She cannot hum and makes preposterous faces when she tries. Skon laughs and laughs.

They get to the school before the spell runs out, and Raafi stops them outside. "We probably shouldn't interrupt; do you want to let Uamok know we're here, Skon?"

"Sure." In he scampers.

Janow is attempting to figure out how to dance, when they get back, with reasonable success.

Uamok, with Skon on her back and Zoi at her side, tromps over. "Hi! - you're a person?"

"I'm a gnome, it's a spell! It's going to run out any second though."

"How does it decide what you should look like when you're being a person?"

"It goes by what I'm thinking of, and then if there's details missing it fills them in with normal stuff."

"You came out kinda interesting-looking. Striking," says Uamok. "Anyway, welcome to our world!"

She shrinks back into her normal form as Uamok's talking. "Thanks! The prince said Raafi wouldn't mind if we stayed a few days, so we might do that, is there anything good to see?"

"The theater was pretty good. There's actually another play I wanted to see that I haven't found time for yet - they've kind of kept me running, I've been teaching classes and bringing people on vacations and touring two different cities."

"He's very popular!" says Zoi. "The only hummun in the world till now."

"What do you three do?" Uamok asks the others.

"I'm a magical trapmaker, Cochik's a loremaster - he's written like eight books or something and a couple dozen songs about the city he's helping rebuild - and and Rannura is - she's not exactly not a paladin but she's not religious? She's a fighter type, Skon saw her knock me over in person form a couple minutes ago, and she does patrols and keeps the sphinxes and giant bugs away and helps people out who get stuck in the desert, that kind of thing."

"Huh, how do you mean not exactly not a paladin?"

"I mean paladins have their whole thing, right, with the magic horse and the spells and the thing where they lose their powers if they screw up, and Rannura doesn't have that, but if you look at what they do - that they help people who need help and fight the stuff that needs fighting and maybe take themselves a little too seriously - she's like that too, just without the answering to a god part."

"What's a horse?" asks Zoi.

"It's a kind of animal humanoids ride on! Like this-" she polymorphs into a white charger.

"Oh that's so weird looking. It has such spindly legs!" says Uamok.

Janow nods.

"I don't think she can talk in that form."

And she shifts back. "Yeah, I can't, only creatures that can already talk."

"Why do paladins have those?" asks Skon.

Janow passes this one off to Raafi.

"Do you mean why they're good in a fight, or why it's paladins specifically and not other kinds of fighters who have the reputation for it?"

"Both," says Zoi.

He switches languages to the local one again. "You might do best to ask someone who's trained in fighting on horseback about that. But horses are faster than we are, and being up higher can be an advantage, and you can let the horse do part of the work of dodging attacks or figuring out where to go, all of those are useful. Why it's paladins with the reputation is because paladins get magic horses and other kinds of fighter don't - a horse can be a lot of work, too, to keep it fed and healthy and to train it, and paladins don't have to do any of that, so you see them with horses a lot more often, especially in cities where other people might not be allowed to ride horses and usually wouldn't think it was a good idea even if they could. And also part of it is just how they look - we think a big white horse like you saw is fancy and eye-catching, and paladins usually have horses like that - most horses are black or brown and much less interesting-looking."

"I think a black one would look cool," says Uamok.

"The magic horses don't have to eat?" says Skon.

"I'm honestly not sure if they do but the paladins wouldn't need to worry about it if they did - paladins' horses spend most of their time on a different plane where they take care of themselves, they're only around on the prime material plane when the paladins need them for something."

"Oh, huh! I thought getting between planes was pretty hard," says Zoi.

"Is it like the elementals?" asks Uamok.