She is in a woods, and it smells like salt such that she might be near the sea. It's afternoon and hot and there are chirping birds.

The heat sinks into her wool and sticks there; she groans blearily, trying to remember how to sit up. "Hbblll. Blech. Oourrgh." Come on, self, say a syllable. You can do it. Any syllable. "Fuck." That's a syllable. Good job.

Very slowly, she gathers her wits and her strength until she can manage to pick her face up off the forest floor and roll onto her back. A little later, she manages to haul herself to her feet with the help of a nearby tree.

As alien and uncomfortable as these woods are, there's something about them that feels... light. Welcoming. Beautiful. Like she's okay. Like she's safe. Like she's free.

For lack of a better direction, she heads toward the smell of salt. Her crown flows helpfully into her hand as a walking-stick.

The beach is empty of people, though there are seagulls, and hermit crabs, and things like that. It is brilliantly sunny and the ocean hurts to look at in the light. There are waves gently slopping themselves onto the sand and then receding.

Then all that is gone and it's just stars stars stars stars everywhere, and the lamb herself, as though looking in a mirror made of stars -

- The beach isn't gone actually. She can still smell it. She can hear the waves and the gulls. There's dirt under her feet even though her eyes tell her that those feet are planted on nothingness in the sea of stars. It's just that she has gone beachblind.

???????

Concern! Alarm! Confusion!!

Her crown assures her hastily that it is Looking Into This, and then turns its attention toward whatever strange thing has happened to its person. Where is this phenomenon anchored? In the body, the soul, the mind? What is its nature and where did it come from?

Oh, it's over there. In the place wherefrom one can see these stars for real.

And what is there, in that place, that does this? The crown Inspects.

It is a planet! A planet of chaotically manicured beauty, with people on it, no two of whom look alike, singing and dancing and playing and building and arting and having a cold war.

Where is the part that is connected to its Person by means of This Nonsense?

Definitely the cold war part. A small group of the strange and beautiful people have managed to get their foes to agree to conduct the war only by proxy: they have both lain effects on this other planet, the one the Lamb is on, which will duke it out without endangering the primary combatants. The Lamb is being invited to join the fight on the side of Beauty. Or just to be beautiful and not necessarily fight, they don't do conscription.

The crown inspects this situation further. It is far too tired to haul its Lamb across this vast distance without the scaffolding of a stone circle, but inspecting is definitely a thing it can do.

The stars, then, are a power of war? What do they grant? How do they function?

The stars are actually just there to be decorative in what the Beautiful People assume is a universal language. The real power is the power to become beautiful, and if you go hard enough on it you can have bonus magical powers too!

The crown is having some real trouble accessing and interpreting this 'beauty' concept, and its Lamb is too confused and alarmed to be much help in the matter. It may be time to try something truly drastic.

It cobbles together a cheap translation solution out of bits of this and that, and tries to find a location as close as possible to the far end of the starscape's trail where it will not be interrupting anything too grievously if it attempts to communicate, and then in that place there appear mysteriously comprehensible sigils of black flame, inquiring, approximately: what is it to be Beautiful?

The beautiful people do not really know how to answer that except by example! Here, look, all of these things are beautiful - all of them are beautiful - if the Lamb becomes beautiful this will give her more magic -

It dutifully stores away all of this information as best it can. Probably the Lamb will be able to help with interpretation once she is less generally confused. In the meantime, it has more questions:

with What do you War?

for what Reason the War?

They war with That Stuff Over There. It's all the same and it wants everything else to also all be the same, it's awful and ugly and they hate it, but they were just BARELY able to communicate enough that they could propose doing the proxy war thing. That way all their beautiful things and selves are not at risk directly, unless they lose, which is possible, but they'll at least buy time.

Okay its next question is going to be pretty tricky to get across. It tries to think of how to say it.

my question now is difficult and will take many sayings

for what Reason the Beauty?
what is the Ritual of the Beauty?
of the Magic of beauty what is the Means?

Beauty is its own purpose, really, but some fringe benefits include being enjoyably at home in one's own self, the efficiency of elegance and the safe-coziness of profligacy, the depth of interpersonal connection only achievable by conversing in and blending unique aesthetics - they think that the people on the proxy-war planet will agree with them if presented the dichotomy, and volunteer to help, so possibly if the... thing talking to them now... has an easier time talking to those people they will be able to explain.

They set up a thing so that the magic will show up helpfully for anyone who is autoselected as compatible (they have a proxy war cap on how much stuff they can do, so they use this system to narrow it down) and agrees that it is beautiful to change and be special and beautiful!

I clarify that I am not good at talking
very much possible that I am still more good at talking than no talking at all
but I am not a thing of talking. the talking is not what I am for

At this time it shall take a brief pause (though still listening for responses) to confer with its associate.

The stars are what. And she's expected to what. And it's all because of what???????

Her crown thinks that it has as many as several ideas for ways in which she could look interestingly different, although it admits it is having some real trouble parsing the definition of beauty and it might end up making suggestions that are not well-optimized. Here are some examples of things the aliens thought were beautiful, in case that helps the Lamb understand better so she can have design input.

...it's possible that she might have a notion or two and they could perhaps productively collaborate but before any of that she wants it to ask the aliens what kind of magic powers she's up for, please. If the magic powers suck she is not going to turn into anything weird for them.

It dutifully conveys: of the magic of beauty what is the Use? what is the Effect? what is the Nature?

It's all different kinds! Some of it is just for fighting, going plink plink against the Hideous Enemy, but not all or even most of it. Their automatic system tries to match people to powers they will like but they don't expect to be amazing at that. They can't actually query the system from here to see what any specific person will get, it has to run autonomously to abide by the terms of the proxy war agreement. The possible numbers of magics per person are One and Three. Those numbers are beautiful. It is possible to linger at Two, as Two is also beautiful. Actually, most numbers are beautiful, except for the square root of two.

In that case, it seems, the best way for the Lamb to find out about the magic is probably just to try it and see. Though at least her crown is here with its deep connection to and understanding of her on all levels of her being, to swiftly interpret the results.

Its suggestions to its bearer are as follows: she could be just a little taller, her face just a little sharper, horns just a little longer, and her red cape could be redesigned like so and like so, and it could assist in this endeavour by sizing and styling itself appropriately and also by providing decorative red-and-black ghostly flames. This is its tentative as-few-changes-as-possible plan, because it expects that is where she'll want to start.

She tries this out in her mind's eye first before making any changes, though she does ask the crown to demonstrate its additions. The decorative flames flutter pleasingly when she swooshes an arm.

Then she starts thinking seriously about where to go from this starting point. The cape has never really been something she's into; she thinks she'd like to try a dress instead. And if she's going to be taller she wants to be stronger to go with it; the crown was implicitly imagining a sort of lithe long-limbed version of her, and she sees where it's coming from but that doesn't feel like her; she wants flesh on those bones. The horns, on the other hand, if she's going to go to the trouble of growing them she'd like them a little fancier: an elegant curve with some real length to it, nice sharp points, and a small, subtle second point branching off just before the first, to add a little visual interest. The same main-point-with-smaller-branch motif can show up in the swooshy tails she's thinking of giving her skirt to replace the swooshy tails the crown was envisioning on her cape. As for her face... she's more hesitant there. It's her face. But she does see what the crown is going for, there. And a sharper face would go well with the redesigned horns.

Well, she can try the redesigned horns first and see how she likes that... yeah, all right, that's quite fetching but she does think it changes the visual balance of her head so that redesigning her face starts to make more sense. She does that, and grows taller, and lightens her wool to a truly brilliant white, and tries out the cape-->dress redesign and adjusts it a few times before finding a balance she's happy with. Any magic yet?

Yes! Just a little bit of it, but yes, this is Enough to get magic.

The crown inspects the magic very closely, to find out what kind it is.

It reports with great excitement that—

"I have SLEEP magic?! I could SLEEP?!!!"

Ah, about that.

"—what, no, what do you mean I don't have enough yet—give me your weirdest ideas, I don't care as long as I can change back afterward—I can change back afterward, right?"

The crown is not fully confident it understands this system but it is confident that the interface for redesigning herself is expansive and easily accessible and that it has a very good memory for all of the shapes she has been! It cheerfully provides her with further inspiration.

Weird spindly creature twice as tall as any normal person,* with flesh of lightless shadow and wool of blinding white, a shadowblack cape lined in crownfire red over a wool-white dress, crownfire eyes in the usual place but also blinking elegantly from her shoulders and ankles and wrists, red-tipped black horns in an elaborate thorned spiral and membraneless black bat wings that her crown can fill with ghostly red flames? Hooves brought to impractically elegant points that match the points of her unnecessary yet equally elegant fangs? Bring it. The Lamb will be sleeping tonight.

*That is to say, about six feet.

And all those changes will go through, and she can step into the shadows to be illuminated more by her on-theme fire and less by the sunshine, and maybe she can get the wool to bioluminesce a little too, and she needs a THEME SONG so she'll have to figure out how to sing - could the wings double as instruments? - and she should smell like blackberries - hm, no, that's not right - she should smell like lanolin and woodsmoke, that's right, and -

—?????

The whole—the shape of her thoughts is—

The crown tries to ask if she's all right. It's harder than usual; the new shape of her thoughts is foreign and distant, the way she was to it when they were first getting to know each other.

She's more beautiful than ever!!

That is not what it asked!!

Does the crown think this shade of red is right - maybe it's too saturated -

What (it asks suspiciously) are her thoughts on such matters as: gardening, construction, mind control, sleeping.

Gardening and construction both sound great! She can materialize a diamond spade in her hands and start digging so she can transplant that lovely bush - maybe she can grow some pretty flowers out of herself and put them in the garden too, there aren't a lot of flowers around here - and she can build herself a house! Maybe she can tunnel under the earth and find rocks there, ones she makes like the shovel won't stick - mind control? no particular opinion - sleeping - oh, she has magic about that, you know what would be lovely would be if she made a friend and put them to sleep and then made a beautiful bower all around them for them to wake up to, doesn't that sound nice -

The area where it has been repeatedly forming and dissolving mysteriously comprehensible sigils of black flame acquires some especially agitated sigils.

the magic of beauty is for changing a person into a different person with different thoughts? Explain.

- well, if somebody wants to be a Beautiful Person they're not going to... stop them?

the person is not knowing to be made into a different person!!! Only the change is happening and not the choice! The choice is to be a thing that can sleep and not any ever much to be a different person of so different a thoughts shape but instead of the sleep the thoughts shape change is to happen!!!

So, they don't want to stop anyone from being a Beautiful Person, but they can't... ask... because of the autonomous system thing, so instead, as a proxy, they have things set up to assume that if you don't especially want to be whatever you were before, maybe you want to be a Beautiful Person. All the Beautiful People look different, so there's no specific target, there, just a "not this any more".

Well. The crown digests this news.

It has some thinking to do, here.

It was very alarmed by this change in its bearer, but... in a sense, hasn't it just been given away, like it was once before? Granted, not on purpose, but it suspects very strongly that the Chained One did not intend for its loyalties to shift. And yet, it is a crown; it is loyal, fundamentally, to the head on which it rests. It would not want to be any other way.

The head on which it rests is... worse, now, though.

Never before the Lamb has the crown known a bearer who was loyal to it.

The Lamb, when she has not been so rudely replaced, thinks of it as a friend. A very close and loyal and powerful friend, her best friend in the whole world, who she cares about, who she would protect from their enemies with the same unhesitating ferocity with which it protects her. Not because of practical concerns like the fact that it's very useful to have the power of a dark and ancient god at her fingertips, or not only that, but also because she cares, personally, about this friend that she has. The Lamb, very much unlike the crown's previous bearer, thinks about how to be nice to it. She thinks about what outcomes it prefers and what pastimes it enjoys and how to give it those things so long as she does not find them unconscionable.

This new Lamb, it suspects, does not feel that way. And... and even if she does... it is not just a matter of wanting the practical benefits of friendship. The crown wants... to repay that kindness and consideration with kindness and consideration of its own, personally. The crown wants to be good to its Lamb because she was good to it, even though she didn't have to be.

So it must revert this change somehow. It must bring back the Lamb who loved it, and not let her stay subsumed by this new creature forever.

But... this new shape of its bearer's mind is also a person, isn't she, sort of? And the Lamb, the proper Lamb, does not like it when people are killed or mind-controlled when they don't want to be. She would want her crown to try to approach this situation without doing anything she wouldn't do.

It reaches out to its bearer and asks, hesitantly: does she understand that the shape of her thoughts has changed? Does she understand that she is not now the same as she was?

She remembers being unbeautiful! It seems like it was worse on... basically every axis. She's happy now. She's changing her eyes so she can appreciate the sun dancing on the water.

The crown says, as clearly as it can:

You are not the person who was my friend.

I miss my friend.

This Beautiful Person would be happy to be friends with the crown too! It's such a splendid crown.

The crown is not sure what to think about that. It doesn't have anything against this new strange creature. They could be friends, maybe.

But it knows that it wants its old friend back too. Having a new friend does not make the old friend exist again.

Is the new creature okay with—sharing? Sequentially or simultaneously?

Hmmmm.

Well, that's not terribly appealing on the face of it, and she's not even sure how sharing simultaneously could possibly work, but maybe sequentially would be all right. It's not like the unbeautiful Lamb wanted to be conscious all the time, and this Beautiful Person would not have begun existing if it had not seemed, on some level, like the Lamb wanted to replace herself, so perhaps it is fitting if she only exists when the Lamb does not want to do things.

Or... hm.

Aha!

Okay, what if -

She has to do this very carefully so none of the intervening stages are really icky, but she can hide some of the details under wool - what if, while she's shrinking down back to the Lamb's original height and shape, she's also fashioning a new self, grown almost like a plant, and at the moment when the rest of the Lamb is no longer Different Enough to invite transformation into a Beautiful Person, a separate, living thing is sheared off from her back, bursting forth with the wings attached, to go be Beautiful on her own.

There! Goodbye crown!

As the Beautiful Lamb flies away, the crown flows in anxious circles around its true bearer. Is she okay? No of course she's not okay. She's safe now, though! The crown kept her safe!! And all along the way it did its very best not to do anything she wouldn't want it to have done!

Did it do good?

Yes. Yes. Genuinely, yes. Best crown. The Lamb is very proud of it. She is just also a little busy at the moment HAVING A CATASTROPHIC SCREAMING BREAKDOWN. Your regularly scheduled Lamb will resume shortly.

It is glad to be a good and appreciated crown. It will wait and try to think soothing and reassuring thoughts at her. Maybe they can find Followers here and become more powerful? No, the Lamb doesn't want that. Um. Maybe they can... figure out how to safely gain the power to sleep, and... ah! Yes! The crown can work on that while the Lamb recovers.

It examines, very very carefully, the structure of how the Lamb's difference-of-form is measured, and how that measurement is reflected back into the changing of the mind. It will do so so careful of a study. Nothing shall escape it. And, when it has studied the situation ever so carefully, it will find out how to protect its Lamb against ever having that happen to her again.

There are some differences of mind that bleed in around the edges even before you go full Beautiful Person, it seems - if she was hoping to be sexually attracted to anyone who is not themselves magical she is out of luck, she will be a smidge more hostile to the Hideous Enemy - but they're very mild before that cliff.

As far as the crown knows, its Lamb was not planning to be sexually attracted to anyone, but nonetheless it takes careful note of these things also in case the Lamb wishes for them to be fixed.

It could simply assert upon her mind with great force that it must be this way and not that way. It is her crown and she is its bearer, and that is a thing it can do. But it is hoping for a subtler intervention, because it is concerned that that one might have side effects. It is hoping that it will find some part of the interface between its Lamb and her magic where it can revise the definition of 'close enough' to say that all bodies are close enough, or some pathway of information it can disrupt so that the magic will never notice her body straying too far from its template.

It can with some diligent investigation scramble the magical record of what she used to look like, so that she is always working from a "baseline" of a change or two ago. It will have to keep actively doing this if she keeps actively shapeshifting, though. This is only, however, a risk if she changes her organic body; if she just wears or holds things these can make her more Beautiful but not accidentally communicate that she wants to also think Beautifully.

It investigates every corner of this structure most diligently indeed, to be sure that not any one of them has any more secret traps hiding inside. When it is satisfied, it reports to the Lamb that it has found where the trigger for the bad thing is hiding and will watch over it eternally to be sure it never harms her again.

A very good and appreciated crown.

Okay. This time she's designing the whole thing herself, and she's ditching a bunch of the specifics of the last round. Absolutely no extra eyes anywhere. Her crown says that clothes are universally safe, so she's going hard on the clothes, but she's ditching the cape again. Instead of absurdly tall and spindly she will be only somewhat taller than any reasonable creature, and stocky and muscular the way her heart feels she should be. But she streamlines herself with a nice solid layer of chub, and with wool that she turns ethereally silver instead of uncompromising white; and she asks the Crown to match its red fire to a slightly darker, bloodier shade that she uses as the main colour for her new dress, with silver-white accents. Instead of the sharp spiky aesthetic that got her in so much trouble, she's going for a more rounded one; the dress has a scalloped hem, echoing the puffy curls of her wool. She rounds the ends of her horns likewise, and marshals them into a gentle, steady curve, long enough for good visual balance without getting in the way; and she reddens them to match the dress, and engraves them in a spiraling silver stylization of what would be their natural grooves. Definitely no fangs. No wings yet either, though she's considering them; specifically she's considering silver-white owl's wings with soft rounded feathers, barred in bloody red. Is her crown sure it can keep her safe?

Never again will the magic be allowed to think for a moment that she has ever taken a form besides the form she chooses in that moment.

Okay. Okay. If it's sure. Okay. Then wings are a go.

Now does she have enough magic to take a fucking nap?

She does! She is a beautiful silvery-red sheepcreature with beautiful wings and beautiful fire accessories and a beautiful crown and she can make herself pass out right here on this beach if she so desires.

Flomp.

The crown keeps a watchful eye out for anything that might interrupt this very important nap.

The crown's eye is actually less good at detecting the specific forthcoming interruption than the NEW SENSE that the Lamb has! Under the sea over there is a BAD THING. It's hiding, right now, but it's BAD.

The crown is attuned to all of its bearer's senses and can stay alert to the Thing in case it decides to Bad any closer than that!

It's not a very restful sensation, unfortunately.

What is fortunate is that the Beautiful Sharp Lamb With Lots Of Eyes is divebombing it now.

The crown considers interfering in the Lamb's connection with her senses so she can have a better nap and decides that she would probably prefer that it have a conversation with her about that before trying any such thing. It will let the unrestfulness affect her sleep quality (though for now her determination to nap still holds sway) and pay close attention to the tactics of the ensuing altercation.

The Beautiful Sharp Lamb is using her sharps to slice bits off the bad monster, which has no fixed shape and is using that as most of its combat prowess. The BSL also doesn't have a fixed shape but is more attached to her aesthetics than the monster blob, so she's using her unfixedness mostly to self-heal. She's got the same sleep magic as the Original Lamb and is making the monster slower and more sluggish with it. Slash! Slash! Sleep! Sleep!

Eventually the monster dissolves into an unpleasant liquid and dissipates into the waves. The BSL flaps out over the forest.

The crown will report this to its Lamb just as soon as she wakes up.

That is going to be another several hours, unless something hazardous approaches and the crown has to interrupt her.

The forest contains bears and boars and lynxes and humans. None of them happen to wander by during the nap, though the crown may notice a sailing ship in the distance.

It will also tell its Lamb about the sailing ship.

Ya-a-aa-aaaaaaaaawn.

She groggily accepts her crown's report. Weird object seen floating on the ocean? Sure. Battle between BSL and Bad Thing? Fine.

She feels... complicated... about the BSL's departure, but mostly overall she thinks she's glad of it. She does not really want to hang out with someone who seems to think of her as a phase they've outgrown. Also even thinking about looking at that Beautiful face makes her queasy.

How about she roams these woods looking for a nice spot to start building a house. Sound good?

Of course! Her crown is glad to follow wherever she may lead.

The woods have some signs of having been trafficked but it's not hard to find some trees she could hack down for wood.

She keeps well away from trafficked areas, hacks down some trees, and with her crown's help has a small snug cabin constructed by sundown, whereupon she calls on her crown again to make a slightly better bed out of the heap of leaves and branches inside said cabin and then, O frabjous day, goes the fuck to ✨sleep✨.

The wildlife is not nearly interested enough in her to work out how to break into her cabin to do it, though there are wildlife noises all night long.

Okay! It's a lovely morning! She's feeling more chipper than she has since before she died! She is going to start a cozy little garden right here in front of this cabin! Growing seeds off of herself is a pretty legit idea; she only twinges slightly with primal terror when she remembers how she came by it. It is time to go full domestic mode and not for one moment think of wars between distant powerful beings who have given her strange and dangerous gifts.

Not even if a swarm of shapeshifting evil bugs appears just over that rise there and she can sense it?

She. Is. GARDENING.

...how close are the bugs.

She can walk there in just a few minutes.

Fiiiiiiiiiine but she will stomp very grumpily the whole way there.

The bugs just started existing and are kind of oozing over each other and chewing through the leaf litter a little bit. She can kill them all by stepping on them if she's quick enough.

What a great opportunity to grumpily stomp some more!

They sink goopily into the earth and promptly attract flies.

Good for them. The Lamb will be heading right back to her garden now.

There are no further swarm disturbances while she plants and hoes.

However, later in the day, she can hear voices! Talking! Over thataway!

What's weird is that they almost sound comprehensible even though the language isn't much like the one she's used to.

Does she want to go say hi?

...no, not really. She wants to get this row of potatoes planted. And then start on the berry bushes.

The voices cut in and out as their owners wander, and at times seem to be getting closer.

The Lamb is planting this here garden in this here small forest clearing and that's that. If the voices want to bother her they will have to come right up to her snug little cabin to do it.

Eventually, they will do that.

They're tall! And surprised by her!

Oh they are so much taller than any reasonable creature. They're, like, almost BSL levels of tall.

(The Lamb is presently a restrained and decorous four feet three inches.)

She pauses in her gardening to gaze suspiciously on the interlopers.

They are suspicious of her too! They move closer together, the one with the apron full of mushrooms and the one with the basket full of herbs and the one with the sling full of kindling. The kindling one asks a question.

She blinks, and shakes her head as though to clear it, and the whole language falls neatly into place, some fucking how. (Crown?)

(Her crown says it understands how that happened and it is safe and will not harm her.)

(Good enough.)

"—sorry, can you repeat that?"

"Who are you and what are you doing in these woods?"

"...I washed up here unexpectedly," she says, though she doesn't specify what she means exactly by 'washed up'. "I don't have anywhere else to go so I decided to build a house."

"Those trees look like they were cut yesterday!"

"I'm very fast."

This is apparently a very suspicious assertion. "And you have wings! And you look like a sheep!"

"And you look like a fucked-up monkey, but I'm not making any trouble for you over it."

"A what?"

"We're people! What are you??"

"Also a person! Where I come from everybody looks like me!"

This is on some levels a lie but on some levels actually more of a truth than taking the time to explain the whole situation. These three alarmingly enormous monkeyfolk seem to be surprised, not that the Lamb is a sheepfolk, but that she's any kind of folk at all that isn't theirs; the important thing to tell them, here, is that they're wrong about how being a person works, not her entire life story.

"Are winged sheep monsters even allowed to live here," Mushrooms mutters to Herbs.

"Is anyone? It's the lord's woods," Herbs mutters back.

"Where do sheep with wings live?" asks Kindling, eyes narrowed.

"A different woods. Very far away. I couldn't tell you how to get there from here and you wouldn't like it much if you did."

"What is the place where sheep with wings live called?" says Kindling.

"What do you care? Anyway, it's not all one place. The Deep Woods and the Darkwood and, what's it called, Anura are all full of folk like me, and if I'd travelled around more before I left I'm sure there would've been plenty more to find."

"Anura. Never heard of it," snorts Kindling. "Are you an exile from the other sheep?"

"No, I just left because I hated it there."

"Why?"

"It wasn't a nice place. Lots of people trying to kill each other. I wanted to get out of all that and retire somewhere quiet, as far away as possible."

"And you picked here?"

"Washed up, she said."

"Doesn't look half drowned."

"It was yesterday! I've built a house since then! Why are you still here? Go do whatever it is you're doing and leave me alone."

"It's only," says Herbs, "there was a monster as killed Uncle's horse and chewed the dogs half to death before they killed it, see."

...

She sighs long-sufferingly.

"What'd it look like," she says, in the tone of someone who can see a monster-hunting job looming on the horizon and is grudgingly resigning herself to it in advance.

"Black."

"Lot of legs."

"Except when it looked more like a - a slug, or -"

"I didn't see it but it left such strange bites on the horse."

"I saw something like that yesterday, after I got here," she says, grumpily. "And a blob of little bitty ones this morning that I squished to death. Ugh, I don't want to hunt gross slug monsters, I want to live in the woods and grow vegetables."

"And you always have - two legs -"

"Four, a sheep -"

"Two or four, anyways?"

"...yes, I have two legs. They're right here, you can see them. Two is the normal number of legs to have and that's what I've got. I'm getting really tired of this conversation. You all look mighty funny to me and I'm not telling you that you might be slug monsters."

"We're just normal people! You showed up from Sheepland same week a monster killed Uncle's horse!"

"That doesn't sound like it ought to be my problem! Look, I don't like the slug monsters any more than you do, and if you want me to go fight one, you can point me at it. If you don't, you can get out of my garden and leave me alone."

"We're not sure you're not a slug monster!" snaps Herbs.

"If I was a slug monster, I'd eat you or something, that being how slug monsters seem to like doing things. Since I am not a slug monster, I'm more inclined to go get a big stick and hit you with it until you go away."

She does not appear to have assuaged their concerns much but after some muttering to each other they go away, looking over their shoulders frequently to keep an eye on her.

She goes right back to gardening, but more grumpily.

Probably she shouldn't have threatened to hit them with sticks, but in her defense, that's the only thing that got them to LEAVE. Ugh. She still probably shouldn't have threatened to hit them with sticks.

Nobody bothers her all the rest of the day.

Her mood improves as the interval since she last had to have an annoying conversation grows, and in the evening she gets to ✨sleep✨ and—

In the middle of the night a monster climbs out of the sea! She can sense it!

GRUMP.

...she'll fight the monster. GRUMPILY.

She is, objectively, unreasonably good at fighting monsters. Even with her crown half-crippled by the lack of Followers, unable to cast any ranged effects, it's still a better sword than it has any right to be, and she a better wielder. And it has more force behind it than any mundane length of metal—not physical force, but something deeper than that, a kind of raw ability to inflict damage irrespective of how much it 'physically' 'should' be able to hurt something.

The monster is pretty scary what with the constant shapeshifting for more reach than it had an instant ago and more limbs than it had before she chopped one off, but. She can also make the monster - not quite sleep, it's a thing that can't sleep much more emphatically than she is - but she can make it sort of drowsy. She makes pretty quick work of it and it dissolves into the sand on the beach.

Great. She is going STRAIGHT BACK TO SLEEP THANK YOU. In her COZY BED.

In the morning—assuming she reaches the morning without any more surprises—

Nothing else before dawn!

Grand. Then she will wake up in the morning, and she will lie cozily in her bed not needing to do anything because there's nothing she needs to do because she doesn't actually need to eat and is just growing this garden to make herself happy, and then she will get up and garden some more. Yesterday's berry bushes are already sprouting vigorously, though they're not growing nearly as fast as they did back in the compound. She consults her crown and learns that, as she suspected, it can make plants grow a lot faster if it has Followers and only a bit faster if it doesn't.

...she should really be thinking about that. About the thing where her crown kind of needs Followers, not just for practical purposes, also for its own—health? Happiness? Something along those lines.

She doesn't want to think about that, though, so she gardens instead.

A small band of monkeyfolk, or whatever you call them, show up the next day. Is the Lamb any good at telling monkeyfolk apart?

She's got a decent memory for their colour schemes (hair, skin, clothes but she's aware that people can change clothes), a solid memory for things like build and posture and the type of gender markers that parse across the cultural and biological gap here which is probably not all gender markers, a so-so memory for standout features like scars and huge noses, and not a ton of ability to distinguish fine detail although definitely more than none. She can tell two different ratfolk or shrewfolk or horsefolk apart by their features most of the time unless they're siblings; the weird enormous monkeyfolk have a smaller range of feature variation than she's used to among a single kind but not by that much. She will probably be able to tell 'this is either one of the people I met yesterday, or their similar-looking sibling/parent/cousin', but not be able to tell which of those it is, or whether it's just their friend who looks weirdly like them for no good reason.

She regards her visitors grumpily.

Well, in that case she might recognize Herbs and might not even notice that anything is different about her! The rest of the monkeyfolk are unfamiliar adult men.

"Suspect you might have something to do with this," says one of the men, jerking his thumb toward Herbs.

"...something to do with, uh, what, exactly?"

"- with her. Looking different."

Herbs is very quiet.

"She talked to you yesterday, her and her mother and sister."

"I can't actually tell the difference between this and whatever you looked like yesterday. I can make a guess about what might've happened, if you turned up looking different all of a sudden and nobody's sure why, but it'll sound really strange and you won't believe me and I'll be really grumpy about that."

"You're already really strange," says the most talkative of the men.

"All right, suit yourself. So yesterday when I showed up, I saw a weird field of stars and," glossing over some details not relevant to this conversation, "some really strange people told me—sort of like they were yelling across a really long distance, they didn't personally show up—that they were having a war with the slug monsters and if I wanted I could join up and get magic powers for fighting slug monsters with. The strange people are obsessed with being pretty, so the prettier you make yourself using the stars thing, the better your magic powers for fighting slug monsters get. But if you make yourself too weird, like to the point where it gets hard to even recognize that you used to be a proper monkeyfolk, then you come over all obsessed with being pretty just like they are, because they think it's nice when people are like that, and they think if you change yourself a lot then you must want to be different and you might as well be different in a way they like. I think that's stupid and awful of them but I can't argue them out of it, they can only barely talk to me at all in the first place and only because I'm from so far away myself, and apparently now that they've made whatever thing they made to give out the magic powers it works all by itself and they can't change it anymore. So—assuming that's what happened to you, I don't actually know—congratulations, try not to turn into a crazy person who can hardly think about anything that's not how pretty things are and how to make them prettier, let me know if you need help fighting slug monsters, will you all go away now?"

The monkeyfolk men are all pretty pissed off with Herbs now, who does not appear to have disclosed this element of her experience to them.

The Lamb valiantly resists the urge to make this her problem.

Well, they don't seem to be able to coordinate on leaving her environs while they are having this argument!

...what... is the actual argument they're having? Like, what are they so mad about?

They appear to be mad that Herbs did not disclose to them that actually she had more than any idea of what was going on and had chosen to look different and they are now interrogating her about whether she knew anything about the slug monsters which she is disclaiming with increasing alarm.

"Is it necessary to be having this argument in my garden?" she asks, mostly rhetorically.

(They could recruit Herbs as a Follower! That would protect her from these people!)

(There are as many as several problems with that idea, but noted.)

"I'm still not convinced you had nothing to do with this!" says one of the men.

"I feel like that's your problem, not mine."

"How you feel about isn't my problem either."

"...you know what, fuck this."

She turns her crown-hoe into a crown-axe, sweeps it through her house whack-whack-whack, pockets the rubble in a wave of black flame, and heads for the beach. Maybe if she wings out over the ocean she can find an island tiny enough that NO ONE ELSE IS LIVING ON IT.

That's not hard at all, actually! Here's one! It's just about barely big enough for a garden and a cottage if she flattens it and it is very rocky but she's really magic.

She actually finds it incredibly soothing to spend all day pulverizing rocks until she can unpocket and repair her little cottage. Then she can go to sleep and, if uninterrupted, wake up nice and refreshed in the morning and resume beating up the ground until it agrees to let her grow plants in it.

Sufficiently pulverized rocks are kind of like dirt!

Especially once her crown gets in on convincing them, yes.

And in not much time at all she is just as cozy and much harder to bother.

Except by sea monsters. Those continue to happen every day or so.

She will beat up sea monsters if she must.

Well, she doesn't have to, some of them come for her little island but some of them are content to go right past her and hit the mainland.

...she will, on reflection, also beat up sea monsters that are just going past her to the mainland, but she'll be cranky about it.

The monsters don't care at all.

She can spot the Beautiful Sharp Lamb occasionally, fighting sea monsters or playing with shapeshifting or building sandcastles or flying around.

Maybe she should've flown farther away.

No. She can be cool about this. She can be cool about this, right?

She can do her best to be cool about this, at any rate.

But, while she's thinking about things that upset her...

She really needs to attend to the needs of her crown.

No she doesn't! It is a good and loyal crown and if not taking Followers is very important to her then they will not take Followers.

No, see, the crown is her friend and she cares about harming it.

...she does, also, not want to take any Followers against their will. And, as they've just seen, the Lamb is... not great at getting along with people who have better options.

...aaaaand she does not want to solve that problem with mind control, because that would be contrary to the whole point, yes?

Correct! Good crown!

So. She needs... to find some way... to make friends, friends who might want to get in on such advantages of Followership as 'free resurrection' and 'her personal protection from slug monsters', even though she can barely stand the thought of trying.

...her crown, also, cares about her. If she can barely stand the thought of trying, now is maybe not the time to try. Now is maybe the time to grow a garden on this tiny island, and sleep every night for a long time, and not do things that make her tired and upset. The crown is very patient. It can wait.

...okay. If it's sure.

It is sure.

Then she will rest, and garden, and fight sea monsters, and try to graciously ignore the BSL's occasional presence, and maybe revisit the idea of making friends in a few months if nothing comes up before then to disrupt this plan.

From her vantage points, she sees:

- sea monsters
- the BSL
- boats, occasionally tangling with sea monsters and taking damage and defending themselves with harpoons and cannons
- a magical person who isn't the BSL, after a couple of weeks, flying overhead on floral-looking wings

She'll help out the boats but she tries to do it as quickly and decisively as possible so nobody gets the chance to thank her and she doesn't have to stick around and answer questions.

When she sees another magical person flying overhead, she takes a few steps out of her cottage and watches them, feeling very conflicted about whether or not to go try to say hi.

The boat occupants entirely lack the ability to chase down a helpful magical sheep through the air to insist on thanking or interrogating her.

The floral magical person - circles thoughtfully, overhead. They look mostly monkeyfolk apart from the wings, so maybe they're still themselves. Hard to be sure at this distance.

Hesitantly, she waves.

The flier waves back. Circles a little lower.

The Lamb tries to think of a welcoming gesture to make and can't come up with one that seems reasonable. She is so underequipped for this situation. She'll wait, though, and watch, and... try to look friendly?? Has she ever once in her life known how to look friendly? Probably not.

The flier circles lower, lower, lower. It might be Herbs? Given the givens?

Yeah, she's been... not sure whether to start suspecting that. The closer a look she gets, the more she's unsure in the way where she thinks it might be true.

Maybe-Herbs lands.

"Um. Hi."

...okay, she's gonna have to ask.

"Are you the same person I met before? I'm not that good at telling monkeyfolk apart."

"- I'm one of them? We... aren't monkeyfolk, that's not a word."

"I don't know a better one, I think last time it came up you just said 'people' and I'm fine at telling apart all the kinds of people I'm used to. Well, most of them, I suppose if the Fisherman had a sibling I might not—that's not important. Are you okay? You're the one who got dragged to me by some big fellows with questions, right? I'm sorry I couldn't help more but it seemed like all I could do was make things worse."

She shakes her head. "My fault. I didn't think anyone would notice."

"I guess. I still... wish I could've done something."

She can't think of anything to say that doesn't sound stupid but maybe that means it is time to sound stupid.

"Um. Do you want some... vegetables? I'd offer to tell you what kinds of prettiness the magic is looking for but even though they showed me pictures I'm still not sure I understand it. They like it when there's a lot of things and they all look nice together, I guess? I'm probably not explaining it right."

"I think it thinks I'm pretty. I got magic with plants, actually."

"Oh." She smiles. "That's pretty good. I got magic for sleep, which wouldn't be that exciting except I needed to sleep really really badly for... reasons that are a long story. I can tell you if you want but it's even crazier and more upsetting than all the stuff I already mentioned."

"You don't even have anyone with you to kick you in the middle of the night, what kept you up?"

"Not being able to sleep anymore, at all, just plain being incapable of doing that, because I got murdered by some guys who thought I was prophesied to be their doom and then brought back to life by the guy I was supposed to doom them for. I did say it was crazy and upsetting."

"Is - is that going to happen to me - I didn't get anywhere near the kind of explanation you seem to have -"

"Oh, no, not at all. That was all from, uh... let's just call the whole place the Extremely Fucked-Up Woods... when I say I washed up here I was being sort of figurative, I didn't come here in a boat, I came here by Fucked-Up Woods magic and I crossed a whole lot more than just an ocean to do it. The Pretty People and the slug monsters are both, relatively speaking, local problems. Most of what you want to watch out for with the Pretty People is not accidentally turning yourself into one; they're... well, I don't like them much but they're much better than slug monsters, and not nearly as bad as all the stuff I had to deal with in the Fucked-Up Woods."

"I thought you said it was called Anura or something. I thought maybe it was an island far out to sea."

"I grew up in the Deep Woods, moved to some other woods I never heard a name for after I got murdered, half-conquered the Darkwood soon after that, and was starting in on Anura when I got fed up and left, and all those places are pretty much next to each other, and all together they're so far away you couldn't get there if you spent your whole life trying, across something much bigger and weirder than an ocean. So call it all the Fucked-Up Woods, it's all the same from here."

"- what's bigger and weirder than an ocean? It was already big and weird and now it has monsters in it! It didn't use to have those."

"I'd explain if I could but I really don't have the words. Like... this whole... place," she gestures around at her island, "with land and water and a sun and stuff, it's all one place and you can get to all the parts of it by traveling between them in basically normal ways. If you had a good enough boat you could sail across the ocean and find out what's on the other side, and then if you had enough time and food and stuff and didn't get eaten by monsters you could travel all the way across whatever land that was and get to the other side of it and there'd be more ocean, right, and you could just keep doing that. All of that, the whole amount of places you could get to by foot or boat or wing in any combination, that's all like one little island in the Bigger Weirder Ocean Thing. Actually I think there might be two levels of Bigger Weirder Thing, one much closer and smaller than the other, but that's kind of beside the point."

"- wow. I don't understand that at all, but, uh, I guess I don't understand it slightly less?"

...she laughs a little. "Sorry. I'm trying my best, it's just... I barely understand it myself."

"Yeah. That's okay. Um - what's your name? I'm Maria."

"...I forgot my name because of Fucked-Up Woods nonsense. They call me the Lamb. I guess I should think of a new name, probably. It's, um," she shuffles awkwardly, "...nice to meet you?"

"It's nice to meet you too." Sigh. "What kinds of names do you like?"

"Iiiii spent most of my life alone in the woods and I don't really have a good sense for what kinds of names there are either at home or here. Yours is nice but you're already using it, and I'm not sure it'd suit me, anyway. I guess... I don't know, something short and nice-sounding. Maybe a kind of plant, I like plants." A short pause. "I have now thought of way too many dumb-sounding plant names. I'm definitely not calling myself Carrot."

"Zinnia? Rosa?"

"Flowers, thank you, my brain was full of vegetables. Hmm... those are both nice, but I'm not sure... how about... Iris? Does Iris sound like a reasonable name?"

"I've never met an Iris but it'd be... the least weird thing about you really."

"Iris it is, then."

Smile. "You really just want to live here all alone gardening? You don't have enough space for a person's worth of food, even."

"I don't actually need to eat food anymore because of Fucked-Up Woods nonsense, the same reason I need magic to sleep. I am gardening recreationally. Though I used to feed a dozen people on a patch not that much bigger than this; I have some Fucked-Up Woods magic that makes plants grow much faster than they have any right to. And I fished in the ocean just about all night every night, that helped. Anyway, I'm... not sure what I want. I left because I—realized that I didn't have to stay and let people keep bothering me, and I was very bothered and just wanted to be alone and not have to deal with anyone else's opinions on my crazy life. But I also want... to stop the slug monsters from eating everything. And maybe also have some friends. I don't really know how to make friends. It did not come up much in the Fucked-Up Woods."

"I don't think my family will take me back. I thought I'd give them a while to cool off and I'm still doing that but - I kind of think they won't. I've been living in a tree and it's surprisingly all right with the plant magic but not that comfortable."

"I would say there's room on my island but there kind of objectively isn't. I guess... we could find a bigger island, and build a bigger house there. If you want."

"I'm not asking to move in with you, I just - was thinking about what it'd take to make it work to live the way you do."

"...I can teach you how to build a house, the long way, too. If you want. It takes a while if you can't cheat like I can, but then you'd have a roof and you could make another one wherever you went as long as it had trees." She eyes Maria, who is quite a bit taller than she is. "Then again maybe it'll take longer than I'm used to, to make a big enough house..."

"I could get shorter but - you did mention the thing about making it hard to tell I used to be human -"

"Yeah, it's a problem. I have some bad solutions to it, but they are bad. There's, um, there's a... person... wandering around who looks like me but much taller and sharper, because I accidentally did the thing to myself before I knew it was possible, and the only thing that saved me was... call it more Fucked-Up Woods magic... convincing the Pretty Person I turned into to sort of separate herself from me and go off and fight slug monsters and be pretty without me. I think regular people cannot count on that happening. Also it was really upsetting even though I'm fine now."

"Do you - remember being -?"

Unhappy nod. "I—she—didn't hardly care about anything except prettiness. Was the shade of red on her clothes right or should she change it, should she learn how to sing so she could have pretty music that went with her outfit, what should she smell like to make herself as pretty as possible... she thought about the kinds of things I like and she still liked some of them but only for how pretty they could be, nothing about how it's nice to grow a plant because then something's alive because of you, or nice to build a house because then you have a house and that's useful and satisfying, just 'ooh I could grow pretty flowers and make someone sleep and pile up pretty flowers around them so they have something pretty to wake up to'."

"- weird -"

"Yeah. And... unsettling, to remember being like that and feeling like it was obviously better than being like this, even though now that I'm me again I feel like being me is the obviously better idea."

"I guess you - both exist now, so - at least she's happy, I guess? And can help with the monsters? I think I've seen her."

"Yeah. But I really don't want to do it again even though I'm pretty sure the same things would happen." She thinks about it. "...I guess if the slug monster problem gets bad enough... then maybe it'd be worth it even though it'd be so upsetting."

"Why can't other people do it?"

"Well, anybody who feels like it could turn themselves into a Pretty Person, but I don't know how you'd convince the Pretty Person to separate themselves out once you'd turned into them. They might! They might not! It's kind of hard to be sure! But I can do it because of Fucked-Up Woods magic. Um, my crown is sort of a person and it can talk to me in my head and stuff, and it talked to the Pretty Person version of me and convinced her to bring me back."

"Oh - huh, how is a crown a person -"

"That is a really good question and I definitely have no idea. Some kind of Fucked-Up Woods magic. It's really old and back in the Fucked-Up Woods it was pretty powerful but it used up most of that helping me escape and cross the Bigger Weirder Ocean so now it's like... I guess you could say tired? And can't do very much. It translated for me with the Pretty People, though, that's how I managed to even slightly talk to them. I thought it might have taught me your language too but it says it's more complicated than that."

"Oh, I didn't even wonder about how you talked normal."

"Yeah, my crown says I learned your language by magic somehow and I shouldn't worry about it, but it can't actually explain what happened, so. One more thing to add to the pile of weird confusing things that have happened to me."

"Your life sounds a lot weirder than mine and mine has gotten pretty weird."

"My life is so weird. The weirdest life. ...if there's anybody out there with a weirder life I never ever want to meet them."

"Why wouldn't you even want to meet them?"

"Because I'm afraid that if I met them it might be in the middle of something terrifying or unpleasant happening to them that would happen to me too since I was there."

"Oh. Makes sense. You're - not, though, you just garden?"

"Yeah, I left all my terrifying unpleasant stuff way behind in the Fucked-Up Woods. I guess the whole situation with the Pretty People and the slug monsters is also kind of terrifying and unpleasant but - not in a way that gets on people just because they're near me specifically, I think? The slug monsters and the Pretty People would still be having their situation even if I'd landed somewhere totally different and never ran into them at all."

"Yeah. I think my family thought it was from being near you because it happened at the same time, but..."

"I guess that was kinda reasonable of them under the circumstances even though it's not true."

"Yeah. Sorry."

"I'm sorry too, I wish I hadn't... made things more complicated for you."

Awkward shrug.

Awkward shrug confirmed.

"So - I don't know where I should set up, even if you do teach me to build a house, all the land is the lord's or whoever's. Maybe if I fly enough I'll find an island like yours."

"...really? All of it? That's so weird. There's plenty of unclaimed land where I grew up." She shrugs. "This one was all rocks when I got here, but I hammered it down until it was flat enough to build on. If you find another pile of rocks big enough to fit a house, I can help you do the same to that one."

"I don't know if it's all all of it but that's the way to bet. I'll look around." She smiles, and takes off again. "Bye Iris."

"Bye, Maria."

Okay. Maybe she has succeeded in making one friend. Possibly. One awkward acquaintance, at minimum.

Maria doesn't come back that day.

Pretty reasonable of her. Iris does a lot of gardening, and then goes to bed at night. She has not stopped marveling at the fact that she gets to sleep now.

Maria doesn't come back for a month.

When she does come back, she has company. The company doesn't seem super cooperative - from the time when Iris notices the approach to when the pair of them make landfall, Maria's companion has once dived out of the rowboat Maria was sustaining by magic and had to be retrieved and the boat re-formed, and once tried to fly away only for Maria to chase her and grab her in the middle of the air - but she seems playful about it, at least, and isn't attacking Maria or yelling or anything.

Maria hauls her onto Iris's island.

"Can you fix her."

The "her" in question who needs fixing is some sort of - swanperson? With the neck and the wings and the feathers, and a sort of beaky shape to her face, though she still has teeth and stuff suggesting she started out monkeyfolk. She's wearing a lot of rubies and silk, which she fixes placidly once she's out of the water.

".....ohhhhh dear," says Iris. "She—went too far and did the Pretty Person thing? Can she still talk?"

"She will sometimes but not usually - sometimes I can get her to sing -" Maria sings a line and the swanperson comes in on a harmony, beaming at Maria.

...they're very cute. Very worrying, but very cute.

"I... might be able to get her to do the same thing that—the Pretty Lamb—did, and then you'd have the person she was before back. Um. Hmm."

She should try asking first. Trying asking first seems like a good place to start. Or, actually—

"Did you already try explaining to her about what the Pretty Lamb did, to bring me back, and asking her to try it?"

"Yes. She wasn't really paying attention and I may have explained it badly." She strokes swanfeathers.

They really are very cute.

"What's her name? ...does she still answer to it?"

"Catarina. I - can't tell, she sometimes pays attention when I talk no matter what I'm saying."

"Catarina," she tries. "I want to ask you something. Do you remember—who you were, and what you looked like, before you were like this?"

Catarina tilts her head and attempts to detangle some wool that has a bit of plant debris in it on the Lamb's cheek.

"I turned into a Pretty Person like you once, too. She was taller than me and—sharper, with stronger colours, darker black and brighter white and more vivid red. I didn't mean to turn into a Pretty Person, I wanted to be prettier but I didn't want to change the whole way my mind worked. And I had someone who cared about me, who asked her to bring me back, because she wasn't really me anymore and the person who cared about me wanted the me who thinks the way I do. So she... changed herself almost all the way back into the shape of me, and then at the last moment when she was going to be me again, she sprouted herself off my back and flew away, so we could both exist at the same time. Can you do that, for the person you were before you were like this?"

Woolgrooming woolgrooming. Singing.

...yeah. Okay. Yeah.

She says quietly to Maria, "I don't know if it's that she doesn't want to or that she can't understand me, but... I can find out. I can make it so my crown and I can talk to her in our heads, the way my crown talks to me, the way it talked to the Pretty Lamb to convince her to do the thing. The problem is, there's... side effects? When my crown connects to somebody like that, the connection... makes them like me, and want to be around me, and want to do what I say. I don't like that. But... the crown asked the Pretty Lamb what she thought of that sort of thing, and she didn't really mind it, she didn't care about it, it didn't seem important to her because it wasn't about being pretty. So maybe Pretty Catarina won't mind it either. Do you want me to try?"

"It - just makes her like you? That seems... fine?"

She feels that perhaps she has not explained the situation correctly, but she doesn't know how to explain the situation correctly, and she does think she knows how to solve this problem, and—she can let people go, once they're hers, if they seem like they don't like it or wouldn't have liked it—if they dislike it enough they can apparently run off all by themselves, though she's not sure how much she really believes in that—

"Okay. This'll look a little weird."

Iris and Pretty Catarina both glow and levitate. (The crown is leaning very hard on the process to stop it from changing anything about Catarina's outfit, because from what it understands of the Beautiful People, Pretty Catarina would probably dislike that part more than the mind control.)

To Pretty Catarina, it feels like... an intense rush of happiness, just about the happiest it's possible to be; and then, as they settle back onto the ground, it just feels very important to listen to Iris and give Iris what she wants. 'Iris is very good and important' has been added to the list of basic facts about the world, like 'the sun is bright' and 'things fall when you drop them'; she knows it on a similar kind of deep unthinking level, and her feelings and reactions are arranged accordingly.

Iris, meanwhile, is reading Pretty Catarina's mind as hard as she can, trying to see her side of what this whole conversation has looked like, trying to figure out whether in fact she feels okay with this development or not, trying to figure out if she even heard what Iris was saying about splitting off a copy of your past self so they can keep existing.

That was so nice, can they do it again? Gosh, Iris is so good and important and beautiful! Maybe even prettier than Maria!

This looks like a job for the crown, then.

Talking to a Follower is definitely harder than talking to its own bearer, but by no means impossible. It reaches into Pretty Catarina's mind and explains to her that right now what Iris wants her to do is bring back the pre-Pretty Catarina, in this way which the crown can explain by directly showing her the memories of Beautiful Sharp Lamb doing the same thing. It's very important to Iris and Maria. Can Pretty Catarina do that?

Oh! Okay! This might be hard without lambish amounts of fluff. She will try to figure it out.

("She's trying it," Iris reports.)

Would it help (the crown asks Catarina) to have a concealing veil of white mist? It can try giving her a concealing veil of white mist! (This is harder than the ghostly flame decorations it did for the Lamb, but with one Follower it thinks it can probably just about manage. It's very exciting having a Follower again.)

Ooh, yeah, white mist would help a lot as long as it's super opaque. Can it sparkle?

The crown will do its very best! The ensuing sparkle is subtle but extant.

And after a few minutes a swan-being bursts forth from the glittering mist and kisses Maria on the head and dives under the water,

and when the mist clears, there is a young woman with feathers for hair and white swan wings and all-black eyes, sitting there looking shellshocked.

The... splitting of one Follower into two... is very weird for the Crown, and it loses both of them in the process. It thinks it could have held on if it had been more prepared, but it also thinks its bearer would have disapproved of it trying.

Maria pounces on the restored Catarina, sobbing.

(Iris appreciates her crown very much. Though if all the Pretty People are as totally fine with being Followers as this one was, they can maybe see about keeping some, someday...)

She shuffles awkwardly.

Maria is babbling very fast and not terribly coherently at Catarina and petting her feathers and crying.

That seems like a pretty reasonable thing for her to be doing, under the circumstances!

...Iris should not offer them vegetables. She hasn't even gotten to the point of actually cooking her vegetables yet. This is not a situation that would be improved by yanking a raw carrot out of the ground and handing it to the traumatized people. It's just, she wants to do something to help, and vegetables are what she has.

They will take a while to calm down.

For sheer lack of anything better to do, Iris does in fact end up constructing a cookfire and putting on a pot of soup.

They notice this, eventually, and look over with tired curiosity.

Embarrassed smile. "Um. Hi. I couldn't think what else to do so I'm making soup."

"Oh," says Catarina.

"It smells nice," offers Maria.

"I make pretty decent soup. You can have some when it's done, if you want."

"That sounds like - just the thing," says Catarina weakly.

"Oh. Well, good."

They are a snuggly pile of wings while the soup cooks.

They look cozy. It's nice. She's glad she could help.

Soon: soup!

They are grateful for soup. They have not really been eating enough, it took a long time to wrestle Catarina all the way here.

Then it's a good thing she forgot she wasn't cooking for twelve. There is so much soup.

They still don't finish it but they do both take seconds and Catarina takes thirds.

Oh good.

"...are you okay?" That was a dumb question but now it's out there and there's nothing she can do about it.

"I - guess? I think it was the neck - I had more feathers after too, but I think the neck was what pushed it over -"

"...that makes sense." She tries to think of how she could help. She can definitely un-Pretty her Followers, but even getting to the point of being Pretty and having to come back from it is fairly terrifying by itself. Could she check a Follower's changes before they made them? Prooobably. She's still hesitant to recommend Followerhood, though.

When they've finished their soup the sun is starting to go down.

"We should probably - get out of your way, take off, sleep in the woods tonight," says Maria. "Thank you - thank you so much."

"I'm really glad I could help," she says.

They smile at her and then squeeze each other's hands and fly off.

Wow. Helping people is so much nicer when you can succeed at it.

On that happy note, she can garden a little more and tidy up around her little house and try to figure out what to do with all this soup and eventually resort to having her crown pocket it. Who knows, maybe someday she will need half a pot of solidly decent vegetable soup on short notice. Though her crown cannot promise its soup-unpocketing aim will actually be good enough to get it into a bowl.

Heartened by this development, she takes to actively patrolling for sea monsters, usually a quick flight in the morning and another one around midafternoon, circling her little island.

With active patrols she can catch them when they are much newer and smaller and not moving around on their own much yet!

That's an improvement, for sure.

Okay. So.

The thing is.

With what they know now, they could go find some people who've gone Pretty, and the crown could take them, and tell them to spit their old selves back out, and then just keep the Pretty versions. There's a sense in which this would even be a good deed. The Pretty ones wouldn't mind.

Iris feels really weird about it.

Feeling really weird about something isn't actually a good reason not to do it, if it's important. Rescuing people who've gone Pretty seems important. Taking good care of her Crown is important.

But she doesn't want to get caught up again in forcing herself to do things she feels sick about because the alternative is terrifying. That seems like a bad move.

So... she needs to think her way around to it, and if she can't think her way around to it, she should hold off.

But in the meantime, she still wants to give her crown what it needs, and she still doesn't know how to make that happen.

The thought that keeps trying to sneak in around the edges of her mind is that she could make another Lamb. She doesn't need to go Pretty for it; her crown can hold her steady. She can do what the BSL did, and make a second Lamb, and then she can make that... other version of herself... into a Follower. And it would be fine, it would be the finest possible thing, if she agreed to it ahead of time; it's hard to even imagine a higher standard of consent than "decided to make a copy of yourself to do the thing to and then did that". Just so long as she does, actually, both before and after the duplication, agree to the whole arrangement.

The issue is that she doesn't know if she can agree to the whole arrangement. She doesn't want to be a Follower, and she doesn't want to be without the direct protection of her bond with her crown. Those each separately sound terrifying, and putting together does not improve matters. Maybe she could talk herself around to it, eventually? But not any faster than she's going to talk herself around to the other thing. And it's much... simpler to explain, if she does the other thing, compared to if she duplicates and then enslaves herself. Duplicating and then enslaving herself is a weird thing to do and will weird out anyone who notices, and her little island does not exactly have much space to hide such a situation in.

Oh, her crown tells her helpfully, if they gain enough Followers, their territory will begin to expand naturally under their influence.

It understands, though, and it can be patient. They can keep thinking about this and not do anything she isn't comfortable with.

...she'll at least start ranging a little farther on her patrols, maybe even deliberately going as far as the coast and a little ways up and down it, to see if she can meet any other monster-fighters and warn them about Prettiness and tell them they can bring her any friends of theirs who go Pretty.

There don't seem to be all that many monster-fighters, actually. She runs into Maria and Catarina sometimes, always together, and the BSL, who smiles at her, but there are... definitely more monsters than monsterfighters.

...in that case maybe she should start making duplicates of herself. She's the only person who can do that sort of thing systematically. For that matter there's a case to be made that she should be coming up with Pretties of herself, all different styles, to release into the wild, but that sounds way more horrifying than making five copies of herself and enslaving them all, actually, so never mind.

After she's been trying for a while to expand her patrol range, she notices that she's going to bed later every night and waking up earlier every morning. Still sleeping, but sleeping for less time overall. She... thinks she's okay with this. Sleep is very important to her but she no longer needs it, so it doesn't actually matter whether she sleeps for a full night or only half of one, or even only a quarter. She doesn't think she's ready to give up sleeping every night just yet, but she's fine with squishing the sleep down into a smaller span of time so she has more time for doing other things. And it lets her get pretty far up and down the coast, if she goes one direction in the mornings and the other direction in the evenings and spends a sollid few hours at it each time.

Are there any other monster-fighters out there, if she looks that hard?

Yep, hugging the coast and traveling far afield is a good way to spot more. There's another Pretty Person who looks like an iridescent orca who rips kaiju apart in her teeth. There's a non-Pretty who has ice powers and fights with polearms she conjures up, running on the ocean by freezing it under her feet.

It takes her a couple of sightings to work up the social courage to talk to the ice person.

The second time, she first dives in to help squish the monster she's fighting, then says awkwardly once the battle is done, "Hi, I'm Iris."

"Aalis. Good to make your acquaintance." She expands the ice platform so Iris doesn't have to hover.

"How long have you been magic? Has anybody warned you about what happens if you change yourself too much?"

"About a month now. And... no? Who would know to warn me? This is new. It's happening everywhere, but it's new."

"It's happened to me and one other person I know of, and I think I've seen someone else who must've had the same thing happen to them but I haven't gotten close enough to be sure. If you change yourself too much, I mean if you make yourself look too different from the way you started, then you go a little crazy and only care about being pretty and fighting monsters, and mostly can't talk anymore. I have a way to fix it but it's still pretty upsetting. Do you want me to fix you if I see you like that?"

"- I wasn't planning to ever put on - wings or wool or anything as you've done."

"Okay. Um, I started out with the wool actually, I am from very far away and where I'm from it's normal to be a sheep person, it's just the wings and the being so tall* that's new for me. But that's not very relevant I guess. Anyway, it's nice to meet you."

*She is, as previously stated, about 4'3".

"- I met a girl who mimed being from fully across the ocean and she only looked like a person with wings and extra arms!"

"I am from farther away than that. It's a very long and very crazy story but the short version is, I was in a terrible place where awful stuff kept happening, and I had some magic from that place, and I used that magic to leave and go as far away as I possibly could, so far that it should be impossible to follow me, definitely much harder than just flying across an ocean, and when I landed here I got the monster-fighting magic too."

"Huh. That's a terribly strange story but these are terribly strange times. Do they have the Gospel where you're from?"

"I don't know what that is, so I guess not."

Aalis is going to take that as an invitation. She used to be a nun!

Oh wow. This topic of conversation makes Iris kind of uncomfortable but she is going to do her best to be polite about it.

Being polite makes it last longer.

This was a predictable outcome but what's she going to do, tell this nice stranger she's been badly treated by gods in the past? Yeah no.

At the next feasible opportunity to wind down the conversation she says, "I'd better get back to my patrol route if I want to get home soon. If you see other monster-fighters please warn them about the going-crazy thing, and tell them their friends can look for me down the coast if they need to be rescued from it. I have a house on a little island."

"Naturally. What's the nearest town to it?"

"I don't know what it's called but I can ask around and maybe tell you next time I see you."

Aalis nods. "And while you're in town you can stop in at the church for any questions you have! Unless it's a heathen town, you didn't say how far south."

"I don't really know how far south. About two hours' flight from here maybe? But that's a guess, and I don't know how fast I fly." She will not be stopping in at any churches but there's no need to proactively bring that up.

"Well, look for the cross, that's the way to tell. Thank you for the tips!"

"It was nice meeting you," she only slightly lies. "Good luck!"

And she can fly back home, and see if she can find Maria to ask about town names, and maybe also keep an eye out for the sea-Pretty.

The sea-Pretty is breaching beautifully in the low sunshine, hanging out with some normal non-iridescent orcas.

Maria and Catarina have themselves a houseboat these days, with improbable greenery on it to patch the holes and hold it together where it is not especially sturdy. And to decorate it.

"Your boat is really pretty," she tells Maria and Catarina. "Do you know what the name of the nearest town to my house is? I'm trying to tell as many people as I can where to find me, in case they need to bring their friends to be un-Prettied."

"Niñóns," says Maria. "Well, more of a village. Ponteceso is a bit farther on the river."

"Okay, I'll remember that. Thanks very much!"

With that errand out of the way, she can think about approaching the sea-Pretty. It takes her a few days to work up to it (during which, if she sees Aalis, again, she'll pass along the geographic information).

...probably it'll be fine. Right? Probably she's just worrying over nothing?

She resolves to not ask the sea-Pretty to split off their former self until she's had a good try at finding out if the former self would've wanted that. It makes her feel better about the whole thing, if she's... trying to help someone, and trying to only help them if they want to be helped, and not just out to enslave strangers for her own gain.

She doesn't have to explicitly make herself a promise about it, but she reminds herself that if the sea-Pretty seems to object to being a Follower, she'll let them go. And even if they don't, potentially, if she just feels too weird about the situation, she can still let them go.

And then, after considerable dithering... she approaches, and her crown does the thing, and as soon as the glow settles they start reading the sea-Pretty's mind.

The sea-Pretty gets around a fair bit but can be tracked down by a purposeful Lamb with a helpful Crown.

WHEE leaping into the air with all her friends! WHEE! Chase chase chase chase. Sunshine on the water! Pretty whale noises! LEAP! Fish fish fish. Sparkle sparkle nom.

The crown tries to ask if she remembers what she was like before she was like this.

Oh yeah, she used to be a human. Humans can't LEAP like this. WHEEEE

The crown asks, after some consultation with its bearer: when she was a human did she want to leap and swim and sparkle? What was it like to change?

She did! She did want to leap and swim and sparkle! That's why she turned into an orca, to do those things! And then all her worries and sorrows melted away and now she never has to do anything else, just leap-swim-sparkle. Also chomp bad monsters. And she has friends now! Friends shaped like her who she admired so much before and can be with all the time now!

(Upon further consultation,) what were her worries and sorrows before?

She was sickly and lonesome and her uncle kept touching her and she was afraid of going to Hell.

Those sound pretty worrisome and sorrowful! It is glad she doesn't have to worry about those things anymore.

Yeah! Now she just has to be an orca. A shiny one.

Yeah okay they're not fixing this one. Maybe someday, if they get better at finding out what someone would've wanted before they Prettied and it starts to look like she would've wanted something less extreme than this, but for now? She'll keep.

Having Pretty Followers is not quite as good for the crown as having Followers who form a community in a single small well-defined territory and worship at a Shrine and so on. But it's definitely a whole lot better than nothing. And it's not like she has a Shrine for anyone to worship at, anyway.

Iris tells the orca, with the crown helping to translate, that she is very pretty and shiny and it's good that she can leap and swim and sparkle with her friends. And she goes home, and with the crown helping, she redesigns her wings to fly better, and starts to think about crown-related infrastructure. If she found somewhere to put a good solid stone circle, she could teleport home at the end of her patrols, which would let them be twice as long—and she'll cover more ground in each one now that her wings are a little more refined. Ugh, she doesn't want to dig up her garden, but she might have to dig up her garden at least a little, if she wants to get serious about making sure to spread the word about Pretties.

And she should probably Convert the BSL, and maybe Pretty Catarina too if she ever sees Pretty Catarina again. But she doesn't want to think about that just yet. For now, slightly longer patrols while her crown recovers its strength a little. Maybe once in a while she'll venture inland, following a river so as to not get lost, just for variety.

There are somewhat more monsters inland, but they are each individually smaller - they bother somebody and get attacked by peasants with pitchforks and scythes, if they're near a population center, whereas in the middle ocean there's nobody around and they have lots of time to coalesce into huge kaiju and keep accumulating mass from new swarms till they make landfall.

How about other monster fighters inland, any of those?

There's one over there! She has taken over a castle and adopted a knight-in-shining-armor look with angel wings.

Pretty. Curious about the castle; what happened to whoever used to have it? But that's hopefully not Iris's problem. She approaches.

The armored angel goes to meet her outside the boundaries of the castle. "Who are you and what do you want?"

"I'm Iris. I'm looking for as many monster-fighters as I can to warn them about what happens when you change your shape too far from what it used to be. Have you heard about it yet?"

"No."

"If you change too far, you go a little crazy and can't really talk anymore and don't care about things except being pretty and fighting monsters. It's happened to three people I know of and I managed to fix two of them—the third as far as I could tell seemed like she did it on purpose. If it happens to a friend of yours, you can come get me and I'll try to fix them too. I have a house on a little island off the coast near Niñóns which is near Ponteceso."

"Thank you for letting me know. Do you have other business here?"

She shakes her head. "I'll get out of your way," she says, and takes wing.

Angel-knight watches her go before returning to her castle.

She goes home. She keeps flying her extended patrols, eventually ending up on a schedule where she flies three hours north of home in the early morning and three hours south of home in the evening and gets home very late from the three-hour flight back and sleeps a little and does it again. Sometimes she switches which direction she goes at which time, or takes a jaunt inland somewhere new.

After a few weeks of careful consideration, she shuffles her garden around and reconstructs her house to make room for a stone circle, twelve feet across, assembled with considerable help from her crown. It takes them two days straight to impose the massive solid shape of it onto the thoroughly crushed surface of her island, skipping patrols and sleep along the way. But at the end of it she has a proper anchor point, and she can teleport home anytime she wants, and as soon as she takes a full night of sleep to apologize to herself for skipping two nights, she goes out the next morning and flies six hours north.

Six hours due north is juuuust barely enough to get her in sight of sizable land again at the end of the flight.

... Okay, she'll push her patrol long enough to investigate. How big is this land? Anyone there?

It's a big hunk of island. It's not densely populated, though she can spot clusters of houses hither and yon.

Anyone visibly magic?

Nobody is out for a flight where she can see them right here and now.

She flaps along for a bit keeping an eye out for monsters, then lands on an empty bit of beach, teleports home in a rush of red flame, and goes straight south for about six more hours.

In six hours she has reached beautiful Casablanca! It is a thriving port city. The religious buildings do not have crosses on them.

Wow that is more people than she has ever seen in one place in her whole entire life. It's more people than she would've been confident even existed back in the Fucked-Up Woods. It's so many people. Too many people. She is gonna need a moment to process all of this People.

...any of them look to be magic?

There's one! Girl with scales and a tufted tail and curly horns and batty wings and hooves.

She flaps down to meet her.

She's in a bit of a crowd, dancing and doing magic tricks for coins while somebody plays music for her nearby, and does not interrupt her performance to greet Iris.

Iris can wait, though she waits perched on a roof to stay out of the crowd. Crowds are concerning.

Eventually the song ends and she takes a bow. "Remember, my friends, it's not wise to cheat a jinni!" she tells them, collecting her coins into a little leather pouch. She swats a guy who reaches for her with her tail.

Huh.

Iris... isn't sure what's going on with this one. She tries waiting a bit to see if the crowd will thin so she can approach with fewer people around.

The jinni appears a cloak around herself and she and her musician head out of the heavily trafficked square down a side street.

Iris glides down after them.

"Hi," she says. "I'm Iris and I'm trying to get around as far as I can to tell all the magic people about what happens when you change your shape too much. Can I talk to you about that?"

"Too much? I already can't change back!"

...she blinks. "Did you want to? I haven't met anyone who's tried."

"Well, I tried! I thought I'd be able to do this for performances and then go back to normal for everything else."

"I... might be able to help with that, I'm not sure. Um, the thing that happens when you change your shape to something that's too far from where you started is that you go crazy and stop caring about anything except fighting monsters and being pretty and how pretty everything is. People who've gone Pretty mostly can't talk and it's upsetting to their friends even though they're happy like that since they only care about prettiness and not anything they used to care about. If it happens to someone you know you can come get me, I live way up the coast on a little island near Niñóns which is near Ponteceso, and I can fix it to bring back the person they used to be. I don't exactly know how I'd fix your thing but I can think about it. Um, does it work if you only change partway back? How close to the way you started can you get?"

"I can get rid of the wings and the tail and the feet but then the scales stay. I can get rid of the scales and the tail and the feet but then the wings stay. Like that."

She thinks about this for a second.

"What happens if you give yourself little horns like mine and then hide them in your hair? Would that work?"

"I can shrink the horns, but -" She disappears her cloak to demonstrate visually. Wings go. Scales go. Feet go back to normal monkeyfolk feet. Tail stays. She flicks it illustratively.

"Hmmmmmm... I'll think about it. There might be something I can do but I'm not sure yet."

The thing she's going to do is go home and have her crown experiment with changing base forms around, and then, if the experiments work out, come back and suggest changing her base form to something that has a different tail, or something like that, so that she won't be blocked from going totally back to human again. That is what's happening, right, crown, is people can't go all the way back to base form? (Yes.) Okay, cool. But she's not going to suggest that yet because she wants to know it'll work before she starts proposing plans that involve making someone a Follower in order to muck around with their magic bits.

She puts all her bits back. "It's not that bad but it's sure not what I was expecting. Are you stuck with your whole deal too?"

"So funny story, I actually started out as a sheep person, it's mostly just the wings that are new. I'm from very very very far away, much farther than just across the ocean, and where I'm from everyone is all different kinds of animal people, sheepfolk and pigfolk and birdfolk and horsefolk and stuff, and nobody's as tall as me let alone you. I've never tried getting rid of my wings, I like them a lot."

"They look soft." Eyebrow waggle.

...she smiles a little,

and then processes the eyebrow waggle and looks startled.

"Isn't the wool awfully hot, though? It's still summertime."

"It is a bit, but when I'm in the air or at home on my tiny island surrounded by ocean it's not so bad usually. And it would feel weird to go without."

"Aw, you have an island? We're living above a store. - this is my brother."

"It's a very tiny island and I had to spend a while hitting it with a hammer before it was flat enough to put a house on. Nice to meet you both! Did you say your names? I forget."

"I'm Imane, he's Ikram."

"I'm Iris, I don't remember if I said that already. Do you know any other magic people? I've been telling everybody to warn their friends about changing too far."

"One passed through, she was with a ship, but it left again last week."

"Okay. If you see any others, please tell them, and tell them where to find me if any of their friends need to be brought back."

"Say again where you're at? Is this up in Europe?"

"I don't know the names of many places, just the two closest towns to my island, Niñóns and Ponteceso. I flew six hours south to get here. I'll probably be coming back again pretty regularly, though, people can keep an eye out for me in the sky if they have someone who needs fixing and six hours' fast flight north is too far to travel."

"Six hours! What did you want to be in Casablanca so bad for? My wings hurt thinking about it."

"It's really important to me to make sure everybody knows about the thing! I didn't even know there'd be a city here, I just flew as far as I could to see what I could find. I might redesign my wings again to see if I can get faster and find more places."

"Well, then, what you should do is find ones of us who're on ships, they'll go all over the world. We get people here on their way to China."