"- you appeared spontaneously - uh - I can get my witch here and she might be able to manage something." He lifts his talon to his beak and bites a couple times. "To clarify you don't mean that she just settled while you were out fishing with your eagle or something?"

"I was in Boston with no talking octopus, I got eaten by a giant snake except then I teleported here and then there was a talking octopus. I am aware of how fake this sounds but I swear I don't have a less fake-sounding explanation." Also he's a talking owl who asserts the existence of a witch so there isn't really a consensus standard of fakeness available here.

"And she wasn't just not an octopus before, she wasn't present at all?"

"Exactly." Possibly the owl is a human or something turned into an owl and is wondering if the same thing happened to the octopus. Actually possibly the octopus also teleported here from some third location?

"I didn't exist and then I was an octopus; I was never anything else," confirms the octopus.

"And... you can't shapeshift into not an octopus?"

"Not just by wanting to, apparently. If there's a more complicated way I don't know about it."

"That's... basically it... long shot anyway, you're too old... my witch has emergency spells for this, uh, general sort of situation. Is there still water around? That will help. If she puts salt in the creek it'll flow away fast."

"There was a pond a little way upstream. We can go back that way."

"Do, there might be a relatively still place where salt will stay long enough for my witch to get a backpack tank for you. How did you... get here?"

Brenda and the octopus turn around and start hauling back the way they came. Franklin takes up his accustomed place on Brenda's shoulder. "I was supposed to fight this snake, right," she says over her other shoulder, "but it was some kind of weird monster snake with a mirror instead of a head, and it--hit me? And then I was in the woods." She belatedly wonders what the fuck was wrong with her thesis, to merit a snake like that.

"...and you don't normally expect weird monster snakes in whatever situation you expect to for some reason fight a snake?"

"No. I mean, I wouldn't have been surprised by a giant snake, but this one had a mirror instead of a head and I've never heard of that even being possible, I mean where would its brain go? And the teleporting definitely isn't known to be possible and I don't know why Mr. Wilson--he's the guy who picks the snakes--would even have wanted to teleport me instead of a normal fight." Maybe if he figured she would die otherwise? But he never intervened to help anyone else, and this would be a weird way to do it even for him. "Are magic animals normal here, do you have teleporting monster snakes all over the place?"

"No, no teleporting creatures of any kind, no magic animals," says the talking owl.

"So I was using 'magic' as a catchall for 'things the scientific consensus doesn't know about and can't explain' and presumably you have at least some understanding of yourself, so, uh, how are you talking while being an owl?"

"...well, I'm not a real owl, obviously, I'm a daemon. Scientists have those. There's magic, my witch is on her way to do some, but scientists also know about witches."

"Wow. Where I'm from we only use the word magic for fictional stuff. What's real magic like?"

"You'll get to see some when she salts the pond. There's chanting and herbs and sometimes animal sacrifice."

Brenda is one of those lamewads who seems to have coincidental schedule conflicts with a majority of family hunting trips, but magic is way more exciting than acquiring extra food. "Can anyone learn magic?"

"No, you have to be a witch, and you aren't, or your daemon wouldn't be having this problem."

"Damn." It would be really nice not to be having this problem. She knows there are about a hundred more questions about magic she ought to be asking but it's kind of hard to formulate them while feeling the sensations of a kind of dying humans can't do.

A witch zooms onto the scene, aboard a flying treebranch and wearing ragged-edged black silk knotted around herself in a fashion that doesn't really look warm enough. The owl swoops onto her shoulder; she lands by the octopus. She has a bag, attached to some of the silk at her waist, and rummages in it and comes up with a canister of perfectly ordinary iodized salt. "This should hold you long enough for me to get you a tank," she says, picking off the paper seal at the spout.

"Thank you. A lot."

The octopus relaxes when the salt goes into the water, and changes from white to a light greenish brown. "Thanks. It's very good to meet you, I'm . . . I should pick a name."

The witch pours just a little salt, chants something in a foreign language, and then pours out the rest of the salt in a heap on a rock near the edge of the water. "The spell will hopefully keep the concentration up, but you might want to top it up if it starts feeling wrong, reach out a tentacle and brush some in," she says. "Uh - I should ask you all my extremely confused questions after I have an emergency tank for you." She gets back on her tree branch, which has been hovering in midair since she dismounted. "I'll leave Path with you but I will already be hurrying as fast as I can so he can't exactly bite himself to speed me up." The owl flutters off her shoulder back to his chosen tree. And she zooms up up and away.

"If you want to ask extremely confused questions and likely get extremely confused answers, go ahead," Brenda says to Path once the witch is gone. 

"Mostly it just boils down to 'how did you previously not have a daemon'."