"Is she... going to spend a while with cocoon traits?"

"Well, it'd be chrysalis, not cocoon--moths spin cocoons around themselves, butterflies just have their skin harden into a shell. There aren't many insect mimis but we managed to find and ask enough to be pretty confident--she'll pupate, but it won't render her completely immobile like it would if she weren't mostly not a bug, she'll get kinda sluggish for a while and she'll have to deal with some hardened skin that'll flake off when she's done. So, puberty will be--less pleasant for her than it was for me, probably, but not even as bad as a baseline human's, probably, on account of how we're also part-daeva on Mum's side and daeva are uh, generally better designed than humans. --Hybrids vary wildly, is why I'm throwing so many 'probablys' in there."

"What an interesting mishmash you have going on."

"There are so many things!!!"

"These are... affinities?"

"They're species - not the technical definition, but still - I don't think witches really have affinities."

"Race is also a commonly used term but that gets complicated because it's completely orthogonal to the human concept--like, both Lanhua and I are racially Chinese, but she's an Elf and I am other stuff. And Tanya's an elf but she's not Chinese--uh, Tanya didn't come with, last we saw she was busy cooing over a relatively docile mal that came through with Bella and her friends--and Eliza is a Mimi and she's not even a little bit Chinese, she and Johann and Melody and Katarzyna are all just white and they're all different witch races--"

"I'd probably go with 'strain' or 'varietal' or something? But that's not really important - it's a chayaena, Mom, they were taming it down all right when I saw them."

"Oh. I knew a girl in school whose family kept chayaenas."

"Tanya thinks it's brilliant. If you had any tips I could bring back to her about how to take care of them I'd be grateful." 

"I'm not really supposed to lend books out of the enclave library, these days, but you could ask Aunt Evelyn."

"I will do that!"

"Mom doesn't actually live here, just grew up here," Bella explains, "I moved in when I started getting tastier."

"Why don't you live here? --Oh, right, mundanes wreck them and you married one."

"It was in the other order."

"I had a big fight with Aunt Evelyn and my parents shortly after graduating, left to travel the world, and settled down with Charlie. Long enough to have Bella, anyway."

"See any cool places while I was in school, Mom?"

"It was a little hard to concentrate but I did spend six months living in Iceland."

"...Would it be rude to ask what the fight was about?"

"It was one of those fights that was simultaneously about every little thing at the same time."

"Huh." Elodea, an only child with a reasonably smooth relationship with her single mom, cannot relate. 

"Ah." 

Lisao, the oldest of a large gaggle of varyingly temperamental girls, absolutely can.

Would she talk to her parents again, if it meant the difference between life and death for her child? ...Yes. But she'd be a lot more uncomfortable about it than Bella's mom looks right now. 

"I'm sorry you were worried, but I think I'm glad Bella fell on us."

"It sounds exciting, which I'm not really in the mood for this week, but maybe next week I'll be all over it."