He looks back up at the nest, considering whether it's even possible for him to make it back up there. It seems like a lot of work, and it won't get him much closer to getting a message to Carissa or affecting the material plane in any way, so maybe instead he'll just flop here for a while. 

"You all right?" Caroline calls down.

Some part of him is briefly tempted to yell at her to go away and leave him alone, but this wouldn't help with anything. "I am not sure how to get back up," he admits. 

She lands next to him. "Why do you think you are a baby bird?"

"I assume because you are trying to make it so I cannot leave." He's getting very annoyed with it. 

"I did not make you a baby bird. Nirvana did, because it thought that it was the best way for you to learn the first thing that you need to learn here."

"My understanding was that Nirvana is just a place, how does it have thoughts." 

"Nirvana does things that cause the people there to heal, and when it does things it is usually because they'll cause the people there to heal. I don't know what the underlying process feels like from the inside but it is easiest to imagine by imagining a person who really wants us all to heal but can only do environmental things to achieve this."

What a weird concept. Mhalir kind of hates it, right now, although possibly it's just the being dead that he hates, and Nirvana in the abstract is fine. 

"Well, it seems like Nirvana thinks that I need to feel helpless," he mutters, more at his surroundings than directed to Caroline, "and maybe it has not considered that I am very tired of that and would really prefer anything else." 

"Do you want to talk about that or should I leave you alone for a little while and go get some food for us."

The question is incredibly frustrating, mostly because he's in a mood where everything is incredibly frustrating. "You can get us some food," Mhalir says. He will sit here on the forest floor being a baby bird. Probably nothing will eat him because all the animals here are people. 

She flies off. It is quiet. A caterpillar clings to a leaf, right near him.

It takes Mhalir a few minutes before the quiet peacefulness of the forest soaks in and the frustration subsides enough for him to remember that probably the caterpillar is a person too. 

Which doesn't mean he wants to talk to it, of course, but eventually he's very bored. "Hello?" he says cautiously. 

"Hello," it says agreeably. "I can't see you, who's there?"

"Oh, do caterpillars not have eyes? My name is Mhalir. Right now I am a baby bird for some reason." 

"My name is Thalie. I have eyes but they're awfully unhelpful." She nibbles the leaf she is on. "I haven't done a baby bird. Did you hatch?"

"- Not that I remember, I just woke up like that a few minutes ago. I - have not been in Nirvana very long. Have you had many different bodies here?" 

"Yeah. I started out as a lion, I think because I needed to check what would happen if I ran around biting everybody. It turns out what happens if you do that is you have no friends, eventually. So I did an antelope, to have a herd, and then a kind of fish that moves in schools, and then a starling with a flock, and then I felt like I'd explored that so I did a rockeating dog and dug a cave, for some friends I'd made to live in as bears, and I spent a while being a bear with them, and then I started going for beetles, bats, deep ocean squid, things with weird senses, and eventually I decided to try a caterpillar. It helps with - noticing what you care about and what you don't really care about and what caring about it feels like in your body."

Mhalir has morphed lots of animals with weird senses and wouldn't have said it helped him notice what he did and didn't care about, although in general he doesn't think he's been that confused around what he cares about? Confused in how to achieve it, sure, that seems different. Having no friends seems to him like an extremely predictable consequence of biting everybody, even here where it seems like they try incredibly hard to be welcoming and forgiving, he's not sure why Thalie was confused about that. 

"Can you decide to be different shapes after a while, then?" he asks her. "I tried to change myself into an adult bird instead but it did not work." 

"Yeah. It works a bit differently for different people but for me I have to - understand myself, and what I want, and what I'm curious about, and think about how my curiosity and my interests are best realized by a different shape, and it takes a couple of days, sometimes, but eventually it clicks. I know someone who said that for her, she just has to retreat to a sense of - security in herself, the sense that she's not under threat, and then imagine her limbs, but it took her a hundred years the first time because she was always always scared. And I know someone who has to study an animal for months before they can shift into it. And I know someone who was able to shift easily from their first day. In general it gets easier over time because hopefully over time you are learning about what you need and what's good for you and what kinds of worlds support you and which don't, and that's - generally related, to shifting forms, knowing that stuff."

"That seems very unfair," Mhalir says before he can stop himself. It seems so stupid, if he can't think himself into a less vulnerable form because he's scared and feels helpless. 

"Hmmm, say more about that?"

"That Nirvana will - punish you, for feeling threatened? I really do not need to learn what it is like to be in a body that is small and helpless, I know all about that already." 

"How would you make it work, if you were deciding how it worked?"

"...I am not sure, it is probably complicated with many factors, I just..."

He trails off, yet again he's run out of words. "Do you know anybody who can do a Sending?" he asks instead. "I want to get a message to my - friend - who I think is in a different afterlife."