particular combination work aside from luck. It's harder to combine very different species of animal; mixing mammal traits is the most straightforward; birds and mammals have been done, the result was gryphons. Birds have been combined with reptiles. Birds have been combined with fish but the resulting animals were never able to reproduce successfully. No animals with spines (birds, mammals, fish) have ever been successfully combined with insects, though insects have been mixed with each other. Some very creative mage once tried to combine mice and grass, which completely did not work at all. 

Huh. :I wanna send a copy of this book to people I know at the university, it'd be useful for that hybrid plant research I imagined a while ago: she remarks to both Amshalan and Leareth.

:Ooh! Good idea!: