"Fair point. Okay, we can see about meeting the critter community in and around Forks for reasons other than extremely justified paranoia," he teases.

Bella giggles. "We can start a club."

"We can! What should we call it? Hopefully something funny and clever."

"Oh, you've gone and set the bar awfully high there."

"I have. I will settle for nothing less, now. Excellence only."

"Well, there go all my ideas, I hope you have something good in mind."

"... Nope! Nothing in the slightest."

"Well, then your high standards might not be satisfied."

"I don't know what I'll do if they aren't! I might cry, Bella."

"Oh no! That would be tragic. Hmmmm. Well, let's see, Angela's not a quadruped, so we can't play off that..."

"And you're not part deer, so we can't play off of that."

"How does all this - animal affinity - work, anyway? Do I literally have ancestors who were lions and birds in, like, the zoo sense?"

"I really hope not? Because um. That implies some things that I don't want to think about very much. As for how it works - I have no idea."

"And apparently there are several kinds of perytons and gryphons and so on? Are they any more related than perytons are to fauns, or are they just loosely similar and sharing words?"

"Yeah - I've got no idea why there are several kinds. I think they're actually similar in species, it's just some cosmetic changes? But I haven't studied critter biology, I majored in magic in creature lessons."

"But where do the cosmetic changes come from? Is one or the other kind a recent mutation of the other?"

"Well. Okay, I've actually got a hypothesis for why things are like this. I think it's because of magic, actually. People screwing up and some of the effects ending up as - 'Oh look now I am a winged lion' or something. So the cosmetic changes would be from the same sort of magical screw up but in a different way."

"Ooh - magic first and accidental animal-hybrid-themed heritable transformations as a common side effect, or at least common out of kinds that don't just kill you?"

"Right. And then they use magic, make medallions, and bam - new species. It actually explains why different critters have different talents, maybe they were trying to change themselves and succeeded, but got crittered in the process."

"Very tidy. Although your species's talent would be an odd one to graft on deliberately."

"Yeah. My species's talent is kind of terrible in every possible way if it was deliberate."

"Unless it's possible for the mechanism to be part of the accidental results, I guess?"

"Right, but I meant if it worked just as they intended it to and only the peryton part was an accident."

"Right. Yeah. Not all the critters have such talents, though, right?"

"Nope. At least, I think so. Maybe there are some ones that only occur in very specific circumstances, like perytons', and they've been forgotten about and haven't occurred since."