"Hm. Well, get me an omnivorous monkey, but I'm planning to have good range of motion with my hands. Plus a tail. And - I've been assuming that this won't necessarily allow me to keep my Gifts, do you know if there's a way to do it -"

"There is definitely a way to set up Mindspeech potential! Tayledras bondbirds have it. I am not sure if anyone has ever tried to create an animal or a species with Healing, but it does not seem so different in principle." 

"Fetching, too? It's not as essential for research but I'd miss it and it'd also be a good safety feature when I learn to fly."

"–It will be an additional chunk of research but it should not be harder in principle. Are you going to do the wings, then? You should perhaps select a relatively small and lightweight monkey species - although not too small or I will feel very weird about it. Maybe we can figure out how to cheat at flight with innate magic instead, the way gryphons do, and then you would not be so weight-limited." 

"It would be disappointing to move into a new body I had a long time to design and have it not be better! Anyway, I can almost fly now, just not quite enough to be safe doing it for fun. I was imagining I would be close to my original size, and if I can keep Fetching then I especially don't have to be tiny."

"Oh! You know, I think there may be a species native to the Pelagirs that has something akin to innate Fetching. And of course Suncats do but we are unlikely to find one to cooperate with us studying it. It would probably not work exactly the same as human Fetching, but I see no reason why you could not transfer that capability to another species." 

"What's the species?"

"...I would have to look it up," he confesses. "At one point I knew all of sort of thing by heart but then I was murdered." He still sounds faintly miffed about it every time he mentions not knowing things that he did before. 

She squeezes his hand. "You'll build it back up."

Somewhat shaky nod. 

Leareth looks it up in the library. They want Changesquirrels, which apparently hunt in packs and are actually quite dangerous. 

"Sounds annoying to study."

"A little, yes. Though mostly annoying to capture specimens, they will not be as dangerous once they are separated and in cages warded against Fetching. And they are not going to be terribly dangerous to skilled mages, mostly they are a threat to farmers in the area and such. I am not sure why people try to farm in the Pelagirs but they do." 

"I guess if I'm not trying to give them wings, them being in a place warded against Fetching isn't such a big deal."

"...No, they sound very inconvenient with wings! Unless you can domesticate them and make them friendly, I suppose. I was thinking that you could transfer the Fetching ability to a monkey, or perhaps a breeding population of monkeys, and then give them the wings." 

"A breeding population of winged monkeys would be good, it'd let me weed out any dicey changes that only crop up with bad luck."

"That is a good idea! Should I work on getting you monkeys, now, or do you plan to practice more with the sparrowmice until you have all of the techniques perfected?" 

"I'd feel worse about messing up on a monkey, so I think I need more practice, but if they might take a while to source and get a good environment set up for, you could start early."

"I think those parts could take some time, yes, so if you are thinking you will have it down in six months, I should start setting it up nowish." 

"I might! I'm making good progress."

Then Leareth will get started on arranging a population of monkeys for her, imported from the south, several different species, and a nice big laboratory so they can live pleasantly while they're being experimented on; monkeys need a lot more than mice, to be healthy and not too stressed in captivity. 

Leareth is oriented enough now to be working in earnest on researching alternate power sources, ones he gave up on a while ago. He's not getting anywhere, really. Diplomatic relations with Valdemar are stable and on pause. His army doesn't need much him to quietly prepare in the background. 

It's a little anxiety-inducing but while she does feel better lifebond-wise she doesn't expect to have any miraculous breakthroughs till she can actually devote her entire brain to something without any of the something being "chronic deceptive emotional pain".

Her strange-coloured mice are reliably having matching babies, nowadays. (If she tries pairing up mice of different colours, the inheritance patterns are pretty interesting, some colours seem to reliably 'cover' others so that all the babies come out one parent's colour; some come out half-and-half; for some reason blue mice and green mice reliably produce teal babies.) 

Wings seem trickier for some reason. Her next mating pair of sparrowmice produce a litter where half of the babies have small and nonfunctional wings and half just have a spine deformity that looks like it was maybe trying to be wings and failing. 

Sad but interesting! She puts the deformed ones out of their discomfort and studies them, but lets the others grow a bit in case the wings will get bigger later - baby birds aren't hatched with flight feathers.

They do get bigger! It seems a little out of sync with the rest of the mouse's development; the tiny baby mice grow fur and open their eyes and start exploring their cage, and the wings are still nubby and covered in down. At a month, though, they start growing in flight feathers. 

Neat. Now if she can just get them some non-siblings who are also born with wings she's in business.