"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'."

"I've never heard of anyone having one. How are they normally acquired?"

"At birth."

". . . I guess it was already obvious from the witchcraft that I'm on a different planet than I was yesterday. At least it's a weirdly Earthlike one." Now that she's decidedly less dying she can think about how being an interplanetary explorer is pretty radical.

"The place is also called Earth," he remarks.