"I don't actually have strong preferences here," he says, demonstrating. He winks. "Why the humanoid genitalia at all - how do you end up with that, anyway?"

"So, there are two routes here. One is that I magically conjure a body out of nothing, which is very … luck-of-the-draw but can guarantee you a mammalian form, I hear a lot of people whose current forms are mammals have strong feelings about staying that way. The other route is that I build a body out of plants to a specification, though I can't easily get anything taller than I am, and the male genitalia would be because male people tend to want that, not because they're a system requirement. Bar isn't thrilled about giving out large plants to dismantle even if the process won't kill them, but she does sell seeds if there's something you'd like that can grow that way. The room I rent here is basically a greenhouse."

"I don't feel the need to micromanage appendages or stay mammalian. That would have been more impactful if I had said it as an octopus but I actually never bothered to learn any languages I could use that way."

"I've never actually built a plant-based body for someone who didn't have several pages of specification, but I can just spend less effort on getting the face and layout and such just so. I should probably work with plants native to your universe for reasons of sanity. If you can plausibly imagine a plant being in humanoid shape, you're not interested in having special plant-themed powers that the base plant doesn't have, and the plant can grow from seeds, this should be doable."

"So about the special plant-themed powers. Are you saying you can't give me any or are you saying your process will interfere with any I already have?"

"I'm saying that my process can't give you any unless maybe I spend a lot of time figuring out stuff and use some extra components. Do you currently have plant powers?"

"Arguably."

"I'm interested in the argument."

"Maybe if I ever trust you. How about you, do you have plant-themed powers?"

"No, I'm just offering to sell you my magic plant-body manufacturing services and mentioning previous jobs in the field for reasons unrelated to having plant powers… yes I have plant powers, but nothing with tons of direct combat utility as a species trait as opposed to skills I picked up later. I have thorns which I thought would be cool but turned out to mostly be annoying so I trim them, my circulatory fluid is poisonous, both of those are things normal plants do too though. No 'magically make people near me calmer' powers or whatnot."

"I mostly don't think of bodymaking as a plant thing. I mean, you just offered me a mammalian body."

"That's fair. There's a reason why the mammalian process involves lower materials cost and less precision and more direct outsourcing to magic than the plant process I work with does, though. Mostly I have experience with nature magic that includes some plant-specific stuff. I could make a section of the backyard here aggressively try to grab everyone in it, make crops grow better, do some accelerated composting, speak with plants if they have the right spirit type, lots of options."

"That is a very cool set of powers."

"Yep! It works better when I'm in worlds with more compatible physics and biology than outside of them, though. Milliways tries pretty hard to be compatible with everyone, which is nice, but if I went to, say, Saira's world, I probably couldn't do much with a lot of my powers."

"Yeah. Weirder that it's even possible to be this compatible, and I have to assume Milliways is doing some filtering because otherwise why have I run into so many humanoids between about three and seven feet tall who talk out loud and belong to social species?"

"She's said the landlords like to put people who will interact with each other in the bar at the same time? But also the multiverse just skews very humanoid for some reason."

"That's so bizarre and disappointing. So, anyway, how do you get motile plants to work?"

Griffie can show Jim a bunch of anatomy diagrams! Among other details, energy requirements for activity exceed that available from sunlight alone, so unless you add a complex digestive system you need to input sugar water or raw magic, and you also need lungs for additional respiration beyond what the skin offers.

He is so interested and has a slightly ridiculous number of questions.

...He hasn't gotten into this specific area, his mad science has had a slightly different focus than this. But it's next door to things he's familiar with.

Griffie can spend hours giving a plant biomancy lecture! Much of it is even relevant across magic systems and elements, because worlds with humans that are made of baryonic matter are weirdly similar to worlds with humans that are made of the four elements!

As if to remind Griffie and Jim that not everyone considers the infirmary to be a lecture hall, a humanlike woman about Griffie's height and actively bleeding rushes into the infirmary.

He chants, briefly, and then the wounds are in the sort of state they'd be in if she'd spent a while convalescing. It's the sort of situation that seems like it calls more for a healing spell per se than for him to remake her flesh in an unwounded form.

"Anything else I can do for you?"

The woman looks over herself. "Seems you got everything? I'd like to wait here in case I notice more injuries once I calm down, though."

"Sure."

Griffie looks at the woman, squints, puts on a pair of bulky thick-lensed green glasses, and looks her over while muttering under eir breath in a way that the glasses' lens thickness responds to. "You're looking healthy at this point to me. Do you want to talk about what happened?"