"Hm," he says. "Is there any reason I shouldn't just - temporarily turn into a shadowperson?"

"It's easier to turn into one than to stop. It happens naturally to people if they stay in the Plane of Shadow for long enough, actually. If you could magically make sure you can turn back, then no, it'd likely be useful. You'll be more vulnerable to light and certain kinds of holy magic, but those won't be much of an issue if you can switch between forms."

"oo."

And that seems to be Saskia's entire commentary on the matter.

"Very few things are irreversible when you're me! Let's see how long it'd take to build—"

He pulls a bit of power and tells it what he wants. Veron is right, it is easier to do it than undo it, but building a spell that switches him back and forth still looks much easier than he was expecting. "Huh, not that long," he comments. "Probably less than an hour, especially with the mind artifacts. If that's longer than you'd rather wait, I can skip it for now, though."

"i can read in your library," ventures Saskia, shyly.

"I don't mind waiting," shrugs Veron.

"Yes," he says, smiling adoringly at Saskia, "you can absolutely read in my library. If you feel like wandering around, you can do that too, but please stay out of the northwest wing; it belongs to my daughter."

"i will probably just stay in the library, but thank you."

"... If you'll be busy for a while, is it all right if I check on your other guests? With you and with them, I would rather not scare anyone."

"Fine by me. Not sure how they'll feel about it."

"Anything any of them are twitchy about? I imagine they wouldn't appreciate the weaponry."

"They probably wouldn't," he agrees. "But I'm not well-placed to tell what they'd be afraid of from someone other than me."

"Fair enough. I'll try to be as nonthreatening as possible."

"Good luck."

"Thanks. They all in the village at the lake we passed by?"

"Unless somebody's gone for a walk, yeah."

Nod.

"If there's nothing else, then I'll go do that?"

"Sure."

He waves, then walks off to find an exit so he can talk to some torture victims.

Saskia waves back, then looks at Serik curiously.

"how does it work to build your spells?"

"I'm not sure how usefully I can answer that without knowing anything about what I'm comparing it to," he says. "I'd offer to teach you how to do it, but I don't know if you'll want to learn - you'll probably mess up a lot at first, everybody does, and when you mess up with this magic the power tends to come out as heat and light. I set myself on fire a few times before I got the hang of it."

"oh. no, i don't think i'd like to learn it if that's what happens when you mess up. i'll stick with - you don't have a word for it, i'm going to use wizardry? i like being a wizard."

"What's being a wizard like?"

She considers.

"scholarly. it's very... i need to keep a lot of things in my head at once. it's hard but i like it."

"Huh. Sounds interesting," he says. "Well, you can watch me build this spell if you like, but it's not going to look like much, I'm just going to sit down and close my eyes for a while."

He goes to sit down in one of the chairs in the lounge in the middle of the bottom floor of the library.